The h Bar

1:50 AM

@0celo7 Judge what?

@DanielSank Shoes

@BernardMeurer has some crazy ideas

4:11 AM

@0celo7 given that in the UK pants means underwear, this is not a wonderful thought.

Do you know x86_64 assembler John?

@JohnRennie You lost the war. Get over it and use the correct terms.

I used to do a fair bit of 8086 assembler back in the day. I've never done 32 bit or 64 bit assembler though.

What's the problem?

Why this is causing this?

Woah wait just one moment here

4:15 AM

@0celo7 :-) It was just that at 5 a.m. I don't need a mental image of some hairy dude in his grundies using a mouse on his skin!

Q: Design for Signal Processing Stack Exchange

10

I'm Stéphane, a senior product designer at Stack Exchange. This community went through the first phase of graduation back in Sep. 2015 and now we're ready to give you the second phase; a unique crafted site design and increase in the amount of reputation needed to access each privilege. I know th...

Handy

Can we get shirts?

I wanna physics SE shirt!

Make Physics SE great again

That's a shirt I'd buy

again?

when was it great to begin with

4:17 AM

@BernardMeurer Booooooooooo

Keep calm and hate on ACM

How about:
Front: Physics Stack Exchange
Back: Ask me a question

@DanielSank I believe I have a Physics SE shirt.

@dmckee kjlwaepoiq2w89uw;oihj gnp98 ;oiewirghj fp9jh aweipoh a

They were swag for active early adopters.

4:18 AM

@dmckee awwwww MAN.

What about really jealous late adopters?

We could ask the team if they still have the designs. Not sure what the next step would be.

@dmckee PLEASE

@dmckee Well, sending a design out to get shirts takes like five minutes on the internet.

White with the mexican-hat logo on.

^ Want

4:20 AM

I'll drop a note in the Teacher's Lounge.

@dmckee Eh?

@DanielSank That's the all moderators chat room.

@DanielSank It's where the big boys go

If I dress nice can I get in?

What I gotta do? Kill someone? I can do that.

2

lol

I had heard that Google fostered competitiveness

4:22 AM

What, no. Nothing to do with Google. It's just that I'm willing to submit to peer pressure to get into an exclusive nerd chatroom.

I mean, realistically who wouldn't do that?

raises hand

Hey if anyone wants a good laugh, load up numpy and read the docstring for numpy.random.normal.

Then count the number of different names/variables used to refer to the same thing.

I have a Stack Exchange shirt and a Cooking SE shirt, too. And Stack Overflow pens and stickers. For the first few years there was a trickle of swag.

@dmckee wow!

the heck

who funded that

4:26 AM

As if the worthless internet points weren't enough to keep us hooked.

I guess I'll just go ahead and bootleg my own.

@0celo7 Joel, I think.

HA, YOU'RE ALL ACCESSORIES NOW!

For some reason, the site-wide mathematics books discount on the AMS website does not apply to all mathematics books.

Seems legit.

Pff, I want PSE swag...

4:27 AM

@DanielSank But do we accessorize?

@0celo7 o_O

Q: Where is the textmode video buffer if it isn't at 0xB8000?

@BernardMeurer Does writing direct to the screen work in modern operating systems? This seems relevant:

16

About 15 years ago, I used to amuse myself and annoy my CS teacher by writing bad code that would directly modify the text on the monitor. This was/is easily done by accessing video memory at 0xB8000 on VGA-equipped PC-compatibles. Fast forward to today, I decided to try out my old trick throug...

graphics dos vga

@JohnRennie That's not a modern OS

That's my own kernel lol

running on QEMU

BernardOS

Ah.

4:27 AM

Seriously dude, you gotta change the name.

@DanielSank It's not real until he puts in on a mango.

It's a textbook sale, not a book sale.

@dmckee Wait, wat?

That's tricky of them.

One of the books I want is a monograph.

@dmckee Hmm, I wonder if mangos can work as batteries

4:28 AM

@0celo7 Tricksy, false publishers.

probably not

@BernardMeurer Also your code is suspect because it won't terminate unless your string has a multiple of 8 characters

Do you think only tubers are useful that way?

@JohnRennie Lol, It's the russian roulette!

@dmckee wtf

@BernardMeurer Brazilian roulette.

4:29 AM

@dmckee tubers and citrics in general, no?

Ok, well, a $17 discount.

That's nowhere near 40%, AMS.

@JohnRennie I changed the code also

@BernardMeurer Should be just about anything wet enough and slightly acidic, I'd think.

