I used to maintain an excel database along with an ecosystem of internal engineering tools in excel/vba. I worked in a vault, and one day I asked my isso if I could get python on some of the machines in my lab. A full 1.5 years later they got back to me that some security office was finally ready to consider my request and sent me a bunch of paperwork to fill out to justify why I needed python. And separate copies for each individual library I wanted to come with it. Needless to say I went on continuing to maintain my excel database and toolkit
YouTube. Straight up. When I learned to code my yt search history was a million different versions of "how to
<do thing>
in python" for months. I also really liked the "Computational methods for physics" textbook (you can find the pdf for free on cambridge website), but that book is written for an audience that knows near graduate math but starts praying if their advisor asks them to write a program
Rule of thumb; if the job asks you to pay a dime for anything before you've gotten your first paycheck, it's a scam. Even if they ask you to buy something and they'll pay you back
That might be the stupidest thought terminating cliché ive ever heard. The virtue of the tool absolutely does matter. I'm not out here trying to metaphorically mine iron with a pickaxe when we have metaphorical excavators available, and no amount of expertise will allow somebody to be more efficient with the pickaxe than any random novice with an excavator.
Old people and technology man. My advisor during my masters was an absolutely brilliant woman; she's one of the people who has been basically defining the field of data science since the early 90s. The first time I ever published with her, I sent my first draft and her response was "can you convert this to docx? I don't know how to work with tex." I still think she's one of the most brilliant people I've ever known but damn did it hurt to work on Microsoft word documents with her
There is no intrinsic meaning to life, we are a random chemical reaction that is really, really good at propagating itself, and we've evolved to be so good at pattern recognition that we psychologically need to see patterns like meaning where none exist.
My response to that state of affairs is that I get to define the point of life for myself. Some days the point is to advance human knowledge. Some days it's to protect people I care about. Some days it's smoking enough weed to make a cloud visible from space. None of those have to sound even remotely reasonable to you because they are things that I've seen as the point of my life at various points in the past. Yours can be different, but I bet if you spend some time analyzing your values and what you believe in as a person you can probably identify a few things you find important enough to consider the point of life, even if only temporarily
I don't think this is loss. I'm ready to eat crow if I'm proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it's loss
I know perogi are eastern European in origin, but the name feels like a Welsh prank to me. I've seen like 8 or 9 distinct correct ways to spell pierogi, none of which I'd pronounce correctly if I didnt already know how to pronounce the word pierogue. Your piroghi pizza fills me with the jealousy of a man who loves potato and cheese but the rage of a man who hates being made to consider the word pirogi.
Yep! To both I think? I remember back in like 2021 there was a paper where some team used lasers to induce radiation pressure in a beam of hydrogen and got it to cool down significantly, but I don't remember if they reached or were shooting for absolute 0. My napkin plan was thinking more along the lines of "optical vortex --> optical tweezers --> OAM molecules in the trajectory out of the way" rather than cooling them down. I'm pretty sure optical tweezers have only been achieved in close range lab conditions manipulating a very small number of particles, so the idea of doing it on enough particles to create a flight path and also at the distance you'd want to fire a projectile is probably unhinged
Napkin math plan: a really big fucking laser. Use aforementioned big fucking laser to generate optical vortices; with the specific intent of creating a brief localized vaccuum state along the desired trajectory. This will require R&D during building. Concept is similar to how lightning works; "ionize" (or in this case, vaccumize?) a path, then send the payload. From there add in whatever condenser you need to generate solid forms of the substance you want to chuck and some kind of mag lev style launch rails to accelerate it into the vaccuum path. Theoretically if you can create an effective enough vaccuum along the trajectory, you shouldn't have to worry about the payload being affected by drag heating in transit.
Possible? Probably not. Would the government give general atomics a few billion to try anyway? Probably
Ya know, I had a thought about this yesterday. The sound of fireworks isn't traumatic for me, but it's easier to tell people that as the reason I won't celebrate the 4th rather than telling them I'm deeply disgusted by our actions on both the global and domestic stage and I am ashamed to be an American, not proud. It's easy to say here on lemmy, but no amount of "being a hero" in the past will prevent the communities veterans tend to be part of from ostracizing you if you question the myth of American greatness.
You pretending it's unprecedented is privileged and incorrect. This the first time since the Japanese internments that white or white adjacent people have regularly suffered illegal search and seizure and been made to feel unsafe in public in the US. The person you responded to brought up plenty of precedent for stuff that's as bad or almost as bad that has been accepted treatment of non-white people in the states since it became a country. You don't get to accuse somebody of being disingenuous because they care about the plight of people you seem to be happy to marginalize by claiming and defending that this is unprecedented. The only thing unprecedented about the current state of affairs is that white people are suffering because of it too
I'm one of them, haha. My archives are nice and organized, but anything related to a current project I'm working on either lives on the desktop or lives at ~, depending on which machine I'm using. Automated output type files go into a structure (like any kind of processed or cleaned data), but figures? References? Drafts? FFA on the desktop. For whatever reason I just cannot function with an organized workspace
I used to maintain an excel database along with an ecosystem of internal engineering tools in excel/vba. I worked in a vault, and one day I asked my isso if I could get python on some of the machines in my lab. A full 1.5 years later they got back to me that some security office was finally ready to consider my request and sent me a bunch of paperwork to fill out to justify why I needed python. And separate copies for each individual library I wanted to come with it. Needless to say I went on continuing to maintain my excel database and toolkit