The h Bar - 2019-04-25

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PM 2Ring

00:44

The supersolid dark matter guy is back, with a new name. physics.stackexchange.com/questions/475825/…

JMac

@PM2Ring I saw that and flagged it, I'm not sure what they can do to keep him from spamming that

PM 2Ring

01:03

@JMac There's not a lot that the mods can do, but I understand they have tools to help identify sock accounts, so he'll have problems if he thinks he can just keep creating new accounts (but I don't know how effective those tools are in this age of dynamic IP addresses). There's no point trying to reason with him. He's on a mission. :(

enumaris

01:26

Anybody here have good resources on learning computational linguistics stuff? Specifically like...generating grammars, dependency parsing, and stuff like that...

Or good resources for learning theoretical CS stuff like Lambda Calc, turing mahines, and propositions as types kind of stuff

._.

I feel like my ML sided NLP and data-driven understanding is quite strong...but my fundamentals in linguistics is weaksauce

PM 2Ring

01:42

This answer is a marathon! I don't want to discourage the author, but perhaps an answer that's an introduction to limits, continuity, and differentiation covers way too much territory. Hopefully, it will help the OP rather than overwhelm and confuse them. ;)

@enumaris We occasionally get people discussing NLP in the Python room, one of them (eg, Arne) may know of some computational linguistics resources.

enumaris

01:57

cool beans :D

2 hours later…

rob

03:49

@PM2Ring We noticed, and are reacting, but deliberately.

In the meantime, I suggest not engaging with them in comments --- a chance at having a trollish comment discussion would make that user very happy. Downvote, flag, and disengage.

PM 2Ring

04:08

@rob Thanks. I won't try arguing physics with them. But I guess even telling them that they're off-topic is engaging with them...

enumaris

04:45

woahhh

printf in C can't print integers?

what is this the 1800's...

1 hour later…

Sir Cumference

05:51

John Duffield, Poole, UK

1 5 17

black-hole general-relativity gravity space-time universe cosmology cosmological-inflation

user image

Huh, not the reason I expected but ok

John Rennie

@SirCumference I assume it's for broadcasting his own idiosyncratic views on general relativity.

Sir Cumference

Don't see how that'd be "promotional content" unless he was advertising his website. On second thought, that isn't too far fetched

John Rennie

I was a bit surprised at the reason, though not at the suspension.

We suspended him for low quality postings and I would have guessed that would be the reason on Astronomy too. Oh well.

PM 2Ring

@enumaris Since when? Of course, you do need to use an appropriate format string, eg for a plain signed integer, you can do printf("%d\n", i);.

enumaris

yeah, I'm used to just print(i)

John Rennie

05:59

Programmers today don't know they're born.

PM 2Ring

@JohnRennie FWIW, one of his recent Astronomy answers was to a question that got migrated to Physics.

Captain Bohemian

is there a way through which you can tell whether a person send you an email by computer or mobile phone?

John Rennie

@PM2Ring actually that was an OK answer, but then it wasn't to do with GR :-)

@CaptainBohemian if you can see the mail headers they might tell what the mail app was.

Sir Cumference

I'd hoped his low quality posts on Astro would be less frequent once he got unbanned from Physics, but immediately he posts a double whammy

Captain Bohemian

@JohnRennie do you mean a series of information which shows how the email is transferred from the sender to the receiver?

PM 2Ring

06:03

@enumaris In C, the format string is how printf knows how many other args it has. It doesn't get passed an arg count, just a stack pointer where the args start, and it has to figure out how much stack space each arg consumes from the format string.

enumaris

way more low level than I'm used to lol

PM 2Ring

And of course, the format string tells it what the type of each of those args is too.

@enumaris Python?

enumaris

yep

John Rennie

@CaptainBohemian yes, the mail header contains all the info logged by the mail transfer agents as the mail is passed between mail servers. You may be able to tell from the info in it where the mail originally came from.

PM 2Ring

I used to write a lot of C, but I hardly touch it these days because Python's just so convenient.

enumaris

06:06

I used to write fortran

but I actively try to forget

Captain Bohemian

@JohnRennie I used to have ever seen that kind of information by pressing some key, but now I forget which key I pressed then. I usually find the function of a computer by haphazardly pressing some key rather than systematically learning computer.

