@BrandonEnright : most are explained here: winterbash2013.stackexchange.com

There are a few that I'm not sure about, like the Chuck Yeager one

And the Johnny Three Hats

@KyleKanos you get three hats on one site

@KyleKanos I was asking about flags (your defender of the realm hat was the motivation)

@BrandonEnright Ooops. I can read good.

I'm 100%

@KyleKanos Me either :-p

48/48

Scratch that, 51/51

My flags are at brandonenright.net/~bmenrigh/se_flags.png

How do you guys take pics and upload them so quickly

But the vast majority of those flags were when I was < 3k rep

@KyleKanos How I do it is definitely different than how others do it. I have gimp on a keystroke shortcut, I cropped, and saved to an sshfs mounted public_html directory that's accessible on the intertubes

Took me the slow way (screenshot, open xfig, crop, upload to postimage.org): s28.postimg.org/d71nwlhlp/my_flags.png

@KyleKanos xfig? If you're on Ubuntu then shift-printscreen and paste in the SE "upload image" box (on the main site) is way faster

Sorry, xpaint, not xfig.

I'm not on Ubuntu. Too bloated for me to want to even touch

@KyleKanos And it looks completely white to me.

@KyleKanos ah

Well that sucks

I'm compiling xpaint now. Gimp is a bit heavy for screenshots.

Am I wrong here:

sorry, here:physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90532/…

@KyleKanos I also know whether my English is that bad

It's not the English, it's the math.

@KyleKanos Looks like it. Your description makes sense (deci being 1/10) but your example is backwards.

@BrandonEnright Is it backwards?

My undergrad textbook is saying that the bel is unnecessarily large, hence us using the decibel (1/10 the bel).

@KyleKanos Well, I don't know the actual definition so I'm going by what you've written. What you have is contradictory. "But the bel is "inconveniently large" for most purposes"

So if a bel is large, that would mean you only need 6.5 of them. So for a fine grain you can use 10th bels and then you'd need 65 of them

If we have 650 B, then we need only 1/10 of that to "normalize" it to a "nicer" number, this is 65.

@KyleKanos If you have 650 bels and that's too many so instead you use 10x bels (decabels) so that you only need 65, that'd imply a bel is too small.

@KyleKanos I think your hang-up is that when you read "bel too large" you're thinking that the number of them you need is too large, not that the unit itself is too large. Notice how those two views are opposite? A unit that is too large you don't use enough of. A unit that is too small you use too much of.

Going by the prefix deci instead of deca implies that a dB is 1/10 of a bel which would mean the bel was too large so you only needed 6.5 and it's nicer to need 65 by using a smaller unit.

@KyleKanos That the things I am not sure in your description of "inconveniently large"

@BrandonEnright Okay, this does indeed describe my hang-up precisely. I'm going to change the answer to reflect this.

@KyleKanos But I am sure that 1B = 10dB = 100cB = 1000mB, though not used that often. The same as 1m = 10dm = 100cm = 1000mm.

@hwlau Nod. That's definitely right.

@KyleKanos Everything about your answer looks right except the example. Just move the decimal place over a bit :-)

Which brings us to another question. What the heck is a decimal? One tenth of a mal?

@BrandonEnright According to Wiktionary, it's an illness: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mal

@BrandonEnright Is it a joke?

@hwlau Yes

@ManishEarth Thanks for the great tip. I can't find the feature after I change to gnome3

@hwlau It's in built, but you may have to assign a keyboard shortcut

@ManishEarth In the old day, I remember I use the super + mouse drag. but it is gone

A post-doc job that I applied for got back to me today and wants to do a phone interview....does that mean I'm short-listed for the position, or is a phone interview a general practice for all applicants?

It's unusual but pretty cool to have the bulk of us using some flavor of Linux. I blame the physics / math / academia background.

I need a clear straight-forward explanation for the difference between N*s and N*m. Any suggestions? I can't find anything useful

@Arc676 Are those Netwon-Seconds and Netwon-Meters?

@BrandonEnright Yes

I know that one of them is momentum and I'm not sure what the other one is

@Arc676 Usually Netwon-meters are used for torque when there is a vector for the force. Or work/energy when it's not a vector.

So N*m is energy without direction?

I guess mass factors out for momentum so Netwon-Seconds would be the unit of momentum.

Just out of curiosity, you do know it's spelled "Newtons" right?

@Arc676 Yep. Sorry, didn't even notice I was typing Netwon. That's finger memory for you. Anything close to net gets typed as "net".

Happens to me all the time :)

Since kinetic energy is mv^2/2 (end result is mass times velocity or N*s) also has direction right?

Wait, another source is telling me the opposite

@Arc676 Another source is telling you Newton-Meters is momentum and Newton-Seconds is energy?

No, that kinetic energy has no direction

Which is because mv^2 becomes joules, which is energy and has no direction

Yeah energy doesn't have a direction.

Do you have time to watch a quick youtube video and help me out with an equation in it?

@Arc676 send a link. I'm busy but if it's short and simple I'll take a look and possibly help.

2 minutes and 11 seconds

@BrandonEnright Are you there?

Look, @BrandonEnright, I have to go now, so we can talk about this tomorrow

Hope to be back here tomorrow, bye!

@ManishEarth What am I looking at? Is that reputation gained?

yeah

That's a lot of rep!

I wonder what the critical mass of rep is

Where you have enough of it that you get a lot all the time without new contributions

@tpg2114 I regularly get rep from random sites every day

@tpg2114 Lubos still gets a lot of rep without doing much. It's more like a combination of rep, name recognition, and enough good answers on popular questions.

Right -- I wonder what the "run-away" point is on that. I get rep from random things too, but not nearly as often as others

@tpg2114 I think there is still a long-tail effect and it's never run-away. I suspect it very slowly dies down.

@tpg2114 One thing I've noticed is that now I have a few gold badges and >4k rep, I get a lot more upvotes on answers than I used to -- even when the answer is no better than when I had no gold badges and <3k rep

There is definitely a certain amount of social bias / status to a user factored into voting.

Yeah, I've noticed that too which is why I wonder if there is a "critical status" where rep just rolls in