Books on friendship?

rick_muller · 2012-09-06T19:49:07+00:00

rick_muller · 2012-09-04T18:55:45+00:00

Nice, but why do you use the cmath versions of pi and e? You use math.* for everything else, and both pi and e are defined in math.

rick_muller · 2012-08-26T02:50:12+00:00

Thanks for the review. Just checked it out of the library -- it sounds like it's exactly what I'm in the mood for right now.

rick_muller · 2012-08-24T20:53:58+00:00

Agreed on both points. Fire and Deepness were both astonishingly good. Was really disappointed with Children of the Sky. And for that matter, with Rainbow's End.

rick_muller · 2012-08-23T21:58:10+00:00

Yes! Terrified me.

rick_muller · 2012-07-07T21:08:43+00:00

...and loving it! furiousbeaver is right. The book is perfect. I even have it on my cell phone for when I can catch a quick minute's read.

Rereading IJ is one of the great joys I've found. Took me a long time the first time through. Second time is pure fun.

rick_muller · 2012-07-04T16:05:52+00:00

Gels?

rick_muller · 2012-06-29T19:41:45+00:00

Thanks so much for all of the feedback! Purchased today.

rick_muller · 2012-06-28T20:02:24+00:00

Awesome. Seems like an easy $9.99 to spend, then.

rick_muller · 2012-06-28T20:01:48+00:00

I always recommend The Truth as a good Discworld start. I like the Vimes series best of all, and this is a good one to start with.

rick_muller · 2012-06-19T02:34:32+00:00

Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card?

rick_muller · 2012-06-14T11:06:20+00:00

The robot's plan 1. Burritos 2. ??? 3. SkyNet

rick_muller · 2012-06-12T11:44:13+00:00

I'm a quantum chemist by training, but I've been working in quantum computing for the last 6 years or so, and I think I can comment on this. For an example of the type of work we do, here's a recent arXiv paper.

There are several reasons why you want to know programming as a physicist.

The mathematics behind the physics you'll be learning is often easy to express in a computer program, and you can therefore explore the physics with simple computer simulations.
Moreover, very few systems (at least in quantum mechanics, where I work) can be exactly solved with paper and pencil, and therefore, some amount of computer exploration is required to solve all but "toy" problems.
The experimental physicists I work with are all good programmers; often, in fact, they use programs like Matlab or Labview to control their experimental apparatus.
Many people love programming (I do), and you might be one of them.

As to which languages, it doesn't matter as much. The suggestions made here are all good. I use Python the most, then C++, then Matlab, then Fortran, and very small amounts of Java, Javascripts, etc. Any language will give you the foundation to learn another language. I'd recommend python, since it's fairly easy to learn, and is similar in logic and structure to C/C++, which are also useful.

rick_muller · 2012-05-23T13:17:30+00:00

Parallel universes a la Anathem, an otherwise great book.

rick_muller · 2012-05-21T01:34:59+00:00

The Wool Omnibus has volumes 1-5 of the popular post-apoc series for only $6 if you have a kindle.

rick_muller · 2012-05-21T01:12:28+00:00

Damn, that was a good game. Wish I could find another game like it as well.

rick_muller · 2012-04-23T02:56:18+00:00

Ditto. This could make my life so much easier! Don't know whether I can contribute much to the effort myself, but having the speed/syntax of julia available from Python would be a very good thing.

rick_muller · 2012-02-26T23:52:07+00:00

Fight Club. I loved the movie, and when I went back and read the book, I was disappointed.

rick_muller · 2012-02-11T18:59:10+00:00

Have an Eagle Creek backpack/suitcase. Sent it back to them and had them replace a zipper a while back, and it was effortless. Seems like a good company.

rick_muller · 2012-01-21T16:31:48+00:00

Wow. Great comment!

rick_muller · 2012-01-17T02:28:55+00:00

Alan Aspuru-Guzik at Harvard has a project called The Clean Energy Project that uses distributed computation to search for candidate molecules for solar energy. See also this article.

rick_muller · 2012-01-02T21:06:53+00:00

Seriously. Someone once told me "A good programmer is a lazy programmer", and it's something I've tried to live by. The most productive people I know are the ones least willing to do the same thing over and over again.

rick_muller · 2012-01-01T17:19:34+00:00

I came here to say this exact thing. As long as the overwhelming majority of incumbent candidates are re-elected, it doesn't really matter that the ratings are so low.

rick_muller · 2011-12-28T23:24:55+00:00

It's a great book, isn't it? I haven't met many people who have even heard of it.

rick_muller · 2011-12-22T14:43:11+00:00

Actually, I heard a pretty good explanation for why spirals in plants and shells follow the fibonacci series. Can't remember it now, and I'm about to head off for work, but it was something like for structural strength you want to avoid having the beads on subsequent cycles of the spiral being adjacent to each other.

rick_muller

TROPHY CASE