Unfortuantaely I haven't any single malt in the house right now. I do have an undistinguished but passable bourbon, however. And some very nice milk stout.
All the "I was studying from <textbook> on the subject of <sophisticated topic> and working out the <equation> and I ran into a question about <complex mathematical statement>...".
Huh I just took a look and there are questions asking for someone to review / referee a specific paper. No specific question, just a paper and a request. That totally wouldn't work here.
Haha I see Dilaton voted to close a question on PO for "PhysicsOverflow is a graduate-level and above physics site, which means that it is for advanced students and physicists. This seems rather a popular physics question, targeted at a general audience. I am therefore voting to close.".
He gives us a hard time about trying to enforce good quality answerable questions useful to a broader audience than just one person (the questioner). His PO close vote reason seems to be the same thing in the opposite direction. This strikes me as a bit hypocritical.
Damn, I edited a question and the asker rolled my edit back. Then I was in the middle of answering the question when it was deleted.
I noticed that the posts of the recent spam surge on AskUbuntu were all edited by community members into something like
EDITED - REMOVED SPAM ANSWER
or similar.
While I understand why the users have done this and I too don't want to leave the spam content visible for longer than absolutely...
@DavidZ Interesting. My main goal of editing was to prevent the content from getting indexed by Google where the spammer could actually benefit from such a post.
The accepted answer to that Meta post involves the closing statement "In short, the community is usually too fast for spammers, so by the time anything can happen out of it, it's already gone." which I don't think is actually true here.
Of course, if the generally accepted practice for spam is to not edit it then I won't :-)
I suppose it is less true here than on the bigger sites, but still somewhat true, and when you edit the post it screws up SE's internal spam analysis system
@JamalS My feeling is that we have a high ratio of new users to old active users. This causes us to run into some interesting problems that other SEs don't see as much.
@BrandonEnright That's something peculiar from an SE viewpoint, but that is not an "ordinary question", they explicitly introduced such "reviews" as another kind of posts they want to have
@JamalS Yes, a ratio of about 6:1, whereas PO has a ratio of about 45:1. Methinks they have no clue what an "advanced theoretical, highly technical" astrophysics question is because they don't have any active astrophysicists there.
@ManishEarth: It's frustrating when they don't send any reply, even when I actually ask a non-trivial question about their research which they haven't addressed in their paper!
Ah, the leader is absent, but the audience lingers on. How are you doing Curious?
Is ACuriousMind an intentional omage to Nash, or just a coincidence? Amazing fellow Nash. His last paper before his... long break?... was a very novel proof on embedding manifolds in Euclidean spaces, if I recall correctly.
The emails I get are never very consistent about time zones. I get one at 8am ESt, or 8:30am EST today, and it says "in three hours". Today Physics SE said it ended over half an hour ago>=?
Speaking of relativity, going through Kip Thorne's finally Kindle-available book (we can thank Interstellar for that I'm sure) is both delightful and frustrating. Delightful because of so many little insights -- Hawking radiation as tide-induced pair production, how elegant and cool is that little snippet!
But frustrating because the landscape changes so much over the decades that he covers that I am left wondering "and why should the current version be any more accurate?" Given Hawking's almost-paper, maybe it's not.
There are two solutions to Einstein's equations that allow for warp drive. One is the Alcubierre warp drive and the other is the Natario warp drive.
What is the difference? Is the Natario warp drive better suited for a real life application than the Alcubierre warp drive? Here is a paper in whi...
I wonder if there's a way to convince Congress to hold hearings on the national security implications of both drives, and why such drives are the fault of the Executive branch? It might make for entertaining CSPAN coverage...
I tried to directly read the paper it came from, gave my analysis of it, and because I didn't go by someone else's analysis I'm staying ignorant. I feel like that's backwards
More seriously, I found Alcubierre easily enough (and now recall seeing its description many years ago, if not the name), but the Natario seems to be more a critique of the Alcubierre idea than a separate idea.
(At least from a quick Googling, nothing more.)
Speaking of warps and temporal uncertainty, my break's up and I've got to drive somewhere. Can't make the chat... if there is one?... at 1 EST. Have fun all!
(Your name is Godparticle, with a picture of Feynman? Hmm I say, hmm...)
Possibly because I stay faaaar away from all popular science accounts of Sci-Fi concepts. I can enjoy Sci-Fi, but only if it's technobabble, and not actually trying to be scientific
@ThePhoton: We cannot choose EE.SE as a target in the default dialog. But I meantain that it is unclear what you're asking because OP didn't even bother to provide minimal context for what they are asking about. Not even the tags are helping.
Nope, the're isn't any. Which is strongly indicative that you should not throw well-known technical terms from that field around here without explaining them
I think the main issue with the question was that it used an engineering term and didn't provide enough context for people unfamiliar with the specific field to have any idea whether the question was gibberish or not.
I ones that one, maybe because I have a bit of EE background and it seemed to make sense to me? I would vote to reopen... (but now really am leaving)...
@BrandonEnright, I don't think the question is meant to be about power lines like your edit specifies. VSWR is used for RF transmission lines. I don't know whether it's also used for power lines or not.
I want to ask several questions about the same problem domain but each question is independent from the others. Should I put all the questions in a single post or should I split them and send multiple posts?
Return to FAQ index
To be honest, I doubt everyone is expected to read the FAQ, it's there for cases where someone new doesn't know the rules and we can point to an authoritative source
@IncnisMrsi I just saw your email. I voted to close your question because I thought it was too broad (indicated in the close reason). I haven't looked at it again.
@Phonon @ACuriousMind I kind of like this one, but mostly because it allowed me to write an answer (first in a long time), and about something I used to be very curious about before I understood it
Last year, we had the Winter Bash on Physics Stack Exchange.
For those who weren't around or don't remember, the event is one where completing various achievements on the site earns you different hats that can be "worn" on site; appearing on top of your gravatar wherever it is shown on the site....
LMAO, excerpt from the press conference today: "Magnus, Nigel Short called your opening today the "Condom Variation"; you use it once and then throw it away. Do you think you can use this opening again?" "We'll see."
@ManishEarth Are they disabled after the 'event' is over?