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3:52 AM

@ChrisWhite Yes, I do!

user54412

Survey question: Since there seems to be some feeling of "why would you ever think something so silly?" on this post, I have to ask -- Am I the only one who grew up hearing that exact same story about uranium breaking up into nothing other than barium and krypton?

ManishEarth

@ChrisWhite me too

user54412

Because every resource I read (and I read a lot of science as a kid) made that claim, without exception or qualification

ManishEarth

I think around 10th grade I learned that i was wrong

user54412

I think by the time I knew enough to know that it couldn't be true, I stopped thinking about it (it's not like you can compute the branching ratios in first-year QM). I don't think I actually realized it was wrong until I saw that post.

ManishEarth

3:56 AM

haha

There are lots of mechanics conundrums I had in my childhood (eg rotation and stuff) -- now I don't even think about that field

ManishEarth

4:09 AM

hello?

@ChrisWhite Greetings from the terminal!

user54412

4:24 AM

@ManishEarth but... why?

ManishEarth

@ChrisWhite It's mostly the only way to test ChatExchange

user54412

(I ask as I work to install a particularly user-unfriendly OS)

ManishEarth

Hello, world!

@ChrisWhite also, I have a spiffy web viewer

Also, yesterday I discovered a way to crash the browsers of all Firefox users in a chatroom :p

(already reported)

so beware the Manish

user54412

All I'm likely to ever crash is a scientific computing cluster

user54412

and they tend to frown on that sort of thing

ManishEarth

4:34 AM

haha

no it just crashes the browser

Open this in firefox if you want to try :p

user54412

Yep, I can confirm that that crashes firefox :)

user54412

But only when I let it through NoScript

user54412

For your next challenge, crash my browser without JavaScript

ManishEarth

It doesn't use javascript

It uses SVG

user54412

java?

user54412

4:39 AM

ManishEarth

It's an SVG image that's got en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs embedded

user54412

out of curiosity, does that crash 64-bit versions without going another level deeper?

ManishEarth

@ChrisWhite I'm on 64bit

It crashed me

user54412

interesting -- wiki says it fills 3G of ram, so I would have thought (hoped) the browser could deal with allocating that much

ManishEarth

@ChrisWhite it can

@ChrisWhite the example in the wiki does 3G, mine does more

user54412

4:46 AM

ah ok

ManishEarth

Also I'm using an SVG -- it needs to render too, not just calculate

it went up to 4G on mine before I killed it

and the rendering is why Fx crashes

Actually .....

I wonder if XML entities are Turing complete

if they are....

Theoretically I could encode any computational problem in an SVG file, and have everyone else calculate it for me

user54412

you know, I've yet to meet a computer-related anything that failed to be Turing complete

ManishEarth

haha

well, if I can code an elementary CA using entity substitution, I'm done

user54412

I once took a for-fun student-taught course on esoteric programming languages, including things you wouldn't think are full languages. One of the topics was using pov-ray to do computation (beautiful output, by the way). Apparently someone even wrote a ray tracer in pov-ray.

Peter

8:31 AM

wow, way to go me, I just got a warning if I post any more stupid questions (formatting mainly) I will be blocked. pedantic much.

3 hours later…

David Z

11:49 AM

@Peter if it's the warning I think it is, that's not what it means. It means you'll be blocked if you post many (not any) more badly received questions. The warning is given very early so you know to pay more attention to your questions.

@ChrisWhite regular expressions?

Peter

12:42 PM

DZ, got ya, I wasn't trying to publish a paper, didn't know it was all so formal, my bad. oh well, I will stick to reading and not writing. peace.

1 hour later…

Sabre Tooth

2:00 PM

@ManishEarth?

ManishEarth

yes?

Sabre Tooth

cn I get your opinion of something?

is there anything wrong with the question astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/8083/… and should I delete it on astro and post it here?

ManishEarth

looks fine on Astro

(would be fine here too, but it's perfectly ok where it is)

Sabre Tooth

hmmm okay, but where would I actually get n answer?

It took 3 bounties from 2 people to even get an answer on a previous question

hmm I think I'll leave it there... have been lviing it up on ES.SE

ManishEarth

Wait. Share it.

It's quite possible nobody on the community knows the answer

shrug

Sabre Tooth

2:10 PM

share it?

aaah got it...lol

hmmm goes off and starts sharing things

might even share my question from here

@ManishEarth thank you for your advice and counsel

Sabre Tooth

2:33 PM

hey @ManishEarth, sorry to bother you again - but good call on the sharing - no sooner than I shared my recent astro question that it got favourited by astronomy news

ManishEarth

nice!

Sabre Tooth

getting famous...woot...lol

User Anonymous

2:54 PM

There's something about Floris and his answers especially to questions about commonplace situations. Of course, the clincher is the coin answer, but even the less popular ones, like this particular answer are absolutely brilliant!

Even though somebody else got the accepted (and correct) answer, I am taken aback by what Floris did there.

Physics Meta

Q: What is the meaning of **effort** that moderators want in homework quo?

Always do I have seen most of the homework tagged questions are hold, where moderators reason to show minimal effort. I thought they wanted the asker to show his attempt. But recently, I got amazed when my homework-tagged question was put on hold by a moderator( I am not disrespecting him!) . For...

Hello @DavidZ

3:10 PM

Some criticism aimed at you (I suppose, from the original question) in the above meta post :)

David Z

Yeah, I see... not really criticism, though, I think the poster is just curious and confused

Sabre Tooth

3:42 PM

how on earth is that question without effort?

1 hour later…

Sabre Tooth

5:06 PM

weird... I can't seem to be able to post a question.... I am sure I am not question-banned (as I have only written 1 that is at +7)...odd

Brandon Enright

5:24 PM

@SabreTooth I think there is a newly-added cooloff period for new users asking questions. I think it gets affected by the number of downvotes on your questions too.

Sabre Tooth

ummm my question was asked weeks ago, and I have had no downvotes and no deleted answers

Brandon Enright

@SabreTooth Interesting, you should ask on mothermeta what limit you're running into.

Sabre Tooth

nor deleted questions

i have only made 3 comments on this site and voted about half a dozen times

odd

ah well

i'm sure whatever it is will right itself soon enough

Physics Meta

Q: Can we Undo Flags?

I flagged a question thinking that it deserved it, but later I realised that the flag wasn't needed. So my question is can we undo a flag?

support feature-request flagging flags

David Z

5:41 PM

@SabreTooth yeah, hopefully so. For what it's worth I don't see anything in the moderator tools that would explain why you wouldn't be able to ask a question.

Brandon's suggestion to post on Meta Stack Exchange is probably a good one, or you could post on Physics Meta.

Sabre Tooth

its probably even my own computer - i'll check again later

5 hours later…

user54412

10:34 PM