The h Bar

user54412

01:16

@tpg2114 Never seen such notation - I guess you can be the first to define it ;)

user54412

you may as well have fun with it too - that's what tex is best for - perhaps \Biohazard and \Radioactivity for upper and lower triangular parts

user54412

or maybe \Homer and \Marge ...

user54412

@ManishEarth progenitor = the thing that blew up. and spectra can be highly resolved, but that doesn't mean you have a clue what's causing the features you see - still, better than photometry

dmckee

01:33

@ManishEarth After you've done physics for a couple of decade you may begin to take that off-the-cuff joke seriously.

I swear that every single sub-discipline of physics has a use for the things.

They have to be the mostly widely used single tool we have.

ManishEarth

04:19

@dmckee I'm already taking it seriously, it seems to crop up everywhere! Sometimes beautifully, sometimes in an icky and annoying manner. It's mind-blowing how such a simple integral can be used everywhere.

@ChrisWhite ooh, thanks

ManishEarth

04:31

@Sklivvz Definitely yes. Crazybuddy has 6k reputation and is a first-year undergrad aeronautics student. Also, see Manishearth, who has 11k and is a undergrad engineering student too. Do you consider them advanced contributors? — Vanished User 2 hours ago

Such comments get on my nerves. I may have to edit my profile to reflect what I study, not the degree I'm getting :/

(My uni's EP program is basically physics with a sprinkling of other stuff)

aufkag

07:24

facebook.com/…

Physics Meta

07:38

0

Q: Can I post this on the main site?

Can I post this on the main site? There is a sweater involved. (Click picture for the link.)

discussion

user54412

07:57

4 AM - good time for drama

tpg2114

Indeed

user54412

I take it you've read mother meta?

tpg2114

Digging through the meta.SO post, haven't even made it off the comments yet

@Dim: with that kind of comment I can start to see why Physics.SE generates so much drama. Want to be treated as profesionnals? Act as such. – Mat 3 hours ago

That's a good one

Shog's answer may have just made my night

5

user54412

yeah :)

user54412

in other news, of all the different physics topics I've heard about from the hundreds of colloquia, workshops, seminars, conferences, and talks I've been to, magnetic reconnection is discussed in the most foreign language

tpg2114

08:11

I have no idea what that is

user54412

@tpg2114 basically, opposing magnetic field lines cancel in a plasma, which they can only do if there is some sort of non-ideality

user54412

apparently it's a huge thing in plasma physics these days, being applied everywhere from tokamaks to solar flares

tpg2114

Maybe I'm being a bit... simplistic... but isn't there always something non-ideal?

user54412

yeah - but what :P

tpg2114

Hah, fair enough

user54412

08:14

electron inertia, short-range scattering, recombination, radiation fields...

user54412

and then throw in turbulence for good measure

tpg2114

What's the magnetic field equivalent of a non-perfect gas?

Just add that z factor to whatever variable it is and move on. Works for us :)

Solar flares are really interesting

user54412

works for me too - I just happen to be sitting in on a local workshop trying to understand where that factor is coming from

tpg2114

I just finished a math project... I learned that Python and NumPy are brutal for numerical linear algebra

Unless you are just using the BLAS/LAPACK routines they interface. But writing your own, bad idea

I'd rather be learning what you are :)

25 more till I hit 3k and don't have to flag anymore... almost there

UV-D

09:13

@ManishEarth is it acceptable to answer my own bounty question?

ManishEarth

@UV-D sure. You can't give yourself the bounty though, the system doesn't let you do that

UV-D

what about if the bounty was put on the question by another user?

ManishEarth

@UV-D you are eligible to receive the bounty. And there are no issues with self answering

Basically: Are you cheating when you answer? Nope. Carry on then :P

UV-D

hmm I am thinking of answering my Saturn question

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 oh, python runs lapack/blas? Didn't know that

@tpg2114 certainly made mine. Well, morning, actually

I woke up in the department, to a professor asking me if I followed major league baseball (there's a long story behind that, but either way that's confusing when you're half awake)

After a while I opened SE and was presented with dramazzzz

UV-D

09:24

an explosion of drama

tpg2114

15:32

I wish there was a button to take all of my chat transcripts and turn it into one long rant so I didn't have to just do it by hand

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 hahaha. There is

@tpg2114 chat.stackexchange.com/users/55425/tpg2114?tab=recent

tpg2114

Well damn, should have checked here first

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 that's not paginated though

tpg2114

That's okay, I should just turn my rants into bookmarked conversations

For easy access later

ManishEarth

haha

tpg2114

15:39

I should do fun things... like post messages in chat rooms that say

(redacted by moderators)

Repeatedly

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 What do you think of a topic of the week sorta thing? Space Exploration and Astronomy are doing it, and it seems like a good way to make the site more fun and increase interest.

