@dmckee: was that "Be nice" comment in reference to my comment? Looking at it now, I could see how it could be not so nice, but at the time of writing it wasn't meant to be not-nice

@KyleKanos unrelated, but a pet peeve of mine, could you not refer to those kinds of questions as 'dimensional analysis', I like to think of dimensional analysis as the more refined art of determining leading order physics from dimensional arguments alone, not just unit conversions

Ah, unit conversions. I drew a complete blank as I was typing that comment and all I came up with was DA. I'll try remembering UC from now on (no guarantees though)

I claim sleep is getting to me

Well, the lack thereof

@KyleKanos No, it was not directed at you. I deleted a "Let Me Google That For You" type comment.

Your comment is fairly curt, but it is curt in a helpful vein.

Or, at least that's how I see it.

A Shape Dynamics Tutorial: arxiv.org/abs/1409.0105

I'm going to submit a paper to a journal and there are some issues.... . I had a question. @KyleKanos (and anyone who can help)

@Mostafa Sadly, that is often the case

If you feel comfortable enough, talk to him about it. If not, drop it and let it go.

Actually

I was thinking of submitting the preprint to arxiv with just my own name. Is it appropriate?

You can write in a footer "Corresponding author email address is <you@you.com>"

Can I later use that arxiv preprint as a proof that the paper is my work?

I'm not sure how that works

@Mostafa Though I don't know what the precise etiquette for this is, I'd say that it is bad style to have the arXiv author list differ from the actual author list of the same paper when submitted

If you want a more-professional opinion, see if your university has an ombudsman and talk to him/her

People seeing that could also think you are trying to deny your co-author deserved credit by not mentioning them on the arXiv

As far as I know, the student's name must come first and the supervisor must be the last author. Isn't it the case?

Also, can the order of names be changed later? (for example, when the paper gets submitted)

@Mostafa Nope, that's not the case.

At least not across the board

My advisor lets me put my name first, but some colleagues of mine who have a different advisor have to put his name first

OK thanks. I think I should email him and asked if I can be the first author.

Gah, stupid Amazon.com

I tell it my new address but it's still sending my stuff to my old address

That's unfortunate...though, depending on the items, it must be also quite confusing for the people living at your old place

Last I heard, there isn't anyone there

@dmckee No, it doesn't make me feel better, already have the one for hitting it once and I plan on never getting the ones for hitting it lots of times

@Jim I think that if you're like John Rennie by answering 2k questions, you hit the rep cap just about every day.

@KyleKanos Some quick tracking through his rep graph shows that he has almost always at least one fresh highly upvoted answer on the days he hit it

Interesting

@KyleKanos Don't even joke. I don't want that responsibility. Once you get that much rep, people start expecting you to be around and doing stuff and being professional

Having lots of answers seems to provide a steady trickle of rep, but not as much as one tends to imagine

@Jim Yeah, like Jon Skeet

I think it'll be many years before I hit 100k

There's a reason I don't have the fanatic badge or any of the moderation gold badges. I like this to pass the time, but I'm not devoting time to it. I'm not a fanatic and would never spend 100 days straight here. Weekends are too important to me

Obligatory reference: Jon Skeet facts

Who's Jon Skeet

I have a fanatic badge here & on PPCG

@Jim An answerer over on StackOverflow

Has >700k rep

#1 on SO by almost 200k

Though one must always remember that math.SE, SO and the like seem to be far more users/votes, and thus rep is inflated there compared to our little site

@ACuriousMind I did the count once a few months ago

Something like 6 million users on SO (with like 5.5 million of them with < 100 rep)

Compared to our like 40k

The size of our site just means we're all extreme meta hipsters

Jon Skeet coded his last project entirely in Microsoft Paint, just for the challenge.

Nice

We like physics before it's cool

Semi-colons were invented to put a pause at the end of each line of Jon Skeet's code to let the compiler finish orgasming

That the accepted answer there is from Jon Skeet and says "Users don't mark Jon Skeet's answers as accepted. The universe accepts them out of a sense of truth and justice." may be my favourite bit of meta-humour in there :D

One would think that somebody would have already done that kind of testing, right? But nowhere is a reliable source of that to be found, so maybe you will produce something publishable ;)

Make a lab

Good point

Write a code that makes a lab

And simulate some test subjects

Gaussian distribution of "good" ears

I got into a debate once with a faculty here over the origin of the term "Monte Carlo"

I said it was from the town, he said it was from the game

Isn't the game named after the town, and the discussion therefore moot?

That's what I said

But he said that the MC algorithm was named after the game

As a retort to the origin of the game's name

@ChrisWhite Better hurry before all of AC shuts down

AC's been losing business to the casinos that opened up in PA

o/

Hi

I managed to get Fedora 20 installed on my old laptop without any issues. Fairly impressed at the ease it went through.

Last time I tried Fedora, it was like version 12 and it sucked badly at installing things

@ChrisWhite Third year of four :)

Currently, taking QM3. Dirac and a bit of field theory and stuff. Amazingness :D

haha yeah

And by that time, some of us grad students won't be grad students anymore

still, last week I was up all night simulating stuff

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOOSCILLATOR

I may not have saved it

bah

wait this one isn't the hypnooscillator

That's a lot

And if you're not doing the same thing as your advisor, it's even harder to get one

A typical proposal is at least 12 pages of text, counting both your proposal and letters. Committee members read about 100 of these (>1200 pages of total reading) so make it easy for a weary reader to get an overview of your work. A good way to do this is to use lots of bold-faced section headings and summarize key points in your proposal.

So basically include TL;DR

Glad I'm a computationalist

I don't need a telescope, just a computer

And now my eyes are going bad because of AstroWorser

Who the hell writes in small white text on black background

If I code in dark backgrounds, I've got bright-ass colors as my text (yellows primarily)

@ManishEarth What on earth am I seeing there?

@ACuriousMind good luck on that question ;)

@Danu It's the second or third in that vein from them today. Classic case of trying to run when you can't even walk.

pfft, cop-out comment! Is it really impossible to think about Newtonian gravity + speed of light?

Haha...I think so - do you happen to possess a Lorentz-invariant formulation of gravity? :P

Because that's why EM is the stuff SR is made for - it is manifestly Lorentz invariant

I know that

but I was hoping that it could still be handled somehow

perhaps John Rennie has some way of making sense out of the nonsense - he often does

It's possible, but I've never seen it, and I doubt it would be useful either way.

And yes, I'll happily admit there are people here who are better than me in providing useful answers to such questions :)

@ACuriousMind I was just trying to provoke you into a stroke of brilliance... but alas

@Danu Ha, well, I can't deliver those every day ;P

So humble, so humble :) Good night - I have to go and view a room at 8:30 tomorrow

Good luck then! (And my condolences for having to rise that early ;) )

Does anyone have a better answer to this question? Mine is just 'shut up and calculate' - to some extent. And the answer by Qmechanic also doesn't address the issue in my opinion, although I've come to a new insight through the exchange with him.

The real question is why it is not k - the obvious choice for the constant because it is just that in classical mechanics - but instead kappa that should be the constant in the continuum/field limit

OK now I'm really going to bed ;)

@ACuriousMind Kuramoto system. Basically some globally coupled oscillators that synchronize. Distance from origin is related to the frequency of the oscillator