The h Bar

Secret

02:27

@enumaris sorry I was asleep after I got that thing rendered as it was 5:00 this morning. When you have countable things, each thing is nested countably many times, then you basically have a tree with countable branches countable levels deep. This gives $\aleph_0\aleph_0\cdots =\aleph_0^{\aleph_0}=2^{\aleph_0}=\beth_1>\aleph_0$ so uncountable

@Semiclassical

Semiclassical

02:43

i'll take your word on it

Cows

03:24

:)

Secret

05:04

nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0270-1

So, you only need 7 photons to make a BEC

That's a research type that the fundemental aspect is more interesting than its potential applications

Captain Bohemian

06:03

I also went to bed around 4 to 5 am and couldn't fall asleep for a period and feel sleepy now at 2 pm.

I found time passes especially fast during wee hours; from 12 to 5 o'clock is like a transient interval.

Manu de Hanoi

10:41

Dear Emilio
1- My *question* is worded carefully for asking for mainstream physics answer .
At not point do I imply that "I know that it is directly contradicted by established evidence but I still have that theory." for the simple reason that my question is asking for that evidence because I dont know it.
2-The duplicate links have been updated with more relevant link. Thanks to who did that. At first glance, the most appropriate duplicate is "What is the experimental evidence for a quantized EM field?". By clicking on that link you will find that the selected answer to that question conta…

Manu de Hanoi

10:54

4-John Rennie himself who closed my question, posted an answer in the duplicated link he provided (self promo ?) titled "Do photons truly exist in a physical sense or are they just a useful concept like i=−1−−−√ ?"
This quote from his answer also goes along "my theory", so I believe I'm not far from the mainstream :
"The only time we really see light behaving as a photon is when it exchanges energy with something. So when an excited hydrogen atom decays a photon is emitted. Likewise a photon can be absorbed by an atom and excite it. As the light propagates to or from the atom it is rarely …

@EmilioPisanty, in case the reply to bugged please check my above 2 posts

Emilio Pisanty

@ManudeHanoi the question does show improvement

But from what I can see, it's already answered in the multiple existing duplicates (and the links therein).

Emilio Pisanty

11:13

If you feel that the existing answers are insufficient, then, as in the rest of the SE network, you of edit your post to explain in detail why.

Manu de Hanoi

@EmilioPisanty @EmilioPisanty sadly no one mentionned the Quantum Non-Demolition measurements of serge haroche in the duplicated answers :D.

@EmilioPisanty not so clear who's most mainstream between you and me now :D

Emilio Pisanty

@Secret that's extremely interesting. Photon BECs are brand new. I remember seeing Bob Nyman give a talk on the project saying "right now it's just me and an empty optical table, and it's only been done once, and I'm looking for PhD students for this". That was probably in 2014. It's great to see them doing something this crazy after one heck of not a lot of time at all.

@ManudeHanoi You asked for my views and I told you. I don't see how you think that a comment like that is constructive, but let me assure you that it is not.

Keep in mind that you do not need my involvement at all to get your question reopened.

I do have a stronger vote than most users, so if you were to fully fix your post then that might be a shorter route, but I don't see it at all. There's a ton of existing duplicates that ask basically the same question and the onus is on you to make it clear why your question is new. Otherwise, I wish you good luck convincing a quorum of other users that your question should be reopened.

user351417

11:37

@EmilioPisanty You think it's likely that they'd be able to implement similar gold-badge powers for non-mainstream closed questions? Like if you have a gold badge for a tag, you can single-handedly wield the non-mainstream closehammer? The only obstacle I see is that the non-mainstream close reason is a Physics SE thing, not a network-wide issue.

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair I see extremely thin chances of that.

user351417

Why?

user351417

Impracticality?

user351417

@EmilioPisanty I don't think it's the kind of thing which can be misused too easily.

Emilio Pisanty

simply because there's not been any movement in any related front for a long time

take e.g.

138

Q: What privilege should 30k users get?

