The h Bar

diobuc eulb

19:22

Balarka Sen

good meme

Slereah

19:36

That might make for a long game

The time it takes will be measured on the long line

dmckee

@Slereah This

is pure poetry.

Slereah

Man, I don't even like numerical simulations!

dmckee

From arxiv.org/abs/0801.4589 so I might be a tiny bit biased.

Slereah

Are you the KamLAND Collaboration

D. McKee

indeed

dmckee

19:53

@Slereah It gets worse than that. That paper is a follow-up with more data from a previous one, and it is better for three reasons: (a) more time means more data, (b) better calibration in the outer part of the detector means more data passes the cuts, and (c) better understanding of low-energy backgrounds means more data and makes the independent axis long enough to show more than one full oscillation. My long-term project for KamLAND was a big driver of (c).

So I'm a little fond of it.

Cows

20:17

@diobuceulb hehehe

vzn

20:31

@DavidZ ?!? its says comments disabled on deleted / locked posts / reviews on the bottom & doesnt allow comments

rob

20:44

@vzn That seems to be an artifact of the question having been migrated to meta and then closed. Since the status is "migration rejected," the comments are open instead on the original. I would posit that having a discussion in those comments isn't a great idea.

Emilio Pisanty

@DanielSank you may find the video link at the end of this answer interesting

@dmckee how come you work in such a small team?

dmckee

@EmilioPisanty Just introverted, I guess.

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee also, how's it feel now that that PRL is ten years in the past?

Semiclassical

tfw you realize the stuff you wrote out had a sign error

Emilio Pisanty

(yeah, I know, that was a low blow.)

Semiclassical

20:48

$e^{+t^2/2}$ should've been $e^{-t^2/2}$...ugh

dmckee

@EmilioPisanty I've been feeling a little bit like I've been exiled to Siberia, to tell the truth. Harken to the howling wolves.

Semiclassical

@EmilioPisanty random question: is the phrase "exponentially improved asymptotic expansion" one you've run into?

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee apparently Siberia isn't howling wolves all the time, though

my PhD supervisor tells tales of summers doing field work in Siberia in August in humid 30°C+ heat

with swarms of bloodflies to boot

dmckee

@EmilioPisanty I imagine it would be. Loots of sun, lots of water small bodies of water.

Emilio Pisanty

Black fly

A black fly (sometimes called a buffalo gnat, turkey gnat, or white socks) is any member of the family Simuliidae of the Culicomorpha infraorder. They are related to the Ceratopogonidae, Chironomidae, and Thaumaleidae. Over 2,200 species of black flies have been formally named, of which 15 are extinct. They are divided into two subfamilies: Parasimuliinae contains only one genus and four species; Simuliinae contains all the rest. Over 1,800 of the species belong to the genus Simulium. Most black flies gain nourishment by feeding on the blood of mammals, including humans, although the males feed...

dmckee

20:53

On a completely different topic, I've just been tinkering with the tufte-handout as an alternative to revtex4-1 in formatting my short treatments for students. In at least some case it is very nice.

Emilio Pisanty

these ones, I think

@dmckee ugh

tufte is overrated

@dmckee sample?

dmckee

Well, so far I've only tried it with a couple of notes that need lots of little figures and encourage a lot of side-comments.

I'm a little worried about how it will look with some of the other notes.

Emilio Pisanty

this? ctan.math.illinois.edu/macros/latex/contrib/tufte-latex/…

what kinda font is it using?

dmckee

@EmilioPisanty The nofont class option makes it fall back on Computer Modern, and so far I've stuck with that.

@EmilioPisanty Yeah, that.

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee meh

dmckee

20:55

Emilio Pisanty

I've developed a mild allergy to Computer Modern

dmckee

^ What it looks like for my short blurb on heat engine basics.

The figures in the margin really work for that one.

The one about thermodynamics at phase-changes is less pleasing because I need a couple of big figures.

@EmilioPisanty I haven't been able to work up the energy to really experiment with fonts recently.

Emilio Pisanty

I'm super chuffed with my latest take on \documentclass{article}

but it doesn't look like I have a shareable draft

vzn

@rob (sigh) ok thx for info

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee there we go

oh, also, I meant to ask

physics.stackexchange.com/posts/392736/revisions this feels like stuff that's appeared before

have we got a persistent potato-banana fan spamming us from time to time?

dmckee

21:09

Cool drop-cap, there.

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee yeah, that took a while to get right

dmckee

What are the fonts?

