mturmon

14 ms·

1. 151.▲
   by mturmon 2y ago

   This column, which appears as the last page in the print magazine, is generally pretty good and often fun to read ( https://www.science.org/topic/careers-overline/working-life ). IIRC the stories never end on a down
2. 152.▲
   by mturmon 2y ago

   Here's one version of that backstory: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/30/773457637/fr...
3. 153.▲
   by mturmon 2y ago

   This is an important point, and true insofar as it goes (because the discussion you quote is about clay). But not all aquifers are clay. The ones that are composed of coarser material are more stable. Like a lot of Earth science, it's
4. 154.▲
   by mturmon 2y ago

   I’m a government contractor. Every year I take a training course on just this topic. If I don’t take the course, my direct supervisor will personally ensure that I do. I may not accept gifts from anyone that I (or my spouse) have business w
5. 155.▲
   by mturmon 2y ago

   Definitely. Taking this to its logical end leads to a beautiful concise notation that I learned from David Pollard: - You literally identify sets with their indicators: they are the same. - You identify the “P” operator as expectation (inte
6. 156.▲
   by mturmon 2y ago

   Here's an article on DIMES, the system JPL developed in the early 2000s to address the problem of estimating horizontal velocity for the Mars landers: https://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/media/documents/DIMES-ai-spa
7. 157.▲
   by mturmon 2y ago

   Agree. In the "For a more concrete example" paragraph, since we're assuming that each byte of 8 bits must have 4 zeros and 4 ones, we always know the 8'th bit after only seeing the first 7. Indeed, many times we would kn
8. 158.▲
   by mturmon 2y ago

   It's not quite that bad. Hubble is primarily optical wavelengths. The other Great [space-based] Observatories are in IR, X-rays, and gamma rays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Observatories_program The notion
9. 159.▲
   by mturmon 2y ago

   > ...why have a satellite waste time looking at the earth when it's dark? ... Exactly. Many NASA Earth-observing satellites use the same kind of sun-synchronous orbit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchrono
10. 160.▲
    by mturmon 2y ago

    As a geophysicist friend used to say, in complete seriousness, the earthquake prediction problem is really easy to show expertise in. Give location, time and magnitude. Period. Have at it. If successful, your results will be noticed.
11. 161.▲
    by mturmon 2y ago

    Thanks for this context. I hadn't known about the link to Jim Clark but it makes sense. Here's another one. It's Carver Mead, Lynn Conway's co-author, talking about the genesis of their legendary book, and process. I was
12. 162.▲
    by mturmon 2y ago

    the Last Bookstore in LA: https://www.lastbookstorela.com
13. 163.▲
    by mturmon 2y ago

    Since the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight#Frictions
14. 164.▲
    by mturmon 2y ago

    This comment opens perhaps a bigger can of worms than intended. The original statement: >> You can't uniformly sample an unbounded set. [of real numbers] is true, provided that by "sample" we mean "sample in a way
15. 165.▲
    by mturmon 2y ago

    > Then you got bipolar junction transistors (BJTs), and most digital logic, such as ECL and TTL, was based on a different paradigm for a few decades. I think the emphasis is misplaced here. It is true that a single BJT, when considered a
16. 166.▲
    by mturmon 2y ago

    Some of that perceived value is the (wonderful) original Modernist attributes of simplicity, manufacturability, and form-follows-function, which are integral to the design philosophy of those homes . The design work of the Eamses is anothe
17. 167.▲
    by mturmon 2y ago

    I’m an encyclopedia lover who works on a variety of applied math problems as part of $dayjob at a national lab. I thought the book might be fun to browse around in, so I purchased it. I knew the companion book (…to Mathematics) had a very g
18. 168.▲
    by mturmon 2y ago

    I follow the above advice. My personal stuff is in $HOME/$MY_FIRSTNAME. I can organize this directory any way I want to, e.g. by project, time, purpose, whatever. It’s my stuff. The stuff in $HOME is then more “the computer’s stuff.”
19. 169.▲
    by mturmon 2y ago

    In the 90's I used to listen to Ian Masters' radio show Background Briefing which was a very pointy-headed, left-leaning examination of various issues. At the time it was just a show run by a very competent host out of a public
20. 170.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    It's here: https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/5511/illustration-comparing-... .
21. 171.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    Part of that is that Earth's moon is quite large compared to other moons like Phobos. Here's a nice pic of Phobos and Deimos as seen from the mast-camera of Curiosity, compared with Luna. I remember reading an Asimov piece many ye
22. 172.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    Good question. LSST was being studied as early as 2008, and it was highly ranked in the 2010 Astrophysics decadal survey - I just looked it up and in that 2010 survey the design was described as “relatively mature.” This was long before the
23. 173.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    Yes, and to amplify, part of the utility is in its ability to observe transient phenomena. As we have been able to do more large-scale surveys, and scan the resulting images with transient detection software, we have observed a lot of surpr
24. 174.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    I went west-to-east in the late 1980s. My group was in, err, very good shape by the time we got to Kansas. We crossed Indiana in less than 2 days of riding (Vincennes, IN to Cincinnati OH along Hwy. 50). It was exhilarating.
25. 175.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    Amazing stuff! And origami is not unrelated to (hexa)flexagons, which are a perennial HN favorite and also a math/physics fascination ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexagon#Discovery_and_introdu... )
26. 176.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    OP is using a lot of words to describe what seems to be the "propensity" interpretation of probability [1] The propensity interpretation generalizes the relative-frequency interpretation to allow for single-shot "propensities
27. 177.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    What an amazing output. Reading his papers, he manages to connect basic geometric ideas (like the notion of "isoperimetry", i.e., enclosing the maximum volume within a given perimeter) to probabilistic notions like convergence of
28. 178.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    And of course the Nick Metropolis mentioned in this story is the first author of Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953), which went a step farther and introduced MCMC. See just above equation 4 of ( https:/&#x2F
29. 179.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    I’m going to gently pile on to the sibling comment here, and note that the “hacking” we find interesting should and does change over time. I used to spend time hacking PDP-11 assembly code to make games. That got old, and if I play a game
30. 180.▲
    by mturmon 3y ago

    Nice post to see. Some friends like the game SET, but I am unable to play more than one game because I get distracted with the discrete math question that Jeremy mentions - how many cards assure a Set exists? And analogous things, like, if