The last time we lifted the level cap was in 2015. In 2014, we added a unilateral close-as-duplicate power for gold tag badge holders, but no new reputation level. So we've been thinking about giving users more reasons to keep playing. (I've answered this question with some circumstantial evidenc...

asked in 2015

lots of interesting alternatives

none of them implemented

121

Q: Help us identify micro-privileges for top users

Are you familiar with tapas? These are little appetizers invented in Spain that people enjoy while talking and drinking in the cool of the evening. What makes them so great is that you get a wide variety of tastes without getting fed up. Not long ago, I asked for suggestions of a new 30k...

feature-request privileges

ditto

109

Q: Empowering tag-badge holders part II - let's look at silver?

Not long ago, we gave folks that have a gold tag badge the ability to instantly mark a question as a duplicate of another. This has worked out exceptionally well in practice. While there have been some disputed closings, the process is completely transparent and community oversight has worked jus...

discussion badges privileges tag-badges

it also wouldn't be very useful.

There just aren't all that many gold-tag-badge holders around

particularly ones that are active in moderation

and in addition, close-as-off-topic, with non-mainstream being just one example, is too open to individual opinions to leave it to non-moderator individual users

user351417

11:45

Oh oops

user351417

Caps lock is annoying

user351417

Owie

Emilio Pisanty

the current status quo with a five-user quorum is a good thing

what we need is better review queues

easier to handle, easier to filter, and with a lower threshold for the red-dot indicator.

user351417

@EmilioPisanty So you think that a demonstration of knowledge in a particular field shouldn't be a major indicator of the ability to decide how mainstream stuff is?

user351417

Strange

Emilio Pisanty

11:47

@Chair eh

I think it would be more trouble than it's worth

dupehammers are already confusing beasts as it is

user351417

@EmilioPisanty I actually don't like the suggested edits one too much. The kind of post which is being edited isn't obvious enough. And it even gets sticky when people correct obvious factual inaccuracies which were very likely to have been accidents.

user351417

@EmilioPisanty What makes them messy?

Emilio Pisanty

it's easy for it to take you by surprise, i.e. you don't realize that your vote is going to be binding

user351417

@EmilioPisanty I still get that with edits sometimes.

user351417

I love this one so much: meta.stackexchange.com/a/253687/392547

The Dark Side

11:55

@EmilioPisanty - Hi. If I am not mistaken you had mentioned sometime in the hbar that your bachelor's/master's thesis was on Nuclear Structure something?

Emilio Pisanty

@TheDarkSide Nope.

My BSc thesis is on quantum optics.

The Dark Side

Oops.

Sorry.

Emilio Pisanty

My MRes dissertation is on strong-field ionization.

though really there's no reason at all for anyone to read that MRes dissertation. Read the PhD thesis instead.

The Dark Side

Why did I get that impression. Let me think.

Emilio Pisanty

... which is also on strong-field ionization.

user 2646

12:02

how many pages is your PhD thesis?

:^)

Emilio Pisanty

@user2646 238 if I remember correctly

user 2646

indeed, i just found it :-)

Emilio Pisanty

@user2646 not the hardest thing to find on the internet ;-)

user 2646

may i compliment you on your detailed user profile

Emilio Pisanty

thx =)

Manu de Hanoi

13:05

@EmilioPisanty, let me lay it out *flat*. My question is an exact duplicate of this one
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/148642/how-to-rebut-denials-of-the-existence-of-photons

So closing it is fair.

I find the "mainstream" criterion you invoqued earlier ridiculous, and that's why I made fun of you. What's the name of that scientist who got burned at the stake for developping heliocentrism against the heavy handed *mainstream* moderators ?

This mainstream thing is nothing more than the Argumentum ad populum fallacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum ) . And…

user1732

@ManudeHanoi have you visited the tower of Hanoi?

Emilio Pisanty

@ManudeHanoi May I suggest that you do not have enough experience with the site to understand the problems that the non-mainstream policy exists to solve, and that such an understanding of the underlying issues is not a waivable requirement to talking about either the problem or the existing solutions?

8

user351417

13:22

Luboš Motl just posted something for the first time in 10 months. Any idea why he was inactive for a while?

user351417

It's strange, when I look at posts listed by activity and start from the oldest, practically all of them were last modified by him

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair it is my understanding that he spends a good deal more time in PhysicsOverflow than here since that site took off.

user351417

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair link?

user351417

@EmilioPisanty To the answer? Or to the evidence that he was the last modifier of almost all old stuff?

