stefco_

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181.
by stefco_ 9y ago
LIGO also searches for BH/NS mergers and for NS/NS mergers. None have been announced yet, but they are definitely something we look for. BH/NS and NS/NS mergers are exciting because they involve conventional matter and a
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by stefco_ 9y ago
I don't keep up with the latest material here, but there is some stuff I've picked up. For one thing, it's probably not ordinary matter falling into the black holes. When ordinary matter falls into a black hole, it usually fo
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by stefco_ 9y ago
Having extra detectors also helps hugely with uptime. We're currently only active and collecting clean data ~50% of the time for each detector. We need at least two detectors active for a detection, and need three detectors for this ki
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by stefco_ 9y ago
I'm a grad student with LIGO. Yeah, the rate of intermediate mass black hole mergers was totally unexpected and has caused a bunch of active discussion on formation mechanisms. In short, intermediate mass black holes are too big to be
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by stefco_ 9y ago
Hi, I'm a grad student working on LIGO. There is no practical way to harvest this energy. Gravitational waves interact very weakly with matter. This is part of why they are useful for observations: GWs can travel from the core of viole
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by stefco_ 9y ago
sudo
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by stefco_ 9y ago
I've read a lot of crappy code written by physicists (my past self included) who lack training and/or don't care about code quality. While I hate proprietary, monolithic programs, I'm not sure replacing them with R would
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by stefco_ 9y ago
We do a lot of high speed triggering in my electronics lab, and i can tell you that most low grade digital scopes cannot trigger fast enough. The $25,000 digital scope works, as do all of our old analog scopes.
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by stefco_ 9y ago
Analog fetishization is definitely annoying. But there are sometimes desirable features of simple analog equipment that are more complicated to implement in digital circuits. Sometimes that simplicty can be helpful to certain workflows, or
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by stefco_ 9y ago
The iPhone has a screen that takes up most of its face. By aligning the camera and screen, they allow you to use the full screen. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to only be able to use ~30% of your screen to shoot video? Sure, it m
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by stefco_ 10y ago
It's decidedly harder to be intelectually lazy when your job depends on understanding nuance. I find that people who actually use these terms as part of their job (unsurprisingly) tend to have a much better understanding of them than l
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by stefco_ 10y ago
> Apple still doesn't have proper keyboard-only management for windows False. Cmd-~ will switch windows within an app. Control-<Left> and Control-<Right> will move left and right between spaces (including fullscreen apps
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by stefco_ 10y ago
I think this is really important to acknowledge. Intersectionality (i.e. subtlety and hollistic thinking) is actually a great way to think about inequity. But a lot of people who are interested in intersectionality are blind to many struggl
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by stefco_ 10y ago
Sure, but it's always much more frustrating and disappointing when those tasked with protecting the innocent end up ruining innocent lives. In particular, it's frustrating that better auditing procedures and transparency would pre
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by stefco_ 10y ago
Agreed. There is even a matplotlib backend called itermplot[0] that uses iterm's image display capabilities, which, combined with iterm's tmux integration, makes developing scientific code on remote servers a dream. [0] https:&#x
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by stefco_ 10y ago
I'm not totally sure that it's correct to group the artist with people who think lazily about AI. If the artist was trying to literally suggest that this trap would work, then, yeah, that would be silly and misinformed. But I thin
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by stefco_ 10y ago
4 Watts! That is a ridiculous amount of power for a project like this. No wonder the screen is so bright! For those of you who want another point of comparison for how powerful this laser is, advanced LIGO detected gravitational waves for t
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by stefco_ 10y ago
"The god of the market-worshipers that celebrate the glories of turbo-capitalism is Adam Smith, but theirs is a devotion that crucially depends on not reading him." I found this amusing. It seems that fanatical devotion to dogmati
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by stefco_ 10y ago
Absolutely, those are very good points, though not all of those problems are best solved by manned missions (e.g. exploration can be more efficiently performed if life-support systems are unnecessary). Increasing human survival odds definit
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by stefco_ 10y ago
There are some interesting points in this article, but I can't help but feel that the author takes the final value of hundreds of millions of dollars as a given. As a resut, there are several recommendations in this article that I can
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by stefco_ 10y ago
This. It is very common for guys who are out of work to be much less productive around the house despite having more time available to dedicate to housework. Tons of guys are not brought up doing housework and being detail-oriented about th
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by stefco_ 10y ago
But so is traveling vast distances to experience something identical to what you can simulate ;)
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by stefco_ 10y ago
Well, they're also for different use cases, so I don't think "ahead" is the right word. Lightroom is pro-oriented and assumes that you know what photo you want to find, whereas consumer photo apps are more about browsing