eigenman

Cars do go too fast through neighborhoods: one ran into a house and killed someone inside.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/1-person-killed-tesla-a...

Things may get more expensive, but if more Americans can live a middle class life even accounting for the inflation of consumer goods I think that is a good tradeoff.

There is a joke in applied mathematics that we’re like Taco Bell. We all use the same six ingredients, mixing them in different ways.

For myself, I’ve found several techniques I use over and over again. Some of this is a “when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” But fundamentally there are only a handful of ideas. One professor of mine once said the only groundbreaking result in the past few decades was compressive sensing.

When I was working with NREL back in 2017, they were thinking about coordinating water heater electricity use with a “smart grid.” Each device attached to the smart grid would measure the electricity spot price and would “store” energy to minimize cost. At the time the goal was to reduce peak load on the grid, but the same ingredients to maximize power use from intermittent power sources.

For example, see https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/82315.pdf

If you want to start cutting money from the budget, cut the things that are the: defense spending. There is just so much waste defense procurement.

“Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That’s why I shit on company time.”

I concur. As a postdoc for many years adjacent to this work, I was similarly unimpressed.

The best part about PINNs is that since there are so many parameters to tune, you can get several papers out of the same problem. Then these researchers get more publications, hence better job prospects, and go on to promote PINNs even more. Eventually they’ll move on, but not before having sucked the air out of more promising research directions.

—a jaded academic

I taught numerical linear algebra in grad school and was really frustrated that even the applied math department took so long to build up to solving linear systems and eigen-decompsotions. The ordering of the material in the textbook is great, focusing on algorithms and decompositions.

“Once you have their money, you never give it back.” First Rule of Acquisition.

The first space shuttle prototype (Enterprise) started construction in 1974. The first shuttle launched in 1981. To the best of my knowledge, there were no major upgrades to the design over its career, save avionics. So even though the space shuttle was “serious space development,” it’s been a long time since a new human rated vehicle has been designed.

It would be great if that tool existed, but it doesn’t seem to right now. I can appreciate the instinct to improve packaging, but from an occasional Python developer’s perspective things are getting worse. I published a few packages before the pandemic that had compiled extensions. I tried to do the same at my new job and got so lost in the new tools, I eventually just gave up.

One of Python’s great strengths is the belief there should be one, obvious right way to things. This lack of unity in the packing environment is ruining my zen.

As someone who works in numerical optimization, this is a dirty little secret of our profession. The optimization algorithms in the literature are great at finding local minima, but often are very sensitive to the initialization as to how small the objective is. Good heuristics for initialization are thus critical for finding a good (small objective) minimizer. Sometimes this gets to the point where the local optimization algorithm does a trivial refinement of the heuristic’s solution.

Once I was working on a government funded small business grant trying to do something that was mathematically impossible (and literally the first example of intractability in textbooks of the field). The only goal was for the company to collect overhead.

(Queue Rick and Morty butter getting robot meme.)

What is my purpose?

To collect overhead.

Oh my god.

Many of the algorithms in BLAS are not easily parallelized. For example, a QR factorization an inherently sequential algorithm. Optimizing BLAS performance comes mainly from rewriting the sequential algorithm into larger blocks so as to efficiently access memory. As Jim Demmel is fond of saying, floating point optimizations are cheap, memory movement is expensive.

But Metafilter’s fee is only one time; not annual like X is proposing.

This is a nice exposition, but it would have been more clear if they laid out the difference between inertial and gravitational masses. So far, these two varieties of mass are equivalent in all our observations, but they need not be so. Negative inertial mass is pretty weird, as the examples illustrate; but negative gravitational mass (i.e., normal and negative mass repel according to inverse square law) would be something exciting to observe.

See, e.g., https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/8616

For reference, a typical adjunct (non tenure track instructor) will make $5000 per course per semester with no benefits. Tenured and tenure track faculty in STEM are typically paid around $60-120k per year with benefits and will teach, at most, six courses a year.

