twistor59

@CrazyBuddy LOL Not quitting, just slowing down a bit....

@CrazyBuddy Twistor has had too much work to do - hardly any time for PSE (sad face)

@CrazyBuddy chief chatter! The honour. The responsibility. I have faith in you......!

@ManishEarth thanks for the info!

@ManishEarth thanks! Where are the links to it?

I really should know this, but what actually is Community Wiki?

@ChrisWhite yep, something like that might work. Much better than "which is best"

@ChrisWhite lol! yeah you can tell the old relativists by their bicep girth

@CrazyBuddy oops!

But @ManishEarth did you really think MTW was that bad? I kind of like it.

@ManishEarth hah yes, you can never have too many of those!

@Mostafa if someone asks which book to self study fluid mechs, the best answer is to recommend a good therapist!

I learned QFT from Bjorken and Drell. That's why I'm so crap at it.

@ChrisWhite yeah, rant away

@Dilaton No, not been away, just very busy with real work that pays my bills!

There were only two in the queue, both of which I thought were perfectly reasonable.

@Dilaton I'll have a look. Haven't checked that queue for a while...

Is anyone keeping a record of the best PSE question titles? This qualifies surely: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/70573/…

No, it's fine, it's just that on PF everyone gets hot under the collar about the ontological status (LOL) of virtual particles

physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68940/… If this was physicsforums, this post would be "initiating flame war in 3...2...1...."

@ManishEarth OK, all is clear. Well, I have to f-off home now. Nice talking, bye everyone....

Cheers David

Whaaat? you mean I've been nice and proper on here .... all for nothing?

@ManishEarth Just as I thought!

@ManishEarth too late Manish. I saw your lol! "Flutes" and "blowing" could lead us into bannable territory

@ManishEarth yep, that's what she said too.

@ManishEarth Ah. figures. Wife used to play a bit, but I could hardly get a note out of it.

@ManishEarth just looked at your long question. Do you play the flute?

Still nothing like the quality pre-Maimongate

@DavidZaslavsky yeah probably. We live in hope.

Dunno if anyone else thinks this, but the questions have taken a turn for the better over the last week or so. There have been some really good ones.

@ManishEarth ...and long questions with lots of diagrams. But nice to see all the effort going in.

Coffee and arxiv - like it...

@ChrisWhite I must admit, I don't trawl the arxiv for interesting stuff, I trawl the blogs....

Talking of 4-quarks and pentaquarks: in general, when is something declared a particle rather than just a resonance? Is it just an arbitrary "the lifetime looks long enough to call it a particle..."?

@DavidZaslavsky Not just physics, Engineering is too...

physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68383/… Might as well ask "if Witten Wiles etc. entered a cage fighting championship, who would come out on top?

Somebody peed in my pool :( meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4408/…

@Dilaton maybe you can switch mode of operation away from browsing and hoping to come across an interesting question towards asking substantial questions instead. There are still some good people around who can answer them, and it would help with the quality issue. Just a thought....

OK time to go home... bye for now folks

:-) OK guys, maybe there are some good homework questions. But as soon as I see a question with a specific force in Newtons or a specific mass in Kg, I click to the next question. Maybe I should put more effort in close-voting

Maybe we should rename the "homework" tag to something more derogatory and hence offputting, so when that gets slapped on your question, it's a badge of shame

@dmckee Yes, I do (3), but I don't do enough of (1) and (2). I should do more.

@ChrisWhite sounds good. I was disappointed about Kepler.

It's kinda lonely these days without the Black Magic spammer don't you think?

@Dilaton Re your question It's true about the homework question ratio, but since it's a public site, perhaps not so surprising since the ratio of specialists to "newbies" is very low. I wish I knew what to do about it. TheoreticalPhysics SE didn't get off the ground.l

@ChrisWhite thanks

@Dilaton sorry, could you post in a link to your question

@ChrisWhite yeah, sounds interesting

@ChrisWhite Interesting conference?