Emilio Pisanty

13:25

the latter

user351417

The image I just sent... physics.stackexchange.com/questions?page=2507&sort=active

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair that's a fluke of the sorting, mostly

user351417

Emilio Pisanty

¬¬

user351417

@EmilioPisanty How so? A similar pattern shows up frequently enough

Emilio Pisanty

13:28

cherry-picking, pure and simple.

user351417

@EmilioPisanty Nah, I bet that if I looked, I could find boatloads.

user1732

does physics overflow have a chat room?

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair boatloads of what?

@user1732 you'd have to ask them.

user351417

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair wait

is that...

other users that are not Lubos?

user351417

13:29

@EmilioPisanty Boatloads of instances where the screen is filled with last-modified-by-lubos stuff

user351417

The second image I sent is also on page 2507

user351417

@EmilioPisanty Eh obviously there are other people about. But more than half of it is Lubos.

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair last-modified is a bad metric

user351417

And he represents way less than half of the community's population.

Emilio Pisanty

you can get that record by just doing a bunch of edit campaigns

user351417

13:31

@EmilioPisanty I just realised that. THe first picture I sent looks like a bulk edit. All are within 2 minutes of each other.

Emilio Pisanty

and just hoping that enough of them get left in peace after you're done with them

user351417

He probably found something wrong in a bunch of his posts and decided to fix em all in quick succession.

Emilio Pisanty

but yeah, I don't know why you find it surprising

he was extremely active during the first years of the site's existence

he was #1 on the rep leaderboard for ages

user351417

@EmilioPisanty Well, I wasn't around back then, and there doesn't seem to be anyone of that level of activity. Except maybe Qmechanic's edit stuff.

user1732

Q is awesome

Emilio Pisanty

13:34

@Chair John Rennie only topped his rep in 2014

right around when Lubos was winding down his participation

stackexchange.com/users/511727/lubo%C5%A1-motl?tab=reputation

lılostafa

@EmilioPisanty What is the logical order of a thesis presentation?
Is it : background -> problem statement -> your idea -> works done

or should I include a short explanation about why I chose this subject at the very beginning

user1732

why not start with motivation?

Emilio Pisanty

@lılostafa depends on the country

lılostafa

@user1732 It seems a little strange to me to start talking about my motivation before introducing the subject (the background part)

Emilio Pisanty

92

A: Welcome to Academia.SE!

Academia varies more than you think it does Academic customs and procedures vary greatly across countries, universities, fields, subfields, workgroups and so on. Therefore always consider that what you assume to be general in your question or answer is not. It is very helpful if your question i...

@lılostafa depends on how much time you have available.

But really, it primarily depends on the local expectations. The person to ask is your supervisor.

lılostafa

13:38

@EmilioPisanty Take US for example, and 30 minutes max

Emilio Pisanty

@lılostafa unless you have a full hour, I would recommend that you go straight to the point.

but again, this is something you should work out in consultation with your supervisor.

Sir Cumference

14:08

Jesus what does it take to get some good weather?

Emilio Pisanty

@SirCumference living in Spain?

Sir Cumference

;-;

Loong

@SirCumference xkcd 1245 or 1606?

Anonymous

@SirCumference I just waded through knee-deep muddy waters to get back home from uni :P

Sir Cumference

@Blue Ok I can't really compare with that ._.

Anonymous

14:13

Also, cars are not running on the roads today

Emilio Pisanty

@Blue are they doing more of a casual lounging?

Anonymous

@EmilioPisanty lol

Anonymous

Well, there are trucks

Anonymous

But the shorter cars with lesser ground clearance would get waterlogged

Emilio Pisanty

btw @Chair how in the hell did this one escape the HNQ radar?

five answers within fifteen minutes of each other, but it doesn't get deemed hot?

I reckon it was within one or two upvotes of completely exploding

user351417

14:24

@EmilioPisanty Ah yeah, I remeber that there were suddenly 5 answers within just 35 minutes of posting it. And it seems naive enough hehehe.

user351417

14:39

@EmilioPisanty Strangely enough, though the favorites came in pretty quick, there weren't many votes (up or down).

user351417

@Blue Heh in Bangalore we don't need rain for that. We had this thing called a Bandh (hindi for 'closed', if I remember) to protest against the fuel prices, so they decided to close all schools and workplaces for a day. I had 2 major tests postponed. I'm getting bored as hell just sitting around at home.

