Software recommendation request: Does anyone know of a good program for cataloging scientific papers locally on one's computer (preferably for mac)? I want to be able to sort by author, title, year, or keywords. Also preferably without clobbering my directory structure (so like iTunes for papers, but better). Bibtex interfacing entirely unnecessary.
I'm afraid not, I just don't get why I should in any way identify with some people doing sports just because they happen to be born in the same country.
Sounds just like me :) I was also more of a programmer in school, but I somehow lost the passion for that - you're always implementing things when you could be busy discovering them.
@cdonts "Looks" implies an observer. It is emitting or reflecting the same electromagnetic radiation it was when you were looking at it, but no one sees it.
@cdonts A little of both. Mind you the physic my answers uses is classical (pre-quantum) and there are arguments for a subtly different answer you you delve deep into QM.
I think, essentially, phyiscs doesn't care about that. Theories are judged by whether or not they predict observations correctly. If a theory says "If you don't look, it's X" and another says "If you don't look, it's Y", how are you ever gonna distinguish between the two?
The classical answer is unambiguously yes, and applies reasonable to macroscopic objects. The quantum answer is "Maybe." and depends on a physical fact that is not uet experimentally probed. You must use the quantum answer in some cases and should use it when talking about the world of the very small.
@ACuriousMind is one of the user you want to ask about the special cases. I'm not. I keep meaning to make the time to understand entanglement, but so far it hasn't happened.
@dmckee: It takes a great deal of self-discipline and epistemology to be satisfied with that! I've spent almost a year on digging through every kind of QM I could get my hands on till I finally gave up on "understanding" QM and accepted that that's good enough for all practical purposes
(Fun fact: Bell himself used "for all practical purposes" so often he abbreviated it FAPP)
@ChrisWhite My friends with Macs tend to use Papers, though you have to pay, they have an academic license. Don't use it myself, but others swear by it.
Aside from that aspect of discovery, once your code is working, you'll have plenty of physics to explore
The hydro code I'm using, AstroBEAR, is being used for a wide array of astronomical phenomena (star formation, molecular cloud formation, shocked clumps, supernova remnants, etc)
I'm afraid I know next to nothing about hydrodynamics or astrophysics, so I've got only a very vague idea what the adaptive mesh may be you are talking about
I guess you get pinged when one types the gap between the Kyle and the Kanos - so we have write Kyle Kanos' name the wrong way to ping him. What sorcery is that?
I did the same when I was an undergrad, but now I've gone completely the other way... this is what comes of having a baby, but early starts are kind of nice once I got used to them
was just scrolling up... Heidelberg eh? some good people there :)
It's basically reviewing the results and techniques for dealing with two-dimensional gauge theories, so one could strech it and say it's QFt, but due to the low dimension it's almost pure topology and group theory instead of the usual messy analysis of QFTs
Most my time is spend deciphering one or two sentences in a research paper and then writing two or three pages about what they did there ;)
It's mathy for sure, but it's beautiful math, in my view, at least :)
Admittedly, it's quite a strech till you see the first result you could even remotely think about applying it to the real world, so I understand it's not everyone's kind of thing
well, I could do the math and see the beauty, but the underlying qualitative ideas just never really piqued my interest I guess... was happy to just learn the ideas, had no interest in trying to push the boundaries of the topic
What will happen with my SE account after my death? Is there something that eg. warn foture users not to try contact with me, because I'm dead? Would my account be deleted for preserving servers memory? Could my family make something memorial with this account?
What other meta problems are gener...
