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6:24 AM
@ChrisWhite Learned it from there, with no extra math or previous experience. I have to say though, that the appendices are a lot more understandable if you do know some DiffGeo
 
 
3 hours later…
9:15 AM
David Z and other mods: You know perfectly well that PhysicsOverflow is not a personal webpage, blog, or product of anybody but a higher-level international physics community. So providing links to useful information on PO, which is very relevant to or even ansers a question, has absolutely nothing to do with spam and such links therefore do NOT fall under this paragraph of the FAQ:
Be careful, because the community frowns on overt self-promotion and tends to vote it down and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to be about your product or website, so be it. However, you must disclose your affiliation in your answers. Also, if a huge percentage of your posts include a mention of your product or website, you're probably here for the wrong reasons. Our advertising rates are quite reasonable; contact our ad sales team for details.
BTW dont you agree, that it would be a breathtaking monstrous stupidity and unprofessionality, if moderators on Math SE together with a handful of very active users would continuously attack MathOverflow and harrass users that are active on MO? This is a hypothetical question as of course on Math SE, the moderaters and in moderation issues active users are generally fair, reasonable, and professional...
 
9:29 AM
why can't we all just get along??
3
 
@Dilaton we're not going to discuss that here. Use the proper channels if you want to respond.
 
10:31 AM
@Dilaton if you want to see breathtaking monstrous stupidity and unprofessionality, may I invite you to come to the Math chat room sometime ;-)
I have personally witnessed the emotional nervous break down of several users upon being bullied in there.
Sometimes the comment threads at math.se and MathOverflow spill over into that chat room, and that's when it gets ugly.
I was there when a prof from MathOverflow was suspended for one full year :(
 
 
4 hours later…
2:17 PM
@Dilaton Lol. You fail on a few points in that FAQ: (1) it is overt self-promotion for your website, (2) you don't link to PhysicsForums or Quora, only PO (3) you don't disclose your affiliation with your link. Note also that it clearly states Also, if a huge percentage of your posts include a mention of your product or website, you're probably here for the wrong reasons. Since the vast majority of your comments the last several weeks/months have been solely about PO, [contd]
it seems you are completely failing to abide by the rules of the SE network.
@Dilaton Except MO is a part of the SE network whereas PO is completely unrelated, so your analogy is flawed.
 
My propulsion lab exam happened today, and I got my favorite computational question...
The problem should be solved using a propellant reaction simulator in computer. What's interesting is that my professor (knowing that I forgot my calculator), allowed me to use my laptop :D
Once he figured out that I had Python, he gave a larger version of the problem - but still, it's Python - solved it quite neatly! :P
 
Jim
Is it wrong that I'm having fun with this?: physics.stackexchange.com/a/145130/23473
 
@Jim Not at all... :P
 
Jim
:D
 
Thanks for bringing it up... Now, I'm having fun :)
 
2:32 PM
@Jim: Not particularly, I think.
Though "The last thing we need is Jew conmen like Einstein to help calibrate our gear for GPS" [emphasis mine] troubles me
This is why we can't have nice things.
 
Jim
Yeah, I was feeling unhappy this morning, but now that I can have fun arguing sense into someone with racial biases, I'm feeling better
 
@Jim: Heh, you do know that these fellas don't accept stuff that we say, right? Arguing is a waste of time anyway...
 
Jim
It's not a waste of time if it makes me feel better
 
Yeah, yeah... (me either)
 
Jim
I know you all probably flagged that racist comment for removal. But I like to think he removed it out of shame
 
2:40 PM
Hmmm... I didn't, I was reading it again
 
@Jim: "I have no reputation to consider" is an unintentionally ironic statement since you are only a few hundred reputation points away from 10k ;)
 
Jim
@ACuriousMind How true, I didn't even notice that. Nicely done, sir
I'll have to keep my eye on this one and let you all know if it continues
speak of the devil. This one seemed a bit off topic
 
@Jim I'm not sure I can understand that sentence. What is the "this one" referring to?
 
Jim
his latest comment
 
I think "What?" sums up my reaction to that
Does he really believe scientists are in it for the money?
 