Anonymous

@Chair We had a bandh here too, yesterday :P

user351417

@Blue Where?

Anonymous

Kolkata

user351417

Oh yeah, now that I think of it, our bandh was yesterday too. I was supposed to have the tests yesterday, and today was supposed to be off for me anyways. I guess it gets confusing when I have every alternate day off because of my tests.

user351417

14:47

Eh whatever it's damn annoying.

Anonymous

I. on the other hand, love it

user351417

Why on earth would you love it?

Anonymous

I get to stay at home and sleep

Anonymous

Home is cozy, and nice and lovely XD

user351417

Ah of course. :P

Anonymous

14:51

What test are you having now though? School half yearlies?

user351417

@Blue Not exactly. I'm doing the IB so we have a pretty unusual schedule. Our summer holidays are June and July. We had 11th grade year-ends in May, and now we have a series of tests called Mock tests, which are based on exactly the same stuff as year 1 because reasons? At the end of these tests, the school gives us something called a predicted grade, which is essentially a prediction of what we'll get in the IB finals, which are next May.

user351417

Using those predicted grades, I apply for college in November and December.

John Rennie

@Blue Kaumudi was saying there was a strike in Kochi so college was closed. It's OK for some! :-)

user351417

@JohnRennie Odds are the stuff was organised for the whole country.

Anonymous

@JohnRennie Haha. It seems that a lot of places had a strike yesterday! BTW any news from Kaumudi about the Kerala floods (and how the recovery work is going)? It was a terrible situation last month (a large portion of Kerala got heavily flooded and it was declared as a national emergency)

user351417

14:59

Over the last 30 minutes I have seen 4 NAAs by new users. What's going on all of a sudden? physics.stackexchange.com/questions/348598 physics.stackexchange.com/questions/78416/… physics.stackexchange.com/questions/297652/…

John Rennie

@Blue I asked her if she was flooded out, but it turns out her family's apartment is on the 17th floor :-)

Anonymous

Lol, that's....good to know :P

John Rennie

She did say the floods were really bad in Kochi and a number of people had been killed. The college was closed because it was being used to house people displaced by the floods.

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair humans have an enormous capacity to perceive random events as non-random?

Anonymous

"a number of people had been killed"....eeeeh :/

user351417

15:02

@EmilioPisanty Me in particular. I love looking at the phase portraits of double pendulums with small amplitudes too.

John Rennie

@Blue yes, a thoroughly unpleasant business :-(

Anonymous

It's sorta unprecedented, yeah

Emilio Pisanty

btw, re: this, arXiv links don't rot.

@JohnRennie the Queen just rang, she wants her euphemisms back.

user351417

@EmilioPisanty Meh pasted comment template. It's still not nice to have bald links just sitting around. But good to know.

John Rennie

@EmilioPisanty As a staunch republican I regard all euphemisms as the property of the people!

Emilio Pisanty

15:05

@JohnRennie ah, got it.

@Chair or to put it another way: if the arXiv stops resolving links, the internet has bigger problems

ditto with DOI links

@JohnRennie but the edit was good, though.

user351417

@EmilioPisanty Yeah but dois are made for that reason right? Because they don't disappear?

John Rennie

@EmilioPisanty edit?

Emilio Pisanty

@JohnRennie physics.stackexchange.com/posts/425907/revisions v2. (duh. replied to the wrong message.)

Anonymous

@Chair That sounds quite different from the CBSE and ISC systems! Did you decide which universities you're going to apply to?

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair yep.

John Rennie

15:09

@EmilioPisanty ah :-)

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair still, if there's a formal journal reference it's always better to include that too.

One of these days altmetric will get their act together and DOI links from SE will be good for authors.

user351417

@Blue Kind of... I need to expand my list a bit, but largely yeah.

Anonymous

@Chair Nice. So, are you looking forward to....physics?

Emilio Pisanty

oh wow

chrome v69 is awful

it just decided that the .m. in the Wikipedia url isn't worth displaying

user351417

@Blue Yep. Definitely. I'm not particularly sure about the theoretical vs experimental thing, but I'm presently interested in high-energy physics and nonlinear dynamics.

user351417

15:14

I guess it doesn't make a difference for the first couple of years of undergrad anyways, but having an interest in a particular field would probably help me find fun research positions.

user351417

@EmilioPisanty What exactly is the purpose of the .m? I've seen that it gives you a pretty different layout, but I couldn't find much about it. Probably because I had no idea what to search for...

