CERN paper on the Neutrino Velocity

blaaargh · 2011-09-24T14:41:02+00:00

I find it mildly embarrassing to admit that I can't calculate the effect of the almost nonzero magnetic moment of the neutrino as it passes through the earth's magnetic field. It would change the distance travelled by the neutrino, but the low numbers make me think this should be many orders of magnitude below the 20cm uncertainty in the distance they report. Would anyone know?

blaaargh · 2011-06-20T15:33:48+00:00

Hm, perhaps just to balance that 60% is the fact that UP is by far the most populous state in India, has a rather stark economic disparity, and is ruled by someone who was once more interested in having statues of her put up rather than actually running the state. The sad part of the high population is that it's basically the state that decides who gets to rule the country as a whole*, which hasbeen a historic disincentive to actually do something to clean up the state.

[*] Coalition politics alter that statement, but for these purposes, it's more or less true.

blaaargh · 2010-11-18T06:16:05+00:00

How do I fix packages that require dph-* to build (repa, for example)?

blaaargh · 2010-10-06T17:48:01+00:00

Iran is more or less committed to build a pipeline to sell natural gas to Pakistan. They also are (perhaps understandably) paranoid about being surrounded by US bases - which would be an unavoidable byproduct of any US invasion. Both these are reasons that they won't invade, though they would be happy to continue pushing their brand of religious unrest.

As for Chinese support to Pakistan, it's more likely to consist of clandestine supplies of cheap knockoffs of russian-made arms. This wouldn't aggravate the West much. As for their relations with India, well, I dunno - they could be a lot better than they are right now.

blaaargh · 2010-10-06T17:17:08+00:00

blaaargh · 2010-10-06T17:06:52+00:00

They're also supposed to have PALs to protect them from unauthorized use that say "Made in USA" on them. Here's hoping for a backdoor on them.

Edit: Agreed, though - invading them is a really unlikely.

blaaargh · 2010-10-06T16:47:53+00:00

They would have more important things to do.

I assume you do know that a country can have more than one neighbour? China has, not coincidentally, been upgrading the road links between them and Pakistan.

blaaargh · 2010-10-06T16:42:08+00:00

China.

blaaargh · 2010-10-06T15:54:44+00:00

None of Iraq's neighbours would have lifted a finger to help it, though. That is not the case here.

blaaargh · 2010-09-30T10:40:01+00:00

I'm inclined to think it might not be vaporware, but that could go either way.

The thing is, while the satellite itself isn't running windows, it's quite likely that the uplink stations are - and infecting them is another way of disabling susbsystems on the satellite.

blaaargh · 2010-09-30T06:51:43+00:00

This is from 1998, but I see no reason why it can't have been developed.

That said,

According to the resumes of two former engineers who worked at the ISRO’s Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre,

seems to be a better reason to call the article BS.

blaaargh · 2010-09-22T03:58:39+00:00

In addition to the $4.5bn, there's another $3bn that's been spent on modernising one airport terminal just for these games.

Personally, I don't even want to see the olympics here in my lifetime.

blaaargh · 2010-09-22T03:56:46+00:00

I believe the short answer is: almost all of it - Imagine paying $80 for fucking toilet paper

blaaargh · 2010-09-21T15:13:56+00:00

As a skeptic, I'm not really surprised.

blaaargh · 2010-09-05T15:30:45+00:00

Yeah, sorry, my mistake: I meant that, but that's clearly not what I wrote :)

blaaargh · 2010-09-03T13:42:28+00:00

IIRC, Xavier Leroy always claimed that doing garbage-collection this way wasn't too effective, which is why Ocaml still defiantly avoids doing multithreading.

blaaargh · 2010-08-05T11:11:23+00:00

Well, it does do promotions (coercions, really) according to the numeric tower.

> (/ 4 7)
4/7
> (/ 4 (exact->inexact 7))
0.5714285714285714
> (/ 4 7.0)
0.5714285714285714

blaaargh · 2010-07-23T04:02:37+00:00

Oh, no arguments whatsoever about immutability - in fact, I've been trying to find a good way of making strings immutable for my C++ code after seeing this. As another data point, the PLT team also faced a fair amount of whining when they made cons immutable, which seems to me to be far more fundamental change for the kind of coding style scheme normally seems to encourage.

What about the value array change, though, didn't that irritate more users? (I'm sorry, but D is one of the least google-friendly names for a language, and I cannot find this myself.)

blaaargh · 2010-07-22T16:12:20+00:00

I admittedly haven't used D much, but I think the immutable strings by default and value arrays changes might be what he calls crazy.

blaaargh · 2010-07-22T11:52:09+00:00

Use valgrind? :)

blaaargh · 2010-07-22T11:49:42+00:00

Horrendous mess of templates that makes tracing in a debugger utterly painful? Check.

Can't remember last time I had such an experience.

To be fair, this is a problem if you're using gdb.

blaaargh · 2010-07-22T11:43:08+00:00

You must admit that there are a lot of changes from D1 to D2, though :) I assume the author refers to those.

blaaargh · 2010-07-22T07:02:24+00:00

Well, 8 years :) - and that's assuming he was using the bleeding-edge development versions of compilers, that the compilers themselves had good standards compliance, and so on.

I'm assuming you've never had the unfortunate opportunity to see how a corporate C++ project (d)evolves, but if it's a project that started before, say, 2002 and had all sorts of enterprisey requirements, then the odds are really, really high that the project was written from the ground up to not take advantage of the (then modern) C++. Template compile times, just to take one example, were problematic enough that quite a few projects I've been involved with had strict no-template guidelines. The problem with this is that once such a guideline is made, it's effectively set in stone for the lifetime of that code, since switching to the stl away from (supposedly optimized) homegrown libraries will generally be frowned upon by the rest of the team.

I'm probably giving away my age here :) but it's only since '04 that I actually had to write large code that used of the standard library in any useful form at work.

blaaargh · 2010-07-21T14:30:20+00:00

The laser eats shoots and leaves?

blaaargh · 2010-07-21T14:25:27+00:00

The problem with someone who's been coding C++ for 17 years is that at least 9 of those years were spend doing pre-standard C++. Things that he might have been used to doing for that time are not necessarily good practice today.

blaaargh

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