Jim
2:55 PM
even after I said we're in it for the fame
 
Your latest comment also makes me think of one of my favourite Feynman quotes:
"Science is a way of not trying to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool"
2
 
@Jim: You "are" having fun... And, you've excited him too much that he's now at resonance!
 
@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut lol...crackpot resonance seems like a terrible thing
 
Jim
If he's at resonance, do you think he'll shatter?
 
C'mon, keep on exciting. We'll find that out today... :P
 
Jim
3:03 PM
experimental physics at its finest
 
I think I made a mistake chiming in now
 
Jim
yup
 
Fortunately, I've got a lot of will power and will now ignore the thread
 
Ah, damn! I can sense his frequency damped out! He was very close to resonance, you know...
 
just like the Tacoma bridge :-)
 
3:09 PM
^ That's such an awesome thing to watch
 
The 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge, was a suspension bridge in the U.S. state of Washington that spanned the Tacoma Narrows strait of Puget Sound between Tacoma and the Kitsap Peninsula. It opened to traffic on July 1, 1940, and dramatically collapsed into Puget Sound on November 7 of the same year. At the time of its construction (and its destruction), the bridge was the third longest suspension bridge in the world in terms of main span length, behind the Golden Gate Bridge and the George Washington Bridge. Construction on the bridge began in September 1938. From the...
the video is embedded
 
Jim
apparently things beat light speed routinely
 
Yep! I bet anyone who had their "vibrations" course would've definitely had that example given by their professor...
 
@Jim I always give Cherenkov radiation as an example. Nothing better than ominous blueish light coming out of a nuclear hell produced by faster-than-light particles.
 
Jim
That doesn't count
 
3:14 PM
So...you mean exceeding the vacuum speed of light?
 
Jim
obviously. Cherenkov radiation is kind of like cheating
beat light speed by slowing it down first
 
But then, what do you mean when you say that things beat the light speed routinely?
 
Jim
that's what he said
 
Ahhhh
 
3:17 PM
Pardon me for not formatting my link :(
 
Sorry, I thought you were sharing an interesting factoid you just learned about :D
 
Jim
I asked him for an example of something. Said it could make me famous, so he should let me know quietly
 
Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh
 
......FTL is real!?
 
3:20 PM
The combination of the words "superluminal" and "entanglement" is really a red flag for me
 
Then how the @#$% does my GPS work!?
 
@KyleKanos That is the number one question all these people doubting relativity have to answer. I've never heard one answer with something that was not a conspiracy theory
 
Another non-capitalizer of Lagrangian and now Hermitian:
0
Q: Polarization sum rule for Rarita-Schwinger field

Andrew McAddamsThere are Rarita-Schwinger equations: $$ \tag 1 (p\!\!\!/ - m)\psi_{\mu} = 0, \quad \gamma_{\mu}\psi^{\mu} = 0, \quad i\partial_{\mu}\psi^{\mu} = 0. $$ So the polarization sum $D_{\mu \nu}(p) = \sum_{s}u^{s}_{\mu}\bar{u}^{s}_{\nu}$ (spinor wave for particle) must satisfy all of this relations. Al...

We settled that one already!
-3
Q: Let me write "lagrangian" in lower case

OokerI wrote this question, intentionally using lagrangian, not Lagrangian. Google is a company name, a proper noun, but google is a verb; Fermi is a person name, but fermion is a noun. I think this is right, alike Feynmann. I know that Lagrangian is widely accepted and if I write different, readers w...

 
Jim
Hey, he's talking about Jew fairy tales now
Resonance reappearing
 
Phew... Back in the game! :)
 
3:28 PM
What is a Mozart number?
 
Jim
a musical piece written by mozart
 
....
Well how does one encode that in microwaves?
 
Jim
same way you'd encode music in radio waves
 
"3 times the speed of light... encoded with Mozart number... microwaves got in & out of wormhole" - LOL!
 
So basically he's saying the guy sent a song through the air using microwaves?
 
Jim
3:31 PM
@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut ya, i'm not touching that one
@KyleKanos I guess
 
@KyleKanos ... and he saw the microwave getting in & out of wormhole! Mind you, only those encoded with Mozart numbers - others aren't allowed inside!
 