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair it's the mobile site

en.wikipedia.org automatically reditects to en.m.wikipedia.org if your device requests a mobile version

user351417

@EmilioPisanty Ah. It still looks prettier than the normal version on my laptop though, and I have a pretty high-res screen.

user351417

Looks like a lot of physics SE posts link to that.

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair regardless

it's bad form to link to the .m. domain. If clients need it they will automatically redirect there.

Anonymous

15:18

@Chair Cool :) Yeah, true, no matter how hard you try, you wouldn't be able to know now what would interest you in the long-term (at least not now). When I first joined my engineering course I thought I'd end up being an experimentalist, but then I realized I suck at it and also that it seems pretty boring to me. Later my interest shifted towards some of the pure math-y stuff, and now I'm finding myself more interested in computer science. And all that happened over the span of a year :P

Emilio Pisanty

what's unbelievable is that chrome is displaying a different URL than the document it's actually showing

Anonymous

It's certainly a good idea to try out as many fields as you can while you're in college.

user351417

Okee I gotta go study. See ya!

Anonymous

Bbye

Anonymous

I'm slightly scared though that I might end up becoming a COBOL developer, after getting bored with everything else in life :P

user351417

15:20

user351417

Shit. What have I done?

Anonymous

QMech took mercy on ya

user351417

@Blue s/he was going easy. I'm sure.

Anonymous

That's what I meant ^

user351417

Couldn't be true otherwise.

Emilio Pisanty

15:28

@Chair you need a hundred times more edits to displace Qmechanic on the all-time tables.

hmmmm. On the other hand, it seems that @DavidZ and I are neck-to-neck there.

user351417

@EmilioPisanty Bah I'm ahead this week only because I'm supposed to be studying for a Business Management test and that's the most wuss subject I've ever seen. But you gotta do gen-eds and it is technically interesting enough.

user351417

@EmilioPisanty Looks like you overtook him today. Congratulations! You are now #2 on the one tab on the users page which absolutely nobody looks at :P

user351417

(Except for me: I just looked at it)

Anonymous

DanielSank - 2018 edits. Coincidence?

danielunderwood

Well you made me look at it too. There's a user on the top rep leaderboard that I'm pretty sure I've never seen physics.stackexchange.com/users/26969/floris

Anonymous

15:39

Everyone knows Floris!

Anonymous

Really knowledgable guy

user351417

@Blue Yeah. You look at an answer and you can just tell he's the guy who wrote it. He has this awesome approach to everyday-life stuff

danielunderwood

I recognized pretty much every user there except him/her. Maybe I don't look at enough questions

user351417

@danielunderwood I don't think he's very active these days.

Anonymous

14

A: Why does paper cut so well?

Paper contains filler particles. These are microscopic “knives” - see for example this picture (Precipitated Calcium Carbonate, from this paper) When paper is freshly cut, such particles (CaCO3, TiO2, ...) are exposed on the edge. They act like any serrated blade, cutting and removing small am...

Anonymous

15:43

One of his recent great answers

user351417

Looks like he hasn't been doing as much since July 2017

Emilio Pisanty

24

Q: The User, The Myth, The Legend

User Floris has recently become the third user to obtain the Legendary badge, which is one of the less awarded badges out there. Being one of the most prolific contributors to this site, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for those amazing ~2.300 answers, thank you for the detailed yet int...

discussion users

this guy?

user351417

There's a pretty sharp drop after july.

user351417

@EmilioPisanty I loved his meta SE post about the pi rate hat.

user351417

15:45

67

A: A Moose, Some Silly Putty ... And A Desperate Plea For Help

How about a pi-rate hat: Materials: warm hat, sharpie (black and silver), paper, scissors, tape. A pirate hat might be awarded for having an answer accepted after another answer was initially accepted. In other words - "stealing" the green tick. Or an upvoted answer that has double r in at l...

danielunderwood

Did he make someone mad on Aug 27?

user351417

Except he used partial differentiation signs because???

