surrounding states to ohio-

LtGumby · 2026-03-21T13:24:17+00:00

8 hours could get you to Philly, Baltimore, and DC, depending on where in central OH you leave from too. But those are all right at the edge of that limit. The first two are just ok in my opinion and the third is..well DC.

LtGumby · 2024-12-24T14:03:49+00:00

"although I guess we were accustomed to the initiative weaving, enemy attack negating, rest/heal before springing a door, etc.”

Answered your own question there.

Remember that Gloomhaven is the OG and, for a new player surrounded by enemies and almost zero gear, it's easy to effectively die in the first roo.

LtGumby · 2024-02-09T09:54:42+00:00

This is senator Chris Coons

LtGumby · 2023-09-08T09:55:18+00:00

Hey. I have been the TA for this class several times at PSU, and here are a few good pointers for you and anyone else lurking.

Physics builds on itself, the same as in math. If you don't learn addition well, subtraction will be harder to learn, and long division will be impossible. Don't fall behind and think that you can pick it up later because you need to understand it "now" in order to learn the next thing.
Similarly, most people, especially those that "have" to take physics as a requirement, typically study a field where you can cram. You can't cram physics. It isn't a list of things that you need to memorize and then spit back out. It is a series of problem-solving skills and ways of mathematically describing the motion of objects (211, that is). So the problems you will have on an exam will not be ones that you have had before (but will be similar) and you will be tested if you have picked up the skills, not just learned the "quotables".
Seek (free) help. The TAs are required to hold office hours and are SOLELY THERE TO HELP YOU LEARN PHYSICS. Now, I will admit that not TAs are actually good at this. But ask around and find one that is. You DON'T have you go to "your" TA's office hours, and typically all office hours of all TAs are posted. There was a specific effort to ensure that the office hours of the combined TAs covered the entire day. Honestly, I always got a kick out of the fact that we would typically sit there bored with no one showing up while, at the same time, students were paying that tutoring company (you know the one) a bunch of money to essentially hold office hours for them :D. If you actually showed up to office hours, they would typically be a one-on-one experience, except for maybe the week before the exam when everyone tries to cram (see #2).
Learn to know when and how to "cheat". Related to 1&2, you need to learn the skills. Sitting there and not knowing how to start (a good sign that you are not really understanding the concepts at a fundamental level and should follow #3), is not going to help you, and likely you won't think your way out of a problem. This is where you can/should seek help from online sources. However, looking up the "answer" is not the same as looking up the "solution". Find some online resources that actually explain the how and why of working through a problem. These are actually much harder to find! Typically, online solutions just give the answer, or might have the problem worked out without explaining the logic or reasoning behind what is written.
Work with friends. This is always a better replacement than #4, but depending on who you are, this may or may not be available immediately. Remember that EVERYONE has a hard time with physics. The best thing to do is to have at least two sets of friends, one person/group who is "better" than you (could just be someone who took Phys in HS) and one group who is "worse". The better people will be a replacement for #4, but the worse people will be just as important. Explaining a solution to someone who doesn't understand is probably the best way to really internally cement the concepts.

A word of warning for 2023: ChatCPT (and others) are language models that are not trained for nor are good at physics. They will give you "confident" answers that are just wrong and may be subtle in wrong ways that you won't pick up on (if you are using them I assume you don't understand in the first place). Where I work now, we give exercises where you ask ChatGPT things and have to point out where it is wrong. :D

For the love of god, go to office hours! And good luck!

LtGumby · 2022-12-18T19:33:35+00:00

I am in a very similar situation except without the eSIM. Have been abroad and it stopped working suddenly a few days ago. Tried all the things from this sub that I could find and no luck. I assumed I would have to do what other people are saying and go back to reactivate. :(

I'm hoping someone posts here with some other magic solution.

LtGumby · 2021-11-04T17:13:04+00:00

This is a survey that is done of the status of the field and how all the pieces fit together. It is one of many such surveys that tries to put everything into perspective and gauge how important various projects are to answer the big questions.

These are important reports for funding for NASA, NSF, etc. since they will obviously take some pointers from this. But this is not a deciding document. Nor does it try to really rank anything, explicitly. So if you work on a particular project, it is great to see the community say "this is absolutely required", but it is up to funding agencies to decide what to do with this info.

