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matt_j

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Given that his sister Joan was an accomplished scientist in her own right, and they got along well, I don't think your comment is accurate.

“During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.”

“No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.”

I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult.”

http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2017/04/richard-feynm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman

Carrying The Fire by Michael Collins is an excellent account of Apollo 11 from the perspective of the command module pilot. I've read it three times, it's a wonderful book, he's a very intelligent, capable and humble man.

The way I understand it, there is one EM field and photons of various frequencies travel in that field: radio, microwave, infra-red, visible, ultra-violet, x-ray, gamma.

We are awash with EM radiation of almost all frequencies from the universe. A little 5G probably isn't our biggest problem.

Besides, this article is more about electo-static forces, and how, when you're very small, these are much more significant than the gravitational force, which makes sense.

Same. My work is very flexible, we can take time throughout the day for an appointment or errand, and in return, we have a strong work ethic that ensures that things get done, which sometimes requires overtime or after hours.

It's nice to be treated as an adult and it goes both ways.

I'm in my 40s and still vibing on a mix of novel and nostalgia. I don't know what my secret is but I've never been in a position where discovering new music was difficult. I don't listen to much radio, but when I do, it's a community station with people that care about music. I don't use any streaming services. I have a large, physical music collection that I still add to, both CD and vinyl, supplemented by a digital collection from places like Bandcamp. I explore a bit on Youtube and Discogs, I read music zines and local whats ons, I take recommendations from friends, I go to gigs: local pubs, concerts, festivals. Music seems to come easily if I put myself in front of it.

I went to a gig last night and saw a great band I found a few months ago with two other new (to me) bands and came home with a head full of tunes, strengthened friendships, and a CD from the merch stand.

It's just part of my life and I give it some time each day. :)

This is debunked to some extent. Veritasium made a good video about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA

Personally I find a multi-pronged approach is necessary to really learn anything. Read it. Read it again. Visual guides are helpful. Work some examples. Make some mistakes, debug them, find the corner cases, write tests. Eventually when I've poked around the material for a while it starts to bed in.

Three months later it's forgotten, but when I learn it the next time I move a lot faster!

Seems an unpopular opinion but I thought EEAAO was pretty daft and I'm surprised at the reception it received and all the Oscars it won.

Now don't get me wrong, it's a fun flick and I'm genuinely glad for the three actors that won an Oscar (bless 'em), but it seemed like fan service from a waning institution trying to generate goodwill more than cinematic mastery from anyone involved.

The film is slightly better than a super bowl Pepsi commercial. There was nothing in this film that was any better than recent Marvel films, and none of them deserve awards for basic stories, basic dialogue and a lot of flashing lights and "multiverse".

We all love googly eyes, but that's not enough to carry a film.

Moral of the story: make friends with PC nerds.

I never had much time for consoles and I don’t feel like I missed out on much. Popular games come and go. The joy of doing whatever I can imagine with my PC is more than enough consolation.

The way I understand it, light from far away, very far away, is red-shifted because the universe is expanding at every point and the wavelength of the traveling light is stretched. Stretching the wavelength means light from the blue end of the spectrum moves closer to, or indeed, into the red end of the spectrum.

If you want to look very deep into the past, say, 13 billion years ago, any light from galaxies that old has traveled 13 billion light years PLUS however much the universe has expanded and will be red-shifted out of the visible spectrum, so you need an infra-red telescope to see it. Hence, JWST.

You simply can't see these things without using instruments that can detect the right light.

On top of that, everything in the universe emits light across a broad spectrum, above and below the visible spectrum. We can enhance our knowledge of these things; stars, planets, galaxies, etc by using instruments that can "see" infra-red, radio, x-ray, gamma ray and that is additional information on top of what our eyes can see in the visible spectrum.

Psytrance Guide 3 years ago

Underworld is usually closer to techno/tech-house than trance although I feel trying to fit Underworld into any genre is a disservice. They are masters of their own sound and a class act!

Psytrance Guide 3 years ago

I play psy-trance at a range of tempos, from dub stuff at 70-80bpm, through prog stuff around 110-130bpm, to more high energy stuff up at 140-150bpm.

The main reason for sticking to a tempo is because psy-trance, and (good) trance music in general is about the constant pulse. The goal is to put the listener in 'the zone' (a trance even :P), and then give them a bunch of ear candy in the mids and highs to keep their happy little brains occupied.

So for any given set DJs generally pick a tempo and stick to it and deliver a driving, consistent pulse, and everything else is just colouring in on top.