Anonymous

@danielunderwood A bounty perhaps?

user351417

@danielunderwood User was removed

Anonymous

Ah

user351417

15:47

Somebody who voted on his posts had their account deleted.

danielunderwood

ahhh is that why suspended accounts have rep 1?

Anonymous

That's different

user351417

@danielunderwood I don't know so much about this, but I think that the votes of suspended accounts don't get removed.

user351417

User removed refers to cases where the user is deleted entirely.

Emilio Pisanty

@Chair eh.

John Rennie

15:48

@Chair $\pi$ is a function of position as well as time. Come on, everyone knows that :-)

Emilio Pisanty

everything on that thread at score $\geq$ 25 is over-rated.

danielunderwood

ohhh I get it

pi-rate

user351417

@JohnRennie Except me, apparently :P technically you could say it's a trivial funciton of time becasue $\pi (t)=\pi \times t^0$

user351417

@EmilioPisanty Yours is awesome

John Rennie

@Chair $\pi$ was 3 in Indiana in 1897.

2

danielunderwood

15:50

Like all of Indiana?

John Rennie

Indiana Pi Bill

The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, rather than to establish a certain value for the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by amateur mathematician Edward J. Goodwin, does imply various incorrect values of π, such as 3.2. The bill never became law, due to the intervention of Professor C....

danielunderwood

Is it discontinuous at state lines?

user351417

@JohnRennie Maybe they had too many engineers there

Sir Cumference

@JohnRennie Ah yeah, Numberphile has a good video on it

How Pi was nearly changed to 3.2 - Numberphile

►

danielunderwood

How exactly does one introduce a bill about a number?

Emilio Pisanty

15:53

btw now that we're starring things

How Far Are The Nearest Stars?

►

↑ is amazing

user351417

@danielunderwood ask them

Anonymous

@danielunderwood The STEM communities have had their fair share of cranks and trolls since time immemorial

danielunderwood

So what I've gathered is that all stars are peas in a gigantic cosmic garden

Or a really big bowl of pea soup

Semiclassical

"The area found by Goodwin's rule is pi/4 times the true area of the circle, which in many accounts of the Pi Bill is interpreted as a claim that pi = 4. However, there is no internal evidence in the bill that Goodwin intended to make such a claim; on the contrary, he repeatedly denies that the area of the circle has anything to do with its diameter."

dat last clause

wowza

Anonymous

lol

danielunderwood

16:02

Small circle same area as big circle? Makes sense

Semiclassical

Obvious crank or secret prophet of GR

you tell me

enumaris

welp...gotta do employee training now...fail

Anonymous

Feed them first ;)

ACuriousMind

@Blue I think he's being trained, not doing the training/feeding :P

danielunderwood

Be sure to do what they say so you get treats

Anonymous

16:05

Ah, ask your trainer to feed you something nice first, then :P

Anonymous

Bad link. Lemme find a better one for you

Anonymous

Gosh, you're out of luck: The stimulation of hunger, the researchers announced in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, causes mice to take in information more quickly, and to retain it better — basically, it makes them smarter. And that’s very likely to be true for humans as well.

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood Suspended accounts simply always are fixed at rep 1 (for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, probably as a sort of punishment like "If you misbehave, you don't get to show off your rep"). Loss of reputation due to "user was removed" is entirely different: When a user account is deleted (not suspended!), all its votes are, too.

Semiclassical

@ACuriousMind maybe it's a simple way of removing rep privileges?

enumaris

1 down 6 to go

if you read SE source code, I'm sure the 1 rep rule will make sense

ACuriousMind

16:11

Deletion may also happen as punishment, especially for sockpuppet accounts, but it's also regularly triggered by the users themselves for various reasons (which they don't have to explain to us). For users with a really large number of votes, a CM has to do the deletion manually in order to preserve the votes since a loss of many votes to many users would be too disruptive to the reputation model

@Semiclassical Also possible. I simply don't really know and never cared enough to ask :P

enumaris

So if John Rennie wanted to delete his account, he can't?

Semiclassical

@ACuriousMind presumably (and hopefully) that latter scenario doesn't happen often

Sir Cumference

@Semiclassical From his obituary:

> As years went on and he saw the child of his genius still unreceived by the scientific world, he became broken with disappointment, although he never lost hope and trusted that before his end came he would see the world awakened to the greatness of his plan and taste for a moment the sweetness of success. He was doomed to disappointment, and in the peaceful confines of village life the tragedy of a fruitless ambition was enacted.

