chuckleMuscle
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10 months ago
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on: Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria
chuckleMuscle
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2 years ago
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on: The Piccadilly line’s new air conditioned trains
Wasn't taking traffic off the central line a motivation from the start for Cross rail? This might be another reason why TFL is prioritising other lines over the central.
chuckleMuscle
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4 years ago
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on: Heavily mutated coronavirus variant puts scientists on alert
In my field nature papers have a reputation for employing a fair amount of poetic licence. Have no idea how universal this is .
chuckleMuscle
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4 years ago
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on: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89
This is true in principle, but in practice my experience is you have to have an extraordinarily good CV to get funding without a masters degree. Natural science bias in my friendship group though.
That said, a masters degree in the UK is much less of an undertaking than many other countries. Level of independent research in my "combined" masters (4 yr course, usually taken as 1st degree), pales in comparison to what colleagues in mainland Europe had to do.
chuckleMuscle
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4 years ago
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on: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
chuckleMuscle
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5 years ago
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on: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
This as a fairly recent occurrence in my research group. It’s often quite tedious because you don’t want to waste the money and it’s never clear if there’s going to be a period where we’re short on cash at some point in the future. most of it’s spent on boring but expensive things to be used down the line. Would be far better if funding wasn’t quite so cyclical!
chuckleMuscle
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5 years ago
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on: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)
I would say that when I started my PhD (aged 22) I didn't think about career prospects in the way I do now. I'm not complaining about my situation -- I love my job.
I suppose my point is that people know what the job market is like in abstract from the beginning, appreciating the actuality of it is something which requires more maturity than is present in many (most?) PhD applicants.
chuckleMuscle
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5 years ago
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on: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)
By contrast I work in a field (experimental plasma physics) where there are relatively few industrial opportunities. For grad students in my field who wish to carry on working in science once they graduate, there are few options outside of academia.
chuckleMuscle
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5 years ago
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on: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
If you assume that accelerator technology remains the same then you do of course have to keep making your accelerators bigger. There are a fairly large number of people working on plasma accelerators which are more compact because they support a greater accelerating potential. The AWAKE experiment [1] is an example of such a project.
As an aside, I think this is a great example of a role which fundamental science plays in society: It can facilitate step changes in technological progress.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWAKE
chuckleMuscle
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5 years ago
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on: The Physics of Space War: How Orbital Dynamics Constrain Engagements [pdf]
I'm curious what the motivation for putting this report together was. Some ideas:
- Create interest in company to aid recruitment
- For fun
- Client paid them to do this (seems unlikely)
Any thoughts?
chuckleMuscle
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5 years ago
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on: Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera
A person I with used to work for the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment. Apparently their former employer’s preferred method of disabling the camera on a MacBook was to break the lens using a nail and hammer...
chuckleMuscle
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6 years ago
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on: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework
Very different use-cases. All the other languages you've mentioned are great for statistical analysis and plotting but are quite slow - for R and Python by virtue of being interpreted rather than compiled. I dont know about the others.
Fortran is often used in academia for intensive number crunching and parallelized code to run on computing clusters with 10s or 100s of cores. I work with some people who run hydrodynamics sims using a code written in FORTRAN. Their workflow is to pull data from these sims into Python scripts for subsequent analysis. It's just a different tool for a different job.
People talk about C++ and FORTRAN being competitors, and there the difference might have something to do with familiarity.
chuckleMuscle
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6 years ago
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on: Rapatronic Camera
I use one of these [1] for work. The software which comes with it asks you to specify an fps when setting up an exposure. Typing in 66 Mfps always feels a bit dumb!
[1] - invisiblevision.com/products/ultra-high-speed-framing/
chuckleMuscle
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8 years ago
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on: Pauling, scientific posters on the go
Personally I just put together a PowerPoint presentation and stick that up (as many A4 pages!). That seems to work better than the standard wall of text on one massive piece of paper, but can be seen as low effort by some people.