3

tpg2114

You mean like:

4

Q: Topic of the week "contest"

I'll start by saying that I really despise encouraging participation in things by awarding prizes, especially money. That to me is over the top, especially for things that are supposed to be community driven like this site. I was poking around several different meta's on the sites where I typical...

discussion

You even answered it :)

ManishEarth

No, not a contest

Check out the Space and Astro metas

tpg2114

Yeah, but the idea is the same. I wasn't a fan of giving out stuff anyway

I think it's a great idea, we should go for it

ManishEarth

yeah

tpg2114

15:45

It doesn't "cost" anything extra in terms of time really, all it can do is waste time posting one extra meta post

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 In this case the topic would be community decided by voting, and then we just try to focus on that topic. It works well on small sites with an enthusiastic community, not sure about large ones

tpg2114

I think you would need to be very clear about what that means

If there's only +1 and everything else is zero, does that count as "community"?

How are ties broken?

Is the purpose to promote popular tags or under-served ones? If every high school kid comes in and upvotes homework as tag of the week, are we really doing that?

ManishEarth

7

Q: Topic of the Week: [cmb] (cosmic microwave background radiation)

Topic of the week is a week where we make an effort to ask and answer more questions around a specific tag, this brings more attention to the topic which in turn should bring us more views and users who are interested in those areas. Topic of the week helps us flesh out topics that look like the...

discussion featured questions specific-question

example

tpg2114

Or do we want to make a list of tags with fewest questions (but not so ridiculously specialized that nobody can ask or answer) and choose from there

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 that .. would have to be decided. Preferably the latter. Homework is disqualified.

tpg2114

15:48

I'm just throwing out the questions that we would need to flesh out before proposing it :)

I'm not making you come up with the answers on the spot

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 haha. I may write a post on this soon (I have another post queued up on how to effectively use the site)

Oh, also, what do you think of having a list of major tags ordered by approx difficulty level (where all tags are more or less confined to a difficulty level) so users can quickly copy paste for ignoring tags?

To me the idea has the issue that it may lead to less downvotes on bad questions (leading to main page clutter), but we have imo a large enough community to prevent that

tpg2114

I think that's okay but it's kind of subjective no? Somebody may think statistical-mechanics is the hardest thing ever but general-relativity comes naturally to them or vice versa

So users would have to sort out the lists by themselves anyway

Lunch time, I'll be back

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 Ah, but this is mainly for low low level tags.

I'll bounce the TOTW idea around with the mods later, though fell free to continue discussing it here, community

ManishEarth

16:36

@tpg2114 Btw, I forgot... (if you don't mind me asking), was the issue with your advisor/guide resolved?

tpg2114

Yeah -- I proved him wrong and he backed down

I showed how I got my work -- I had transposed two numbers in the paper and didn't catch it on the edit and that's why it wasn't working

And I went off on him about assuming I was dishonest and told him the next time he wants to accuse me of that he might as well fire me because I'll leave either way

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 yay

@tpg2114 ah, I see

@tpg2114 Ouch!

tpg2114

I was not pleased... He didn't apologize, but I decided not to press the issue

ManishEarth

ah

well, at least you're out of it scot free :)

aside from your advisor possibly hating you

tpg2114

Haha, yeah... The environment here is not that great at the moment. He's rampaging against all of us

Like he doesn't want us to succeed. He delayed my proposal, again

ManishEarth

16:47

:/

tpg2114

That looks like a nice setup

ManishEarth

I have three screens (two of them are of my laptop, one of a department computer), and I'm sitting on two swivel chairs (one is a footrest), with a blanket. This is the life :D

tpg2114

You should see what we had set up during the winter Olympics to watch curling... we each were working on our dual-monitor setups and had 4 laptops on a shelf so we could watch all 4 matches at once ;)

ManishEarth

haha

I dual monitor all the time, but sometimes I need two OSes. But I also want dual-monitor. Triple monitor!

RhysW

I want a Tri-monitor setup

ManishEarth

16:50

You need some funky adapter for that.