Ah

the string is composed of bytes so it should be loadsb and stosb

4:29 AM

It doesn't stack with the membership discount

@BernardMeurer that's how I would do it.

@0celo7 You'd think AMS could do arithmetic.

Hey everybody, in case you have been living underground, I thought I'd draw your attention to the trailer for Rogue One:

@JohnRennie github.com/daedalos-os/kernel/blob/master/src/arch/x86_64/…

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Trailer (Official)

►

@DanielSank They can, they're just tricky.

4:30 AM

Still doesn't work, but it's closer

JJ Abrams isn't directing, so it might be good.

@DanielSank ::chuckles::

Not everything he does sucks.

@dmckee False.

@DanielSank NaCl much

@0celo7 Eh?

4:33 AM

Why the hate

Hate?

I just can't think of anything Abrams has done that I thought was good.

Admittedly, I sometimes dislike his stuff because of script issues more than direction.

But still, I can't think of a single thing he's done that I liked.

I swear to god assembler makes my brain cells attempt suicide

Lost, Star Trek, Star Trek: Into Darkness...

@DanielSank Your mom

Force Awakens.

4:34 AM

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I really like The Force Awakens

@JohnRennie Uh oh.

Shall we not discuss this?

:)

I liked TFA

It was ok

It was a good space romp

The script was terrible. It was only not horrible because the acting was actually pretty good.

The script was so bad it's funny.

4:35 AM

I didn't like Death Star 2.0

3.0, bro.

And it comes out of nowhere

and like 2 minutes later it's gone

^ that

and you're like lolwat

That's the problem with the whole damned movie.

Nothing has any weight.

4:36 AM

Weight?

R2D2's big entrance happens because... uh... I dunno, he woke up from his nap?

You're taking this far too seriously.

@JohnRennie ?

It's a crappy script, that's all I'm saying.

@JohnRennie You have no clue how seriously this man takes his Star Wars

@JohnRennie I don't understand? Are you going to accuse me of being too serious if I explain an opinion? I think that's usually a less than interesting way to run a conversation.

@BernardMeurer ~Sigh~ It's more that I find discussing narratives, in any form, very interesting and fun.

4:38 AM

SF films (all SF really) are targetted at prepubescent (spelling?) boys

I'm not sure why backing up an opinion is "too serious".

@DanielSank Hey, I never said I didn't like that about you :D

Or those who, like me, have the same mental age

@JohnRennie And? So that means the scripts have to make no sense and suck?

All that matters is that it's fun - and SFA was fun

4:39 AM

@JohnRennie Great. I'm glad you had fun! I did not.

I liked parts of it very much!

But leaving the theater I felt kind of crummy. Han was dead for no reason, the entire republic was dead for no reason. The main hero was just sort of awesomely powerful for no reason. I didn't want to see it again.

Compare this with The Matrix. That, too, is directed at young males, but the script is 99% flawless.

I read on average two SF novels a week. If I judge them by the standards I'd use for e.g. a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book then 99% of them are crap. But they are still fun to read.

@JohnRennie Again, I did not find TFA fun.

What else can I say?

When the rathtars show up, it was just... boring.

::shrugs::

@DanielSank You urgently need to find the rewind button for your mental age :-)

Can you accept that different people experience different amounts of fun from a thing?

@JohnRennie I really, really don't think that's the problem.

Is there a shrug emoji?

4:43 AM

When I was like 12 I went and saw Lost in Space and had much the same reaction. Parts of it were fun, but I had zero desire to see it again.

@0celo7 Yeah google it.

I remember that because after I saw it, my friend's dad asked what I thought.

¯_(ツ)_/¯ is not an emoji

I said "The special effects were good but the plot was kind dumb."

He looked right at me and said "You're a smart little f----r, aren't you?"

Funny moment.

@DanielSank Hmm, I saw Lost in Space at around the same age and apart from the idea of an ID monster, which I thought was brilliant, I thought the rest of it was crap. So I'm not sure how good a reference that is.

Oops, I'm thinking of Forbidden Planet

@JohnRennie Well, it calls into question my "mental age" being the issue.

I can't remember if I've ever seen Lost in Space

Did you like Forbidden Planet - the script was written by Shakespeare! :-)

4:48 AM

@JohnRennie What's Forbidden Planet?

:: John faints away at the thought that someone hasn't seen Forbidden Planet ::

:(

Sorry.

Now you're just boasting.