Anonymous

@enumaris He can. But he'd need permission from a SE dev

John Rennie

@enumaris I think ACM meant accounts that have awarded a large number of votes

Anonymous

16:12

Because of his high rep

enumaris

hmmm

John Rennie

i.e. when the account is deleted lots of of users would lose votes

enumaris

Test it out, for science?

:P

ACuriousMind

@enumaris All users can delete their account. But the deletion of accounts with a large number of votes cast has to be done manually, so it is not automatic.

John Rennie

I lost about 2000 rep when accounts were deleted during a big outbreak of sockpuppetry!

enumaris

16:13

so it's a votes cast thing, not a high rep thing

Semiclassical

rep awarded vs. rep received etc

Anonymous

They're correlated

danielunderwood

@JohnRennie do such outbreaks happen often?

and hmmm

Paper saw blades, PART TWO--what can paper cut? // Homemade Science with Bruce Yeany

►

enumaris

hmmm

ACuriousMind

@JohnRennie Ah, sockpuppets are of course not protected by this - they are deleted and all their votes reversed regardless of the quantity.

@danielunderwood Not on that scale. I daresay that we're pretty good at catching them in earlier stages ;)

danielunderwood

16:14

And when you say sockpuppets, you mean users with multiple accounts?

John Rennie

@danielunderwood this was an usually large scale attack! :-)

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind not quite. Past a certain threshold, the votes are retained.

@JohnRennie precisely to prevent this

ACuriousMind

@EmilioPisanty I think there's a manual element on the CM side involved in the preservation of such votes, though I might be misremembering

Emilio Pisanty

hmmmmm

enumaris

too many m's

I'm confiscating 2, so here you go: hmmm

Emilio Pisanty

16:16

1073

Q: Don't throw away all votes when a user is deleted

Currently, when a moderator deletes a user all of the user's votes are removed along with the user themselves. I was pretty surprised at this behaviour when I first heard about it, and I don't think it is a good idea to throw away all of the votes just because the user is deleted. Votes are lock...

feature-request status-deferred voting users deleted-accounts

that appears to be it

> If either threshold is exceeded, deletion is held up until someone reviews it. Otherwise, deletion proceeds and any votes are discarded.
> If, during review, it becomes apparent that the user is or ever was involved in voting fraud, the votes are discarded as they would normally be.

but for clarity, that's to prevent things like this:

danielunderwood

Do you guys read papers multiple times? Like run through it quickly and reread if it's interesting or something?

enumaris

I've read Wald like 6 times

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood That's my standard mode of reading

enumaris

(not all of it though)

danielunderwood

huh maybe that's what I need to start doing. I take ages to get through anything, but I try to process it all as I'm reading

Anonymous

16:22

Btw are deleted accounts really not recoverable? What is the precaution against a mod getting ummm...*possessed* and deleting multiple user accounts at random ?

danielunderwood

I'm sure the devs have backups they could use if really needed

Emilio Pisanty

@danielunderwood How to read a scientific paper

danielunderwood

neato stackexchange.com/performance

enumaris

SE sites are periodically backed up on 12 Million 3.5" floppy disks

ACuriousMind

@Blue The account is not recoverable, the content associated to it is, cf. meta.stackexchange.com/a/283926/263383

enumaris

16:26

@danielunderwood that whole page is lies, we all know the storage is all on floppy disks

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood If you really want to understand a paper, it does take ages. That's normal. The quick reading phase is just to determine whether I want/need to invest that kind of time.

Semiclassical

@enumaris nah man. it's little gnomes in your computer manipulating miniature abaci

danielunderwood

@EmilioPisanty So is that saying that I should sit down for hours and understand everything?

> Can you put coffee in a humidifier?

or do that

Emilio Pisanty

uh...

did your comedy detector break down?

