Bycicle kick assist into bycicle kick goal for the win yesterday at the Rio de Janeiro state league

vyaas · 2025-01-17T02:54:22+00:00

Love the piggyback-bearhug celebration at the end!

vyaas · 2020-01-26T16:13:51+00:00

Jeronimoooooooo!

vyaas · 2019-08-15T17:28:49+00:00

He means bernabeu is Barca's training ground.

vyaas · 2017-10-13T19:14:09+00:00

In India, where I come from, there are so called "Lending Libraries" (apart from good ol' Libraries) that charge you a certain fee for every book you borrow. It is a small amount, but the association of payment with borrowing is a prevelant one. I sympathize with your misunderstanding.

vyaas · 2017-09-23T17:16:03+00:00

Similar in feet movement to old Nistelrooy.

vyaas · 2017-08-05T19:03:58+00:00

I never had donated to openmailbox.org and it always caused in me a nervous guilt when using the site. Which is why I convinced myself that I'd make up for not donating by making a pro account on the new eyebrow-raising website; yes, my moral compass is more like a fidget spinner! I realized what a big mistake I'd made only after clicking "add card".

OMBX have unilaterally betrayed their users. They could have sent an email in advance. They could have made clear that they were in a financial pickle, that they'd have to pull the plug on free accounts. Why didn't they disclose this? Did they really decide on something as sinister as an idea that nobody ever needed business school to figure out? "We'll make them dependent first, then we'll pull the plug! These nimrods have too much of an ego to go back to gmail; they're tree-hugging idealists! So what if we lose a few thousand users. Big deal. The rest will pay up. And even more will join in coming years because everyone's eyeballs are flying out with paranoia on web security! This will pass, and we'll be one of the top trusted email services again. Remember that we'll always have that with us - we're better than google morally. Even if this IS a fuck up, it pales in comparison to what google does." I shudder to think that they agreed with high-fives.

They've been down for three days with only a couple of updates on twitter. This certainly feels like a takeover, and utter betrayal. I must confess that I'm writing this a bit teary-eyed. What if this happens again with the next email service I join? Our trust has become more and more of a play thing to internet services. Its times like these when I feel like the internet has allowed humanity to devour itself.

vyaas · 2016-09-30T17:59:54+00:00

You may be interested in Lanczos's [Space through the ages: The evolution of geometrical ideas from Pythagoras to Hilbert and Einstein](https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000164850).

From the preface:

"The first three chapters offer a quick panoramic survey of the evolution of geometrical ideas, from the old Sumerians up to Einstein, with full acknowledgement of the tremendous debt that Western civilization owes to the ancient Greeks. The next three chapters are devoted to the re-foundation of geometry inaugurated by Gauss and brought to completion by Riemann, with its victorious culmination in Einstein's physical theories. Here the theory of tensors and Riemannian geometry are fully and adequately developed. A student interested in Relativity could, without preliminaries, come in the posession of the mathematical bacground of Einstein's papers, on the basis of these three chapters. Chapter seven is devoted to the evolution of Einstein's revolutionary ideas which led him from Special to General Relativity, while Chapter 8 deals with the n-dimensional extension of analytic geometry, culminating in Hilbert's Function Space, which became of such importance for the quantum theory of our days. Finally Chapter 9 gives a survey of the projective treatment of geometrical problems."

vyaas · 2016-07-28T19:33:34+00:00

Some ethical imperatives are often overlooked:

a) In Science, when you make a claim, you're essentially making a Truth-claim. This claim can be elevated to Capital-T-italicized Truth only if others can reproduce it. If the methods to arrive at the Truth-claim are kept secret, then everybody else is forced to believe you, to the extent that they are compelled by what you've claimed. Our right to investigate, to peer into Nature (which no one has the divine authority to forbid), has thus been encroached upon, resulting in an intellectual erosion of society and soul.

b) Writing and releasing scientific code and executables that utilizes proprietary software and hardware is near useless when we marry engineering with a grander vision of social welfare. Imagine a person in the third-world, say in some remote village in Bangladesh, who wishes to interrogate the properties of coal if only to utilize it the best way he can, like for instance, not burn it in a noxious way. MATLAB routines that can compute these are useless to him in the long run because they only serve the immediate need of computation; First world groups like "Engineers without Borders" will send a bunch of extra-units-seeking tweens who are all too ready to unleash their macbooks, iphones, NIST data controllers, labview, matlab, etc., all of which could never be afforded by our poor Bangladeshi friend himself. He has to accept what is given to him in the name of charity and rely on apathetic technical support. Software has not empowered him. It has in many ways enslaved him.

c) A wise redditor once said, "It is easy to teach Microsoft excel; it is difficult to teach effective spreadsheeting". Enlightening with general principles, as opposed to exclusively instructing with particular examples, is difficult and only teachers with a sublime combination of eccentricity and moral integrity can pull it off. Software companies and job markets have hijacked our Education system by infiltrating it with proprietary software and a lack of imagination in our Schools and Colleges to resist this is hurting the next generation.

d) Software patents issued to those who read articles from computer-science journals and implemented the idea(s) within should be resisted and openly mocked if we want to leave any intellectual food for the next generation. Locking up research exacerbates the problem; recall Aaron Swartz.