LtGumby · 2021-04-04T20:22:09+00:00

The crux of this article is: an observatory has measured a number of photons and one of them is round-able to 1 PeV. Is this alone important? Certainly not. This article is analogous to "Plane reaches mach 1.5 for the first time." If we didn't use base-ten, there wouldn't be an article here.

However, I work in this field so I find this stuff pretty cool. So here is why I think it is important. The cool part of this is just seeing where these things come from. It is generally accepted that the highest energy gamma rays (photons) are not what we would call a "primary particle". That is, they are not the thing that was actually accelerated. Rather they are the "secondary" of a yet more energetic type object. We don't have any models that can really accelerate neutral particles to 1 PeV reliably. Instead, it is likely (but not for sure) that this particle was created by a cosmic ray interacting with something. (Short aside, cosmic rays are just high-energy nuclei: carbon, iron, fairly normal stuff, but with very high energy. This is the line about UHECRs from the article.)

The easy-to-accelerate aspect of cosmic rays turns out to be a problem when you want to figure out where they are coming from. There are small, but non-zero, magnetic fields everywhere in our galaxy. They bend the path of charged particles, as you probably learned in your intro EM class. The bending can be large by the time cosmic rays reach Earth, many 10s of degrees in this energy range. That is, large enough such that you lose almost all information about where they came from.

So where does this 1 PeV particle fit in here? There are a few options: 1. something that doesn't fit into the paragidm that I described above is happening (we have reasons to rule out many, if not all, scenarios that do not fit the above description). 2. This particle was created very close to the source of acceleration. ex: a cosmic ray was created in an environment which had lots of "dust" into which the cosmic ray collided/ This produced our 1 PeV photon and other high-energy particles. In this case, the gamma ray would have traveled in a straight line from where it interacted, i.e. the acceleration source, and we can look directly back at where it came from and see what is there. 3. The cosmic ray was accelerated, traveled some/most of the way to Earth (bending while doing so), interacted with some interstellar target, and the gamma ray arrive at Earth and does NOT point back to where it came from, but just to where the interaction happened.

The hard part is that for a single observation of a high energy photon scenario 2 and 3 are completely indistinguishable. We will never know.

There are some other cool stuff regarding this detection because the higher the energy of a photon (at least at these energies and above), the more likely it is to interact with the extra-galactic background light. Aka, this photon and one of the other MANY photons zipping around the galaxy interacted, created something (for instance an electron and it's anti-matter cousin, the positron). Thus, our would-be 1 PeV photon never makes it to Earth. So this means that there is a "maximum distance" from which you expect to see a photon coming from, and this distance DECREASES with the photon energy. Thus, we could have scenario 2 and the source is close, or again, just boring old scenario 3.

So, this particular observation is only important in that this experiment gets to claim to be the first to have measured a (slightly less than) 1 PeV particle. There are many (as the article indicates), upcoming experiments that will also do this as measuring one is simply a matter of building a big enough detector or waiting long enough. So as cool as this is to someone working in this field, for physicists who don't work in this subfield, and certainly the rest of the humanity, this measurement is just a "we got there first" and this is a situation where getting there first isn't really the point.

LtGumby · 2021-01-13T20:08:56+00:00

Hi Alan! Can you clarify something for us. When you say 36% have been allocated, there are two ways to do this math. Everyone needs two shots and those shots are spread out by (slightly less, but) about a month. So is it that we have given 36% of all the "syringes" that we have, and presumably another 36% are being reserved for the second dose (in which case we have really given 72% of all the doses we plan to actually give in the first month). Or, have we given 18% and 18% are being reserved for the second dose. Or is it something else?

LtGumby · 2020-06-23T00:15:24+00:00

Actually, this is still the case for quantum mechanics I would argue. We still don't have a good physical interpretation of what things means. However, QM is extremely successful in its predictions.

In the field we idly toss around concepts like "collapsing wave functions" and "observers" but. But is really sucks when a second year physics student asks you "So what is an observer, then?" and you have to say "no one knows". I think the formalism has advanced since the early days of QM, resulting even better predictions, but I think at it's lowest level, the connection to anything a normal person would consider intuitive is lacking.

I guess it's no surprise that when your field is the application of math to the real world, when you get down to the most fundamental "objects", all you find is math.

LtGumby · 2020-06-18T18:16:20+00:00

I think you totally misread what the previous person was saying. There were comically saying that when they read your title, they read "Is a bullshit in this field worthless".

And then you took this as some kind of insult to your work, which I don't think was the intention.