John Rennie

@CaptainBohemian what mail app do you use?

PM 2Ring

:) One of our Python ROs, Andras, still writes some Fortran. It's still used a lot for scientific work. IIRC, some parts of scipy are written in Fortran.

enumaris

I need to learn more

there's too much I don't know...

Captain Bohemian

@JohnRennie I don't know what's mail app you mean. I directly go to the email website I registered to login in to reach my email box. For example, if I want to go to my Yahoo mailbox, I just go to Yahoo website to enter my mail address and password.

John Rennie

06:17

Ah, I didn't realise you were using a web interface.

You'll have to Google to see if there is a way to see the mail headers with the Yahoo web interface.

enumaris

sigh...

Captain Bohemian

@JohnRennie did you consider I use Outlook to deal with email? I used to have learnt that, but the steps of doing that are too long so that I seldom use that and forget how to do that.

John Rennie

06:54

It's looking like a lovely day in Chester:

user image

Captain Bohemian

It's so hot with air temperature over 34. 6 C and I feel so hungry, not being able to think of what to eat. I feel it's so troublesome to need to think about what food to go to buy to eat to solve hunger every day. I miss when there is automatic meal delivery, like in conference.

Slereah

07:47

Typical British weather

@SirCumference did he try to flog his book

John Rennie

08:42

To be fair the weather in Chester is usually pretty good. We're between the Welsh mountains to the west and the Peak district to the east. Whether the wind comes from the west or the east the rain mostly falls on the mountains before it reaches us.

1 hour later…

Pedro

09:54

Hi. I saw a question "Can we percept time as non uniform field? [On hold]", with -4 votes, which is on hold because it is poorly explained and I think I know what it means, but I do not have a reputation to edit.

I think he is asking about what is called Kozyrev's time (Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev). Although there is a lot of pseudoscience around the name of this astrophysicist, his old and abandoned concept of time is very interesting, and one can find a full explanation in "On The Way To Understanding The Time Phenomenon: The Constructions Of Time in Natural Sciencie Part II" from A.…

John Rennie

@Pedro Kozyrev's later work is firmly in the crackpot category. Whether that's the result of his imprisonment we'll never know, but he lost it big time. Any questions about those theories would be closed as non-mainstream.

PM 2Ring

10:09

@Pedro Oh. They deleted the original, and just reposted. physics.stackexchange.com/questions/475929/…

Pedro

Ok, I understand. I agree, that is undeniable. It is also undeniable that his experiments with his idea about time were not replicated, although all his contemporaries affirm that he was an honest person.
Be that as it may, its concept of time, being radically opposed to the concept that we handle today and seems more correct, it is still very interesting and curious, and we must remember that today time is still a mistery.

John Rennie

10:29

@Pedro time isn't a mystery

user351417

Oh dear, our Physics SE drama appears to have gone to the mother meta meta.stackexchange.com/q/327279

Pedro

10:49

@JohnRennie I am sure that the current physical concept will remain firm and will only suffer generalizations in the future, but today it is just a working method with a lot of assumptions and add-on elements, there's still much to be done at a lower level, and above all, a description that also covers our perception of it.

John Rennie

11:00

@Chair who is the offending chat user?

user351417

@JohnRennie Nah, it was apparently someone from physics who was part of a conversation in one of the meta rooms. The person was suspended for activity on Physics.

user351417

I didn't bother reading the whole conversation, but the essence of the part I read was that they didn't feel the Physics suspension was fair.

JMac

I could probably guess who that is.

user351417

I'd rather not mention the name of the user because we shouldn't really talk too much about them, but I'm quite sure that there's a link somewhere in that meta post.

user351417

(a link to the conversation in the meta SE chat room)

user351417

11:06

@JMac Yep, as far as I know, there haven't been many recent drama-filled suspensions on Physics.

user351417

So there aren't many candidates.

John Rennie

@Chair no link in the meta post. Which chat room? Can you post a link to the chat room if you don't want to explicitly give the users' name?

