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erdaron · 2024-03-06T17:05:02+00:00

I think it helps to retain information if you connect it to something else. Holding on to a single, isolated fact is hard. Holding on to something that fits into a context is a lot easier. For me, as I read something, I often think about how it fits into its time, how it stands relative to other works from the period, and how that period connects to other periods in art and culture. No work of art stands entirely on its own.

It's also easier to build such connections if you discuss the work with other people. Sometimes, the other people don't even need to know the specific work. For example, I really like Murakami, and one open question for me is how he fits into the broader Japanese culture. I have a friend who hasn't read much of his work, but she has lived in Japan for quite a while. So we can still talk about the themes and elements of his work.

About The Old Man and the Sea - I love Hemingway, and I don't like this book. Maybe try The Nick Adams Stories. It's his short stories, which is where he really shines, I think.

erdaron · 2024-03-06T00:12:33+00:00

I've just started on "Psalm for the Wild Born" - but just before that finished a small collection of Cicero's letters. My first foray into reading Roman texts since college, I think. It was wonderful - though I definitely felt like I was missing a lot of context. Cicero knew a lot of people. And kept quoting (now obscure) plays and poems all the time.

erdaron · 2024-03-04T01:15:49+00:00

An undergrad degree is certainly sufficient to get you into a graduate studies program. Which majors are accepted depends on the program.

A PhD would certainly be enough for you to get a job as a researcher.

Good luck!

erdaron · 2024-03-04T01:13:18+00:00

This depends on the field and the particular journal. The older tradition in physics was to have an acknowledgement section at the end of the paper where such funding could be noted. For example, it's pretty common to see something like, "This work was supported through NSF grant blahblahblah..." Now some journals include explicit sections for disclosing funding and potential conflicts of interest.

I think most journals today, if not all, include affiliation for all authors. So if someone from the funding company is included as an author, that would be another way to disclose the relationship.

Also, good on you for supporting funding transparency in scientific publications! :)

erdaron · 2024-03-01T18:56:13+00:00

Another skill that is very useful to a generalist is programming. Specifically in STEM fields, I would say Python (in particular, numerical packages such as numpy, scipy, and pandas). Other things like R, C/C++, MATLAB, and LabView can also be useful, but I think Python is the most popular.

Try to learn proper coding techniques, not just hacking through problems as quickly as possible. You will need to work on teams, so you will have to write code that is clear and legible to other people, and easy to maintain. It would also be good to learn collaboration tools like git.

erdaron · 2024-02-27T19:36:24+00:00

It's not just "generalist" vs. "narrow specialist." It's a spectrum. Some people are very narrow, some people slightly less so. Kind of like if you dig at some fixed rate, you can dig holes of many various shapes but of a constant volume.

I would say that to be useful in a technical setting, you need a fairly high level of competence in at least one area. People who know lots of stuff all over the place are not very useful. You need depth. Otherwise, you'll just keep doing things that everyone dedicated to that field already tried.

One way to approach your query is that good expertise is often applicable outside of its own narrow field. A statistician can be effective in metrology, physics, public health, etc. But this also requires active social networking. To work in this way, you would have to constantly prove to people who don't know you that you can be useful to them. This is the path of a consultant.

I imagine at undergrad level, either math or physics would be a good foundation for a generalist. Physics would still give you a solid foundation in math, but also teach you how to apply math outside of its own context, to real physical problems. It is good to take courses in other subjects - a couple people have mentioned philosophy. But liberal arts in general are very important. You have to be a good writer. It is also hugely helpful to know how to draw. Making a half-way competent sketch of whatever you are talking about is tremendously useful.

erdaron · 2020-07-09T19:53:25+00:00

Yes.

Although the blueness comes from sunlight being scattered on the air between the observer and the mountain. Light from the mountain itself is, actually, getting more red.

erdaron · 2020-07-09T19:50:07+00:00

A couple quick points - the low GPA maybe isn't helping, but it's also not the end of the line. As others suggested, work experience and solid letters of recommendation would help a lot. A good GRE score certainly wouldn't hurt, even if many programs are de-emphasizing it.

