The h Bar - 2014-03-01

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4:24 AM

0

Q: Big list resource questions

This is really just posted to get the conversation rolling and please don't infer my view on the topic from the question -- I'll post an answer when I have some time that will reflect my opinion on it. Anyway, there was a recent big-list question seeking to create a massive compilation of readi...

1 hour later…

Brandon Enright

5:37 AM

-1

Q: Light Time and Curiosity of Anti-matter

I'm not a studying scientist of any sort. Merely a curious bystander with a desire to contribute. If light reacts with our universe in a way that promotes time couldn't we create a bulb of various anti-gasses to react to some source of energy to create anti-light and reversal of time as a final ...

quantum-mechanics particle-physics relativity antimatter

"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." - Carl Sagan

6:06 AM

@brandon ick

But try not to be too abrasive on such posts :\

Brandon Enright

@ManishEarth Did my comments come across as abrasive? I tried to word them firmly but diplomatically. Perhaps I came across ruder than I intended :-/

The bolded one sort of did. Not too much though.

3 hours later…

8:57 AM

0

Q: Should this astrobiology question be reopened?

Silicon-based life was closed for being off topic. It's possibly an astrobiology question, and was migrated from the old Astronomy.SE. In which case it is on topic by current rules. Probably. (we might want to have a more critical look into exactly which topics from Astro we have made on topic,...

discussion scope closed-questions

user54412

9:48 AM

"Classic inflation is a catastrophic failure by this measure; numerically, it is one of the worst failures in the history of science." arxiv.org/abs/1402.6980

@tpg2114 and others, we agreed in meta that questions about software exclusively used by and useful for physicists purpose are allowed. So there is no need to close this question, voted to leave open. Please do not overrule that agreement like this. — Dilaton Feb 3 at 8:05

user54412

I do love it when Paul Steinhardt and company tears apart inflation

As said elswhere > 3000 rep users should not act as blind mindless machines that mechanically execute the instructions written in a computer code called policies or rules without thinking about it as individuals. Even on MSO I heard the notion that community moderation works best when high rep useract in accordance with their best knowledge and fair judgement in the context of some community guidelines which allow some room for wise case to case judgement. And as this is a physics site after all, IMHO the physics/physicist point of view is what should govern all policies and review decisions. — Dilaton 19 mins ago

O.o

@ChrisWhite hah

user54412

@ManishEarth it's actually a pretty good article to skim through, if for no other reason than because the pro-inflation people will never talk about how the "naturalness" or "necessity" of their theory is predicated on some random measure they pull out of thin air

user54412

@ManishEarth at some point I think we need a broader meta question about what astro is on/off topic (I could draft one up when less tired)

9:57 AM

yeah

user54412

points of contention include (1) astrobiology, (2) amateur observing, (3) popular science (e.g. Hubble image color scemes), (4) purchase recommendations for amateurs, (5) data gathering for academics, (6) data reduction for academics, (7) amateur astrophotography, (8) astrophysical theory, (9) software packages

user54412

I feel all of these were allowed on the old astro SE, and people here never really thought what they meant when they said everything allowed there is allowed here

user54412

plus I see plenty of indications that people here think all astro should go to the new site - that is, they only think astro is a part of physics if it has no other home on stackexchange

user54412

and with that I should head to bed before I post anything too inflammatory about what is and is not actually astrobiology vs. science fiction

@ChrisWhite lol

Yes please, some expert opinion would be better on this. I don't think the reopenvoters are quite clear on what astrobiology is (the first question looks like pure Bio to me, and adding an ....in SPACE!) doesn't help, but I'm not too sure of it myself.

@ChrisWhite claiming that you can apply the notion of terrestrial life to extraterrestrial life is way to narrow minded for a scientist. The question is about astrobiology and therefore on topic here as often enough discussed on meta. I wish reviewers could be a bit more tolerant to the way of thinking and methods of others working in fields that are outside their own domain of expertise ... — Dilaton yesterday

Wut? Astro-* is your domain of expertise

2 hours later…

12:14 PM

Hello

3 hours later…

Waffle's Crazy Peanut

3:38 PM

Hmm... someone have casted their reopen votes like hell -- I don't understand why that question should be reopened o_O

... along with a few other similar questions -_-

4:24 PM

1

Q: Would it be useful to have a "dimensional regularization" tag?