BTW is that convention of using :: whatever :: documented anywhere? In my day we would have used [fx: whatever]

4:49 AM

fx?

fx = "Effects"

Like this:

As in "special effects" presumably

fx: Dan goes to get food

?

@dmckee Fancy

4:51 AM

Oh hey, pop quiz!

"Visual effects" ?

Suppose I give you some noise, and then you compute the Fourier transform of that noise. Pick a frequency. What is the probability distribution of the modulus squared of the Fourier component at that frequency?

The answer may surprise you (unless you're an astrophysicist and know everything about stats already).

90

@BernardMeurer Nope.

Was it close?

4:52 AM

No, your answer threw a type error exception.

A gaussian?

90 is not a probability distribution.

@JohnRennie You mean like the positive half of a Gaussian?

Well the mean won't be at zero, will it?

@JohnRennie Nope.

That would be odd.

Well it would be approximately gaussian as long as you weren't near zero

4:54 AM

@JohnRennie It's related to a Gaussian, but it's actually not Gaussian

The real and imaginary parts of the Fourier coefficient are both Gaussian though!

I can't remember the name for that type of distribution

Poisson?

@JohnRennie Nah. Basically the question is: if x is Gaussian and y is Gaussian, what's the distribution of x^2 + y^2.

It's not a Poisson.

Look it's six a.m. here :-)

@JohnRennie Ok ok, it's an exponential.

My brain is up to discussing Star wars, but little else :-)

An exponential?

4:56 AM

@JohnRennie Ok, well, from the previews Rogue One looks like it will be good.

@JohnRennie Yeah, a decaying exponential.

@DanielSank That's just racist against the 90

@BernardMeurer That makes no sense. Go get your bio-CPU checked out.

Aha! I left a server to update and restart overnight with little expectation that this would complete normally. But it has!! Wheeeeeeeeeee!

@JohnRennie nice

@DanielSank Always a relief.

Every network manager I know hates restarting servers. You never know if they're going to come back up, and the wait seems endless.

5:00 AM

I forget: how do I list all files in a directory with a given extension?

ls *.py doesn't appear to work.

@JohnRennie Yeah, it's extra fun when you do it remotely :-D

Most of our servers have remote access cards - effectively a remote keyboard and screen. So we can even dive into the BIOS settings if we need to.

@DanielSank I do ls | grep .py

@BernardMeurer Yeah ok fine.

But that's stress I don't need early in the morning :-)

In a sensible operating system you could do "dir *.py"

@DanielSank or ls | grep .py | less if I want it fancy

5:03 AM

@BernardMeurer I find it a bit sad that we mostly interact with our systems by manipulating strings.

@JohnRennie Oh shush :p

@JohnRennie :-D

Let's say "sensible shell", shall we?

@DanielSank ls *.py should work though...

It works here

There are a lot of things about the architecture of *nix that i like, but the emphasis on globbing isn't one of them.

@JohnRennie Nobody likes that.

5:04 AM

I like it, not even joking here

Various people have invented shells using their favorite programming language and REPL.

manipulating strings is EZ

@BernardMeurer Like your mom?

@DanielSank LOL

You earned that one, junior.

5:05 AM

@DanielSank Fair enough, fair enough

@JohnRennie Look, you can interact with your *nix system through Scala!

lihaoyi.com/Ammonite

I don't get why people don't like bash

it's awesome

@BernardMeurer It's better than nothing, but the fact that the result of everything you do is a stream of bytes with no structure is kinda stupid.

Right, @JohnRennie? Wouldn't you rather use PowerShell?

::hides::

Okay, I'll give in that JSON would be nice

@DanielSank PowerShell is cancer

their curl and wget aliases invoke tools which do not even resemble their originals

Powershell is a nice idea, but the learning curve is horrendous. And if you stop using it for a few weeks you forget everything again.

5:08 AM

so much so that the dev. of curl opened an issue asking for the alises to go

@BernardMeurer Why is the implementation important?

I'm used to relatively high level programs where the interface is all that matters.

@DanielSank Not just the implementation, the functionality is very, very different

oh

That's lame.

Ooh, there is a server down ...

However its remote access card isn't responding so it looks like a power or switch problem.

Balls, and I can't get anyone on site until Monday.

@JohnRennie Head to the pub?

5:17 AM

At six a.m.? Yes, why not? :-)

It's pretty funny to see you write "balls". In the US we don't say that too often, and "bollocks" always sounds like a very uniquely British expletive. Seeing a direct "translation" is kinda funny.