Emilio Pisanty

\usepackage{tgheros} %% Main sans-serif font
\usepackage{tgtermes} %% Main serif font

and for the drop-cap

%% Fancy first letter
\usepackage{lettrine}
\pdfmapfile{=montserrat.map}
\renewcommand{\LettrineFont}{
  \fontfamily{iwonal}\fontsize{42}{42}\selectfont %% Iwona Light
%  \fontfamily{Montserrat-LF}\fontseries{l} \fontsize{42}{42}\selectfont %% Montserrat light
%  \fontfamily{Montserrat-LF}\fontseries{l} \fontsize{41}{41}\selectfont %% Montserrat extralight ?
%  \fontfamily{Chivo-TLF}\fontseries{l} \fontsize{42}{42}\selectfont %% Chivo light
  \color[rgb]{0,0.25,0.8}
  }
%% use as \lettrine[lines=3]{T}{\,} he

I think the chivo version was slightly nicer but there just wasn't any way to install it on my texlive system

(that's TeX Gyre Termes and Heros, respectively, for the main text.)

David Z

21:22

@vzn huh that's weird, I see the "add a comment" link as usual

@dmckee @rob how about you, do you see the commenting link on that meta post? I wonder if this is different for mods vs non-mods.

DanielSank

@EmilioPisanty OH MY GOODNESS!!!!

YES

So much yes.

This is exactly what happened in my field.

Emilio Pisanty

lolz

dmckee

@DavidZ I see a link to let me comment.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ I see 'comments disabled on deleted / locked posts / reviews'

DanielSank

The paper I shamelessly linked in my comment on that same post had the following essential message: You have to lift the two level approximation and the RWA in order to understand superconducting qubit readout.

@EmilioPisanty My colleagues are going to find this hilarious.

Emilio Pisanty

21:27

@DanielSank if it earns me bragging points, I helped organize that workshop

DanielSank

@EmilioPisanty Excelent.

I just mailed that video to my team. It's funny.

David Z

@EmilioPisanty cc @dmckee huh, OK then, I never noticed that particular difference.

Emilio Pisanty

22:00

@DanielSank ah, yes, here it is

dropbox.com/s/6t1ftmgufblvp1t/056.JPG?dl=0

That's me receiving the Sir Peter Knight Prize ::grin::

DanielSank

22:17

@EmilioPisanty Wow!

Is that Mercedes in the bottom right?

Small world.

ACuriousMind

@EmilioPisanty Are you a giant or does it just look that way in the photo? ;)

Danu

o/

Long time no talk, people

ACuriousMind

Hey there @Danu

How's it going?

Danu

So many oldies here today! :D

@ACuriousMind I'm doing alright... Dealing with some personal issues but in general Hamburg is a pretty nice place to live, and work is OK too.

You happy in your job, still? :)

ACuriousMind

@Danu Yes, it's great :)

Danu

22:21

Cool!

Today I stayed at home, alternating between chess, Fortnite, and preparing a talk I suddenly have to give in a few weeks' time on geometric quantization(?!)

ACuriousMind

Ah, student life where you spend weekdays at home. Not sure I miss it, I've gotten used to going to work more quickly than I thought

Danu

Heh, yeah... Nobody checks if I'm in the office, ever.

Turns out my supervisor is also pretty hands-off... I only meet him if I ask to.

ACuriousMind

I spent the day learning about performance analysis tools which would have been much more useful the day before when I actually had to analyze a problem in a customer's system :P

DanielSank

@Danu Hi!

Danu

hi Daniel

alarge

22:26

@ACuriousMind I assume you can work from home if need be, or are you onsite with clients? A friend of mine who used to work for SAP seemed to be consulting all the time.

DanielSank

@alarge write a book on random processes.

Please.

Danu

@ACuriousMind Yea... Sounds like a classic move order problem :-)

ACuriousMind

@alarge I can work from home if I want, up to a maximum of 20% of the time. But right now there's so much I still don't know and need to ask more experienced colleagues about that that doesn't strike me as a good idea

alarge

@DanielSank You do that; you know more about the subject matter than I, I expect

Danu

I'm happy keeping myself busy with basic results in sheaf cohomology :-)

ACuriousMind

22:28

And I don't do consulting...but if there's something going wrong with "my"/my team's code somewhere that support can't solve we occasionally have a look ourselves

@Danu That's nice

alarge

@ACuriousMind VTune was just made free the other day I think. I guess if that's the sort of performance tuning you do, you'd already have a license at work anyway, but oh well.

ACuriousMind

@alarge It's all ABAP code, and the ABAP systems have all the right tools already baked in, you just need to know where to find them.

I'm not in a position where I could install additional tools on a system

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind well, Peter Knight isn't the tallest man ever

But yes, I'm pretty tall

alarge

@ACuriousMind First time I've heard of ABAP. At quick glance (wikipedia) it looks like COBOL or something?

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind What type of work are you primarily involved in? Data analytics?

Emilio Pisanty

22:31

@DanielSank indeed it is, that's some MRes event or other

Possibly a Christmas party?

ACuriousMind

@alarge It's SAP's own programming language that started in the ancient past as a sort of COBOL dialect and has evolved into something...different.

