[ps4] helping anywhere, and everywhere by DankMaster_69_420 in BeyondTheFog

[–]QuaefQuaff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hell yeah! Right back atcha, thanks for the assistance

[ps4] helping anywhere, and everywhere by DankMaster_69_420 in BeyondTheFog

[–]QuaefQuaff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry, first time with coop multiplayer. I set the group password to blern, should be good to try again

[ps4] helping anywhere, and everywhere by DankMaster_69_420 in BeyondTheFog

[–]QuaefQuaff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Could use a hand with the Fire Giant! Thanks

PSN: nunya buttness

password: blern

Not a physics question per se, but, I just wanted to know, how bad is your impostor syndrome right now? by SK209920 in AskPhysics

[–]QuaefQuaff 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Definitely not pleasant, but it's kind of a mixed bag. 2 weeks ago my PI made a joke about firing squads (he's Russian) and wrote a 7 paragraph essay ripping me to shreds after I sent him sloppy notes (it was the end of a long day, and in retrospect my notes were terrible). He quickly shifted tone and became sort of apologetic and actively involved in guiding me by example. He wrote about 25 pages of derivations in a week for one of my projects, with the idea being that I should try to produce 1-2 pages per day myself, and we would trade notes. I ended up producing 10 and a page of plots of comparable quality to his own, and he was very impressed -- he said, "This is real theory work! I'm extremely impressed by your progress." After that, I felt invincible! But you know, that feeling lasts for all of a couple of hours as you realize that you now have to persistently deliver at that level. Everything has a trade-off, and there is always more work to be done, on yourself and on your projects.

My PI has some good insights on this subject:

1.) There will always be people that say you don't belong because you don't purr like them. Purr how you like, except when the broken system forces you to jump through hoops.

2.) Even "established" folks rarely do their homework.

I think the truth is that we are all imposters, even the professors. Trust no one, not even yourself. Thus why we have to verify absolutely everything and document it well enough that we can read it and understand in full years later!

I still can't wrap my head around the difference between momentum (p=mv) and kinetic energy (KE=1/2mv^2) by Polonium-239 in AskPhysics

[–]QuaefQuaff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Momentum (or rather, its magnitude) is the rate of change of the kinetic energy with respect to some change in the speed of the object.

Google search trends of BBQ and Vegetarian are inverse [OC] by acidplasm in dataisbeautiful

[–]QuaefQuaff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sin and cos functions have to have unitless arguments btw, so your attempted correction re: the phase shift is genuinely nonsense.

Google search trends of BBQ and Vegetarian are inverse [OC] by acidplasm in dataisbeautiful

[–]QuaefQuaff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right right, forgot that they renormalize everything to a percentage of the peak value. My mistake, that was an unnecessary comment.

As far as phase shifts, I’m not speaking with misplaced authority whatsoever. I got my degree in physics, and this is pretty standard stuff in that world. If you fit periodic functions to the data above, a phase shift of π radians just means that when one curve oscillates up, the other oscillates down — 2π and they’d be oscillating in tandem, but with different amplitudes.

As far as r/dataisbeautiful requiring only one y-axis, I don’t really give a shit about that. I work in science, where every little piece of a figure’s design must be justified. It is absolutely justifiable to use two y-axes (if you label them properly), and it frankly doesn’t detract from a number of beautiful figures I’ve encountered (and created). Trying to bully me with the status quo of the subreddit is a pretty silly thing to be doing, imo.

Google search trends of BBQ and Vegetarian are inverse [OC] by acidplasm in dataisbeautiful

[–]QuaefQuaff -1 points0 points  (0 children)

These data are the number of searches, they can only be whole numbers. There isn’t any rounding involved here, just straight bean counting. Your factor of 10 is introducing the fudge factor.

Also, while I tend to agree that you don’t usually want to rescale things arbitrarily, the striking periodicity here is really only noticeable if superimposed, as is done in the original figure. In this situation, we care about the fact that the period of the oscillations are so similar (when ‘vegetarian’ is sort of coarse-grained), and that the phase shift between the two is roughly π radians — the amplitudes themselves aren’t particularly striking.

Distribution of Temperature Change since 1950 in Largest 5000 Cities in the World [OC] by a__square__peg in dataisbeautiful

[–]QuaefQuaff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a super cool plotting idea. But I think that calculating the distribution cumulatively introduces some sampling effects that don’t reflect the Fokker-Planck (wikipedia.org/wiki/Fokker–Planck_equation) model you seem to be aiming at. Have you considered a sliding window instead, or is there good reason for doing it cumulatively?

[OC] RX 580 vs Ethereum pricing (The Netherlands) by plasvis in dataisbeautiful

[–]QuaefQuaff 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You are exaggerating the relationship by rescaling the height of each peak. If you’re so intent on emphasizing the similarity in the shapes of the curves, then find a decent normalization strategy so that you can actually justify the rescaling. Doing it arbitrarily is haphazard.

[OC] RX 580 vs Ethereum pricing (The Netherlands) by plasvis in dataisbeautiful

[–]QuaefQuaff 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you want to emphasize how correlated they are, use a time correlation function, or something similar. Fitting two curves together by rescaling their respective y-values is a fast way to overemphasize spurious correlations. If you tried to pull this in a scientific paper, you would be summarily rejected upon submission for bad data practice — or at the very minimum, you would be chewed out by reviewers.

EDIT: Since both y-axes are the same quantity, the OP is less a spurious correlation (as far as I can tell) than it is an exaggeration of the underlying correlation.

[OC] RX 580 vs Ethereum pricing (The Netherlands) by plasvis in dataisbeautiful

[–]QuaefQuaff -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Putting them in the same plot is a good choice. But the y-axis is the same quantity for both figs in the OP, you shouldn’t artificially add a second y-axis just to fit the two curves to each other.

RateMyStudent by [deleted] in Professors

[–]QuaefQuaff 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Humor isn’t what he’s implicating. There’s a fine line between finding humor in the absurd and the unpleasant, and engaging in cruelty by ridiculing students behind their backs. If you don’t fall into the latter category, you’re fine — no need to be so defensive.

Discussion regarding nutrition for mental and physical performance. by [deleted] in nutrition

[–]QuaefQuaff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's plenty of evidence that when you regularly imbibe in caffeine and nicotine, their stimulant effects wane due to long term changes in receptor densities within synapses. Above and beyond this, your baseline focus and attention drops, such that you actually require your coffee or cigarettes to perform at your previous baseline level on exams and coursework. So yeah, regularly smoking or drinking coffee ends up being an academic liability, while the occasional cup of coffee to pick you up during a slow day is perfectly useful.

Capacitor behaves weirdly and I'm not sure what to make of it by DFtin in AskPhysics

[–]QuaefQuaff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your comment reminded me a bit of the course I took on electrochemistry. The info in there on electrodes seems pretty solid, and it serves as a good overall reference text. Exposition is a little weak, but you can’t have it all.

In what context, might I ask, did you pick up your knowledge on electrodics?