The h Bar

1:58 AM

Aww, I got excited when I just hit 1905 close reviews

@ChrisWhite. I was a Darb. I did Ph 11 as well, which was pretty life changing. I'm a little disappointed you're against my Kapitza thing, it was my attempt to bring some of the joy of Ph 11 / 101 to the masses.

Kyle Kanos

I'm telling you, post the same question over at Puzzling. You might get a more positive response from there

alemi

You mean the proposal in their meta?

Or just start asking questions

Kyle Kanos

I agreed mostly with John Rennie's sentiment, that I would feel like I was being tested & not trying to help someone in earnest

@alemi Yes, the proposal. Ask if it's something that would be on-topic there

ACuriousMind

@KyleKanos What's so special about 1905?

Kyle Kanos

2:02 AM

@ACuriousMind The year

alemi

annus mirabilis

ACuriousMind

Ah, I see :D (the first thing I thought was: "You're not that old, are you?")

Kyle Kanos

Haha, no

I was born in 1983

alemi

@KyleKanos I can understand the sentiment, but stackexchange isn't really meant to just help the person asking the question, for the average question, over the lifetime of the sight, it will help 100s of people (for the popular questions, possibly 10s of thousands), this site is for them, the people coming across the answer to their question already asked and answered, not the original asker.

Kyle Kanos

@alemi I know, but the instant gratification comes from knowing I helped that person. The few upvotes that trickle in over the months/years adds to that satisfaction.

alemi

2:09 AM

@KyleKanos Maybe its just me then. When I did the coin thing, or the speeding thing, or the racquetball thing, it was about 50% the fact that I wanted to figure out the answer, 40% that I could leave what I worked in a public space for others to come an learn from and maybe 10% that I was helping the one person that asked the question.

I've learned a lot from reading answers to questions I've wondered about in areas outside my expertise, and I guess I just think of the site as a more than just a Q&A system. It feels like a collaborative peer reviewed thought engine.

2

Kyle Kanos

Each of us has their own reasons for doing Physics.SE

alemi

2:24 AM

Kyle Kanos

Looks interesting....what is it?

alemi

That is actually a traffic flow simulation I did a decade ago. Now that the speeding question is featured, I'm beginning to feel quilty about not discussing traffic flow models. On the first pass, I didn't bring them up because I don't think they really have much to contribute to the question at hand, as they tend to be single lane and mostly interesting in flow as a function of density, not speed. But I'm wondering if I should mention them now.

The figure itself is a spacetime diagram. The road goes left right, time runs downwards. Each pixel is a car (though this is blurred), so the dark bands are traffic jams that flow backwards down the road as cars pile on at the back and are freed from the front

Kyle Kanos

I see

alemi

Also, just managed to find the picture on an old hard drive

Kyle Kanos

I did 1D traffic modeling in a ODE class at my masters program

The mathematicians in that class made me angry

alemi

2:32 AM

why's that?

Kyle Kanos

We worked with springs for about 3 weeks and one of the Math students asked when we were going to get off physics and onto real math

user54412

3:30 AM

@alemi Cool. I was in Avery myself. Didn't do Ph 11, and after the fact I'm keenly aware of the missed opportunity.

user54412

btw in case it wasn't clear my concern is really with the presentation format for these questions

user54412

in and of themselves, the questions have a lot of potential - more than the average question asked here

user54412

in fact, to the extent that I've asked questions here at all, I've had the most fun with my looser, order-of-magnitude style ones

Phonon

9:48 AM

@alemi I personally really like your work, you put passion and time into it, and always look forward to your new posts/answers. (PS: and let's be honest here it is clearly 100% that you want to figure out the problem and not only 50%, as Feynman said:"Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.") ;)

Physics Meta

10:01 AM

0

Q: Proposal: Gedanken tag

I would like to bring this issue to your attention and it would be very nice to know other position and comments on this, I think something useful can come out of this. Motivation: After reading many questions and comments I have seen that several questions are oriented to better understanding t...

Kyle Kanos

2:12 PM

Yay, I'm getting a T440

ACuriousMind

2:23 PM

Google tells me that you probably mean a ThinkPad

Kyle Kanos

Yes

ThinkPads are the bestest ever compooters

ACuriousMind

They're addictive

Kyle Kanos

Better processor than what I've got currently + twice as much RAM

Though smaller HDD

I wonder if there's a dock for a second HDD...

ACuriousMind

Would an external HDD be too slow/cumbersome for you?

Kyle Kanos

Not necessarily.