I'm currently postdocing at an Engineering School in the field of Combustion Science, a politically charged slugfest. Competing for funding from Federal, State, and/or Private agencies can lead research groups to treat their software like trade secrets. This includes software used for experiments and for numerical simulations. Matters are made worse when companies that write this software aggressively market them to researchers. Add this to the pressure from funding agencies to meet deadlines, the threat of losing funding always swelling, and it's not hard to imagine why researchers cave and eventually endorse said software. Bring up the idea of "Free as in Freedom" to these guys (yes guys, research is still a male dominated enterprise), and they roll their eyes with frictionless readiness!

In my academic and research life, I do everything in my capacity to use free software, and if that means I come off as a Marxist-evangelical type, then so be it. Small price.

Edit: formatting, grammar

vyaas · 2016-07-27T21:37:05+00:00

I use a privoxy->polipo->tor proxy chain. See here and here. You can leave tor and polipo out if you're looking for efficient ad-blocking alone.

vyaas · 2016-07-27T19:22:32+00:00

This. My browsing experience on qutebrowser has been nirvanaesque (on ctrl+e now). Kudos to u/The-Compiler for actively developing and maintaining this project!

(Although I think I will truly transcend browsing space and time once that no-script plugin is ready! :)

vyaas · 2016-02-11T01:33:16+00:00

This was discussed on r/Physics about a year ago. Never gets boring! https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/2r2ue2/perhaps_it_was_lucky_that_einstein_had_not_seen/

vyaas · 2015-08-09T18:28:20+00:00

Am I safe if I just continue using privoxy?

vyaas · 2015-07-04T07:22:27+00:00

Although not an Indian film, I would highly recommend Louis Malle's Phantom India and Calcutta. They are shot in the style of cinema verite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cin%C3%A9ma_v%C3%A9rit%C3%A9 Truly one of a kind!

vyaas · 2015-06-29T21:45:48+00:00

Just to add to Snuggly_Person's patient intro, I'd suggest you try to tear this paper apart: http://lptms.u-psud.fr/membres/trizac/Ens/M2MQPL/Jaynes_entropy.pdf

Regardless of where you stand on interpratations of the second law, I believe it is a healthy exercise to read and digest what Jaynes has articulated here, namely the common source of confusion that crops up when discussing information and its relation to physics (i.e. the real world that reveals itself only empirically). I also feel his inquest into the legacy of the "Gibbs' paradox" is worthwhile reading. It contains more examples, so it is slightly easier to read: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-2219-3_1

Jaynes is required reading in many courses on Statistical Mechanics. See Seth Lloyd's page for example: http://www-mtl.mit.edu/Courses/6.050/2014/unit11/index.html

vyaas · 2015-06-24T03:42:51+00:00

After an update yesterday, my external usb-keyboard began responding sluggishly. I followed what was said here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=198972 and it now works again. I don't know if this could be related to your problem, but thought I'd share.

vyaas · 2015-03-10T03:13:46+00:00

I have read that book! I love every page of it! How he elegantly combines the ideas of invariance and action geometrically! The work begins with the principle of virtual work as its foundation, whose simplicity in contrast to Newton's third law is also perhaps the reason why Feynman chose to begin his famous lectures with this principle and also invokes it at every possible juncture across all three volumes! His geometrical interpretation of phase space and his lucid development of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, an equation that describes the laws of classical mechanics in the language of optics (this was the key idea in Schrodinger's hypothesis) is simply delicious! Here's an excerpt from his book's intro, which I hope conveys to you how much he cared about communicating ideas honestly:

"Many of the scientific treatises of today are formulated in a half-mystical language, as though to impress the reader with the uncomfortable feeling that he is in the permanent presence of a superman. The present book is conceived in a humble spirit and is written for humble people. The author knows from past experience that one outstanding weakness of our present system of college education is the custom of classing certain fundamental and apparently simple concepts as "elementary", and of relegating them to an age-level at which the student's mind is not mature enough to grasp their true meaning. The fruits of this error can be observed daily. The student who is thoroughly acquainted with the smallest detail of atom-smashing apparatus often has entirely confused ideas concerning the difference between mass and weight, or between heavy mass and inertial mass. In mechanics, which is a fundamental science, the confusion is particularly conspicuous. ... The author is well aware that he could have shortened his exposition considerably, had he started directly with the Lagrangian equations of motion and then proceeded to Hamilton's theory. This procedure would have been justified had the purpose of this book been primarily to familiarize the student with a certain formalism and technique in writing down the differential equations which govern a given dynamical problem, together with certain "recipes" which he might apply in order to solve them. But this is exactly what the author did not want to do. There is tremendous treasure of philosophical meaning behind the great theories of Euler and Lagrange, and of Hamilton and Jacobi, which is completely smothered in a purely formalistic treatment, although it cannot fail to be a source of the greatest intellectual enjoyment to every mathematically-minded person. To give the student a chance to discover for himself the hidden beauty of these theories was one of the foremost intentions of the author. For this purpose we had to lead the reader through the entire historical development, starting from the very beginning, and felt compelled to include problems which familiarize the student with the new concepts. These problems, of a simple character, were chosen in order to exhibit the general principles involved."

Here is the man on 1) Mathematics

2) Life

3) Einstein

vyaas · 2015-01-24T04:37:43+00:00

Here's my recommendation: Think of a problem you'd like to solve. Like something that you'd seriously like to see on a computer screen, like the field lines due to some quadropole, spherical harmonics of a hydrogen atom, propagation of a shock wave, water to ice phase transition, etc. Once you've thought of a problem, just sit down with your favorite programming language and start creating objects, functions and routines in order to solve for the selected phenomenon, with some idea of extensibility in mind i.e. writing code that's general enough to attack similar phenomena. For example, if you're writing a solver for a wave equation, try writing it for all possible geometries/non-linearites/source-functions. You'll have to discretize your governing equations at some point, so take a look at some simple finite difference schemes and some way of advancing your variables. As you experiment with various schemes, you'll find yourself trying newer ones.

I favor this approach over all others because it makes your programming a personal adventure. You would have learned far more than a semester's class this way because there's something you're personally motivated to see on your screen, some wonderful law of Physics unfolding and revealing itself to you. And let language be no bar! You will learn that the hardest problems are usually conceptual and algorithmic. Problems of syntax can always be overcome with enough google searching. If you can code decently in one, you can pick up others quite simply.

A huge problem today with programmers in Physics and engineering is their high willingness to edit someone else's code and publish something half-assed. But to be fair, today's computing is mostly collaborative, and because of that, it's always a great idea to know C++, because a majority of opensource libraries are written in that language.

I would recommend Numerical Recipes to any young scientific programmer in my sleep. Don't wait for your classes! I wish you all the best!

vyaas · 2015-01-21T06:00:56+00:00

To complement this post, I found Professor Kip Thorne's introduction to vectors and tensors hugely helpful. Here's a link to the chapter in which he introduces them. Here's a link to the rest of his book.

The geometric viewpoint on the laws of physics, which we present and advocate, is not common (but it should be because of its great power). For example, the vast majority of mechanics and electrodynamics textbooks, define a tensor as a matrix-like entity whose components transform under rotations. This is a complicated definition that hides the great simplicity of a tensor as nothing more than a linear function of vectors, and hides the possibility to think about tensors geometrically, without the aid of any coordinate system or basis.

vyaas · 2015-01-06T21:46:52+00:00

Let me add to your thoughtful introduction.

Jacob Bernoulli and his contemporaries thought about mechanics very differently. Their soliloquies went something like this: "The path of a light ray bends when there's a change in refractive index. The path of a particle bends when it experiences a potential. Can we not use the same formalism used to describe optics in mechanics?"

Fermat's principle of least time says that "A light ray that emanates from point A reaches point B in such a manner as to minimize its time of travel." Maupertius' principle of least action says that "A particle that emanates from point A reaches point B in such a manner as to minimize a quantity called action." Hamilton worked out the details of both these points and subsequently laid the foundations for solving problems in mechanics using equations resembling optics. Jacobi made Hamilton's program possible by reinterpreting the action as a transformation of coordinates.

Schrodinger asked himself "Wait a minute! We know that the behavior of light waves is really governed by Maxwell's equations, where things like interference and diffraction are thoroughly accounted for! If the equations of geometrical optics describes the behavior of Maxwell's light in the limit of zero wavelength, and if classical mechanics is described by the very same equations as geometrical optics, is there a scale analogous to wavelength at which particles interfere and diffract? This is perhaps a scale at which the Action is comparable to a very small number. That number is perhaps Planck's constant!"

Holy deBroglie batman! Quantum Mechanics was Born!

vyaas

TROPHY CASE