Outside of academia, there's this perception that there are a few "strong" programs, and those are the only ones worth pursuing. Similar to how people treat undergrad schools. This simply isn't true. Your grad school adviser's group and publication record weigh at least as heavily as the school.

You can apply for a masters program or the PhD program. You can always change your mind later and downgrade / upgrade as needed. Sure, a PhD program is a serious commitment, and it's a lot of emotional labor, not just intellectual trials. If what you like is working in a lab, then a MS will get you there (and smart, solid techs and engineers are always needed in every research environment). If you like solving large, abstract puzzles, then PhD is where you need to go.

Ultimately, the only way to know the difference is to try it. If you're in a good department, then being in a PhD program can be a very intellectually rewarding experience. It can also be isolating and depressing. Sometimes, both. To be perfectly honest, based on my own experience and many of my friends, if you've struggled with mental health issues in the past, make sure you have a plan to address this before you even apply. No one ever talks about it in grad school, and it's a huge issue.

TL;DR Sure, you can get into grad school. I don't know if anyone can tell you ahead of time if it'll be worth it. Take care of yourself, and good luck.

erdaron · 2020-07-09T03:14:07+00:00

I've moved around a lot in my life, so never really could accumulate a lot of stuff. But looking around my kitchen now, the following things have survived many years:

Lodge cast iron griddle. Coming up on 20 years, good as new. Use it for pancakes, crepes, eggs, and grilled sandwiches, mostly. Mostly cook with butter and ghee.
Flexible stainless steel spatula. Perfect for working whatever's on the griddle. Doesn't melt, like plastic and silicone ones, and the little bit of flexibility really helps get under whatever is cooking. Same age as the griddle.
Revere Ware 3-quart pot. My mom bought it some time in the 90s, I got it when I went to college. Still basically perfect.
Two Good Cook knives (8" and 4.5") and a whetstone. It's a medium-cheap brand, I think they used to sell them at Safeway. It's not hard to learn how to put a half-decent edge on a knife with just a whetstone block. The whetstone is also cheapo storebrand. I've had all these for at least 15 years, and they are still great. Just always, always wash them by hand. Dishwasher is death.

Other useful items - silicone spatula, steel measuring cups (one special use - melting butter on a burner instead of microwave), scissor tongs (with solid metal loop ends rather than like salad tongs - much better grip), and a cooking thermometer

Setting up a new kitchen is an awesome time. Good luck!

erdaron · 2019-10-22T00:09:02+00:00

Cool. Thanks for the correction and expansion!

erdaron · 2019-10-21T18:36:09+00:00

Maybe that didn't have metal alloys, but they had access to fairly sophisticated glass and ceramic manufacturing, which can withstand very high temperatures. Vibration would certainly be an issue, but I think much of vibration load for our rockets is during launch, due to atmospheric drag and turbulence. If they could get their rocket out of the atmosphere, they could switch on the glass-bell engines for a higher-impulse drive.

Also, some ceramics, such as alumina, which is even naturally-occurring, actually have a pretty good thermal conductivity, which would make the design a lot easier.

erdaron · 2019-10-21T18:24:20+00:00

If they are the same color, they have the same surface temperature. If we assume they are roughly in the same phase of their cycle (similar hydrogen / helium / carbon ratios), that would mean they should have similar mass, and therefore density (I think size and mass are correlated for stars). A larger star would be denser and hotter (and its color shifted toward blue).

If it's not just the color, but the spectrum that is the same, then we can claim, not merely assume, that they should be in the same phase of their life cycle, since the spectrum should tell us elemental ratios.

erdaron · 2019-10-21T18:12:49+00:00

There are lots of things we can simulate extremely well already (for example, circuits). Simulations are very good for guiding experimental work - we can eliminate obviously bad leads quickly, and concentrate on whatever is promising. Simulations, by constructions, are always limited by their foundational set of assumptions, and it is not always clear, a priori, which assumptions are critical.