The experiment was outlawed too
So it's semi-non-repeatable
sigh....sometimes acronyms suck. Consider this paper. It's being published under the Proceedings of Science = POS
 
That FTL topic reminded me of an interesting answer (which I had been searching all this time)...
14
A: At what fraction of the speed of light have people traveled?

lurscherWhen swinging my comfy hammock, I travel all day even up to 0.99 $c$, some days even more, depending on what particles are passing me by and measuring my exorbitant speeds with their atomic clocks and photons..!

 
Do 10k rep members get to auto-delete comments? I've flagged a few of that guy Graeme's for being rude and/or offensive and it immediately removed it and added the "helpful" remark in my profile.
 
To David Z: I am still responding in the context of the discussion Kyle Kanos has started in this very chat room. So your order to use another chanel makes no sense to me.
 
3:44 PM
@KyleKanos Happened to me with one, too, so I don't think it's a 10k priviledge
 
Wow... He's back into excitation! Thanks to @Jim :P
 
It's probably rather the system that has received a number of flags about comments from the same poster and has reduced the number of flags necessary for deleting comments
At least, that would fit into the "intelligence" the system otherwise displays, I think
 
@ACuriousMind True... (or, a mod's out there!) :)
 
Maybe the fact that he's a 1-rep user with a few negative-scored answers?
And is unregistered
@Dilaton Hey, if you want to take this conversation to another chatroom, I'll go ahead and create one.
 
@Omen the getting along is unfortunately not possible for the reason I mentioned in my second to last comment: Since it has gone public, there has not been any hostility against other physics/science Q&A sites on PhysicsOverflow. Useful and correct physics information that enlightens the issue of a question or even answers it, would never be considered spam. Any links to such information are welcomed as good contributions, as it should be the case IHMO on a physics site.
And we dont care about what other communities our users take part in. By no means would PO users get banned for posting useful on topic links to questions. So the not getting along is not caused by our side or site ...
 
Jim
3:56 PM
now he says relativity is a theory about velocity absolutism
bit backwards if you ask me
 
@Jim So, you would say velocity absolutism is a theory about relativity?
2
 
Jim
very funny
 
(Note: I have no idea what that sentence even means :D )
 
:D
 
@Jim Of course, I eat the heart of a clown every day to be that way
 
Jim
3:58 PM
i think we're at the shatter point ladies and gentlemen
 
:: drumroll ::
 
ba duum tssss...
 
@ACuriousMind You should teach me sometime...
 
@Dilaton I take it by your lack of responding to me directly that you're not interested in a conversation with me and want only to "communicate" your opinion in indirect manners.
 
lack of response, is a good thing sometimes :-)
ie cool down time
 
4:04 PM
@Waffle'sCrazyPeanut It's easy: You just need to open one of these shops where they sell all kinds of prank stuff, and the clowns wander in. Then you need a backroom where the step-ladders and red noses and flowers that squirt water are. Washable walls and floor, preferable, and a sturdy door. Be careful to let some live though, you don't want to cull the population too much
Uh. Sometimes my mind takes me to scary places. (Note: I am not actually a serial killer)
 
:O
silence of the lambs clowns ???
 
@ACuriousMind O_O
 
The rings are the planets clearing their orbits (because we all know that that's part of the definition of a planet, right?)
 
@KyleKanos Oooooh, shiny
 
4:12 PM
@KyleKanos as there is nothing that could ever change your attitude towards PO/me or how you talk about it/me, it is better to agree to disagree. Also, you obviously have reached the goal you intended by starting this discussion about external links (congratulations!), so I dont see anything left to discuss. You have won and should go celebrating by having a good drink or something ;-).
 
My goal about the external links was determining if that was appropriate/accepted behaviour. I have yet to actually get a definitive answer as both mods said, "That's what we mods want to know from you the community"
Not there was anything to win or lose here
 
@Jim: Why is your "friend" thinking that the entire point of "the OP" is that all velocity is relative?
 
"agree to disagree" <---wise words!
 
I think that guy is getting waaaaaay out of the curve...
 