I've got all my work on a 1 TB HDD on my current ThinkPad

And I've found swapping HDDs (at least as master) doesn't always result in a working system

ACuriousMind

2:27 PM

That's true. I hope your work is not only on that one HDD, though? ;)

Kyle Kanos

The important stuff is on the universities Cluster

And an external HDD

Pictures are all on Google+

Some of my course work over the last 3-4 years is duplicated on my desktop (that I don't use anymore)

I've had a few crashes and lost weeks of work in the past, so I ensure that things are duplicated

ACuriousMind

It's always to be rather safe than sorry with such things

Kyle Kanos

I recall reading an article about some guy whose laptop was stolen from his university's library

Never duplicated his work

All of it

On one HDD

On that laptop

Danu

Ah, a Thinkpad

I'm currently on holidays in the USA and I tried to order one

the shipping time was too long - I would've left before it arrived :(

Kyle Kanos

@Danu What part of my great nation?

Danu

2:31 PM

Boston

Kyle Kanos

Gotcha

That's about 20 hours North of me (I'm in South Carolina)

Danu

my girlfriend lives here - I met her last year when I was looking at some of the big-name universities (I just graduated a month or so ago)

In the end my application for all of them got rejected, so I'm staying in Europe - where strangely enough all my applications were accepted

Kyle Kanos

Did you look on lenovo.com or outlet.lenovo.com?

Because the Lenovo outlet doesn't actually have to make the computer & has all the same products (though they're not customizable)

That's where I ordered my new one

Danu

true, I looked there too but really wanted the better specs etc - and even with the outlet times it wouldn't have worked out

I was being a slowpoke and wasted about a month without buying one, then only ordered last week (I'm leaving the USA today!)

Kyle Kanos

Hmm, mine says 3 days for shipping (not including weekend though). Short trip, I suppose then

Aha

Danu

2:35 PM

I was here since early June, hah

Kyle Kanos

The last time I left the country was 2008 when I got married (went to Mexico for the honeymoon)

Danu

I have the feeling that Americans don't like to get out of their country a lot in general ;)

Kyle Kanos

I can't imagine staying away from home for so long a period of time

Yeah, well all other nations suck ass, so why would we want to leave ;)

Danu

hahah

(un)surprisingly, many think that way about the USA

I'm not one of them (although I do prefer Europe)

and about staying away from home - it has turned out to be a lot easier than I thought

I better get used to it, since I'm starting a graduate program in Munich in a couple of months

Kyle Kanos

Max Planck Institute?

Danu

2:39 PM

no, LMU

theorie.physik.uni-muenchen.de/TMP

Kyle Kanos

What subfield are you looking at, QFT?

Danu

nothing too specific atm

I wrote my bachelor's thesis about infrared divergences in de Sitter

I'm very interested in both GR and QFT

perhaps trying to move into the more mathematical side of things - it's a big challenge for me

I've been reading Reed & Simon - Functional Analysis in preparation for the (mandatory) mathematical QM course of my program, and it's very tough on me

Kyle Kanos

I'm awful at math but spectacular at programming

Hence Computational Astrophysics suits me amazingly

Danu

hmm, programming really isn't my thing

I am not specifically bad at it, but I don't have a lot of fun doing it

I always get stuck searching for hours for some semi-colon I forgot about or something

Kyle Kanos

It gets frustrating when things to don't work

Danu

2:44 PM

so the physics part gets lost in the frustration

Kyle Kanos

Your compiler should flag when you're missing a semi-colon

Or you could use Fortran & never need a semi-colon to begin with :D

Danu

the course that I took used MATLAB

isnt that fairly standard?

Kyle Kanos

MATLAB as a standard?

I think that depends on the subfield

I have a friend in topological QM who uses MATLAB, a few other friends in astronomy who use Python scripts, several biophysicists in my dept use C/C++, and me & a few atmospheric guys use Fortran

Danu

ah, nice and unclear then

Kyle Kanos

Yeah, pretty much

Some of it stems from "what's easiest for me to do my work" kind of thing

Danu

2:48 PM

the professor teaching it was doing research on FFT algorithms - I think

also, now we're talking about computers, can you help me out with this: At some point I wound up on John Rennie's personal website, and downloaded the 'reconcile' utility that he made, since it seemed useful to me

Kyle Kanos

Someone who solves a 50k x 50k matrix multiplication for QM can get quick results in MATLAB w/o much difficulty. Someone who does hydrodynamic simulations needs something fast & robust with respect to multi-dimensional arrays, so Fortran is the obvious choice

Danu

right, yeah I guess that's the main factor then

so I have this utility now, and the accompanying text file tells me the following:
Reconcile is a program to keep the contents of two drives and/or
directories the same. The syntax is:

reconcile [-x -u -d -t -q -r -e -f -a<dir>] <source> <dest>

me, as a computer n00b, assumed that this means I have to use cmd.exe

and then just use it like that

but cmd.exe tells me reconcile is an undefined command

I assume that this means I have to put the reconcile folder in some specific place, where cmd.exe will 'see' it

but I really have no idea

any tips?

