6
points
jeffwass
Joined 4,312 karma
www.jeffwass.com
I’m currently writing a kids sci-fi novel : Jace and the Elysian Planes www.jeffwass.com/jace
- I see the opposite quote a lot.
Advertised “No Fee” currency conversions, but a HUGE spread built into the conversion rate that comes out to a massive fee.
- The “expected distance” is not what you think here.
For a binomial distribution of probability p and (1-p), after N steps the expectation value of right steps is Np.
The Variance is Np(1-p), so the standard deviation (or Root-Mean-Square) scales as Sqrt(N).
- Same. It’s a wonderful movie that can be thoroughly enjoyed by young and old alike!
- He was also brilliant as Michael “Meathead” Stivik in the phenomenal TV series “All in the Family”.
Amazing how many classics he worked on throughout his career.
- The first time after getting my driving license and having to find parking in the city, I was so jealous of George Jetson whose car collapses into a briefcase when he gets to work. Glad to see TV converging to reality.
- A few people I know had moved to houses on one side of the bridge for easy access to schools and jobs on the other side, and were hit hard by the closure.
Their commute times skyrocketed to go to the next Thames crossing.
- To be fair, this issue isn’t endemic only to big companies. I’ve seen similar even in academia, some people just know how to “play the game” and play it very well.
It really depends on the culture of where you are, which can even vary team by team in the same org.
- 3 points
- I don’t understand the seeming lack of regulation for flashing bike lights.
I don’t mean a simple “normal” flashing light, but the super bright ones that are like a camera flash strobe going off 2-3x per second which hurts your eyes and kills your night vision, making it hard to see anything including the actual cyclist.
- Title is a bit misleading - it's not pure germanium that superconducts here, it's germanium doped w/ Gallium atoms.
Superconducting germanium alloys have been known for decades, I used a Molybdenum/Germanium superconducting alloy in my PhD research 20 years ago, with much higher Tc.
The interesting aspect of this current experiment is the precise alignment of the Ga atoms into specific points of the Ge lattice, so preserving the crystalline structure order which leads to some interesting effects.
- 36 points
- The sheer irony of your unwarranted pedantic critique of the usage of “next” is that all HN threaded comments, including yours, have a “next” link in their headers which clearly does NOT refer to unwritten future comments.
Not sure why I bothered responding to a troll.
- 9 points
- Reminds me of Google Maps for the NES :
- 4 points
- I’ve learned all sorts of strange facts about eels by doing crossword puzzles. EEL is a super common crossword answer. If the clue references some aquatic creature and the answer is 3 letters long, very likely the answer is EEL.
- This is cool, my Dad has an old OSI (Ohio Scientific) computer circa 1978 that likely used this or similar version of BASIC. He fired it up a couple of years ago and it booted to the welcoming Micro-Soft message (I think it had a hyphen like that).
- I’m curious to know what your diet is like. Eg, if you are only eating meat, do you eat more bones and sinews than the usual omnivore to get enough “roughage” for digestion?
Eg, birds at a falconry can’t be fed just the usual bird “meat”, they need to have the skin and feathers attached which is essential for their digestive tract.
When I took quantum mechanics in grad school, I struggled through the weekly (and intense) homework sets. My TA was a hardass, I’d spend hours on some problem, several few pages of math work just for one problem, and make some dumb mistake in an integral somewhere, being off by a factor of 2 at the end and only getting 2 of 4 points.
It was painful, and I felt like a dumbass seeing the other kids regularly getting perfect scores.
Then the midterm came and I blew them all out of the water. I hadn’t realised they somehow had the solutions manual so just got perfect scores all along but clearly didn’t learn the material like I did.