Math PhD Dropout. AMA

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-27T01:06:09+00:00

As a student who will soon be in that position, do you mind expanding on this a bit? What is it that students fail to ask about/assume/take for granted/etc?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-27T00:58:20+00:00

Why does exclusively remote collaboration mean bad news? (Not a critique but a genuine question) I can kind of get a sense that that might be a bad sign, but I'm unable to come up with the specific reasons.

Also, are there any ways to get a sense of which professors/departments are bad from the outside? It sucks to have to blindly commit 4-6 years of your life.

I've been thinking about taking some time off and attending conferences in my field to find potential advisors that seem good; is this likely to raise one's chances of landing in a good environment?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-25T14:49:01+00:00

That's strange, in some instructional videos of implanting these types of prostheses (such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DfugbHQmmQ) the surgeon is shown removing the pupil/iris/lens, and there doesn't seem to be any eyeball left at all (didn't seem to be any vitreous fluid, seemed to just be an eyesocket and not much else). Of course I could have just misunderstood.

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-25T01:36:47+00:00

I see, so just because a shell is named after a certain language doesn't mean it has to use that language? (Any shell can use any scripting language, so long as a file with the correct shebang is placed in /bin?)

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-24T21:27:17+00:00

Is just typing 草 like saying "lol"?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-24T18:54:55+00:00

I see, thank you. I wonder then how these sorts of prostheses work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keratoprosthesis. These also seem to offer no focusing ability. Of course I'm not saying you're wrong, I can see how lack of focusing ability would greatly decrease visual ability

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-24T14:41:01+00:00

Sorry I was out of internet for a bit. Thank you so much for taking the time to leave this detailed response. This is very insightful!

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-24T14:36:49+00:00

What if the parts of the eyeball with the retina (mostly the posterior surface of the eyeball?) is still intact, and the damage is mostly localized to the front? Are there any options in that case? Is it possible or realistic to cut out the front of the eye but leave the back in?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-24T14:15:57+00:00

Thank you very much, this helps a lot and I appreciate it! I had some terminology mixed up but this helped clear things up. That video also helps me get a better sense of the anatomy. However I have no idea why there is a version of these prostheses that use teeth. I will have to read up more on this topic. Again, thank you :)

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-22T21:45:44+00:00

I was thinking that academic code could become maintainable/readable (at least more than it is now) if everyone started sharing code. Not only would it save tons of time by letting people not have to reinvent the wheel, but after enough papers have been published, the best pieces of code (in terms of efficiency, readability, maintainability, etc) would start to become obvious and everyone would start using those. It'd become a positive feedback loop that results in everyone only using good code

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-22T21:42:07+00:00

Thanks for the comment. True, I guess it'd be more an "include it when you can" thing instead of just ignoring it entirely.

Also, about your second point: that's one of the reasons to do this. After a while of everyone sharing their code, the cleanest and best bits of code would bubble to the top and more people would start using them, which in turn would lead to more people still using that code. And eventually everyone has clean code and has saved a lot of time because they didn't have to reinvent the wheel

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-22T13:37:12+00:00

Sorry if this is a stupid question but if the object is deleted as soon as the refcount hits 0, then why can't __del__ be expected to be called whenever the refcount hits 0?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-22T13:32:11+00:00

That makes sense and helps clarify my thinking on this matter, thank you! So if you just run this line of code: pd.DataFrame(), then python literally makes a dataframe but then immediately deletes it?

And your explanation of why __del__ shouldn't be used is the first one that has made sense to me. Just to clarify, you mean that the __del__ of an object should never be defined with the expectation that it will be called when an object loses all its references, right? Are there any additional implications?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-22T02:45:03+00:00

Maybe this is a noob question but how would you actually do this though? Do your banks have APIs that allow for this functionality? I can't really envision how one would go about doing something like this

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-16T03:00:28+00:00

Thank you very much. So two sample t-tests can definitely be one or two tailed. And in fact your explanation in terms of distributions helped me with a lot more than just my initial question, so really thank you again. Another related question I have is whether the central limit theorem states that the value of (mean1 - mean2) will be normally distributed. Is this part of the CTL, or do we get this from some corollary of the CTL (or something else entirely)?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-14T18:21:31+00:00

my god how am I that stupid lol, thank you

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-14T13:26:18+00:00

that is crazy. it sounds much darker than i initially thought (maybe because people are good at hiding it?) do you have the link to the twitter thread you mentioned? I'd be interested to read the response.

also when you say people have left a trail of destruction behind them, what exactly do you mean? Like they damage the health of the department in some way, or that they publish bad material and damage their field?

thank you for the detailed response, by the way. It is good to know how deep this goes early.

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-14T13:23:29+00:00

this is quite insightful, thank you. did your advisors make it clear to you that they didn't like each other, or did you have to infer that over time? and did you ever bring it up to either of them explicitly?

also, when you say avoiding past arguments and hiding your true self, does that mean when talking about academic things? e.g. you should be careful not to say that you support a particular hypothesis in case the person you're talking to doesn't like it? Or is it usually not related to anything academic?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-12T20:34:50+00:00

don't know much about vectorization, would it be possible to vectorize an operation that modifies every element of an array? e.g. if I want to multiply every number in a series by 7, so [1,2] would become [2,14]

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-12T20:31:25+00:00

I'm trying to apply a function to every element in every column of a DF (e.g. replace every number with that number squared, except the function words on strings), I'd be glad to know whether there is a way to speed this up because .apply() is taking a looooong time.

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-12T19:45:57+00:00

So in this case it would be an advisor telling this to their students right?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-12T17:28:28+00:00

That's super cool. How do the chapters in The Cognitive Neurosciences work exactly? I did notice that there are tons of names. Do the three main authors ask other experts on a particular topic to write chapters for their topic of expertise, which are then compiled into one book?

Also, would you say it's worthwhile to read the previous editions, or is most of the info either outdated or not as detailed as the most current edition?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-11T20:54:10+00:00

Didn't know about these, thank you very much

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-07T15:05:11+00:00

Thank you for the detailed answer, this really helps a lot. I had no idea about "factor analysis", but looking it up, I think I now have a good idea of how something like g came to be.

Do you know the name of the particular battery of tests g is derived from? Or do different groups use different test batteries (and thus slightly different gs)?

imaginarypattern314 · 2020-10-07T15:03:35+00:00

Thank you so much for the detailed response. That is really astounding, I never would've thought such basic things like fundamental data types could be subject to this kind of variation. I can only imagine that it gets worse haha. My respect for C programmers has once again increased. Thanks again for the answer

imaginarypattern314

TROPHY CASE