RhysW

my coworker has a quad setup plus a seperate 5th one

tpg2114

I had quad on mine for awhile -- I have 2 graphics cards

ManishEarth

Oh, I also have sudo access to the lab (legitimately, I haven't cheated my way through it), and a script from which I can zombify. Once I wanted to brute force something, I simplified it in Mathematica and then handed out little chunks and watched a whole bunch of comps solve it for me :D

tpg2114

But then I swapped out one of the cards for a Fermi GPU and lost the ability to display with it

ManishEarth

That's what I call a 70-monitor setup

@tpg2114 wow

tpg2114

16:52

We were tempted to hijack our cluster to mine bitcoins

RhysW

@tpg2114 lots of people do this secretly at work

not where i work, that i know of

but of places i have heard of

tpg2114

Yeah, I've heard of it too. But they probably don't have a brand new cluster from Intel with 2048 cores :)

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 I probably could do that and get away with it :>

tpg2114

And another one with 64 cores each with a intel Phi board

And another cluster with 1000 older quad-core processors

ManishEarth

I have access to a computational cluster too (since I'm working with a prof on computationally intensive stuff). But that one gets used, if I hog up all of the power the physicists would get angry.

tpg2114

16:56

Nothing drives me more insane than logging into the DoD supercomputers and seeing 10,000 cores taken up by the same person running 10,000 single-processor jobs

ManishEarth

hah

Colin McFaul

@ManishEarth I've been thinking about something similar for a few days, and am trying to put together a Meta question about it. I was thinking of something like a journal club: users would find a paper, and post questions about it. That's been done before as chat sessions, but I'm thinking of trying to encourage people to do that on main.

2

ManishEarth

@ColinMcFaul huh, nice idea. So the community looks for really good (and broad-ish) papers, and we ask questions about them for a week? I like it.

tpg2114

@ColinMcFaul I like that idea too, but would there be some requirements on sources? Like peer-reviewed, posted on arvix, etc?

ManishEarth

arvix?

RhysW

16:59

@tpg2114 freely available legally so people can read it is a requirement

ManishEarth

it's like a hybrid of arxiv and vixra

@RhysW Bleh, most of us have free access to most papers. blows raspberry

tpg2114

@RhysW That greatly reduces the pool of papers, not saying I disagree of course, just pointing out

ManishEarth

also blows customary raspberry at Elsevier

tpg2114

It would eliminate virtually any credible paper in fluid dynamics; unless it happened to be published open access at an established journal

ManishEarth

Also, some of the best papers are in journals like Nature and all. Grr.

tpg2114

17:01

@ColinMcFaul Also, I'll give the same disclaimer I gave Manish earlier -- I'll ask questions not to destroy the idea but just to give something to think about :) I don't try to be antagonistic

ManishEarth

Yep, that's what bouncing ideas around is.

Colin McFaul

@tpg2114 Absolutely. There's definitely a lot of things that would have to be fleshed out.

RhysW

@tpg2114 sure, just saying that you will get rid of 90% of the people who don't have access!

tpg2114

I'm all for it, and it could actually tie into the topic of the week if we chose a tag and had people discuss a paper from that field

ManishEarth

@RhysW eg, you :P

@tpg2114 yep!

Colin McFaul

17:05

@tpg2114 I would expect something like peer-reviewed would have to be a requirement, to keep it from devovling into personal theories.

RhysW

@ManishEarth cough maybe ;)

tpg2114

@RhysW Find a friend at a university who has access to it... they couldn't send you a copy, but you could call them and ask them to read it to you ;)

Colin McFaul

I'm torn on the open access part.

RhysW

ooooh @ManishEarth !! :P

tpg2114

@ColinMcFaul I think that's an important requirement

Colin McFaul

17:06

I sort of don't want to require it, so we don't restrict the papers that could be asked about.

But asking about a non-open access paper does restrict the number of users who can respond.

tpg2114

It could be encouraged that it be open access but not required. I think how the paper is chosen may bear that out

Colin McFaul

So maybe we put that in as a strong suggestion. Point out to people that non-OA papers probably won't get as good a response.

tpg2114

For instance, if you put up for a vote a series of papers and most people can't access them, then the open access one will be highly voted no?

Assuming it's good

And so it's a measure of who could actually access the papers anyway

Colin McFaul

@tpg2114 Yeah, that should hopefully help balance those two conflicting needs.

