@BrandonEnright Way too much time on his hands

@KyleKanos you just bet me to the punch with the cratering question

yeah, oh well

discarded mine, so allis good

I am sure the online calculator I found for the same would be pointless as well

my contributions are pretty crap anyway it seems

@Amaterasu Join the club :-)

@BrandonEnright not too sure why I am still a member

I am more of an environmental physicist, experimental and the like - a lot of the theoretical questions are of no interest to me

@Amaterasu Yeah same here minus the whole "I'm a <anything> physicist" part.

the answers I hve made are pretty rubbish (if using rep as a gauge), and my 2 questions are definitely rubbish - unanswered, low rep and low views

@Amaterasu It picks up as you gain rep.

that's the thing, I am finding it near on impossible to gain rep here

I mean, my answer here physics.stackexchange.com/questions/72711/… took an hour for me to get all the bits and pieces together... and it stil is crap

@Amaterasu I thought it was good and upvoted accordingly

well, thank you, but I just wanted to assure I did not link it to get upvotes - just as an example

@Amaterasu I'm not on 24/7, so I'm bound to miss good questions/answers

This was one of them

I guess at least I got to post preety volcanic eruption pics in a different answer

@Amaterasu I dunno if pretty pictures are all that important. This answer of mine contains no images but was upvoted 54 times while this answer has a pretty image and was upvoted 32 times

true, but sometimes they help in an explanation, as was the case in the answer I wrote

and big volcanic eruptions are pretty awesome pics

@Amaterasu Is that Emilio's question you're answering?

have answered, yes

in a former life, many moons ago, I was a geologist

@KyleKanos You're lucky that you've answered a popular question. Questions like those, earn a lot of views, get into the hot list, then other SE fellas (I mean, the 101 rep. guys) pop in and put their votes :D

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut Yeah, and I have no idea how those two became popular questions

Well, the rocket one I can understand

But the earth's molten core one I'm not sure

/peeking into profile

ugh, it's an SO profile -_-

/looks over @Waffle'sCrazyPeanut shoulder

@KyleKanos: Meh, that too is a popular question, ain't it? o_O

holy odd socks!

What do you mean "It's an SO profile"?

Yeah, @ManishEarth is there... So, it's definitely a popular one :P

@KyleKanos Your default chat profile is targeted to SO :D

wheres my default?

... while mine and all others' are Physics, and Manish's is Chem

@Amaterasu I started on SO

aaah

@Amaterasu Chem... Click your icon here, and you can see that ;)

a site i won't be going back too - SO that is

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut Check it now

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut that makes sense... i have slightly less crappy contributions there

@KyleKanos Whooo... Fine :D

i participate far more on P.SE than on SO

P.SE?

Yeah, that's why I came to suggest a "change" :P

@Amaterasu Physics

aaaaaaaaaaaaaah

I thought mods waited a few weeks before cleaning up comments?

Because this answer on Std Dev has zero comments on it now

i sort of float around and make my crappy contributions on the sites i am a member of

@KyleKanos probably got flagged as obsolete as the error was fixed

Ahh. Gotcha

they are watching

Physics is 3rd highest on my list, behind Chemistry and Sustainable Living

So I got an email from a university I applied to, letting me know that they didn't get the 3rd Letter of Reference

wasn't me

But the Dept Chair wouldn't be emailing me that the application wasn't fully complete unless I were a viable candidate

At least I don't think so

Right?

sounds like you have a strong chance - can you contact your 3rd referee?

I did

He said he'd send it out today

If I land it, I'll be back in PA

(Pennsylvania for those not in the US)

I'd say you are in with a great chance

It'd be a good fall-back in case the Quantitative Analytics position at Wells Fargo falls through

@KyleKanos My dict saves me each time when you people speak new words :P

meanwhile, in Australia, I can't get an academic job, so I do independent research (attached to a UNi)

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut You could always ask

I know... ;-)

But, that always saves a wonderful discussion sometimes :D

I mean, people could get into discussing about the "word" itself :P

Well, I think they wanted to use Transylvania, but people didn't like vampires and witches back then

^ sarcasm

even though, they rule

@Amaterasu Debatable.

a vampire-witch would be epic

Nowadays, I play too much games

I haven't played them for over an year -- I just dig into my PC, surf the internet and always read, read, read...

But, now - this gaming is sucking my time :/

What game?

i write papers, do weight-training, go for 5-10km walks, eat (when i remember to), sleep and write crappy posts here

@KyleKanos Call of Duty, Age of Mythology (basically shooting & RTS) :D

I write code & do things with the family

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut I've played CoD 1. The others, not so much

@KyleKanos Yeah, I'm playing that right now (quite old) :D

Yesterday, I finished COD world at war :)

The last PC/Console game that I played was Final Fantasy XII on my PS2. I sold that shortly before #2 kid was born, which was about 2.5 years ago

Why? Don't want your kid to play a game? :D

I might tackle some unanswered questions here, on sustainability and chem and write my trademark crappy answers

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut I was 28 at the time, my wife & I both agreed that it was time for me to put the games away

Maybe I'll let the kids play video games, but I'd start them off on things like Mario Kart racing

@KyleKanos oh, that way... :D

No, it really was a mutual thing

hehe, I understand... :)

@KyleKanos: Have you "created" videos?