Kyle Kanos

I don't know. Windows stuff is lost on me

I haven't used Windows in about 4 years

Linux only

Danu

ah, I see

I guess I should ask John himself sometime

is he in chat a lot?

Kyle Kanos

Not usually, from what I recall

Danu

2:54 PM

this is something that always annoyed me a little about SE - how can I get in touch with someone personally, except through chat

Kyle Kanos

Some of us include email addresses for contact information

Surprisingly, I've gotten very few emails

Danu

I don't know - why would anyone send an email? :P

Kyle Kanos

I remember one guy specifically

He used Google Translate to translate his Portuguese into English

Danu

haha

Kyle Kanos

And it was awful. Looked like a mess of scientific words used in the wrong places

So I voted to close as off-topic & he got super pissed at me & my comments

Started sending hate mail to me & my blogger site (not that I use that site anymore)

Danu

3:00 PM

right - sometimes they get angry

Kyle Kanos

He stopped after a few attempts

Danu

I had that happen to me once too

he downvoted a bunch of my stuff

Kyle Kanos

Hopefully in enough time that it was reversed?

Danu

I don't remember, but it was quite annoying

the penalty from downvotes isn't all that harsh anyhow

@JohnRennie will this ping John?

ACuriousMind

@Danu Only if he's been in chat the last two days or if you are a mod

@Danu: You could always ask your question on the superuser SE

Danu

3:09 PM

hmm, right

Jim

4:45 PM

Ok, figured I'd ask here to test the waters before posting to meta.....

Non-mainstream questions = bad. Everyone agrees. But what about non-mainstream answers? If it attempts to answer the question but does so by giving unpublished personal theories, no doubt everyone says that's bad too

But under VLQ review, there is no option to delete because the answer is non-mainstream

There's also no flag option for it

That said, I have often just flagged for mod attention writing "non-mainstream reasoning" and it is usually deleted pretty quickly.

So, I don't know, should we formalize this? Maybe include the non-mainstream reasoning in the VLQ deletion reasons?

Or perhaps is this a case where deleting the answer isn't the correct course of actions. Should it really just be downvoted?

dmckee

Custom flag reason. There is a bit of a judgement call, in my opinion, about the fine line between widely-disbelieved-but-still-science and get-outta-here-already.

ACuriousMind

@Jim: I'd be in favor of adding a non-mainstream reason in the "recommend deletion" dialogue. If we don't allow unpublished personal theories in questions, we shouldn't allow answers containing them, either.

alemi

5:04 PM

Ugh. Lame. Forgive me as a rant a bit. Re: this question. The user offers 300 bounty, I do a bunch of research and write a long response 5 days ago and rise to the top of the answers. Time goes on. 5 days later the bounty is in its grace period and still no word from OP, so I kindly remind him that if he doesn't manually award the bounty, I'll only get half.

He then let's me know he doesn't think my answer fits his criterion, so he doesn't plan on awarding the bounty, 7 hours before it expires. So I scramble to try to meet his demands, but it seems he went to bed before I found the killer references, so I only got half anyway.

C'est la vie

@Jim, sorry I didn't mean your idea was lame, just what happened. As to your suggestion, I think it really would be up to the people who review the flag queue as to whether they would find it helpful.

Between downvotes, flags and comments, I think people have mechanisms to detract attention from crazy theories.

ACuriousMind

@alemi: I think your answer is exemplary and have decided to make up for the stubbornness (and unfriendliness, as it seems from the comments) of the OP.

alemi

@ACuriousMind You really didn't have to do that. I didn't mean to beg, just wanted to share my frustration. I found the question interesting and enjoyed hunting for references across the centuries.

@ACuriousMind But thank you none the less

Jim

@dmckee so post it to meta? I'm hesitant to do a feature-request post because they almost always make me feel like I didn't take enough time to think about it when a response comes back with a simple reason why it's not implemented

alemi

Who actually implements feature requests? Do the mods ask someone over at stackoverflow headquarters or something? Or do they have access to actually modify the code of the physics.SE ?