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 yep

Feel free to post this on meta (maybe together with the TOTW proposal? Or two simultaneous proposals?) then, this is a great idea

tpg2114

17:10

I would say do them separately

In the event people like one more/less than the other, rather than conflate them

Or -- post a question "How to increase participation/fun/love of life"

And post each as an answer

With a 3rd answer being the hybrid

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 I'm planning on a similar post "how can I improve my experience"

tpg2114

And that way people who have other ideas can jump in too with answers

Just CW it so we can work on the details :)

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 No, that one will contain tips and tricks. Information about the tag favorite/ignore system. A request to close vote and downvote bad questions. Etc.

What else could go there? Hmm.

tpg2114

@ManishEarth Sorry, I meant the question/answers about topic of the week/journal/ideas to increase activity

ManishEarth

oh them

shakes fist at pronouns

@tpg2114 @ColinMcFaul So, queued meta posts:

- How can I improve my Physics.SE experience?

- How to increase participation/fun/love of life

Also, a list of tags sorted by rough difficulty, maybe we can categorize the higher ones.

tpg2114

17:19

@ManishEarth "Here is the list of users to block from appearing in comments or chat:"

ManishEarth

haha

tpg2114

I say jump the fun things one to the head of the queue since you only need the question and to put a stub of an answer in for the topic of the week and another for the journal article one

Shouldn't take too long to write that one up no?

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 if you're willing to write up the answers I'll write up the question :)

btw, the other one is also a stub question, I'm not writing a long FAQ answer for it -- I'll write some answers and hope for others to pitch in

tpg2114

Put up the question and I'll drop in the idea for the topic of the week

With the questions to be addressed alongside the ones I can put forward an answer to

ManishEarth

Alright. Have a look at the TOTW post(s) on Astro meta to get an idea of how they run it

Colin McFaul

17:28

I've just finished my outline for the journal club question, so I should have something a little bigger than a stub by the end of the workday.

ManishEarth

0

Q: How can we improve participation on Physics.SE?

A lot of members have recently noticed a drop in the net question quality on this site. Many of us feel that this is fixable, and what we need to do is: Stem the inflow of homework questions Attract more expert users Make participation more enjoyable What do you think can be done to achieve a...

discussion homework retention policies

Feel free to edit the question, too

@ColinMcFaul If you want, post it as a draft answer

jinawee

Arnold Neumaier is back?!

3

A: Operator that describes particle detector

The observation of particle tracks is in terms of a sequence of ionizations of atoms, which are subsequently magnified by an appropriate mechanism. How particle tracks arise in quantum mechnaics is described in the following famous old paper: N.F. Mott, The Wave Mechanics of alpha-Ray Tracks,...

ManishEarth

@jinawee yay :)

Physics Meta

0

Q: How can we improve participation on Physics.SE?

A lot of members have recently noticed a drop in the net question quality on this site. Many of us feel that this is fixable, and what we need to do is: Stem the inflow of homework questions Attract more expert users Make participation more enjoyable What do you think can be done to achieve a...

discussion homework retention policies

Colin McFaul

@ManishEarth I want to flesh it out a bit more before it goes up.

ManishEarth

17:38

sure

tpg2114

I'm working on the topic of the week one

Stay tuned

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 alrighty :)

Crazy Buddy

OMG..!!! I was out for a while and I see hbar showing 130 msgs o_O

Crap... When am I gonna read those? -_-

ManishEarth

@CrazyBuddy yes, there be good stuff here

Crazy Buddy

@PhysicsMeta BTW, Nice idea @Manish ;-)

Physics Meta

17:44

0

Q: As a user of Physics.SE, how do I make my own experience smoother and more enjoyable?

Related: How can we improve participation on Physics.SE? (Not a dupe, this is about what a user can do to improve his/her own experience, and that is about more global changes) This post is meant to help users smoothen their own Physics.SE experience. Later on it will be turned into a commun...

discussion faq-proposed

tpg2114

Drafted

@ManishEarth Do you want to CW'ify it to allow anybody to edit the answers?

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 the draft or the whole question? CW the draft if you want, I may CW the whole question depending on what happens

tpg2114

Either way -- are you worried that the draft would be defaced or something if it's CW'd?