Because, I'm gonna do that, and I need help (if anyone had done it)

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut Only of mundane things like birthdays, getting the babies to laugh, etc

Duh, not that one...

Then definitely not and definitely never will

My friends asked me to make those "drawing" videos (the ones like minutephysics) for a subject called Kinematics & Theory of machines

While I can record my drawings with camera, and simulate the levers & mechanisms with mathematica, I have no idea how to work with both :/

I mean, joining them...

Any ideas? (this is for everyone)

/searching @BrandonEnright

Dunno, sorry

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut Are those the same style of videos used in Khan Academy, by any chance?

@DavidZ No... Because, I have to simulate them

Hey DavidZ ;)

That's why I pointed minutephysics... (or Doodle Science)

Just marker & paper

@KyleKanos No problem... This would be a question for everyone anyway :D

I've already written the script for that video, and I'm waiting for my material (neighbor's camera)

But, I've got no idea how to work with videos (have never done that) :/

@DavidZ Why? Are those easy?

I don't know, but I have a friend who has made some videos in that style

It sounds like you're talking about a different kind of video though

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut the minutephysics guy has a few videos on video creation around the net! Definitely worth checking out.

Two lectures and one short interview by the guy that does periodicvideos.

@DavidZ Yeah, because - those looked like a "stylus-Tab" touch-writing type

youtube.com/watch?v=_Cv5ldhxpLA and youtube.com/watch?v=YoQcg39Krvk

@NeuroFuzzy I checked the one on Sixty Symbols - but the interview was about "why he makes such videos"

@NeuroFuzzy Oh, the first one -- I didn't see that :)

Ah, this other lecture has a lot of his ideas on what makes a video interesting and what makes them educational. Veritasium is another user who has a whoooole other $0.02 on video creation/what makes videos educational.

@NeuroFuzzy Will look into that lecture (it loads for a few hours with my internet). Thanks ;-)

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut ?

@ManishEarth Nothing, I tried to make a joke... :D

Oooh, also, @Waffle'sCrazyPeanut I read what you wrote above more carefully - let me know if you ever get an idea for something that would be nice on an online app. I like writing physicsy things. khanacademy.org/cs/gear-lg/1673806854 / khanacademy.org/cs/bullet-block-interactive/1902087509

@NeuroFuzzy Will do :)

Physicists explain 'gravity-defying' chain trick : Nature News & Comment

@DavidZ: Thanks... I'll transfer that comment into an answer :)

Is $4 \pi \int_0^\infty \delta(r)r^2dr=1$ correct? It's come up in physics and seems to be a case of 'semi-rigorous' mathematics.

@Alyosha Shouldn't that be 0? $\delta(r)$ is 1 when r=0, which means the whole thing is zero?

That's what I think, but I'm reading books.google.co.uk/… (page 45, middle) that says differently.

It reminds me somewhat of Gauss' Law.

That is strange. I'm going to consult my calculus book real quick

Okay, Calc book doesn't have delta functions...what a waste

But my E&M book definitely has it and it says $\int \delta(x-a)dx=1$ and $\int f(x)\delta(x-a)dx=f(a)$.

And Wolfram Alpha confirms as well

The author may be taking the limit $r \to 0$ oddly, but I fail to see how anything could yield that result.

Stupid lack of rigour!

@Alyosha yeah, that doesn't seem correct to me. I can't see how that integral could be anything but zero.

Strange to see a mistake like that in a textbook though.

The oddest thing is that the later parts rely somewhat on the results that rest on that erroneous assumption.

@ChrisWhite ah, yes

That's what I thought

@ChrisWhite What now?

Being harassed on SO?

Yeah

There was once a now deleted question about getting the last insert id in PHP PDO. The top voted answer by a >20k was one that basically said "you never need this, so I won't tell you how".

I had a long argument with that guy explaining that non thread safe code can be OK in some specific cases and this "feature", if extant, would make certain bits of code easy, but he seemed to refuse to step out of his little world of complicated concurrent programs and stick to "non thread safe is bad and stupid" and give circular arguments

really annoying, because he is telling me that I shouldn't need it and that I'm an idiot to want it in my code, while I know perfectly well why it is bad in most code but would be perfectly fine in mine

Exactly

It may be bad practice in the industry, but not necessarily for your application

a lot of banks use cobol

everyone here uses fortran

@ChrisWhite mmm

@ChrisWhite I don't participate on the IT Security SE site because of issues similar to this.