Danu

@ACuriousMind It is, really :-) I going through the explicit isomorphism of $H^2_\text{dR}$ with Cech cohomology.

ACuriousMind

@Blue Static code analysis, i.e. writing code that runs over other people's code and tells them it's bad ;)

alarge

@ACuriousMind Is it a nice language to work in? I have almost zero experience with SQL and databases and such, so I don't think I'm really in a position to say

DanielSank

@alarge I thought you've answered several noise questions that I've posted.

Anonymous

22:33

@ACuriousMind Best job....ever :P

alarge

@ACuriousMind Do you read a lot of category theory, now, then? Not sure if it's super helpful for parsers, but if you have proper typing in the language...

ACuriousMind

@alarge The integration of the Open SQL dialect directly into the language is nice, and nowadays it doesn't look as COBOL-like and verbose as it used to. I don't love it, but I don't hate the modern variant, either. The legacy code is a different matter, though...

Danu

I wonder how relevant category theory is to any actual problem solving with code in day-to-day situations.

ACuriousMind

@alarge It's somewhat strongly and definitely statically typed, but I haven't really had to engage with the type system in depth yet, and I have my doubt category theory would enlighten it. Category theory is for Haskell ;)

alarge

@DanielSank I answered a couple, yeah, and I spent some time thinking about physics.stackexchange.com/questions/319989/… when it was new, but I think I never got to an answer.

ACuriousMind

22:37

@Danu Haskell has functors and monads. But then again, it's a niche language

alarge

@ACuriousMind Well I wouldn't really call Haskell niche coming from ABAP :)

ACuriousMind

@alarge You really don't want to know how many million lines of ABAP code are keeping various large companies running ;)

It may be niche with regards to the amount of people that actually know it, but not with regards to its impact

Danu

I was recently forced to use some kind of programming when setting up my personal homepage on the university website

ACuriousMind

"some kind of programming" :D

alarge

@ACuriousMind tiobe.com/tiobe-index oh wow, it is actually above Haskell on Tiobe

Danu

22:40

HTML... I guess it doesn't count for all you pro's

ACuriousMind

@Danu That's a document description language, not a programming language ;)

Danu

WELL IT FELT LIKE PROGRAMMING TO ME

2

ACuriousMind

lol

Danu

In fact, I'm spending quite a lot of time on mathematica recently

I really dislike that

ACuriousMind

You're computing sheaf cohomologies with Mathematica?

I'd dislike that, too ;)

Danu

22:45

No, luckily not haha

My main project is some really down-to-earth differential geometry

ACuriousMind

@alarge I need to tell KyleKanos that it's above Fortran the next time he pops in :D

Danu

I'm computing the isometry group of some Riemannian manifold... And that does feature mathematica.

ACuriousMind

Ah

@Danu "down-to-earth"...how many dimensions are you working in?

Danu

$4n$ :D

quaternionic Kähler manifolds

ACuriousMind

Ah, yes, salt of the earth, those quaternionic Kählers :D

Danu

22:55

The true proletariat

But really, it's stuff any master's student with 2 courses on differential geometry could understand.

ACuriousMind

@Danu Perfect for you, then!

(I jest, I jest)

Danu

Cry evrytiem

ACuriousMind

Is it at least nice geometry any master's student could understand, i.e. do you like it nevertheless?

Danu

It's a little bit tedious, to be honest. I was never the biggest fan of this rigid Riemannian stuff.

But the results will be nice when they come (and they are essentially guaranteed to)

Plus it's good to learn how to calculate things, I guess

ACuriousMind

Rigid Riemann and Lenient Lorentz sound like a comedy duo

Danu

23:04

Keeps you grounded and sure you can do something :)

Lol

ACuriousMind

@Danu Yeah, one shouldn't underestimate that!

Danu

Also, my supervisor is kind of the grand architect of the whole story that I'm working on developing; he proved all important properties of most of the constructions involved. It gives a safe feeling!

And I'm also really enjoying certain things outside of academics

I've taken up chess more seriously

ACuriousMind

@Danu Online or in a local club?

Danu

I play in a club now, too

ACuriousMind

nice

Danu

23:07

I already played a lot online over the past years

(still do)

ACuriousMind

I remember ;) Still not my kind of game

I've just got a regular board gaming group that usually meets once a week

Danu

You guys also play chess?

ACuriousMind

@Danu Nope

Someone brings a game suitable for 3-5 players, then we play it

Danu

Ah, just this RPG thing right

ACuriousMind

@Danu No, the RPG groups are a different thing altogether ;)

Danu

23:18

4-player chess :D

ACuriousMind

I guess if the week's game bringer insisted on that we'd play it :D

Danu

23:40

Fair enough ;-)

Sir Cumference

23:55

Howdy :)

Danu

o/

I gotta go, bye guys

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