I figured it would give people the impression that the draft isn't the be-all, end-all for how it should work but I can leave a comment saying that and suggest we flesh it out in chat if people have suggestions

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 nope, feel free to revert any changes to your post, just that question CW causes by default answer CW which may not always be desired

CW on meta gives lower reps (those with 25+ iirc) the ability to edit as suggested edits don't work. More importantly, it is an invitation to edit. Though I'd prefer if changes and all were hashed out in the comments

tpg2114

Works for me

I'll leave it as-is

ManishEarth

18:01

17

Q: How much purring is too much purring?

I have an adolescent cat that I adopted as a kitten. For some time now I have noticed that he is purring a lot. I know that when giving affection this behavior is normal but my cat seems to start purring whenever I'm in the same room as him or even when he sees me from another room. I understand...

behavior cats health purring

the title.

Funnily enough, I don't think any of the other mods have any clue of the meta-explosion (the good type) that seems to be occurring. I did leave a "warning" message, but I think most are offline. Oops.

tpg2114

The physics mods about our meta explosion?

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 yep

aside from me. I'm pretty sure I'm aware of what I'm doing.

Am I?

Hmm

tpg2114

The robot is becoming self-aware...

RhysW

meta explosion?

ManishEarth

@RhysW two meta posts coming up, one which may hopefully have some game-changing ideas

I plan to post to that one later.

Also one more which may come up, a meta-categorization of tags and difficulty levels

Low level tags grouped together and ordered by difficulty. High level tags grouped by field

RhysW

18:12

ahh

not a ka-boom then?

tpg2114

@ManishEarth Would it make more sense to group them by field in order of difficulty?

Rather than 2 different groupings

ManishEarth

@RhysW Possibly. @tpg2114 is involved, that's where his research is

@tpg2114 Oh no, I meant we group them by field, (and maybe by difficulty per field), and then we have a bunch of groups for ignoring, which contain all of the beginner level ones sorted by difficulty

Because the beginner tags aren't in just one field

tpg2114

@ManishEarth I follow now... good call

ManishEarth

of course, open to suggestions. I'm not even sure if I should post that

tpg2114

Do you want to do a crap-load of work?

The whole point to tagging is that it's a graph and not a tree, right? So it's hard to put things into classifications per se

ManishEarth

18:15

Oh, I'm hoping the community does that bit. I just help

Crazy Buddy

@ManishEarth // Flowing through comments -- And, I see someone pointing my name :D

ManishEarth

@tpg2114 Btw, wonderful meta post. The MSO one, that is. Though you've formulated the TOTW proposal pretty well too :)

tpg2114

@ManishEarth Thanks. Like I said at the start of it, it was all things I've said at various points to all of those guys either here or in comments

ManishEarth

I don't think I'm answering there, myself. Not sure. But I doubt it.

You now have 3k rep on physics. Use your new powers wisely, young padawan. — EnergyNumbers 3 hours ago

tpg2114

I felt like I had to, to show that it's not just mods and insane people on the site.

ManishEarth

18:27

GAAAAH WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN DELETE THE SITE BEFORE ITS TOO LATE

@tpg2114 yep, thanks for that :)

tpg2114

I spent a good hour or so going through the close/reopen queue earlier

ManishEarth

ooh nice

Shog9

Hey folks,

Some of you may have seen an answer I wrote yesterday on MSO, in response to a frustrated complaint about some of the past events here on Physics.SE. I want you to know that, in spite of the somewhat blunt tone, it was not intended as a blanket condemnation of the majority of folks here - people who as a whole I consider good, intelligent and helpful members of a most excellent community.

12

There's been a certain... dramatic... minority here for a couple of years now, whom I've tried hard to reason with both publicly and privately with seemingly very little success; I've come (perhaps belatedly) to the sad realization that diplomacy in these situations has had little positive return and has indeed hurt the folks most willing to contribute constructively in this community.

I apologize sincerely for letting this go on as long as it did, humbly asking for your forgiveness and pledging my support for your continued efforts to make this site a supportive and productive place for the dissemination of good information on physics.

Crazy Buddy

@Shog9: A "giant" Thanks..!!!

ManishEarth

@Shog9 In turn, I apologize for not being able to effectively handle/assuage the situation myself. I used to think this was a real possibility.

tpg2114

18:33

@Shog9 There's no need to apologize, we've all had the same series of maddingly frustrating public and private discussions with the same people. I think more and more of the previously silent majority are getting annoyed to the point they are starting to stand up for the moderators and refusing to be railroaded into the minority's claims.