I'm aware that we have a "regularization" tag, but I don't think this is the same as dimensional regularization. I've only just started learning about these concepts, so I'm not 100% sure, but I believe regularization is the method of finding divergencies in integrals. Dimensional regularization ...

5:13 PM

@ManishEarth I'm realizing more and more that for some people, it's not about fighting for consistency or following policies, it's really just about fighting whatever opposes them. So if a policy supports their view, then all hail the policy. If a policy doesn't, then it's too narrow-minded and should be ignored

Waffle's Crazy Peanut

@tpg2114 Agreed... All hail @tpg :P

I can handle people who fight for a principle, so long as they are consistent in their approach to the fight (follow policies but openly disagree, or even ignore all policies and openly encourage others to do so)

Waffle's Crazy Peanut

Have I told you, "Man, you're awesome!"? ... especially in putting the words :D

Would the next moderator election occur, I'll vote for you ;-)

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut Haha, thanks. I'm really just tired of having the same argument with the same people about the same things. Nothing changes as a result of it.

Waffle's Crazy Peanut

Well, I ain't gonna argue with you on that... :)

@tpg2114 The "same argument with same people" is what bothers me... -_-

No matter how many times this has been brought up front, it just doesn't converge at a proper ending

"Digging old stuff again & again..." I'm still wondering how the mods handle them very well, especially without getting bored of all that... :D

5:22 PM

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut Because debates are only useful when people are willing to listen to the other side. Unfortunately, neither side has much respect for the other anymore and so discussions get derailed very quickly.

Like the comments on Manish's answer on the meta question. Almost none of them actually address either 1) Why it's okay to vote against policy or 2) Why should that question be reopened and/or what to do with the existing answers (which Manish provides options for)

3

Waffle's Crazy Peanut

@tpg2114 The former can happen when there's an arbiter, but the thing is both the parties should believe in his judgement... But, that doesn't happen often :D

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut Which actually is sort of the definition of a moderator -- to arbitrate when the community cannot agree. Although that's in the dictionary sense of the word, SE moderators don't really assume that role

Waffle's Crazy Peanut

Yeah, I meant the "moderator" (implicit :P)... While we believe, the other side doesn't!

Hmm... I have a slight thought that Manish's post would become hot in a few days (seeing the hotness in that discussion) :D

5:41 PM

@Hunter Don't let the tone that is taken on meta scare you off from participating in the discussions. There's a lot of history there, don't get dragged into the muck with the rest of us!

Waffle's Crazy Peanut

@tpg2114: Who's hunter?

I don't see anyone... O_O

@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut He's the guy who wanted the big-list question kept open and I recommended he start a meta discussion. But I went ahead and started it anyway and tagged him in it. Basically he's a relatively new user who has asked about site policy in the past, and I dragged him into a meta post that devolved the way they usually do

And since it's not a comment related to the discussion, I pinged him in here rather than leave an off-topic comment somewhere else

Waffle's Crazy Peanut

Hah! :D

So it's not really a great "first meta" experience. Don't want somebody turned off from participating because of it

6:06 PM

@ChrisWhite I'd argue that anything about observations belongs on the new Astro.SE (e.g., which backyard telescope should I get, is IDL worth learning for my research) while things about the physics (e.g., Kepler's laws, GR & cosmology) should remain here. That seems to be their basis for the new Astro.SE page (as per the Area51 page (e.g. discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/questions/6193/…))

6:30 PM

Also: the Steinhardt paper you linked earlier is pretty good, but I have one question: is inflaton pronounced in-flay-ton or in-fluh-ton or something else?

Glen The Udderboat

@KyleKanos Excellent question.

user54412

@KyleKanos I would say the latter, so that it has the same stresses as graviton

Glen The Udderboat

@ChrisWhite Then I would say the former, so that it has the same stresses as inflation

@ChrisWhite I concur

@ChrisWhite I'd argue that graviton should be pronounced gravy-ton

Though, seriously, the comparison of stresses is probably a good point.

user54412

6:40 PM

@GlenTheUdderboat but what if inflation has the shifted stress due to its suffix (cf. rule 3 on this random site)

Glen The Udderboat

@ChrisWhite I am listening to a 1.5 hour lecture by Steinhardt, hoping that he'll say it once. I'll be back.

Also: theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/feb/26/…

Glen The Udderboat

IN-flah-tahn

cfa.harvard.edu/~hrs/ay45/articles/BigBang.html

@GlenTheUdderboat Close to what I wrote of "in-fluh-ton"

Good find though

Glen The Udderboat

@KyleKanos Not close. It is the other one!