JMac

There's a particular user who gets an annual suspension, and also has a tendency to purposefully go around the rules to complain about suspensions they get for purposefully going around the rules, I can only guess it's them

user351417

@JohnRennie Eh I don't know if it's OK to post this, but here's the room chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/1251/2019/4/23

John Rennie

@Chair it's hard to take that too seriously :-)

JMac

11:26

oh snap, I wasn't actually thinking of the same person. That's good for the person I'm thinking of I guess, since that probably would have added to their suspensions

Secret

12:00

9

Q: What can moderators do about suspended chat users who attempt to engage with users via their chat profiles?

Recently, we encountered a rather persistent user in a chat room, repeatedly attempting to engage with other users in the chat by editing their chat profile description and repeatedly leaving and re-entering the room in order to draw attention to themselves with the entry animation. Some users do...

discussion support chat moderation account-suspension

One of the very few meta posts I actually starred. Having rich experience of ghosting in my real life, means I also have very deep understanding of its antithesis: Trolling. As far I am aware, stopping trolls are much harder, primarily due to the following phenomenon highlighted:

> I do realize a few users have trouble with that. That said, they also typically love drama and it's best to deal with it quietly. Telling them on chat to ignore a person trying to get attention, gets that person attention.

Both the social phenomenon of trolling and ghosting have this unique property that by warning about not engaging with them, you are effectively engaging with them

(also some disclaimer in case it causes trouble, these comments are my advice on combating these phenomenon. I am not ranting about the phenomenon because the ignore list is currently empty)

user351417

What was surprising was that the author of that meta post was among the participants of that conversation. But perhaps there's some more background which actually prompted the post.

user351417

But apparently such conversations aren't as uncommon as I thought they'd be, meta.stackoverflow.com/q/364951

Secret

yeah, I have checked the relevant transcripts, and it seems that particular drama has a lot of things beneath surface level. It does not seemed to be a random trolling event

I do think, however, disabling the entry animation may help deal with the problem, since this is the first step to this particular pathway of circumvention.

John Rennie

Within five minutes you'll either be toast from heating or jelly from pulling 15-20 gees

Or possibly both :-)

JMac

just a lump of painful burnt jelly

PM 2Ring

12:29

Burnt jelly is no trifling matter.

1 hour later…

Captain Bohemian

13:53

listening to others' conversation is easier than reading others' transcript

it's 27.7 C now. I think summer has arrived and the weather won't become too cool again so that long-sleeves won't have use for several months. This year, adapted to my hope, there were not cold days lasting for long during winter so that the winter didn't feel too cold.

I hope not to have another winter in this homeland, which is not a place even for cool winter.

JMac

14:11

@CaptainBohemian Hah; we literally got 10 cm of snow here last night and a bit of ongoing flurries today

Captain Bohemian

14:23

@JMac I am in a place of completely contrast weather to yours--snow is never seen in sea level. Yesterday I still wore thin long-sleeves but felt so hot, so today is the 1st day this year I wear short-sleeves and feel today is the hottest day I have encountered this year. This week the air temperature has gone over 30 C almost every day and even reached 35 C sometimes. Apr. 11 is the 1st day I saw ice cream on sale in supermarket this year, and up to now, I have eaten 3 cups of ice cream.

JMac

@CaptainBohemian The weather here is fun. In July and August, it will reach 30+ most days and be incredibly warm, then start the decline again and by november it will be snowing

Captain Bohemian

@JMac our summer starts from early or mid April every year and it won't get really cold until mid or late December.

PM 2Ring

I like Sydney's mild warm climate. I kind of would like to see snow falling, one day, but I really don't cope well with cold weather. And for me, that means anything colder than 15°C. :)

JMac

I'm used to far less extreme weather, but I moved somewhat north. Here the coastline only really gets the arctic currents, and doesn't mix with the gulf stream like it does in Nova Scotia; we get pretty moderate seasons (for Canada) there

Captain Bohemian

@PM2Ring I have never seen snow in reality but have seen it several times in my dreamland.

15 C is our typical winter weather when it gets cold.

PM 2Ring

14:47

@CaptainBohemian Same here, although it can get a little colder, especially at night. Also, I'm only a couple of km from the coast here, which keeps the climate mild. Temperatures get more extreme on the western side of Sydney.