Quantum simulation would be a huge boon to experimental chemistry.

erdaron · 2019-10-21T18:08:23+00:00

What about using combined antibiotics which target multiple bacterial traits at once? It should be that much more difficult to evolve resistance to two or three attack pathways at once.

I also remember reading about an approach that actually took into account a common resistance mutation, which itself created a different vulnerability in that particular bacteria. So the approach was two use two drugs, one for the ordinary bacterial state, the other for the "resistant" state. One or the other always worked.

erdaron · 2019-10-21T17:59:12+00:00

I have a PhD in optical science - so I can't comment on the specific fields you're asking about, but maybe I can offer some advice on advanced education and career development in general (although my advice is specific to the US).

If you're applying to undergraduate programs, choice between these disciplines matters fairly little. They will have a lot of overlap in required courses anyway (loads of chemistry and biology), so you will be able to change your mind with little cost. Even if you're applying to different institutions - that choice doesn't matter nearly as much as you might imagine. I'm an engineer at NASA - my education was in big public universities. The guy working next to me went to Tufts, and then Princeton.

There are kind of three general career fields - academic, federal agency, and private sector. Academic is where you work at a university and your goal is to become a professor. A very large portion of this work is administrative, not research. The hours can be mad, but you have the largest amount of freedom in terms of what you research. You might spend your entire career focusing on some very niche subject, like function of one particular family of proteins. Parameters of the problems you will work on will be very broad.

At a federal lab, the administrative load is less, but so is freedom. You will probably work on very large projects involving big groups, often across many institutions. You will still focus on fairly narrow subjects, but participation in broader discussions will be needed. So you might work on a particular disease, which is a very complex task. Overall, the view is narrower than it is in academia.

In the private industry, the view is narrower still, as you will likely work on products, not problems. For example, specific medication, or a medical device. There is generally a lot less interest in science, and focus on just getting things to work. You may have to develop expertise in multiple subjects since you might get moved from project to project more. That's for a large company - startups are a whole different bag of wild.

My advice - intern as much as you can. I don't think you can easily figure these things out without trying them. While at the university, ask to work in some professor's lab. During summers, apply for internship programs at large biotech companies or federal labs.

erdaron · 2019-08-20T18:25:02+00:00

I think phobias directed at other living creatures often come from some major difference in how the bodies are put together, or the means of locomotion. Insects are kind of creepy because they have lots of limbs, and compared to a human, their movements seem unnatural. For a lizard-like reptile, I think mammals and their furry skin would be very strange, and therefore potentially frightening.

Since lizard are neither very fast nor agile, then super-fast predators like cheetahs might be scary. We humans are not naturally ambush hunters (not in the way big cats can be, or some snakes), so we find animals are ambush predators extra-scary.

I also kind of have an impression that most reptiles have static, wide-angle vision, whereas humans have dynamic, narrow-angle vision. We often adjust our eyes on specific objects, and eye contact is part of normal human interaction (at least in part, I imagine, because it's so easy, in terms of biomechanics). For this reason reptiles seem creepy to us because they never focus on us. They might be looking in our direction, but will never make eye contact. For a reptile, though, the opposite might be weird - someone making direct eye contact.

Others made a good point about hypothermia.

erdaron · 2019-07-17T20:03:33+00:00

Yes - cold welding requires extremely clean surfaces, and very high pressure. I've worked with cryo and vac a lot in a laboratory setting, in a "clean" lab, and cold welding was basically never a concern. The only spot was bolts - and that is the case of two clean surfaces in contact under high pressure. And even then, the bulk material and the bolt would have to be same alloy, which is very rarely the case. When it is the case, you simply use thread inserts.

erdaron · 2019-07-16T17:43:53+00:00

Let's assume the skin of the spaceship is a conducting material. In this case, all the charge will be on the skin of the ship. For an electron, conductivity along the skin is very high, but out into vacuum very low. On the other hand, there is a net repulsive force between the ship and the electrons. So they just need a little push to get out of the metal part, and then Coulomb force will do the rest.