6

ManishEarth

And yes, no need to apologize :)

Crazy Buddy

@Shog9: BTW, I didn't expect you in chat... I thought you'd come post some nice article in meta... :P

Shog9

@CrazyBuddy :-) I think Manish is headed in the right direction there - please lend your support and guidance to his efforts if you can.

2

ManishEarth

@Shog9 Think that would be a good question to cross post to the main meta (after rephrasing?).

Crazy Buddy

@Shog9 I know... //me -- reading previous msgs in the room... Soon, I'll get into the meta discussion (for sure) ;-)

ManishEarth

18:36

Because there may be tons of input that would be useful to us, though not all will apply.

Shog9

@ManishEarth I think this is something best done locally, by the folks who have and will be providing similar guidance one-on-one as the site grows.

ManishEarth

@Shog9 Nah, I mean ask the question to MSO in the context of general SO/SE participation, see what they come up with. Steal ideas if possible.

Oh, I see what you mean.

Physics Meta

3

Q: Let's have a journal club

This idea is not totally original: there was at least an attempt at a journal club in chat in 2011. That, in turn, was inspired by mbq's (and Cross Validated) idea, which seems to have happened at least twice. We already have users do this, so I'm really just suggesting that we more actively enco...

discussion retention

David Z

@Shog9 I lol'd at that. You said what I think several of us wanted to say but didn't because we didn't want to validate certain people's claims of moderator "tyranny" or whatever. Something like that anyway.

Shog9

@ManishEarth You already know this, but... Because the communities tend to overlap, folks on these sites tend to steal good ideas from one another fairly liberally - for instance.

ManishEarth

18:47

@Shog9 OK, so? (not entirely sure what you're getting at here)

tpg2114

I think he's saying there's no need to cross-post it

The ideas will circulate anyway

Shog9

@ManishEarth I'm saying, I'm interested to see what y'all come up with ;-)

ManishEarth

@Shog9 oh, I see

@tpg2114 Well, yeah, but MSO is a greater pool of ideas IMO. Many more active users

Shog9

@ManishEarth The flip side of that is that MSO has an almost overwhelming population of people from very, very different communities, not all of which are directly comparable. The most obvious contrast being SO vs. Everything Else

ManishEarth

Sure. So we get many ideas, which have different applicabilities for different sites. Pick the ones that fit :P

Shog9

18:54

That can work, but for broad questions it can be a lot of work to focus participants. Ideally, you would approach such a community with a fairly specific problem (and then still get 20 wildly different responses)

ManishEarth

ah

aufkag

19:27

I bought myself a kaki today. I think it is a fruit. Are you familiar with it and, if so, how do I eat it?

ManishEarth

Not familiar. I assume you lob it in the general direction of your oral cavity and pray.

user54412

...so many chat messages...

ManishEarth

ooh, yay, @ChrisWhite

Read them. From the top (not just from when Shog appeared). Lots of interesting discussion, though a lot of it has been presented in a more coherent form in the last three (four?) meta questions.

user54412

I just read everyting

ManishEarth

ah :)

user54412

19:33

looks like i'll need to spend some time on meta

tpg2114

Which one? Ours, or the fun one? :)

ManishEarth

user54412

metas with taverns are more fun

ManishEarth

Hey, we have a bar!

tpg2114

Time to migrate home... I'll be lurking once I get there

ManishEarth

19:35

@tpg2114 aight, cya :)

user54412

@aufkag is that a persimmon? actually I still don't know how to eat it

aufkag

@ChrisWhite Yup, I just looked it up. Says you can remove the skin. I wonder if it comes off like an orange or more like an apple. Or perhaps even a tomato. :)

@ManishEarth So, how many users are currently benched? Just the three of them?

ManishEarth

relevant to this? Just the three.

There are more suspended users but for other random reasons.

aufkag

@ManishEarth So, where exactly is this place where apparently they hang? (Where on Motl's site?)

ManishEarth

19:50

@aufkag comments section

aufkag

@ManishEarth You mean under any random post by Motl?

ManishEarth

used to be that way. Not sure now. I don't go there.

I think there's a specific post about setting up a new site that can be found on Dilaton/dimension's profile

aufkag

Are string theory and knot theory mathematically (and perhaps surprisingly) related?

ManishEarth

yes

don't know how

I believe it's got to do with strings interweaving with each other

One of the professors in my department is working on knot theory, and she's a string theorist. (also sometimes a qft-ist)

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