How to (seriously) read a scientific paper

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind "By restore content, I mean that posts (questions and answers) and comments which were connected to the previous profile would be attached to a new profile that must be created. " - that's fair enough!

danielunderwood

16:31

Evidently my comedy detector had the sensitivity set wrong

I detected a slight bit of comedy, but wasn't sure

Emilio Pisanty

> To avoid interruptions from cellphone calls, I made sure it was 1999.

actually, forget it

I was going to quote the few bits that are most obviously comedic

but the whole thing is plastered with it

Semiclassical

@EmilioPisanty tbh what immediately pops out to me is the fact that the sidebar showing 'top-ranked articles in Careers' has "Ph.D. students face significant mental health challenges" at the top

Anonymous

@danielunderwood I took over a month to read my first XD

enumaris

I just asked my adviser for the gist of the paper

let him do the heavy lifting

mmmhm

danielunderwood

@EmilioPisanty I thought the whole thing was serious and just his writing style. But then I also find serious things funny at times, so who knows

Anonymous

16:37

@enumaris My advisor was/is a PhD student who had/has absolutely no clue about the contents of the paper :P And his advisor only spoke to us once in two weeks .... and that too about unrelated topics. The other paper I worked on, however, was easier to go through since I could directly interact with the authors (who were from my uni)

danielunderwood

Oh no SE is written in C#

My advisor just handed me a stack of papers and books when I started and I had no idea what to do. I suppose the reasonable thing would have been to ask him how to read them

Anonymous

I sort of realized that the papers are mostly way too "dense". They assume you already know a lot of things! (which is fair, if you expect only experts to read them)

enumaris

only experts in your field who have done similar research on similar topics using similar methodologies

Anonymous

Review papers are a bit easier to get through, tho

Anonymous

@enumaris Yeah :P

enumaris

16:40

I write papers expecting only my adviser to ever read them

Anonymous

lol

enumaris

well, not true

my adviser and my cowriter

my co-writer understands more about what I write than I do

danielunderwood

Speaking of papers, I hear about dozens of theory papers on arxiv the day after an experimental result. Are those people throwing those papers together in a day or is it usually something they've been working on for a while and just waiting for an experimental reason to release them?

Does your co-writer not write them with you?

Anonymous

I'm on the other end. At the beginning of the summer vacation, I had 5 other undergrads working with me. Gradually, over the month they started vanishing one-by-one :P Now only 2 are left and none of them are writing anything substantial. I'm having to write up their parts too. I guess this experience has made me believe that undergrad group projects almost always end up being unproductive, especially when you don't have a stern supervisor

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood Before the release of an experimental result you can usually hear rumors about it, so many of them probably have had longer than a day to prepare. Also, right after such a discovery they are more willing to publish material that they wouldn't consider quite polished enough otherwise, in order to establish primacy if their idea turns out ot be good.

enumaris

16:48

@danielunderwood I provide the first draft, my adviser and co-writer revise my draft to be publishable

incidentally, my co-writer knows way more about what I'm writing than I do

danielunderwood

Has physics always had theory work popping up like this (at least per scientist or so) or is it a new thing? I guess we don't really hear about the failed theories of the past for the most part

enumaris

U gotta be the first to publish

so ppl don't steal your ideas

also, you gotta be secretive with your work before you publish it

otherwise people will steal it

danielunderwood

You could use that naming principle. Let someone else publish it first and you'll get your name on it

I have no idea what that effect is called at the moment. The one where the person named for a work isn't the one originally responsible

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood My impression is that this is to a large part because many theoretical fields don't have unexplained results around you can do something with. Sure, we have dark matter and so on, but without further results there's hundreds of possible directions you can go in.

My wholly unfounded impression is that In the past the situation was rather in reverse: There was a plethora of rather specific experimental results that demanded explanation, like the heydays of particle physics when the experimentalists found new particles faster than the theorists could explain them :P

@danielunderwood Stigler's law

danielunderwood

Experimentalists just need to figure out how to materialize equipment without needing money!

And that's the one. I couldn't even figure out what to google to find it

ACuriousMind

16:53

I just remembered the name, otherwise it would've taken me longer to find it

enumaris

Pretty sure Einstein's Field Equations are named after the first dude who found em

Alberto Einstein - cousin of famous physicist Albert Eintein

danielunderwood

Einstein figured out so many things that they couldn't name everything after him

enumaris

well it helps that 4 separate famous physicists arose from the Einstein clan

the aforementioned Alberto and Albert Einstein as well as Alonzo, and Alfonzo Einstein

danielunderwood

Could you imagine what it must be like to be a relative? "Einstein...so you must be a genius right?"

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