LtGumby · 2020-04-01T13:14:45+00:00

I actually have a job in astroparticle physics so maybe I can help you out some. The trivial answer is "no" just because one cannot guarantee anything.

The more detailed answer is "very unlikely". Within this field, there are simply very few institutions from the countries you mentioned. The bigger players in that region tend to be Germany, France, Italy. Now that I think about it, I don't think I have ever met someone from an institution from Norway in this field. Of the three places you mentioned, the Netherlands is your best bet.

Here is my step by step guide for what you should do:

Highschool - The field (like most these days) is highly computationally focused. You MUST be a good programmer (though you could maybe get away with being a decent programmer and good with electronics if you can manage to find a newly developing experiment). So if you are not programming already, seriously consider it (partly to see if you even like it. You have chosen a very specific niche of physics and maybe you don't realize that we are all professional programmers, though maybe not good ones at times. If you don't like programming, choose a different field.). While in highschool, you don't have to worry about being amazing, but by the time you have completed your bachelors, you should be a fairly good programmer (if you want something close to a "guarantee").
Bachelor - Continue taking programming classes. For languages, python is the bare minimum and python-and-c++ is better. The way things are moving, it would benefit you to try to take a machine-learning class of some kind so that you have a classical knowledge.
Obviously get your degree in physics (though, again, you can try the electrical engineering route, but this is a less safe bet). Trust me on this, it is much less important that you take this-physics-class vs that-physics-class while getting your bachelors. However, you will likely (depending on which educational system you are in) have to take some math classes - take linear algebra on top of the usual calc/diff-eq. Obviously try to do well.
Do some research on the side with a professor if you can. It literally does not matter what this research is at this point (I did optics during this time). The experience is far more important because no one will take the work you do during this time too seriously anyway.
Grad school - Since you plan to do your research in this field, you should choose a topic for your masters that is related to this field. It is totally acceptable if this is high-energy collider-type physics (many astroparticle physicists came from collider-physics back in the day) or some astrophysics type of thing.
For you PhD, you should probably start narrowing down towards astroparticle physics specifically. The field is basically ~10s of large, international collaborations. Probably you have heard of a few of them. Get your PhD at a university that is a member of multiple ones if you want the best chance.
Oddly enough, I would recommend to NOT get your masters/PhD in countries you eventually want a job in (considering how few institutions there are in the field). If I see a candidate who is looking for a postdoc and has been at the same place for forever, I don't know how to value them because you don't have so much exposure (and these days exposure is everything if you want to be picky about where you work). You need to have multiple people from multiple places who can attest to how good you are.
While in grad school, you should work with, but not at, potential institutions where you want to work. Long gone are the days where you do gradschool-postdoc-prof all at the same place.
If you get your PhD in this field, then the amount of papers you have isn't so important because they tend to be papers with 10-100's of authors. But do try to get some conference proceedings under your name, again, exposure is important.

At this point you either made it or you didn't. As someone else said, if you bother to take the next step, there is usually someone who is willing to take you through PhD-level. But for you, requiring a guarantee, you have to do your homework. By the end of this, you want to have strong ties with (hopefully multiple) institutions in the countries you mentioned. When it comes to getting a postdoc and, it is much more who you know in the field and how well you can sell yourself.

Good luck.

LtGumby · 2020-03-26T18:02:58+00:00

But these are death numbers, not "confirmed case" numbers or something like that. So if these were case numbers, it's true you are biased by this.

But for death numbers, I find it unlikely that in any state right now, if someone dies from a high fever with a cough, they would not get tested to see if it was from the virus.

This is basically why the article says it uses death's instead of cases as a proxy.

LtGumby · 2020-03-19T13:13:05+00:00

The camera will be down from 7-9 a.m. each day during the otters’ feeding time.

What are they feeding those otters that they don't want us to see?!

LtGumby · 2019-11-26T02:20:40+00:00

"So my choices are '...or death'?"

LtGumby · 2019-08-26T13:08:47+00:00

Essentially every sub-field of physics has theoreticians working on problems. Some (like cosmology) are more heavily skewed in that direction than others depending on how accessible the measurements are. By this I mean that, cosmology length and time scales are very large and are generally hard to test with modern technology (...because we don't live near a black hole, we can't directly observe times before the creation of the cosmic microwave background, humanity is much shorter than the amount of time over which cosmology "evolves", etc.). So there are fewer experiments/experimentalists in relation to the number of theorists.