Or is it a limited set of templates for close reasons and the like that they can edit?

ACuriousMind

@alemi: I didn't perceive you as begging, else I would not have done that. ;) But your persistance in producing great, well-researched answers (as opposed to sharing something you already know) is something worthy of an award (even if it's only imaginary internet points) regardless of circumstance.

alemi

5:18 PM

@Jim I don't think the meta post would hurt anything and would allow comments from a broader audience.

dmckee

@alemi For most things there is a secret lair somewhere (under Joel's volcano, I suppose), where SE techs work their magic.

For a few the mods can uses tool that came from the secret lair.

In particular mods can edit (some of) the off-topic close reasons. I'm not sure about flag reasons. Looking to see...

ACuriousMind

5:39 PM

@alemi If it soothes your mind, my reputation gain today is still positive - the bounty is not even a day's work ;)

Phonon

@ACuriousMind kudos to you for that nice gesture on alemi's answer, well deserved.

dmckee

@alemi I think a little ranting is justified in this case. I always worry when see a low-rep user offer a large fraction of their rep as a bounty that they may not know enough to know what a really good answer is going to look like and might have unrealistic expectations.

Jim

5:57 PM

Still, A Curious Mind is very kind. A bounty offered with the reason of "One or more answers is worthy of additional rep" does more than give them the additional bounty rep. It also attracts views from people who then reads that the answer is great and are thus more likely to upvote it. It's like if I pay you to be paid more by other people.

A great reward, to say the least

Physics Meta

6:08 PM

0

Q: Adding "Non-mainstream physics" to the answer deletion/flag reasons

Okay, so we have the question VTC reason of "we deal with mainstream physics..." yadda yadda yadda. And everyone is grateful for it. But what about answers? Surely everyone would agree that we don't want to see someone answer a valid question with non-mainstream physics and/or unpublished (crackp...

feature-request scope answers review-tools flags

user54412

6:55 PM

@Danu the specific place is the path - on windows cmd try typing PATH for a semicolon-delimited list of directories where it searches

user54412

but I think your problem is slightly different - the actual command you call might need to be start followed by the executable name

user54412

(in which case it probably searches the current directory for executables by that name anyway)

ACuriousMind

7:14 PM

Huh, did you know that one can link SE sites by just writing e.g. math.SE in brackets without adding the link in () behind it?

Jim

@ACuriousMind did you not?

ACuriousMind

@Jim No, I just discovered it. I guess it's something so obvious that I never tried it before.

user54412

7:35 PM

173

A: Add data.SE style "magic links" to comments

Most of these now work. My comment below has the following markdown source: On [main], you are expected to write proper English (as advertised on [english.se]), but here on [meta.se] it's more important to have freehand circles, so please [edit] your post, otherwise I'll have to flag you (see...

ACuriousMind

@ChrisWhite That's good to know, thanks!

user54412

Interesting corner case the system doesn't handle well:

user54412

physics.stackexchange.com/questions/130244/…

user54412

3 voted to migrate, 2 voted to just close because by then we realized it was cross-posted anyway

user54412

but the system decides to migrate, so now the OP has 2 identical questions on math

user54412

7:39 PM

I wonder if instead of 3-2 it was 1-4, would it still migrate?

ACuriousMind

Hm...somehow, I supposed someone would merge them, but now I realize that's just giving the math.SE moderators more work without any benefit to it

user54412

well, I flagged as dupe so it'll go into the queue

user54412

(not enough rep over there to even vote)

alemi

8:53 PM

Are proper footnotes supported? They are on stackedit.io, but they don't seem to work in the answer editor.

David Z

10:24 PM

As far as I know there are no footnotes in SE's Markdown. You have to fake it using <sup> tags.

David Z

10:41 PM

@alemi for the record, we have no access to the underlying code.

alemi

11:13 PM

I love the quotes you can find in old letters.

"brainwasting... elaborate and painstaking, though benumbing " Heaviside, of Duchayla's static proof of vector addition

ACuriousMind

@alemi I suspect you might just have become Physics.SE resident historian ;)

alemi

I had remembered vaguely that there was a controversy over the addition of forces, but looking deeply at it again, its really surprising that it has been so completely forgotten. All of the big guys threw punches in the ring back in the 1800s.

I do really like Poisson's proof

Very elegant

there went my saturday

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