at my uni it goes like this: If you're a grad student, then half your time is supposed to be TA or RA (unless you're on a fellowship) and the other half spent on your student work
so typically a new grad student will be assigned 20 hours of TA work a week
(that's really more like an average across the entire semester: very non-uniform)
@MoreAnonymous there were some previous comments on the subject, which I thought were on this chat, but it turns out they're in comments under a deleted answer
I imagine that's the reason my TA jobs in the UK carried the clunkier title of Post-Graduate Assistant
TA and RA (Teaching & resp. Research Assistant) are terms in very wide currency in worldwide academia, i.e. academics speaking in English, not necessarily in the US
in the UK TA tends to be called PGA (in my experience)
@MoreAnonymous and no, this is inaccurate (again, in my experience) -- the bulk of the TA-equivalent work in the UK is performed by PhD students who have yet to earn their PhD degree
Basically I am a high school student, and learning some good facts about physics problem I have no intention to hurt anyone by my words, I just thought that it is normal ask a doubt, but I think I was wrong, and humiliating a school going student, I think is not the good thing, any way I apologize for coming in chat room Har bar sorry sorry sorry
@yuvrajsingh We can do without such not-really-an-apologies here. You have simply been told clearly what not to do here. If you find that humiliating, that is entirely on you.
@Loong Well...clearly should've spent more time contemplating the laws of levers!
@Rudi_Birnbaum Generically, energy cannot be assigned to individual parts of a system when they're interacting
energy is a global property
the cases where it can be subdivided into per-particle energies are exceptions rather than generic cases
@ACuriousMind I think that it's a Europe vs US thing ─ you see a hell of a lot more DC-10s in cargo roles taxiing around airports in the US than you do in Europe, I think
the real innovation in airline planes is jet engines that are reliable enough that you can fly for multiple hours after an engine failure without fearing for the other one
@ACuriousMind seriously?
these guys?
recently on the news because they've just been put on the chopping block?
@EmilioPisanty I know very little about aircraft... but that seems like a really crappy claim to me. Wouldn't a modern fighter jet be a lot more of a pinnacle than a friggin double decker passenger plane lmao
@EmilioPisanty I just can't imagine that the technology in large commercial passenger aircraft would be innovative enough to represent the pinnacle when compared to military aircraft. I guess it depends on what people look for, and what they are actually comparing.
@EmilioPisanty Fair enough I guess. To me it just seems like the large planes have such gradual improvements model to model that I would have to dig into the history to see what makes any of them a clear "pinnacle". The fact that we can put any planes in the sky safely is enough of a pinnacle of engineering to still kinda blow my mind.
@EmilioPisanty Gradual because it's part of the process of continually making better aircraft with increased capacity and capabilities. Again, I don't know nearly enough about the specifics, but I assumed that the A380 was part of iterations in design where they were able to make planes larger safely over time. It's not like one day they were making propeller planes and the next day rolling out A380's.
I had assumed that they are still working on even better planes, but IDK enough about the industry.
Close :-) I worked as a colloid scentist, which is on the boundary between physics and chemistry. I have indeed worked on toothpaste, as well as shampoo, washing powder and anti-perspirants.
@MoreAnonymous "A method for obtaining free thermal antineutrons within the cage-like structure of a fullerene molecule comprising irradiating the fullerene molecule with free neutrons causing free neutrons to be trapped within the fullerene molecule wherein the trapped neutron oscillates between the neutron and antineutron states." Yeah, right. :rolls eyes:
@PM2Ring I'm curious how does the patent system work? Can anyone effectively patent bullcrap? (like what does it mean to patent say a perpetual motion machine?)
Remember, Einstein spent several years working in the Swiss patent office, assessing the validity of patent applications. I assume that modern patent assessors try to be thorough, but I assume that they aren't scientists of the calibre of Einstein. :) And he was still very young, fresh out of Uni. Also, they're mainly concerned about verifying that the application is legally sound and doesn't infringe an existing patent. They can't be expected to be experts on cutting edge science.
@MoreAnonymous Each country has its own laws. There are various conventions and agreements between countries, but we certainly don't have a unified international legal framework.
Eg, just because it's legal to sell some new drug X in the USA, it's not legal to sell it in Australia until it has been vetted by our system, although the fact that it has FDA approval will streamline that process. And since the big pharma companies are multi-national, they're (generally) unlikely to infringe on each other's patents.
@AaronStevens The term "Favorite" is probably rather misleading. Discussions on SO meta & chatrooms revealed that lots of regulars use Favorite to mark bad questions, especially deletion candidates. But plenty of people, especially newbies, think that when their question gets the Favorite star it must be a good thing. Little do they know... :evil grin:
@PM2Ring Oh of course. I know that this is what people use. I guess it is more of a personal issue. Although isn't there some badge if your question gets enough favorite markings? I guess if you question is that bad you deserve a badge :P
I do use Favorites to mark good questions as well, especially useful duplicate targets.
@AaronStevens "There's no such thing as bad publicity". Let's just say it's one of the components of the Stack Exchange system that has evolved away from the designers' original intentions.
@PM2Ring It would be interesting if there was a sort of "post bookmarking" feature in SE where you could tag your bookmark with relevant information for yourself. Such as "check if answer was edited", "go-to question for centripetal force", "read this interesting answer later" etc.
I guess similar remarks could be made about the HNQ, for better or worse. Yes, HNQ questions attract attention, but they're often not the kind of question we want the site to be famous for, and the extra attention leads to low quality answers and inflated, distorted votes.
@AaronStevens Indeed! There might even be userscripts that do that sort of thing. But they'd have to store those comments on your device, not the site, which is less convenient if you access the site from multiple devices. I guess they could use cloud storage...
@AaronStevens Linear operator was an "answer song" to Sade's Smooth Operator, but it wasn't a hit. :)
@PM2Ring Interestingly, there are such things as "linear drum beats" where you only hit one thing at a time. i.e. you can't hit two or more things for one note
Although I have never heard the term "non-linear drumming", which is actually the norm
@ACuriousMind Very clever. I'm sure Tom Lehrer would approve.
@AaronStevens Kind of related to Serialism, where you use permutations of series of pitches, timbres, etc, so you can't reuse a note from the set until you complete the current permutation. Frank Zappa was a fan of that technique.
I don't like writing answers in comments, but does this question deserve a full answer?
Regardless of the process, conservation of energy implies that it takes at least as much energy to convert $\mathrm{CO_2}$ back into carbon & oxygen as you originally got from burning the carbon, so unless you have lots of cheap carbon-neutral energy at your disposal, this is a losing proposition. — PM 2Ring2 mins ago
Anyone aware of some useful techniques of fitting a model consisting of a system of non-linear, coupled differential equations to data? There are roughly 7 parameters to be determined, and there is not data for all of the dependent variables.
Trying to hunt down what was likely a popular science physics book I consumed as a child; does anyone know any popular science books which made the claim that the interior space of an atomic nucleus might be a meter or more? Probably written in the 80's or very early 90's. Likely candidate authors include Sagan, Feynman, or Hawking, but I consumed pretty much anything I could get my hands on until I was twelve or thirteen.