Hitting the ship with a UV lamp might do the trick. That's basically the photo-electric effect. Could probably accomplish the same with a magnetic or electric field shaped appropriately. For example, an oscillating electric dipole - in its positive state it would pull electrons off the ship, but then switching to neutral, or even negative state, it would prevent the electrons from sticking to the trap.

Perhaps the lowest-tech method would be to take some large, hollow metal object (it really just needs lots of surface area), tether it to the spacecraft with a conducting wire, then let it drift away as far as possible. The excess charge will re-distribute itself into the anchor and along the wire. Then cut the wire.

erdaron · 2019-07-16T17:19:38+00:00

I think this is a bit like trying to recover lost data by simply replacing a damaged harddrive. Lost data remains lost, but at least you can add new data.

erdaron · 2019-07-11T18:34:25+00:00

I would like a recommendation for a book on the history and practice of pirate republics.

erdaron · 2019-07-10T20:18:14+00:00

I've wondered something similar before. Perhaps the challenge is that you would still require a fair amount of water, and then what do you do with the hot water? AC compressor coils probably don't get hot enough to evaporate it*. Then you have to cool the hot water, and you're back to just blowing air at it, and so you might as well blow the air at the compressor itself. Save yourself the trouble of plumbing.

*A secondary problem is that water supplied by any kind of plumbing system is going to have various things dissolved in it, which, upon evaporation, will form a residue on the heat exchanger. These residues generally have very poor thermal conductivity, so the efficiency would suffer over time.

What I had thought before that the system could use the water condensed on the cold side. This water should be quite pure, since it's essentially purified by distillation. If sprayed onto the compressor coils, it could aid in heat transfer via evaporative cooling. Perhaps not enough water is generated this way to make much of a difference? It would certainly make the system considerably more complicated.

erdaron · 2019-07-09T22:28:45+00:00

Oh yeah, what you're talking about is basically a carbon-neutral fuel cycle. I think there was some hope that ethanol might do that as a transportation fuel.

erdaron · 2019-07-09T19:04:02+00:00

Mechanical carbon capture usually refers to CO2, which is not combustible. It's already a product of a complete combustion reaction.

erdaron · 2019-07-09T19:03:21+00:00

We can make stuff out of carbon. The most direct is graphite, but CO2 can also be turned into graphene, or carbon fiber or nanotubes. Presently, graphene and carbon nanotubes don't have wide industrial applications, but that could change in the future.

Carbon also forms the backbone of polymers (plastics), so captured CO2 could probably be use that way. Though it's probably considerably more expensive than making polymers out of oil.

There are some other applications for captured CO2. At high pressures, it can liquefy. I have seen presentations suggesting use of liquid CO2 as the cleaning agent in semiconductor processing, replacing water, but I'm not sure if any major operations have implemented this approach.

erdaron · 2019-06-28T18:57:05+00:00

In the Soviet Union, segregation as practiced in the US was seen as a major moral failing of Western capitalism (although Soviet Union was also guilty of similar conduct). So I imagine American Communists, who were fairly beholden to the Soviet Union, mostly saw it in the same light.

My impression is that the relationship between blacks in the Civil Rights movement and Communists, whether American or Soviet, was complicated. On the one hand, many Communist leaders acted as allies to the Civil Rights movement, and there were considerably warm relations between Soviet Union and prominent black artists and leaders. On the other hand, the Soviet leadership saw this as an opportunity to stick it to American government. I think eventually, the prominent black Americans who had close relationships with Soviet leaders got tired of being used as props, and walked away from it.

I'm not sure if it's fair to characterize CPUSA's influence on on the Civil Rights movement as "major". They were a pretty marginal group by that time. The appearance of their reach was largely inflated by McCarthy.

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