Captain Bohemian

the passing winter was not so cold that I guess even high mountains here did not got any snow.

Captain Bohemian

15:11

@PM2Ring just one week or so ago, I found no matter how hot the weather was in daytime, it still got more or less cool in night time, but in last wee hours, I was in a forest park feeling so hot; I saw the air temperature there showing it's 29 C, but I felt it's like well over 30 C.

John Rennie

Huh?

PM 2Ring

@JohnRennie Also see physics.stackexchange.com/questions/171914/…

John Rennie

@PM2Ring I confess I am mystified. Some considerable effort has gone into writing the two posts, but why? What benefit is the OP getting in return for all that effort?

Kyle Kanos

15:27

Sharing their idea?

Doing something to pass boredom?

Semiclassical

in the words of Blade: "Some [people] are always trying to ice skate uphill."

PM 2Ring

@JohnRennie Never underestimate the motivational power of missionary zeal.

John Rennie

@PM2Ring I find it hard to believe the posts are sincere. I doubt anyone could be that incoherent without working at it, so I believe them to be trolls. But to what end?

Semiclassical

15:44

There's a level of Poe's law at work, of course

How do you tell apart someone who says ludicrous things to get a rise out of you, from someone who genuinely believes them?

JMac

@JohnRennie There's a certain subset of people who seem to get really invested in their personal theories, and go well out of their way to promote them. I think a lot of the time, it really does make sense in their heads. For example, the "Dark matter is a superfluid that surrounds us" guy seems to spend a significant amount of time posting that theory in every semi-relevant physics article comment section that he can find

knzhou

Superfluid DM is a real thing though.

These people are grasping at something, they just lack the mathematical training to see how much their theories are missing.

JMac

It's a thing, but he posts an entire theory about it as fact on like 1000 different pages, never published, only as comments on pop-sci articles referencing papers that usually have something to do with dark matter

That's the thing, it's not total nonsense, but they grasp at it too strong before putting the work in to understand what they are trying to grasp. It's not that surprising. When you think you figured something out, it can be really exciting. They just seem to get more swept up in the excitement and focus less on the self-critical parts

PM 2Ring

Superfluid dark matter is reasonable, supersolid dark matter isn't. But hey, a century or so ago, they thought the aether was an extremely rigid yet intangible fluid.

JMac

@PM2Ring I can't remember if the guy I'm thinking of exclusively talks about supersolid DM, or if he talks about both. I can't remember if he also talks about pilot waves all the time, or if that was someone else that used to spam a pet theory

PM 2Ring

16:05

@JohnRennie He's now turned that answer into a question. Sort of. physics.stackexchange.com/questions/475999/… I think he's discovered the Cartesian Diver.

JMac

physics.stackexchange.com/questions/475999/… yikes

oh dang PM beat me to it

PM 2Ring

Somewhat surprisingly, I only get 2 hits for a question search on Cartesian Diver, and neither of them are good dupe targets.

Scáthach

what is cartesian driver

JMac

I'm still trying to make sense of his example. As far as I'm aware, a typical globe valve is nothing like he is describing there. They are a very basic valve, actuating system goes down, and sits a seal on the seat, blocking the flow. They don't even typically have a diaphram, let alone one with holes

PM 2Ring

16:20

@JMac I must confess his thought processes are too convoluted for me to follow. I'm not sure what the connection is supposed to be between a basic ball valve and his thing with the porous tube.

enumaris

oh dear

John Rennie

what can the matter be

PM 2Ring

@Scáthach See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_diver

IMHO, if you've never played with (and thought about) a Cartesian Diver, you aren't entitled to call yourself a physicist. :)

On Astronomy, someone just invoked negative-energy exotic matter to explain Hawking radiation. astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/31640/16685

enumaris

16:38

@JohnRennie the dataset I'm working with might be too easy lol...the baseline model I trained already performs quite well

gonna be hard to iterate on that

Emilio Pisanty

@Scáthach a ketchup sachet floating inside a closed water bottle

enumaris

I still gotta write some code to evaluate the model more rigorously tho so at least I got something to do today

Semiclassical

Here's an observation (which may be particular to English)

If I talk about an equation, I refer to the left-hand and right-hand sides

enumaris

this primes and squares room seems pretty dead..went there to ask for resources on linguistics and got nothin

Semiclassical

but if I refer to my brain, for instance, I just say "left/right side of my brain"

enumaris

16:42

showerthought?

