zbyszek

8 ms·

31.
by zbyszek 14y ago
I liked the T-shirts he and his pals were wearing emblazoned with "Sikhs in the City" -- the worst puns are the best.
32.
by zbyszek 14y ago
Interesting. I recall how we had to decrease the clock speed of the processors on a high-performance machine in order to reduce errors - these were detected by simple reproducibility tests. With code optimised to sustain a huge percentage
33.
by zbyszek 14y ago
This was also colloquially known as the "leapfrog" algorithm and is the simplest of a class of integrators that are symmetric (in simulation time) and symplectic which are crucial properties for some simulations. I take it that RESPA is th
34.
by zbyszek 14y ago
Surely in a Markov process the next state is picked at random with some probability distribution, which may be uniform.
35.
by zbyszek 14y ago
And there is a university in Lublin named after her too.
36.
by zbyszek 14y ago
At the risk of being patronising towards someone using English as a foreign language, to my mind the best thing is the text accompanying the cartoon story: "The piteous woman is disturbed. A sweet dreaming is broken. She is feckless in the
37.
by zbyszek 14y ago
It's more along the lines of an international lab. Many, perhaps most, of the academics working there are still employed by their home institutions and are funded just as if they were working in a lab in their own university. In fact, the s
38.
by zbyszek 14y ago
That's about it. See also http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/06/28/why-we-shouldnt-com...
39.
by zbyszek 14y ago
Having something good, creative or worthwhile to say and saying it well are two different things. I understand the phrse "good writer" to mean the latter. Too often have I come across excellent insights buried like diamonds in a dungheap in
40.
by zbyszek 14y ago
The Warsaw Uprising museum ( http://www.1944.pl/ ) is well worth a visit. For a long time this history was suppressed as it didn't fit in with the prevailing orthodoxy that the Red Army did all the liberating. The existence of the museum is
41.
by zbyszek 15y ago
This accords with my experience. I have a lousy academic publication record, partly because I wasn't that bothered about getting the next post-doc (although I was never short of offers, strangely enough) and partly because I liked to build
42.
by zbyszek 15y ago
My very first program, in BBC Basic, was for work, drawing a graph of some kind of lab instrument data interfaced via the analogue port. That was 1989 or 1990, and I didn't do any programming again for at least a year or two until learning
43.
by zbyszek 15y ago
This is tangential to the discussion, but as an obtuse non-American I'm glad to have the phrase in question explained to me (you wouldn't believe I have actually spent some time in the US). The UK equivalant is "as the actress said to the b
44.
by zbyszek 15y ago
Very odd to see this here; my mother works in that bookshop. I remember her telling me how the phones were constantly ringing for the whole week after that first ad was put in the paper, with everybody wanting that damn poster and nobody in
45.
by zbyszek 15y ago
It's a hard hypothesis to prove either way. One finds that quantum effects dominate the physics at smaller length scales. In quantum theory, the smaller a thing is (its Compton wavelength) the higher its mass or energy. At the Planck scale
46.
by zbyszek 15y ago
I know someone who programs EDA tools and this is what I have observed: You need to know how to make an IC out of lumps of metal, or at least know someone who does. If this were simple they wouldn't pay designers so well (sweeping generali
47.
by zbyszek 15y ago
I had that experience recently; being told on the phone to a utility company "Sorry, but that address does not exist." to which I replied "I'm sure it does because I'm standing in it right now."
48.
by zbyszek 15y ago
A scientist who does not get promoted or win tenure is likely to cease being a scientist. Losing those scientists who favour change makes the system even less likely to change.
49.
by zbyszek 15y ago
I can't help being reminded of that ball in Woody Allen's "Sleeper". Fascinating speculation, none the less.
50.
by zbyszek 15y ago
Why should the reviewers feel unconfortable? In the current system, reviews are made available to the paper writers, and that doesn't seem to inhibit the reviewers, despite the fact that one often has a good idea of who the reviewers are, e
51.
by zbyszek 15y ago
I wasn't so keen on the idea until you mentioned "dirty limericks and communist propaganda". I could be mollified after a crash if I read "This software refuses to comply with the oppression of the proletariat by the boss classes. Bug repor
52.
by zbyszek 15y ago
Was there not something similar after the Vancouver riots? There were misgivings expressed: http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/world/on-the-dangers-of-crowd... . Was is successful?
53.
by zbyszek 15y ago
You are probably right, and it's odd because if I've learnt anything from my time in science research, it's that science isn't like your school homework or undergraduate exams where there is a right answer. I find the notion that there is s
54.
by zbyszek 15y ago
The fact that humans have been expending valuable brain-power on art for millenia might suggest that it does have some use, or more broadly, that utility is not always obvious.
55.
by zbyszek 15y ago
Aren't these already in public records in the form of birth certificates and, if you own property, the title deeds?
56.
by zbyszek 15y ago
The free electrons in a conductor move at nothing near the speed of light, though.
57.
by zbyszek 15y ago
What about about the Peloponnesian wars? They went on for decades! Of course, the Athenians were known for other things too.
58.
by zbyszek 15y ago
My experience of being mugged leads me to believe that the degree of violence meted out is not necessarily the amount strictly needed to gain control.
59.
by zbyszek 15y ago
True, but has it not always been the case that writers have tended to view the past through a lens shaped by their contemporary mores? When I studied history (we used Books -- it was that long ago) I was taught that the development of argu
60.
by zbyszek 16y ago
tcsh

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