Comments for Physicist Amok

Comment on Against the Copenhagen Interpretation by George Hacken

George Hacken — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 11:50:03 +0000

Discovered your site this morning, upon having ‘googled’ the phrase, “damnation by faint praise” — for purposes of confirming or refuting Shakespeare as its source. (I’m suitably embarrassed by my lack of culture, etc, etc. For completeness’s sake, I’ll state that my ‘final purpose’ is to use that phrase in a quite positive review of Graham Hutton’s ‘Programming in Haskell.’) There is much that Alfred O’Rahilly (Electromagnetics, 1938) is wrong about, including his theory of E&M; however, he’s dead right when he says, “Physics cannot solve philosophical problems.” Hear, hear. You’re right about Copenhagen. I felt quite cheated when, almost 45 years ago, the very smart (late) Professor Gerald Feinberg overloaded the Advanced QM final with Copenhagen-type and EPR-paradox philosophical questions. And here I wanted to come to grips with calculating renormalization & the Lamb shift. I hope not to sound as if I’m slouching toward Philipp Lenard, whose motive was not better physics, and whose diatribe Jack Steinberger asked us to translate as one of two foreign-language requirements for the PhD.

Thanks for some great ‘reads,’ and sorry for my exercise of Proustian tendencies.

– George

Comment on An observation on accumulation points by John A

John A — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 05:54:45 +0000

You’ll be pleased to know that categories, blogrolls and links are back (the update to Wordpress MU wasn’t as smooth as I would like).

Tags are now available for your posts, to make searching on specific topics for your reader(s) a lot easier. The line on where to insert them is just below the text field where you enter the post itself in the admin console.

Comment on BIO2010 (Part 3) by Organic Chemistry

Organic Chemistry — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:26:08 +0000

I would emphisize the importance of organic chemistry in molecular biology. Making sense of biological molecules and their in vivo reactions is much easier with a strong foundation in organic chemistry

Comment on Hidden costs in NIH grants by John A

John A — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 08:59:06 +0000

Jeebus. No wonder academics are fixated by grant applications in climate science.

Comment on Encapsulated experience by madhadron

madhadron — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:11:09 +0000

Actually, I find git very easy to use. They’ve apparently come a long way in the last year.

But I agree with Linus that any system which makes branching difficult is essentially useless. I have to have various branches and versions available and maintainable. For some things, we need a stable version with no whistles. Someone may be collaborating in developing a new feature. I have rewrites of parts of the code going on elsewhere. If I can’t easily isolate these things in branches, I am in deep trouble. I remember being so. It’s why I need source code control.

Comment on Encapsulated experience by RobBlake

RobBlake — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:20:02 +0000

I looked into switching version control software awhile ago. There are two main flavors: centralized and distributed.

Centralized: A good fit if less than 5 people are collaborating on code, or if no one ever wants to branch the code.

subversion is the winner here, especially since you can team it up with a Trac wiki and drill down into your repository history

Distributed: Allows for infinite numbers of branches. Scales better than centralized. A bit less support, sometimes harder to use.

darcs - Really nice, beautiful theoretically, but checking in code is strange and the algorithm has a bug that sometimes requires an exponetial search in the patch space.

git - Alpha/Beta software when I was evaluating it, perhaps it’s stabalized?

mercurial - I have friends that swear by this program. It’s supposed to be the easiest to use of the distributed programs.

Comment on First impressions of Scala by madhadron

madhadron — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:38:35 +0000

Thanks for pointing that out. I hadn’t noticed it in the documentation.

Comment on First impressions of Scala by Henry Ware

Henry Ware — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:12:30 +0000

Scala’s case classes do detect total functions in the cases where it is possible to do so:

sealed abstract class Foo{}
case class Left extends Foo{}
case class Right extends Foo{}

def left(foo:Foo)=foo match{
case l:Left => 2
}
Quick.scala:7: warning: match is not exhaustive

This does not work for non-sealed classes– where additional cases may not be known at compile time– or for cases where unapply is used.

Comment on James Watson by madhadron

madhadron — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:47:24 +0000

For the error functions in Mathematica, see MathWorld’s erf entry. Unfortunately, there’s a wee problem: not having an email address, I can’t send you details.

Basically, all that post did was take Larry Summer’s proposal about variance in Gaussian distributions with equal means seriously, and showed that for any sizable minority, such a model doesn’t even come close to explaining the variation. The error function at , (usually denoted ) is the integral of the Gaussian from to .

Comment on James Watson by cc

cc — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:58:37 +0000

Very true.