The h Bar

@DeepakVaid About your question and comments -- I'm not going to remove comments, but you have a right to edit your answer and thus effectively and visibly respond to Lubos's arguments. The power of voting lays in averaging, so you should rather invest your energy in getting votes from other people than on fighting with LM.

there is some concern that Physics users have been "somewhere between very condescending and downright rude" to new questions that really weren't bad

Hey, there could be a paper in that idea ;)

maybe if there were a flashing link when somebody was in the room more traffic would come this way. After all there is a "join the room" button so one could have online this information.

Dont really wish to make a deal out of it, so not posting on Meta. But I just saw that post even if provocatively posed, it did express itself as a valid physics question. In reference to the question, there were strong opinions on either side, but all it amounted to was to educate further by knowing more of the criticisms and its defense. It is my opinion that there are lots of issues that remain unresolved, but it doesn't help to close them off just because they are.

@Coward Did you mean "I'm-not-an-idiot-degree"? I guess you could say that. There are a lot of employers who do things completely unrelated to physics but will still look favorably at a physics degree.

Will there really be nothing done about Georg downvoting two of my answers out of revenge? I don't care about the reputation points, but that sort of behavior seems blatantly and directly opposed to the sort of community we are trying to have here. I'm just a little shocked that absolutely nothing is even being mentioned

IMHO one reason chat is so dead is its extremely cumbersome interface. You have to open a whole new window and physics.SE is already a fairly heavy webpage. Then the chat page fails to detect my login status so I have to login again. Compare this to the pop-up chat in Facebook and imagine the possibilities if SE had something like that. Just something for the good folks running this site to chew on.

@kame The site is intended to be general one, with questions at any non-embarassing level. So go on!

Shellllldon? Leonaaard? Raaj?? Howard??

Answer: Sits down and works it out with a pencil.

What does the physicist do when he's constipated?

And about this fusion case... Let's give science a chance to work.

Interesting find: meneame.net/story/donde-va-masa-pierdes-cuando-adelgazas

And there's nothing wrong with the first time he closed. Mods are supposed to act quick on the early stages of the site, so they are forced to judge in a matter of minutes. But closing it a second time after it was opened by community vote, that's just stubborness.

of course you don't have to answer either one of those. its just that I wish I could be in Brazil and your name sounds really cool - like something from terminator 2 ;)

There are two things you get here. One people have to be relatively smart to have the confidence to post because of the peer review process itself. Two if there is a wrong answer, someone will call the answerer on it very quickly so people tend to answer when they know the answer they don't just BS like on a forum where a newbie will answer something stupid and it takes 15 posts before someone smart notices. You don't get that when you ask your buddy in Phys. 202 what he thinks.

Right. Well the site seems pretty viable to me. How are we doing for questions in Google so far? Do we have a set of standard searches that we use to monitor progress?

by the way, I've seen number of people from MO crop up. it would be nice if more come because I know there are few good (mathematical) physicists settled over there. is there anyway besides asking questions at MO that reference physics.SE (as a motivation for question, supposedly)

Here's one example of a question that I think should have not been closed but was. Perhaps losing us a supporter in the process: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2567/…

@Kostya that is actually very good point I haven't thought about. We probably don't want such questions. Perhaps we should edit the title to make it more physical

Looking at the list from last time, the only things that look like they could have central implementations are the two suggestions for publicity generation: doing posters or some such, and asking prominent bloggers to plug the site. Most of the others involve the questions being asked.

i guess, from my perspective, the first step in describing the correct answer is to show why the incorrect answer fails

I'm sure there are aspects of the physics of Mythbusters that are unexplored in the blogosphere which we could host questions about

@Marek since it came up, for analysis of the physics of Mythbusters my favorite source is wired.com/wiredscience/tag/mythbusters

This is currently closed as a duplicate, though it has been suggested that the original question be merged into the new one. I think that would lead to confusion because the answers for the original question wouldn't make sense when applied to the new one. But I welcome community input on this, if anyone thinks the current course of action (closed as duplicate) is not the best resolution.

possibly:

@gigacyan, @mbq so maybe it would be worthwhile to go over some of the better questions and think about ways to improve titles

It wouldn't be hard or out of line to send email to people running higher-traffic blogs. I've mentioned it a few times on ScienceBlogs, and you could probably get one or more of the Cosmic Variance bloggers to mention it.

If you could get it plugged on twit.tv/kiki - that would be great

@Marek Here's the type of "answers" we could hope for with a question like that: princeton.edu/~artofsci/gallery2010

Thats the type of question (the one I posted from programmers) has a wide enough appeal that I'd be happy to post on my facebook page. I think a question like that would be great for promotion of the physics site too.

Did anyone see this question on the programmers site?: programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/7806/…

About the promotion: I was trying to put together the posters but I didn't get to it in the end. Perhaps over the Christmas. Does anyone has good ideas about what should go into such poster (e.g. just questions, or also answers? And what questions concretely?)

@gigacyan okay, well we can keep an eye out for good simple questions. I guess the important thing is that the question can be answered in a high-quality way

Ie: a rigorous derivation for the stability of Earth's orbit

@Ami It would be nice if you can seed those as content for the site

The problem with Torricelli's law is it only works in a steady state. Considering the m'(0)=0 case forces us to consider what happens before it reaches that steady state. I found a journal article about it but don't have access. "An exact solution to the draining reservoir problem of the incompressible and non-viscous liquid"; should be able to google it. However once we pass that " initial transient region" it works fine.

@Marek: because there is a torque

I'll add my few thoughts here

in any case, i'm still quite discouraged by the lack of decent level, well-formed, quantitatve (or even conceptual) questions

maybe trying to convince some well-established physics blogs to add us as a link?

mathoverflow.net/users/602/noldorin

interesting... I'd always assumed that anything I could ask would be too low-level for MO

@Marek You can express +1 on chat with starring a post -- there is a small black star on the right of a post when you hold your mouse over it.

yeah, that makes sense. I was wondering why this room was better before and David couldn't think of a reason (if I remember correctly) and so I assumed there is no particular reason