@IceBoy Passive-agressive words in 90% of the cases. Realizing that there are issues which cannot be uniquely and rationally settled - wise. Saying "agree to disagree" because you believe yourself superior and "understand" why the other is "unable" to understand your viewpoints - passive-agressive and not at all wise.
 
4:21 PM
@ACuriousMind you're right, this is none of my business.
My apologies.
 
@IceBoy Huh, I didn't say it were none of your business. I just made the observation that while those words sound wise, they more often than not are not. I'm not really commenting on the specific situation here (and I don't want to)
 
99% percent of the time it comes down to point of view:
in my experience
 
Heh. There's an SMBC for that, of course.
 
good one :-)
 
Jim
@ACuriousMind the better question is why is my "friend" thinking that relativity is lying to us and is really about velocities not being relative at all
 
4:30 PM
@Jim Because the speed of light is obviously not relative!
And relativity is really mostly a consequence of there being a finite, frame-invariant speed limit
That is the one aspect he may not be so far off the mark about
 
@Jim Obviously because the speed of light itself is variable:
Variable speed of light (VSL) is a hypothesis that states that the speed of light, usually denoted by c, may be a function of space and time. Variable speed of light occurs in some situations of classical physics as equivalent formulations of accepted theories, but also in various alternative theories of gravitation and cosmology, many of them non-mainstream. In classical physics, the refractive index describes how light slows down when traveling through a medium. The speed of light in vacuum instead is considered a constant, and defined by the SI as 299792458 m/s. Alternative theories therefore...
 
Jim
Ok, but that is based on observations, not merely imagined. So what could we be lying about?
 
Hmmm...about the observations, probably?
Y'know, because all that relativity enhanced GPS has made us scientists filthy rich
:: grabs pack of ramen ::
 
Jim
You have food!? O.o
 
Since it is the first week of the month, yes
 
4:35 PM
Ramen....barf
Of course, I'll be having ginger-fried salmon mixed in with salad & guacamole myself
That might be "barf" to some
 
(I don't actually eat ramen, you don't find it here much. Frozen pizza is the student nourishment of choice (not eating it frozen, obv))
 
Jim
go bread and beer
 
What's the bread for? Don't you know that beer is liquid bread?
 
My wife used to lament the fact that I don't heat up my lunches.
 
Jim
absorbs the alcohol, allows you to drink more beer
 
4:38 PM
Sounds legit
 
4:54 PM
@ACuriousMind Yes, "agree to disagree" is an overused clique ... but in the heat of battle there is no time to be creative :-)
 
Jim
@IceBoy I disagree, the heat of battle is the only time to be creative
 
Orly?
 
Jim
yes, really
 
In my experience, people don't think rationally in battle, they are mostly running on instincts and emotion.
 
@IceBoy Since when are creativity and rationality dependent on one another? ;)
 
5:01 PM
one could say they are correlated, no?
albeit, weakly
 
Perhaps
 
while, at the opposite end of the spectrum, instincts and emotion go hand-in-hand
 
I'm not sure I support the idea that there is a spectrum with emotion at one end and reason at the other. It is possible to be rational without being a robot
Reason and emotion should be complementary, not opposites
 
how about reciprocals? :-)
 
Together, they give unity. Yes, I can live with that
 
5:08 PM
:D
 
Does it still count as hitting the rep cap if I hit it and then lose 1 rep because I downvoted an answer?
 
Probably. But you've got 8 more hours or something (before hitting 12 UTC and rolling over to the next day) to get 1 more upvote
 
Guys, are you aware of this:
Dilaton got suspended !!!
 
Well, I guess it was to be expected since he's blatantly disregarding SE network rules
 
So, is this what all his above comments today, were about?
 
5:23 PM
Yup.
 
This is bad. It will only fuel more tension between P.SE and PO.
2
 
When was he suspended? I honestly had no idea until the above was just posted
 
I suppose 2:11 standard SE time. (Looks like a one year ban!)
 
Though, thinking about it for a minute, I suppose that's what he mean by me winning by mentioning the comments
 
I'm sure that's not what you intended either. But is sad.
 
5:27 PM
I'm sending him an apology email now
 
@KyleKanos :)
 
Sigh... Waiter, there's drama in my SE again!
 
:O
 
Wish I had one more star for Omen's comment to give
 
if wishes were stars?
 
