eaq's comments

> Therefore, we’re asking everyone, including Jason and me, to refrain from using our company Basecamp or HEY to discuss societal politics at work effective immediately.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/basecamp-s-new-etiquette-regarding...

The system prompts for various Claude models are publicly documented by anthropic: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts

For local use, this Python library can generate SVGs with QR codes: https://github.com/lincolnloop/python-qrcode

The astral team is definitely doing great work, and it's wonderful that these tools are permissively licensed, but what happens if astral doesn't work out as a business?

One technique that is straightforward to understand is that folks have done "time-slide" analyses for many years - i.e. offsetting one detector's data in time - to understand what the "baseline" rate of correlations is in data streams where there is no possible physical origin.

Naturally, much more statistical analysis has been done to ground the claims of "detection"; beyond detailed academic publications, LIGO and others have been producing layperson-accessible science summaries for years/decades that address these and other questions.

To those focusing on the URL’s TLD rather than the content:

> This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Counterpoint: heroin

If you got a fever tomorrow, would that be statistically insignificant?

The paper describing the event is available to the public at https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P170104/public

The instrument data of this event is also available to the public at https://losc.ligo.org/events/GW170104/

While there are many compact binary systems in the universe continuously emitting gravitational waves for a very long time, LIGO is only able to detect the most violent waves emitted by the final coalescence and merger. So, on the astrophysical side, there is some joint probability given by how common these systems are, and how likely they are to merge in a given time frame. (Space based observatories like LISA would be able to see the long-lived inspiral waves though.)

On the instrumental side, we've only just reached the sensitivity levels to make any detections in the first place, so it's not surprising that we're not getting a huge number of events (otherwise the previous generation of detectors would've seen something). In addition, each individual observatory has its own "antenna pattern", making us less less sensitive to certain sky locations. This will improve as VIRGO, KAGRA, and LIGO-India come online in the future.

Thanks for the links. I find it unfortunate that often in science (and especially with the LIGO data) much is written about what could possibly be lurking in the data but isn't actually favored over our current understanding.

This creates more interest, but can obfuscate what the real situation in the field is. In this case, while Gravastars are certainly something many scientists actively do and should consider, there is no real evidence from the LIGO data that favors the hypothesis of "we are in a universe that lacks causality" over the observation of the merger of two Kerr black holes.

> 2/3 LIGO detections imply one of the merging pair of black holes should be a naked singularity.

Where did you get this impression? All of the LIGO results are consistent with "standard" GR black holes whose event horizons merge.

I like the table that 18F uses to distinguish between the federal pay scale levels[0]. I.e. Comparisons like

> Your supervisor reviews your work from an overall standpoint to ensure its effectiveness in meeting requirements

Vs.

> The results of your work are considered technically authoritative and can be used to establish best practices

0: https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/pay-grades/

Just a heads up: the authors of the paper this article is talking about are not part of the LIGO collaboration. They ran their own analysis on the publicly available data.

At least in science/engineering: not really. Faculty positions are saturated, only one in three PhDs will get hired as an assistant professor, let alone receive tenure. One could argue that the number of graduate students is hugely inflated, since they're such cheap labor.

What? All of my fellowships/assistantships as a PhD student have always been considered taxable income.

I'm not so surprised that there are no GR deviations in these early days of detections that are just becoming significant over the instrument noise.

GW physicists are hard at work on the future generations of GW detectors... In 50 years, a signal like GW150914 might have an SNR of >1000, so we'll see all kinds of detail that may hold more information than what we've seen so far.

The waveforms are predicted by our knowledge of general relativity; specifically what the gravitational wave profile would be for two objects of certain masses spiraling into each other.

A semi-hand-wavy way we know that the objects in this particular inspired are black holes is that for them to be orbiting each other this fast, they must be very close. For them to be this close, they must be very small. Together, this implied the objects have a certain size which is smaller than their Schwarzschild radius, which means they are probably black holes.

For this particular event, see https://losc.ligo.org/events/GW151226/, near the bottom of the page

Data and audio files relevant to this event are available to the public at https://losc.ligo.org/events/GW151226/

There are also Jupyter tutorials on processing GW signals at https://losc.ligo.org/tutorials/