jadero @ jadero @mander.xyz

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2 yr. ago

All great things start in a bar. Or coffee shop. Or in the shower. Or in a dream. But never in a meeting.

New word! Thanks.

I made a half-assed guess as to its meaning based on the fact that I've heard of an elite basketball player by that name. I got pretty close, according to urban dictionary.

All roads lead to PIE. Or is that from? Oh, and maybe not "all."

But seriously, I went through a linguistics phase in my reading and came away with the sense that Proto Indo European is a lot closer to us than it seems at first glance.

Gotta lock those cells, even when the sheet never leaves your control.

I used to teach Excel at an adult vocational college. When I moved into the corporate world, I quickly learned why the University of Hawaii's research found that well over half of spreadsheets have critical errors. Even the people treated as Excel experts were often clueless.

I'm not saying that spreadsheets should be banned from the workplace, but they definitely need to be very tightly controlled.

Oh, and always, always lock formula cells, even in sheets that never leave your control. :) If possible, make use of Excel's native data forms, too.

There word "sticks" is being used in the sense "adheres". So the "coo" doesn't bounce around in a series of reflections, but instead remains attached to the first surface it strikes.

And Canada, but we're really messed up. Most people I know across multiple generations use Fahrenheit for indoor temperature, cooking, and water you might swim in. Celsius is for outdoor air temperature, mostly, I think, because that's how weather is reported. There is a fair amount of variation, but I don't think I've heard anyone using Celsius for cooking.

What is this stop business? I have it on good authority that it's turtles all the way down.

(looks around)

I thought we did.

Yes, but it's important to remember that a much (most?) of that work was performed by those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of the church, or by clergy who had plenty of free time beyond their duties and no separate need to earn income for housing and food. In fact, one reason to enter the clergy was to gain access to the resources to pursue other activities.

The self-proclaimed experts really muddy the waters. As do those seen to be experts by virtue of their charm, charisma, fame, or actual expertise in bullshitting. Another issue is those who claim to be or are judged to be experts in one field by virtue of their legitimate expertise in another.

I think there are actual experts as long as we're willing to define the term in a way that doesn't confer wisdom or in relation to what remains unknowable. For me, a true expert is someone who knows more about something than the vast majority of people, is continually striving towards expertise and mastery, and can explain things to those with little or no expertise.

Also, I think expertise is a range, not an absolute. It's completely reasonable to accept the expertise of your local accountant without also thinking that they could be the CFO of a Fortune 500 company.

For myself, I try to embrace the unknowns as new adventures or ignore them as irrelevant to the task at hand. I don't know why there are so many joinery techniques in woodworking or how to choose the most appropriate for a particular situation, but I'm having fun learning. At the same time, joinery is irrelevant to many of my projects, where doing everything by eye with scraps on hand using nails and screws gets the job done quickly and effectively.

I also think there are better places to put this kind of money, including on projects that we are certain have obvious potential to change the world for the better.

What I was getting at was the very idea that we absolutely have to know what the return is before we start. Just because we know the potential return doesn't mean that it's not research (as in your fusion example), but just because we can't identify a return ahead of time doesn't mean there won't be one.

Also, I don't know if there have been any tangible benefits from the LHC. Precision manufacturing? Improvements in large-scale, multi-jurisdiction project management? Data analytics techniques? More efficient superconducting magnets? I don't know if those are actual side effects of the project and, if they are, I don't know that the LHC was the only way to get them.

Edit: or, like the quantum physics underlying our electronics, maybe we won't know for 50-100 years just how important that proof was.

Yes, with finite resources, we have to make choices. As long as there are some resources for people to just poke around, I'm good with whatever. If we're actually looking for some place to drop a few billion, I actually don't think another collider should be on the list, let alone at the top.

The problem as I see it is that "but what good is it" is used to limit pretty much all fundamental research.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any advance that didn't at some point depend on people just dicking around to see what they could see.

"What happens if we spin this stick really really fast against this other stick?"

"Cool! What happens if we put some dried moss around it?"

"That's nuts, man! Hey, I wonder what happens if we toss some of our leftovers in there?"

"C'mon over here, guys. You gotta taste this!"

At worst, a project like this keeps a lot of curious people in one place where we can make sure they don't cause harm with their explorations. At best, whole new industries are founded. Never forget that modern electronics would never have existed without Einstein and Bohr arguing over the behaviour of subatomic particles.

Say the actual construction cost is $100 billion over 10 years and operational costs are $1 billion a year. Compared to all the stupid and useless stuff we already spend money on, that's little more than pocket lint. We could extract that much from the spending of one military alliance and it would look like a rounding error. Hell, we could add one cent to the price of each litre of soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and bottled water and have money left over.

As a non-geologist living next to Lake Diefenbaker (the reservoir formed by damming the South Saskatchewan River), I also like geological history.

I have a standard reply for when I'm asked why we chose to move to this "treeless wasteland". "I look out at the flat horizon and see how the glaciers planed the earth the way a woodworker flattens a board. I look around me at the river breaks and see how the meltwater from retreating glaciers carved the earth away into shapes that defy imagination." I don't know accurate any of that is, but it fits my mental model of what I was taught in high school.

(What we call the river breaks are twisted and braided networks of coulees, some with sides so steep as to require mountaineering equipment. Most still run with meltwater in the spring.)

Is there a site that does a variety of energy comparisons

Yes! Thank you. It's always nice to see other perspectives.

When I'm figuring the buoyancy of a 20 litre pail or, alternatively, how much it'll weigh when filled with sand, 3 is easier to work in my head for off-the-cuff estimates so I know about how many pails I need.

That said, I do typically use the π button on my calculator when it comes time to actually execute on the project. :)

I get it now. I was taking exception to your characterization of 3 and 5 being equally inaccurate in the sense of how close they are to the actual true value, which, of course, can never be known, except in every more accurate approximations.

In that case, I guess we still have a difference of opinion. I think that using approximations that are closer to their true value are more useful in teaching, despite (and maybe because of) the greater difficulty. If the student is not yet ready for that level of difficulty, then perhaps a different problem should be presented.

To that end, I actually think that there are several things to teach. That PI is not 3 or 3.14 or any other decimal expansion. That 3 is close enough for most casual encounters outside school. That 3.14 is close enough for most engineering work. That 3.1416 is close enough for most scientific work. That 15 decimal places is close enough for rocket scientists. That 37 decimal places are enough to calculate the circumference of the universe to within the diameter of a hydrogen atom. (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/ is my reference for the last two items. The others are just wild-ass guesses.)

I would draw your attention to the difference between mathematics and reality. Although mathematics is extremely useful in modeling reality, it's important to remember that while all models are wrong, some are nonetheless useful.

Thus, a household gardener or storage tank owner or a builder of small boats can choose the appropriate diameter of hose, tank, or pontoon very effectively by rounding PI to 3 but cannot do so when "rounding" to 1 or 5. In these cases, it literally doesn't matter how many decimal points you use, because the difference between 3 and any arbitrary decimal expansion of PI will be too small to have concrete meaning in actual use.

Under the philosophy you are promoting, it would be impossible to act in the physical world whenever it throws an irrational number at us.

I don't know, but I suspect that there is a whole branch of mathematics, engineering, or philosophy that describes what kinds of simplifications and rounding are acceptable when choosing to act in the physical world.

The real world in which we act has a fuzziness about it. I think it's better to embrace it and find ways to work with that than to argue problems that literally have no numerical solution, at least when those arguments would have the effect of making it impossible to act.