Or not???!?!? :)

No, I guess you are right.

user54412

6:49 PM

@KyleKanos flah -> fluh: Is that a Southern drawl I hear in the spelling? :P

@ChrisWhite I hope not :(

I need to move back to the North, get away from the y'alls

Glen The Udderboat

@KyleKanos So, will the next big breakthrough be actually due to a randomly generated fake paper? What are the odds?

@GlenTheUdderboat Nah, I don't think any break-through would be possible using that. The authors of it say it just produces gobbledegook (meaningless statements)

Glen The Udderboat

@KyleKanos But not purposely so.

@KyleKanos Cause youse guys is so much better?

7:00 PM

@tpg2114 I'm not from NYC

Philly sounds the same... And Mass sounds worse. So there's really no good accent up there

@GlenTheUdderboat I suppose that it is true, arguing the whole "a monkey & a keyboard can write Shakespeare, given enough time"

Glen The Udderboat

I think it would actually be quite a complexity-theoretical accomplishment to produce a totally meaningless paper. Unless all papers are meaningless to start with.

They're all just linearly interpolated accents between the major cities :)

I'm not from Philly either, I'm from South Jersey

We don't say youse

We say you guys

user54412

7:03 PM

I feel like I say "ya guys"

I think I mostly just say "hey idiots"

user54412

as in "whadya guys think?"

Glen The Udderboat

Has anybody (e.g., lotteries, game shows) gone as far as publicly producing the winning number/answer in encrypted form? Only to reveal the key later. (It saves the notary, bank vault, etc.)

user54412

@GlenTheUdderboat never heard of such a thing - sounds like something one would do with bitcoins though

10:07 PM

Hello

I have one question

10:50 PM

@tpg2114 Yeah :/

@tpg2114 Fortunately, Hunter seems to be participating constructively :)

I need to check how much of the book curation really was done. Emilio and I did a bunch, but iirc there still are a lot of locked CW posts out there, and the master list has not been updated. Maybe I'll post about it again.

@ManishEarth I've always been in favor of not having master lists/questions and putting them on the tag wikis

@tpg2114 Yeah. But it's an okay compromise

And plus they can be moved over later, if we can get the support

11:39 PM

Hi @ManishEarth

yeah, got your PR

Just sent you a pull request on GitHub

Ha

Whatcha think?

I'm honestly sick to death of \langles and \rangles.

@EmilioPisanty (a) use physymb in real latex

(b) yeah, I'm merging, just after I check if you used clickButtonEventLambda correctly :p

Oh, for sure, in any real piece of work I use proper \bra{} and \ket{} commands

yeah

11:42 PM

but it's not realistic to include \newcommand{}{}s on every new post

@ManishEarth or braket which is the package that implements that

@DavidZ I know

but ud and udd and pd and all are also there, so awesomesauce :)

@EmilioPisanty is the modified script overflowing your buttons bar?

user image

I'm not sure, I wasn't able to get tampermonkey to run off my github repo. I ended up copy-pasting direct into tampermonkey. Buttons worked fine but none of the tooltips worked (they all said "true").

@EmilioPisanty You can install scripts directly into chrome

@ManishEarth Graphically it looked just fine - exactly like that

@ManishEarth Yeah, I think that's what I did.

I'm fairly new to this thing.

11:47 PM

tooltips work for me

It's working perfectly for me now :)

I'll update the documentation + the advert unless you want to do it yourself

@EmilioPisanty I updated the site matrix, edit anything else you want :)

In other news, you'll likely get that citation helper script in a while

@ManishEarth OK, on it

MO contracted me for it. I don't have the time to do it for free, but this works.

@ManishEarth That is aaaaaaaaawwwwwwwweeeeeeeeesome. Seriously.

@ManishEarth Kudos!

11:50 PM

Still time for a finished version though :p

What database are you searching as back end?

With luck we can package it up so that SE can just include it natively

@EmilioPisanty Scott is handling that bit. I haven't looked into those details though I plan on getting a better backend up

@EmilioPisanty Project Euclid

@ManishEarth OK. Is there a lot of freedom there? I would imagine different back ends to be quite different to deal with (so each new back end would be a pain in the back end to implement).

@EmilioPisanty modularized. Not an issue

@ManishEarth that's pretty good.

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