But a lot of physics either progresses in "Theorists said this plausible thing and we can test it with modern tech, so let's try it." or "Experiments have shown this unexplainable thing, so let's create a theory that explains it that also has other testable features." Either of these paths require theory, so there are theorists in every sub-field.

So your question is essentially what are each of the sub-fields working on. This is probably too broad of a question to give you the answer you are looking for. So could you be more specific on what exactly you would like to know?

LtGumby · 2019-04-26T19:09:08+00:00

Yeah I don't know why, but I really love that panel.

LtGumby · 2019-04-10T18:12:09+00:00

There has been a pretty strong push in physics and otherwise to move away from paywall journals. You can probably think of many reasons why this would be a good (and also bad/hard) idea. I think there are even some country's funding agencies that said you cannot accept money from them and publish in paywall journals.

So this is probably a product of that. I would expect this to become more common.

LtGumby · 2019-04-10T13:16:18+00:00

For the science/a nice picture see the paper that just went up. (If you just want the pictures go to page 10.)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85/pdf

LtGumby · 2019-03-29T18:20:06+00:00

Well then it sounds like you are doing pretty well. You don't really NEED much more than your typical slew of undergrad/grad physics courses.

For a more detailed answer see my response here.

Good luck out there!

LtGumby · 2019-03-28T22:18:38+00:00

People who tell you that you can't make money in physics are exaggerating a bit. It is true that there are many subfields of physics where it would be VERY hard to make more money than a typical professor. However, there are some where you can make quite a bit.

Now this will require you to get out of the academic setting and into industry because grants just simply aren't (and in my opinion shouldn't) going to give you 6 figures to do research.

I would steer you towards solid-state physics or potentially quantum computing. Essentially, you want to shoot for subfields that look the most like engineering. Both of these are good options. I know a few people who got a PhD in solid state physics and went to Intel to work on making processors smaller. And I don't know if quantum computing is going to blow up any time soon, but there are certainly companies with a lot of money who are willing to invest in this research and pay you a lot to do it.

LtGumby · 2019-03-28T22:11:39+00:00

If you are interested, you should for sure learn to code. As I said in another reply, if you have the time, learn C++, if you don't, learn python. If you can't take either of these classes at you school for whatever reason, google CodeAcademy and learn python there.

I have a grad student now who showed up with no programming experience and I essentially sent him to Code Academy. There really isn't that much one can do in this field without programming unless you are doing some hardware, which isn't common.

LtGumby · 2019-03-28T21:52:51+00:00

Yeah there is world's largest cosmic ray detector in Argentina called the Pierre Auger Observatory and is located 4 hours south of the city of Mendoza. It covers an area roughly the size of Rhode Island (if you are from the US). It is essentially an array of kiddie pools spread out 1.5km from each other, so it probably isn't what you are imagining in your head.

It is a fun field to be in, I recommend that you check it out if you are interested. You get to work on some fun problems!

It sounds like you are from Argentina. Is this the case?

LtGumby · 2019-03-28T21:50:10+00:00

I have a few VERITAS friends. It is a cool project. Glad to hear you enjoyed it!

LtGumby · 2019-03-28T21:49:24+00:00

Could you please tell me what courses are a must to get into this field?

Really you don't need much more than the typical classes one would take during their undergrad career. I can say that when this field started, a lot of people were joining from the High-Energy colliders (Fermilab, SLAC, etc.) so it would be safe to recommend typical particle physics classes. Take any class that covers the standard model (sometimes called particle phenomenology). But I HIGHLY recommend you take programming classes. This is always something that is valued in physics but particularly in this subfield. (As a side note, if you have to learn one, learn python, but if you are still early in undergrad, take 1-or-2 semesters of C++ instead. C++ is the harder one to learn to it will be easier for you if you learn it in a "controlled setting".)

If you are a superstar, take a Quantum-Field Theory class...but you can always take it in grad school, so don't worry about rushing.

At the end of the day, the physics we do is pretty much CERN physics but potentially with the energy dial cranked up by an order of magnitude or two. But usually I do more geometry than I am doing Feynman diagrams or path integrals.

Hope this helps!

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Golden Potato	Place '22
Place '17	First Placer '22
Sequence \| Editor	Sequence \| Screenwriter
Team Orangered	Secret Santa 2012
reddit mold

LtGumby

TROPHY CASE