tomkat0789

20 ms·

151.
by tomkat0789 9y ago
Is there a more thorough study of the scientific and intellectual productivity of people studying whatever they want and fooling around? This makes me wonder about the culture I saw in graduate school where many professors seemed spend more
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by tomkat0789 9y ago
I remember Kim's story mentioned some H1B's from Asia who seemed stuck. What happened to them?
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by tomkat0789 9y ago
Has anybody tried launching a rocket from an airship/dirigible?
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
My scientific writing was transformed by Rafeal Luna's "Art of Scientific Storytelling". I'm on my phone, so I can't do it justice here, but I think that style will be crucial for the distillation TFA is discussing.
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
+1 Firefox user for the better add-ons. The ones in Chrome/Chromium just haven't seemed as effective for me. Reading people's comments here, I'm actually learning about some add-ons I might add to Firefox! (tree style ta
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
This is really great! I kept encountering Kalman filters in my research during graduate school, but they didn't directly affect my research so I never made the time to understand them. What a fantastic explanation! I'm also a huge
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
Even if they don't totally ban politics on HN forever, what if we keep a week/a few days a month where no politics are allowed - just as an occasional reminder that this is isn't supposed to be a political website. Maybe we c
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
+1 for drainpipe theory! As a ChemE grad student I took an EE control class after basically forgetting all the circuits knowledge I learned as an undergraduate (my high school didn't teach electronics and magnetism!). Water analogies w
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
You can learn the basics with this little browser video game: http://vim-adventures.com/ I used to hate vim with a passion because of how unintuitive everything seemed, but this made me want to learn more once I get used to
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
An engineering professor I greatly respect was talking about a book about the class material he liked better than the one the department said he had to use. Author A's book was 1000 pages long, Author B's (the professor's pre
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
I don't know how useful biological ideas will be to urban planning, but this sentence tickled my brain: "...This can include such things as cataloging bugs and unexpected behaviors in our infrastructure (like how a naturalist migh
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Why North Korea is a safe haven for birds(bbc.com)
124 points by tomkat0789 10y ago|69 comments
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
I guess the Soviet government was known for such "logic". A dissident once gave a speech at my university and told us this joke: After the Americans landed on the Moon, the Soviet Politburo went to the cosmonauts saying, "Rus
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
Awesome! Thanks guys!
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
Sometimes I dream of leaving engineering to research plants or rocks. I don't think I'd like being university professor with all the responsibilities that entails, but it's nice to imagine exploring the wilderness, looking at
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
>If you're not part of a fraterntiy/sorority that archives coursework/tests of previous students or part of an international student in-group then you can easily fall through the cracks from this grade deflation effect. +1
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250,000 words of app terms and conditions(forbrukerradet.no)
2 points by tomkat0789 10y ago|1 comments
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by tomkat0789 10y ago
Back during my PhD quals, I used to just walk in a circle around my smallish apartment complex to blow off stress. Once I even met my roommate doing them same thing on one of my laps! More often I'd walk around some trees around the un
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by tomkat0789 11y ago
Yes. As I understand it (chemical engineer, not a petroleum engineer), fracking for oil and gas (in addition to normal oil drilling) is USUALLY done thousands of feet below the water table. For some reason here they were fracking at a much
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by tomkat0789 11y ago
The Dark Dungeons movie mentioned is actually a movie made by people who DO understand D&D et al, but are trying to create an accurate film portrayal of Chick's cartoon tracts: http://www.wired.com/2014/05&#x2F
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by tomkat0789 11y ago
I actually just attended an incredibly interesting seminar about sea level rise! (ChemE grad student: the our department required it. It was way cooler than watching yet another presentation about catalysis!) Based on what I saw, I think it
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by tomkat0789 11y ago
I'm surprised (not that surprised) to hear there's ride sharing apps in China at all. I lived in Beijing for a few months several years ago and the taxis are (for a foreigner) pretty reasonable and efficient. Besides better public
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Visualizing the Similarity of Human and Chimp DNA(cs.ucr.edu)
19 points by tomkat0789 11y ago|9 comments
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by tomkat0789 11y ago
For the full text: http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~lacher/courses/COT4401/notes/cise_v2_... Ask yourself, which of the 10 have you used today?
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by tomkat0789 11y ago
There should be another view showing the cost per kWh or some other indicator showing the bang people get for their buck with these plants. It'd be interesting to see how, say, solar in Nevada and Arizona compares to solar in Massachus
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by tomkat0789 11y ago
Working with the chart, to reach the lowest dose clearly linked to cancer (100mSv) minus background radiation for a year (4 mSv, so to get 96 mSv), you can find some silly permutations of that to get to 100mSv: Spend a year in the Fukushima
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by tomkat0789 11y ago
There's good arguements for and against a complete conversion to open access research. Ruining all the free fun of open access are charlatans from around the world creating open access journals from nothing and picking up free money an