@JohnRennie Oh right. Well sure, go get some bangers and mash.

I have lamb sausages for lunch today.

Halal lamb in fact, though that isn't relevant.

::drools::

I just like the middle east flavour lamb sausages.

@JohnRennie They are delicious.

5:20 AM

I never had a lamb sausage

@BernardMeurer You guys eat beef all the time don't you? Or am I thinking of Argentina?

@JohnRennie We do, I eat beef at least 2-3 times a week

maybe more

I've had lamb three times in my life

meh

And there's nothing wrong with beef, but for me lamb has a lusciousness that beef lacks.

@0celo7 do you eat curry?

no

5:23 AM

@JohnRennie Agreed.

@JohnRennie I'm tired of beef

I can't take it anymore

halp

@0celo7 ah OK. I was about to say that in curries lamb works really well because it has a soft juicy texture, but that isn't going to be relevant to you.

@DanielSank: is lamb used in chilli con carne at all, or is there an equivalent dish maybe called something else?

@JohnRennie Well generally no.

At least not in Southern California. Normally you find beef, or sometimes turkey.

Lamb works so well in curries that I was wondering if there is a Mexican equivalent.

Pfffffft. One of the Rogue One actors let out a huge spoiler during an interview.

Secret

5:31 AM

[Dream]
Last night I dreamt about going to a bookstore and read a particle physics booklet for young children. When I flip through the pages, there's the good ol' standard model plus some weird particles in an extra row. Beneath where the quarks are (they swapped the position of the neutrinos and the quarks in this table) there are 3 generation of particles with the symbol m. Later from the text next to the table it is found they are called mcf particles. There's also something called the gc$\Gamma$ problem. On the next page it talks about the colors of gluons and quarks. Besides the usua…

Dream analysis: It seems the visit to the Collider exhibit in the pwoerhouse museum somehow got mixed up with photosynthesis

Reality check: Colorless hardrons ar not detectable, which is one reason why there are only 8 gluons

The more technical reason is because SU(3) has only 8 generators

@DanielSank very close to get my kernel to say anything I want

I just need to figure out how to write color information to the VGA buffer on the go

bloody 0xb8000

Secret

Caption: The super weird standard model saw in the dream within a dream last night

Secret

6:10 AM

sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160819114629.htm

Nonequlibrium dynamics in buffer gas cooling

@BernardMeurer What is a kernel anyway?

A program that can start up easily?

What's the real difference between an OS and anything else?

Seems to me like an OS is just a program that runs other programs.

An OS provides beautiful interfaces for a hardware

b/c hardware interfaces are ugly as fuck

and it manages CPU time

that's what it does

Ah

There's a book with a really good introduction on this

is what made me love this stuff

@BernardMeurer Norton's book?

I read that as a kid.

It was cool. It was like "what happens when you flip the power switch on your computer".

6:18 AM

@DanielSank Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems

ohhhh

ok

I haven't read Norton's :p

David Z

6:55 AM

@BernardMeurer ooh, yeah, I remember that one from a class I took.

@DanielSank To oversimplify, the kernel is the program that acts as the middleman between all other programs and the hardware. Or, it has to do at least that much. It can do other stuff too.

If you were really asking....

And an OS is a collection of a kernel with a bunch of other programs that do... things. Whatever the OS designers want.

Q: What kind of tank do I have in what is it used for because the label is halfway ripped off

8:27 AM

What!

0

I have a metal tank about 3 feet tall maybe four with a hose and a handle and a metal end has Eric comes out of it it's got a knob on the end like a torch. It also has a screw valve like you see on a propane tank to turn it on and off it's an ideal gas brand it's got the letters TW - 75 underneat...

ideal-gas

peterh

8:44 AM

@DanielSank Wow! I understood it :-) Also my Russian is around this level :-)

user116211

9:18 AM

Joined physics.stackexchange just to upvote this answer: "Both you and your ancestors are wrong" — The Red Pea 17 hours ago

user116211

Too chatty?

I think it shows excellent judgement :-)

privetDruzia

@DanielSank bce normalna a y tybya?

Wow, I've just seen this on Facebook:

sciencealert.com/…

A: Question about Calabi-Yau manifolds and quantum fluctuations at the Planck scale

9:54 AM

Does this answer make sense? I find it hard to make any sense of it, though that may simply be my lack of understanding of string theory.

