Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

Posts

5

Comments

453

Joined

2 yr. ago

Programmer? Nah, programmers have to deliver.

If they have a thousand years of experience promising any wish granted, but no ability to follow through on that promise? They'd be wasted as a programmer. They should be made executive leadership. CTO at least. Maybe CEO.

Although maybe they'd make more by handling investor relations on contract -- e.g. paid a % by seed or Series A investors to handle fundraising in later rounds. Private equity is pretty screwed up these days :(

Godot is so cool. I use its UDP networking to make a UI to control robots over WiFi, and I get a single code base for Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Not too awful to learn too.

Oh yeah, me too :)

The datasheets for AVR microcontrollers are probably my favorite. Browsing through them and imagining all the things I could create is a good way to lose a couple of hours :D

I guess the short answer is I create my own content, at home. Creating good content is enjoyable, but hard work, so it certainly fills up time. I don't post it to YouTube.

I have some talent at writing, but mostly enjoy coding and electronic design (I order the parts delivered to my home). Putting it together for public consumption (even if I don't release it) made me learn new things I wouldn't have otherwise -- at least photography.

Occasionally I'll play video games, watch shows, or read too. More often I'll study new topics to expand the scope of what I can create. I can't stand YouTube content anymore either. I limit social media time by not installing any social media on my phone. So if I want to sit down at my desk and assist people with their projects online for an hour, it's a conscious decision.

Those are some of the habits I've found useful in controlling my consumption of mass culture and social media. I don't consider them inherently bad things, I just don't want to spend more than 2 hours a day on them because they get tired and stale.

Yes -- I buy MP3 player modules and make them into things like (otherwise mechanical) music boxes that support multiple songs.

I've also made little boxes that you can plug a headphone in, and press a button to play a single recording repeatedly. This is so a loved one can record a sound clip for someone on the autistic spectrum to play when they are feeling unwell, e.g. a song or just kind words. It has just one large tactile ON switch, and integrated battery rechargeable by USB-C. A phone can work for this too, but many don't have headphone jacks anymore, and the touchscreen is hard to use sometimes -- when things get difficult they may lose some manual dexterity and find the bright screen aggravating (this one was a special request).

Finally, an MP3 player plus an amp is a pretty cheap way to make automated public address systems, and robot horns. I'm partial to the horn noise the big alien machines make in the War of the Worlds film.

Also makes a great doorbell.

Hm, sound like abuse of power to me. I'd wish for the genie to lose the ability to grant wishes. It needs to be cursed though, so I'd have to help with that.

Since it can still offer wishes, just not grant them... I'd help it learn to code. It could have a bright future as the CTO of a tech startup in the next hype cycle. I would not invest.

I wonder how many times this has already happened.

I/O error.

'Not too hard' is a bit of a spectrum I guess ;)

I mean yeah, in principle I could cram textbooks for a few months (I know EE and SE pretty well, but particle physics only very basic stuff), order parts made at the factories I know, and would probably succeed eventually. More realistically I'd have to hire a university prof as a consultant to save time.

What I am really unable to construct is a powerpoint presentation that justifies that expense and labor to management :P

Especially in a cost-driven market (my company is in Vietnam). Often the parts for these things are export-controlled too, that can be a real pain. I've gotten irate phone calls from the US DoD before over fairly innocent parts orders -- it's not super fun. I recall it was some generic diode, I must have stumbled on something with a military application I wasn't aware of. The compliance paperwork ended up costing me hundreds of dollars for 20$ in parts, too.

Anyway, if it was something I could just tack on to ongoing research projects, I could maybe get away with it as a marketing expense. It's for a STEM program. It's hard enough to convince management to take the risk on a nuclear & quantum module as-is! I can mostly get away with it because the locally-manufactured beta-detectors cost like 20$ per classroom.

Yeah, that's going to be too hard. I only have two SiPMs (besides the current detector) and they are expensive. I figured I could maybe rely on the gamma from the annihilation energy being a quite different energy than the gammas from the more common electron-capture.

However you raise a good point that that would not be a very good demonstration of positron annihilation at all -- just evidence that it's not the other 2 decay modes (and it would take ages to collect that evidence besides). Ah well. Got plenty of other science I can do instead.

Probably I'll tackle something easier like checking for radon decay products in petrol.

Bananas are not typically very high on the danger scale except in exotic (and universally embarrassing) circumstances.

In fact, that's another thing we could use bananas for scale with. Probably driving to work is equivalent to several kilobananas worth of danger daily :)

Anyway, I think the positron should be about 44keV if that helps you calibrate your magnets. The typical banana should produce something on the order of a positron every 10 seconds (although I used much rounding for the sake of brevity). Most commercial positron sources e.g. used in hospital PET scanners, are many times stronger than that!