I've adapted the same work flow as well. It's really nice to have one script that generates data (often taking a few minutes or hours) and then another (in TeX) that configures display. That way when I recycle plots from papers into slides for a talk, I can reconfigure these easily.

A good place to start might be Bret Devereaux, who regularly appears on the front page here

https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

TL;DR it depends on what you mean by “Rome Fell”

Only on a short term basis. As the snow is melting, this creates a large number of small, shallow ponds where mosquitoes can breed without being eaten by fish. As the year progresses, these ponds dry up, reducing habitat to those permanent lakes which likely have fish present that predate the water part of the mosquito lifecycle. Moreover, there is a lag introduced by the predator-prey dynamics, in particular short lived species like dragonflies and mosquito hawks that predate the flying stage. Thus, it can take a few weeks for these predators to start reducing the number of mosquitoes.

Source: I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and I have been swarmed by mosquitoes on several occasions. Mosquitoes were particularly bad in Yosemite in late June and Washington in early August; mosquitoes are finally letting up now that theses processes are taking place. Let me just say mosquitoes make the most of that interval before predators dominate.

There’s plenty of precedent for corruption with respect to tax incentives, see, e.g., what Foxconn did in Wisconsin:

https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_in_Wisconsin?wprov=sft...

...but it will almost certainly hurt the taxpayers as a whole.

I would be interested in seeing how different branding terms evolve in the literature; e.g., "machine learning" vs "artificial intelligence" vs "neural net" or "surrogate model" vs "digital twin" vs "response surface". There a number of terms of art that have substantial overlap, but which term ends up being used depends on the audience, which often includes grant providers. I suspect the popularity of these terms evolves according to what terms appeal the most to funding agencies.

I'd also add C. T. Kelley's "Iterative Methods for Optimization" for more non convex theory. Nemirovski also has a variety of books and course notes that are available, but I haven't spent as much time with them.

I agree with thxg, there are few undergraduate textbooks that I've liked.

Most police departments have internal affairs departments, but these are largely toothless. I would not expect a national organization to perform much better. The incentives simply are not aligned: it is easy to see a politician leaning on the department saying "this will make me look bad, make it go away."

I think what would be more powerful would be to empower citizens to bring criminal cases against police offers acting in their official capacity. Then at least we could be assured that the prosecutors are motivated to win the case for their clients.

I frankly blame funding institutions like the NIH and the NSF for this situation. They readily fund lots of cheap graduate students rather than pay for experienced techs. This leads to the glut of PhDs even in fields where there are jobs outside of the academy. Too many of them (myself included) think we can make it in the system, having been sheltered by our supervisors and who themselves may have an outdated notion of what it takes to succeed. So like people who want to be movie stars there are too many for too few jobs. Although we never had a formal union, when administrative jobs were filled by late-career academics it sheltered us from market forces. Now with the corporate-minded boards and professional administrators that shelter has been removed leading to the “cost saving” adjuncts.

There are many perverse incentives in this system, but one that tends to be overlooked is the incentive for faculty to publish in predatory journals. It's not that most want to publish there, but when even 3rd tier schools require their faculty to publish a certain number of articles a year under pain of not making tenure or an increased teaching load, submitting work to an undiscriminating journal is the easiest way to check that box.

I would also strongly recommend "Triumph of the Nerds." I think it is invaluable because it gives an inside perspective on the tech industry using interviews of people who were actually leading the change: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, Dan Bricklin (of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet), etc.

I've been using a hotspot from the Calyx Institute https://www.calyxinstitute.org/ as my sole internet connection for the past year and a half. It's a nonprofit which offers an "unlimited" hotspot on the Sprint network for $500/year. I get 16.3Mbps down and 3.96Mbps up (per Google) and streaming video works just fine. You might want to check that out instead.

Mathematians (such as myself) don’t look down on intuition. It is the only way to construct a map through a complex proof.

However what you may have picked up on is we disstain people who insist they have a brilliant idea for which someone should prove they are right. That’s like saying a car engine consists of cyclinders and piston; someone else just needs to do the work to put the pieces together.