5:33 PM
@IceBoy Then we wouldn't have Olbers' paradox, as the sky would be lit by the power of a thousand suns ;)
 
7 hours ago, by Ice Boy
I was there when a prof from MathOverflow was suspended for one full year :(
8 mins ago, by New_new_newbie
I suppose 2:11 standard SE time. (Looks like a one year ban!)
Am I the black plague?
:(
 
I'd say you were precognitive, but the suspension happened before you wrote that, if I can do math on the clock correctly
 
I see.
 
@IceBoy Dunno, do you prefer to travel by rat?
3
 
lol
 
5:37 PM
Gah. I feel bad
 
Me too
The last desperate cries are the worst :(
He can always open up another account and change his attitude.
 
He doesn't want to because Physics.SE is not TheoreticalPhysics.SE
 
@IceBoy Dilaton didn't want to participate here anyway. The links to PO are obviously meant to promote PO. Since they also contain relevant information, and are not posted as answers, I would have preferred to just tolerate that, but I can understand the decision to suspend for that. What you hear is not desperation, but the last of many attempts to style themselves as the victim of an unfair system that just doesn't "get physics".
2
 
All he does around here is (1) take the CC-BY-SA'd content that he likes ("advanced, theoretical questions") and ports it to PO and (2) vote to keep open every question that has a particular set of tags, even if it's a duplicate of another question or a straight-out-of-the-book-without-thinking HW question
2
 
hmmm... all very good points
thanks for the context :-)
 
6:31 PM
Todays commit strip is quite nice:
Did you hear about the planet with only robots on it ?
 
@ACuriousMind Let's just say that this was in discussion amongst the mods for quite a while before any discussions in the public chats.
 
16
Q: Scientific accuracy of Jurassic Park's premise?

AnkitI was just watching a documentary about dinosaurs and this question came to my mind. In Jurassic Park, the whole story is based on the premise that dinosaurs were recreated using the blood found in an amber. Later scientists create the dino DNA and hence create dinosaurs. How realistic or scienti...

 
nooo movie question noooooo
 
What? :D
 
oh, on M&TV
I thought it was on phys
 
6:34 PM
I got distracted by side bar
We couldn't even begin to answer that question since it's about genetics
 
@KyleKanos There's an SMBC for that, too
 
Haha, oh Zach Weiner
I stopped reading SMBC regularly a long time ago
 
Any particular reason, or did you just..."fade away"? ;)
 
Faded away, I guess
A similar thing happened with Penny Arcade. I stopped playing video games and stopped getting their jokes
 
I have read a few of Penny Arcade, but I don't really like them,
 
6:47 PM
I remember them being funny back when HL2 came out
But they make fun of most every game out there and I've played so few of them that I just didn't understand what they were going on about. So I stopped
 
@KyleKanos That's... ages ago :D
 
It was only 10 years ago
 
Yes. That's almost half my life, so...no "only" there for me :P
 
That's about a third of my life
Youngen'
Three Panel Soul is pretty good too
They came up with this one:
 
Ha, it happens
 
6:57 PM
Refreshing story out of hollywood: arts.nationalpost.com/2014/11/05/…
 
@Kyle Isn't Interstellar Kip Thorne's pet movie project?
 
that's the one
 
@ACuriousMind With this comment, I completely buy that you eat clowns!
 
I'm interested to see/read Thorne's paper
 
the second video on that page is alright - Thorne talks a bit about the project, though it's all at a pretty superficial level
@ACuriousMind I ran into the same thing a while ago - as far as I can tell, it still counts as hitting the cap as long as you got +200 from upvotes (I think being accepted +15's, accepting +2's, edit approvals, etc. also count, unsure about bounties), even if your net change is +198 because of the order things happened in
 
7:09 PM
I'm just curious how the script works - what if I'm downvoted, so that I may have gathered 200 in upvotes, but not in total votes? It's not really relevant, but...
 
iirc you still get credit for hitting the cap
maybe not if you go exactly +200 then get downvoted
but if you go +200 (missed +10) then downvoted it seems to count it?
this is all my recollection from sorting out what happened with days I hit the cap, and some digging around on meta
 
Would make sense that way, but who knows what a system will do that thinks "can you banana muffin" is a subjective question title? :P
 
I think the sure way to check is to go look at your rep log a day or two later, you should see you got +200 for the day even if the site claimed +198 in the topbar
 
7:42 PM
@KyleKanos a friend of mine spent her summer trying to make mouse brains transparent (reproducing a result discovered elsewhere)
 
@ManishEarth Still sounds unnecessary! Why do we need invisible body parts?
 
hah
 
@KyleKanos Do you really want to hear answers to that?
 