Nice -- you wouldn't happen to have any ideas on how to differentiate positron annihilation, from the continuous distribution of β− energies caused by the more common decay mode, using only a PIN photodiode? I'm a bit stumped on this point and suspect it's not possible. I probably need to do gamma spectroscopy but would really rather not.

So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale...

Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the 'banana-equivalent-dose', which is about 0.1 microsieverts.

My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it's also an antimatter source.

Truly a remarkable and versatile fruit.

Well, if it's annoying enough, we would just... stop using it, I guess. That does put some limit on how much advertising they can shove down our engagement holes. So the ad-blockers could force them to be so obnoxious that they ostracize their user base, at least in principle :D

The ads are already aggressive enough that I won't use it to host video (I'd rather just pay more and host it myself), and only use it to view content when I have no other option (e.g. reviewing a colleague's work that they posted there for some reason). The youtube ads we get in VN are also quite loud and obnoxious, to be fair :D

In principle, I'd be willing to pay them for ad-free content, but frankly I don't find the content or suggestion algorithm are useful enough for me to spend any time there. Other activities are just more interesting to me.

As a mercenary science hermit, I approve.

I suppose wheeled boats are just... cars with sails? Sailcars? Wind chariots?

Hm, one thing I didn't think about was magma, if the variations are not so small. Going to have more volcanic eruptions, as fluids get pressed out of high-gravity regions and into low-gravity ones (creating big mountains that grow and tumble into the high gravity wells like some sort of horizontal convection?). Earthquakes too, as the high gravity regions sink and the low gravity ones rise creating shear force. I bet the planet would be more "lumpy" than your run-of-the-mill oblong spheroid. I wonder what continental drift would be like?

With that much irregular magma flow, I bet the magnetic field would be weird if it could sustain one at all. Maybe as 'cells' where the eruptions occur in low gravity regions, then gets pulled into high gravity regions where it compresses, heats due to radioactive decay, melts and is pushed back out into low-gravity regions. So maybe you'd have 'local north' for the cell? Or a very weak magnetic field overall (yay radiation)? I don't really know on this point.

Oh and exceptionally high-precision clocks won't be useful except locally, because of the effect of gravity on spacetime, but that doesn't seem so bad. Low precision clocks based on pendulums won't be useful at all! Spring escapements should be fine though.

Maybe it would be better to live underwater?

Wow all of that, and home ownership still seems more accessible there than here. I bet real estate prices are a bargain!

Well if we are going for science...

Giant constructions will have a lot of wear and tear under varying gravity. On top of that, high winds and frequent storms are likely to weather geographical features a lot, making them more flat. In a fantasy world, you can just magic things away, so that's fine :)

I don't know about you, but I would find constant high winds fairly terrifying for air travel. Perhaps they are high enough to permit wheeled sailboats on land? That would be creative!

Instead of wind mills, you could have gravity mills. Pump water into a higher-altitude reservoir on low-gravity days, and let it flow down -- turning a turbine -- on high gravity days. At least electricity would be cheap.

Or if it varies by region, pump water horizontally (or let it flow slightly downward) from a high gravity region to a low one. Then pump the water upwards there, then horizontally again to the high gravity region. Then let it fall down to turn a turbine that runs all the pumps -- perpetual motion (ish)!

Predicting tides becomes hard. Everything is going to be really windy all the time, as the atmosphere expands in low-gravity regions and contracts in high gravity ones. This makes tall buildings impractical, as they would also have to be built for some maximum gravity rating on top of the constant gravity storms.

The oceans would be weird, and violent. Hurricanes might get far more powerful than what we deal with, if the right gravity conditions occur.

For any sort of civilization to emerge, gravity would have to change/vary really slowly. I don't even want to think of orbits. Kerbal Space Program would be like, really hard in that universe.

An Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester is a device that lets you test whether a light-sensitive bomb is a dud or not at arbitrary precision, without blowing it up. It is an example of interaction-free measurement.

The method does not really have any practical uses so far, although it has been demonstrated experimentally.

I think a key observation in my childhood, was that adults don't generally know what's best, or right, or even what's true. Intentions mattered more than some arbitrary 'correct' behavior. I figure all children work this out at some level, faster than we're willing to acknowledge :D

So I guess yeah, it is a bit weird, but that doesn't make it bad. Maybe the best we can do is suggest parents hold their children's best interests at heart, and do what's best for their specific situation.

I'm pretty sure we farm sturgeon here in Vietnam. Mostly for the caviar, but I do see the live fish for sale in the supermarket pretty often.

I don't know what your definition of ethics or culinary excellence are exactly, but hope maybe the above will be useful to you somehow.