Kyle Kanos

Doesn't the left side of the brain actually control the right-hand side?

PM 2Ring

Wow. A nice answer from a newbie on an old question. physics.stackexchange.com/a/476003/123208

Semiclassical

that's the popular myth, anyways

ACuriousMind

@PM2Ring So why haven't you voted it up yet if it's so nice? ;)

PM 2Ring

@ACuriousMind I used up all my votes a couple of hours ago.

ACuriousMind

16:46

Ah, bummer

enumaris

There's a limit on votes?

ACuriousMind

40/day

PM 2Ring

7 hours to go. But at least I scored another Vox Populi badge.

enumaris

never reached it I guess lol

PM 2Ring

I was in a good mood today, so most of those votes were upvotes, but I did downvote 5 things.

Kyle Kanos

16:51

There's an additional 5 for questions only, innit?

5 votes, I mean

ACuriousMind

@KyleKanos No, it's 40 total, 10 of which must be on questions, cf. meta.stackexchange.com/a/5213/263383

Kyle Kanos

Hmm. Wish I weren't so restricted. There's a lot of content to vote upon

PM 2Ring

When I see a bad answer, I generally comment first, and give the author some time to fix it, at least an hour or two, generally a day or so. But if they don't fix it, or at least respond to my comment, then I downvote. If they do fix it, I'm very likely to upvote.

When certain posters are having a busy day I have to keep track of who I'm voting for so that I don't accidentally trigger the serial voting reversal script.

enumaris

I haven't voted in a while

JMac

Depending on what the issue is, I generally downvote while leaving a comment, assuming it makes the answer incorrect (that way the incorrect answer has a score that properly reflects that), less inclined to downvote the more trivial the issue is and how much of the full answer it represents

enumaris

16:57

they're doing a boat show at my office...interesting view outside today

so many boats

Kyle Kanos

But it's difficult to vote when on vacation. Don't really feel like looking at anything

Semiclassical

17:22

@JMac I feel like there's an element of "due diligence" there. If I can tell that the writer has put in a certain amount of effort in order to present their answer, then I'm inclined to put a similar effort in critiquing it

On the other hand, if the answer is both wrong and lazy? then I see no reason to spend time on it beyond downvoting

JMac

Oh absolutely, if it's so wrong that it seems like commenting will lead to an argument, or will be completely misunderstood, I rarely bother

Semiclassical

pauli's phrase "not even wrong" seems applicable here

David Z

@JMac That sounds more like my approach

2 hours later…

bolbteppa

19:04

@RyanUnger back yet?

20 days :\

Physics Meta

19:46

0

Q: Single uncontrolled measurements as an answer

TL;DR if you don't want background information: Should we allow answers which only provide a single experimental measurement to remain posted as answers? The other day, an old question What is the temperature of the clear night sky from the surface of Earth?, was bumped by an answer which contai...

discussion answers

thermomagnetic condensed boson

20:19

hi people. what do you think about the book "Lectures on quantum mechanics" by Weinberg? @knzhou for instance?

bolbteppa

@thermomagneticcondensedboson it's great, in the beginning he gives a super clever way to get the angular momentum eigenvalues for the hydrogen atom without any angular momentum algebra

thermomagnetic condensed boson

thanks. i dont have any QM book and it looks nice to me at first glance

bolbteppa

Another reason to read it is as prep for his QFT books

knzhou

21:13

Been meaning to read it but haven’t done it yet. Looks good though. Wouldn’t use it for a first or even a second book.

JMac

21:59

@KyleKanos That comment you left on my meta answer was a point I had meant to make in my reply. Thanks

vzn

22:58

@PM2Ring there is a credible new ether theory by reputable phd physicists. Tenev + Horstemeyer. @knzhou @JMac what do you know about superfluid darkmatter? there was a lot of media commotion last december over Farnes/ Oxford ideas sciencealert.com/…

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