0

The calabicle (my coinage) has a complicated internal structure, and must have this structure (information) in some form on a surface, per holographic principle. There are ~10^500, or ~2^1700, different calabicles. If we view these as having 2^1700 index numbers- the minimum information necessary...

12:07 PM

@JohnRennie It's complete and utter nonsense.

Alas, I can't flag it for VLQ because I'm banned from flagging for a total of three declined flags. Is this a joke? I have almost 1200 helpful flags and less than 30 declined ones, and I get banned because in one case a moderator didn't agree with my notion of "explicit answer to homework question"

and in the other two cases a low quality flag was declined although no LQ flags are supposed to be declined currently

^@DavidZ @dmckee @Qmechanic Is this the intended result of "when in doubt, flag"?

Also, the ban message is infuriatingly vague - it doesn't say anything about the length of the ban

@ACuriousMind I thought that might be the case :-)

I've flagged it as VLG and voted to delete.

Funnily enough, I can still vote to delete. What point is there in forbidding me to raise VLQ flags if I can just directly obliterate posts?

I've been flagbanned before as well, for the same sort of reasons you currently find yourself banned. Oh well.

Seems this is another not-entirely-thought-though SE mechanism. At least I'll only have to wait for a day if I read that post and my flag history correctly.

@JohnRennie I think it's a counterproductive system because it means that if I want to be sure to be able to keep flagging the egregious stuff it encourages me to not flag the ambiguous stuff to avoid getting my flags declined.

Which might be needed for a site like SO where the moderators drown in flags, but our mods have repeatedly said they'd like more flagging in any, not less.

Danu

1:00 PM

So, we're having an AMA with Secret?

@ACuriousMind I can feel your anger :P

@JohnRennie Then again, NASA produces lots of crap :D Like those stupid supposed free energy things, exotic matter warpdrives etc...

@DanielSank Much easier: Just manipulate some democratic process :D

@Danu Well, good, I am a bit angry about this. I'm just not sure yet at whom this anger is directed specifically :P

1:47 PM

Wow that salt

1:59 PM

@ChrisWhite Halp

2:11 PM

@ACuriousMind Would you believe that the sequence $(f_n)$ with $f_n(x)=x^n$ defines a seuquence in $C^0[0,1]$ that is Cauchy yet fails to converge in the $L^1$ norm?

Yes, it's a standard example.

@ACuriousMind Oh, well, I came up with it myself

The hint for that problem in the problem set is actually horrible.

@ACuriousMind I'm having trouble showing that $\ell^p$ is closed wrt. the $p$-norm. Is this possible without using the Minkowski inequality for sums?

David Z

2:36 PM

@ACuriousMind I suppose we should mark more flags helpful, then, even when they're not things that should really be flagged

But in a sense, yes, it is the intended result. That sense is that people who flag things that shouldn't be flagged lose the ability to cast flags, so that the flags they would cast on things which shouldn't be flagged don't distract the mods from handling flags on things that should be flagged.

I guess the threshold must be set pretty low or something

@DavidZ Well, but that would encourage people to further flag things that shouldn't be flagged...I don't think the fault lies with the mods' actions here

@0celo7 Can't say for sure

@DavidZ It's 25% declined flags for people with more than 10 flags during the last week. I cast 12, 3 were declined.

David Z

Ah OK. 25% is probably reasonable, and I guess people can hit it just by statistical fluke every once in a while. It would be much nicer if that 1200-flag history counted for something though.

Anyway. 2 days until you can flag again (so say the mod tools).

@ACuriousMind lol the physicist in me is telling me to use Minkowski with integrals and represent the series as $\sum x_n\delta(x-n)$

A: How do spatial curvature and temporal curvature differ?

@ACuriousMind and @0celo7 and indeed any differential geometers who happen to be around, could you have a quick look at this answer:

2

Consider a local Lorentz frame, $g_{ij} = \mathrm{diag}(1,-1,-1,-1)$. An observer (really a congruence of observers) at rest with respect to this frame has velocity vector $u^i = \delta^i_0$. It experiences no force (geodesic deviation) if it obeys the geodesic equation, which in this case become...

not sure that would fly here

your answer or the one that's linked

2:47 PM

It's beyond what I currently know but looks very interesting. I'm tempted to try and learn enough to understand exatcly what it's saying, and I guess I'm asking if you think it's worth the effort.

@JohnRennie I think I've heard something like that before

Thanks, perhaps I'll sharpen up my Google fu and try to work through it ...

I am leafing through a book where I could have heard about it.