Spotify has a catalogue that appeals to people that like pop music. Bandcamp provides an outlet for artists that aren't part of the pop music spectrum. I'm deep into electronic music and Bandcamp is the _only_ place that some artists are even listed, and it's become an amazing space for artists that want to release limited press special edition records - pre-ordered by fans to cover the manufacturing price. Prior to this I acquired a few cool records via Kickstarter, but Bandcamp is preferable.

Furthermore, Spotify are well known for paying artists next to nothing. Bandcamp are well known for letting artists take the majority of the purchase price of their music.

Not to mention, listening to mp3s is for chumps!

Bandcamp is the best there is (for now) if you want to financially support the artists you like. I spend a lot of time in record stores (both physical and digital) but they are mostly extinct now. There's a few I still frequent: Juno, Boomkat, Hardwax among them, but the more the world turns to services like Spotify, the less room there is for real music stores.

It's super annoying how the internet kills everything that was good. Bullshit for the masses over quality service for people that care.

English is a marvellous language and there is often a specific word that conveys exactly the desired meaning, but instead we resort to saying “very good” when we mean brilliant, or “sad” when we should use morose.

I’m all for writers using whatever word is appropriate and if I need to use a dictionary then that’s a win for me, I learned a new word.

Use better words. Teach me. :)

I don't trust anyone to review a film, but I still read/watch reviews. Over the years I've learned to read between the lines a bit and I usually have a gut feeling for how a reviewer and the film in question 'match up'.

People that 'hate' art movies are usually wrong. People that 'love' popcorn movies are too. Art movies are nuanced and delicate, so hating it with a 1 star review is too broad of a brush to paint your opinion with. If you don't like art and connecting with humanity, don't watch art movies (peasant). Similarly, popcorn movies are trash (<3) and love is too strong a word. Have fun, be entertained, but if you love The Avengers with all 5 stars you are paper thin.

I speak strongly with a smile and fully accept that film is a subjective medium, open to interpretation, and you can go ahead and hate The Royal Tenenbaums if you want, and love The Avengers if you want, but I will take your review with a large grain of salt and you deserve to not to be taken too seriously.

I had a nerve conduction test on my arm, it was pretty neat! I didn't find it uncomfortable, just a bit of a tingle.

My issue was a combination of a previous shoulder injury and bad sleeping position and bad sitting at desk position (resting forearm on the edge) that would result in numbness in my hand and fingers.

I'm more conscious of how I sit and sleep now (as much as you can be "conscious" of how you sleep!) and I started indoor rock climbing which has really transformed my upper body in terms of arm, shoulder and back strength and mobility. Funny, I don't look any different, but I can hold onto and hang off things well good. :P

Teaching with AI 3 years ago

I mostly came to this conclusion in math classes at uni. Handwriting my notes was far superior (in terms of knowledge retained) to using my laptop. My recall was excellent. You could argue that writing math is hard in a text editor (due to the required symbols) but I think it was deeper than that. Writing on paper requires more mental focus than smashing keys, it takes longer and that feels good when you're digesting abstract concepts.

I don't write code on paper for (probably) obvious reasons, and I tend to write essays in a text editor although I also enjoy the act of writing on paper in that situation.

Teaching with AI 3 years ago

For me, and I assume others, the act of writing is an important part of the learning process. Writing on paper even more-so than typing on a keyboard.

Writing forces me to organize my thoughts, summarize, elaborate, reference other parts of the text, iterate until the pure essence is clear, remove redundancies, and this cements the concepts in my mind.

Merely reading, or worse, hearing, or worse copy/pasting something is only the first part of learning.

It's similar with programming but I would take it even further. I never really understand complicated code until I've written tests and run the debugger and been very close to it.

An AI chat bot is a powerful tool, but if you just use it to generate assignments you won't learn much. Inevitably it will be used both well and poorly and the results will be mixed.

Mock a result that says "everything is OK" and continue watching Netflix.

I jest. I don't like mocking database methods, they don't give me much confidence. I test the SQL against Postgres in a Docker container.

Gen-Z grew up in a world where the old, searchable internet was already dysfunctional and overrun with siloed apps. I think most of them don't know what they're missing. It's no big deal to do documentation in Discord for them, and I can even see a few pros (comments, chat, pins, multimedia, likes/emojis). At the very least, the format aligns with things that are already ingrained in their minds.

Personally, all of that can go to hell, just give me documentation generated from source on a static site and get out of my way.