Yes. Yes I do
 
yo guise
 
8:01 PM
Dis guise?
 
8:14 PM
Guise is my favorite misspelling in the English language :)
 
I like the "they're" "their" and "there" because half of the students I teach don't know which is which
 
@KyleKanos That I've never understood. How come that native speakers have such problems with that?
 
Easy: schools don't teach kids how to be smart, they teach them how to not be dumb (and usually fail at that)
 
8:30 PM
okay guys
I finally managed to read through chat.
@DavidZ @dmckee @ManishEarth @Qmechanic can the mods give an official statement on why Dilaton was suspended, and why the suspension is as long as it is?
 
@Danu: No, they can't. Suspensions are private things, we can only infer
Note also that notice of suspension says This account is temporarily suspended for promotional content.
And it was mentioned (by me :( ) that he was promoting PO in all of his comments
 
Relevant mother meta post: meta.stackexchange.com/q/23385
 
I'm not happy about how this went down.
 
Me neither
twern't my goal (though one of his comments here suggests that it was)
 
You certainly contributed
Perhaps not on purpose
(I'm not salty @ you about it though, don't think that :) )
I don't think this was the right way to go about it though
 
8:42 PM
I'm well aware of my unintended contributions :/
 
I really think there should be some way to discuss this though, with the mods.
 
0
A: What would a normal thermometer read at the Sun's photosphere?

bill nyes dadIt would melt the thermometer so it would be illegible.

 
Screw it, have an upvote
 
@Danu Not without Dilaton's explicit permission. The length is due to Dilaton's long suspension history.
 
...ok, not really
 
8:48 PM
And no, @KyleKanos didn't contribute -- we had noticed certain behavior long before and were debating what to do with it
2
 
@Dilaton would you grant permission for the moderators to make a statement about your suspension?
@ManishEarth I'm aware of the long history.
and thanks for responding, by the way :)
 
@Danu : Technically, moderators are not allowed to discuss any suspension due to privacy concerns (even if the suspended waives that right). You would have to put 2 and 2 together from information that is publicly available, keeping in mind that that is not the full story.
 
@Qmechanic thanks to you, too, for your response. I am pretty well aware of the entire story and this is not a matter of personally understanding for me, I'd just like to have an 'official' statement.
If that's not possible, I think that's not a good thing, but I'll get over it.
and @KyleKanos let me just formally apologize in case you understood what I said as an accusation of sorts.
 
 
2 hours later…
11:14 PM
@Danu wanna play 1 or 2?
 
sorry dude, I'm already stretching my awake-time beyond what I should :(
I have time between 8 PM and 12 PM most nights
also, I got a lot worse over the past few weeks since I havent had time to play :(
 
@Danu sure man, np, k good to know;D
@Danu same here...
 
The struggle is real ;)
 
^^
 
11:44 PM
Whoa...this could be the first day I don't run out of close votes in a looong time
 
haha I see,
 
So did you guys see the answer I linked to above (now deleted)?
The comment thread is rather amusing
 
Give me a day, and I can read it myself :P
Did only read the answer when there weren't any comments
 
Not unless I start downvoting you, muahahahaha!
Also:
@julianfernandez: But there is a high likelihood that the reviewers were friends with the authors Of course, leave it to nepotism to be the excuse a paper got through. Even still, it's up to the editor to publish it (but I guess nepotism could exist there). Please allow me to roll my eyes. — Kyle Kanos 2 mins ago
 
what is this about?
 
11:54 PM
Julian thought that the OPERA result was published because of nepotism
 
...
 
He didn't actually say nepotism, but it's definitely implied (his actual quote is the italics there)
 
yeah^^
 

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