wthomp | 1 year ago | on: Numpyro: Probabilistic programming with NumPy powered by Jax
wthomp's comments
wthomp | 1 year ago | on: New telescope images of Jupiter's moon Io rival those from spacecraft
I visited the Large binocular telescope just a month or two ago. A very impressive facility, and one can only imagine the image quality if they were captured using both mirrors coherently.
wthomp | 2 years ago | on: PHOLED Will Transform Displays
That doesn’t seem to match what I understood from the article.
At one point they say explicitly that it will enable brighter displays.
wthomp | 2 years ago | on: Extremely large telescopes at risk
My understanding is that the AO system for GMT is going to pose quite a challenge. A big topic of ongoing research is dealing with “petaling” where the separate primary mirrors in phase due to the atmosphere.
For combining the projects, it does seem like that may be the only option funding wise, but it’s hard to imagine what the resulting observatory would look like. Maybe it would have to be a completely new design?
wthomp | 2 years ago | on: Extremely large telescopes at risk
There’s a bit more to it than that. GMT is further along but its design has many compromises versus TMT. Also, a second ELT in the southern hemisphere is less useful than one in both Hemispheres.
The situation for TMT on Maunakea is definitely tricky, but it’s also a better site than either of GMT’s or EELTs.
wthomp | 2 years ago | on: A Harvard professor became the world’s leading alien hunter
Worth mentioning that essentially all professional astronomers / astrophysicists consider this person a grifter.
It’s amazing that he keeps getting so much press though, would love to learn his secret.
wthomp | 2 years ago | on: An arrowhead made of meteoritic iron from the late Bronze Age
Yes exactly. Which means it's extremely, extremely low.
Even though the probably of a meteorite hitting somewhere is high, the probability of hitting somewhere in particular is tiny.
wthomp | 2 years ago | on: ImPlot: Interactive plotting library, ImGui style
I’m using this from Julia and both the user and developer experience is great.
It’s much more limited than publication style plotting libraries but the instant 60fps reactivity is amazing.
wthomp | 2 years ago | on: LK-99: Team of Southeast University observed zero resistance below 110 K
#3 spot at atmospheric pressure
wthomp | 2 years ago | on: Makie, a modern and fast plotting library for Julia
Coming from matplotlib, I found Makie such a breath of fresh air. The API is just as (if not more) flexible but way more predictable. Their layout system in particular is amazing. I think it bundles it's own constraint engine?
Congrats on the new website!
PS. Thanks to the Makie team for the shoutout to my corner plot package in the ecosystem section!
wthomp | 2 years ago | on: Physicists produce neutrino images of Milky Way galaxy
As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is the first image of our galaxy in something other than light (radio, infrared, x rays, gamma rays are all photons).
wthomp | 2 years ago | on: The best place to drink is the emptiest bar in the city
Would you mind explaining this further? Since sound is literally pressure waves, I don't understand how reducing sound can still leave "sound pressure".
wthomp | 3 years ago | on: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it
This is not a “nature publication” in the common sense. It’s in their commentary section.
wthomp | 3 years ago | on: It is time to stop teaching frequentism to non-statisticians (2012)
This is true but the poster above doesn’t mean Monte Carlo integration. Rather, testing those methods on simulations from generative models.
wthomp | 3 years ago | on: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
Small correction, no one will be able to pay for time on JWST. But if you put in a proposal for time and it's accepted, they will pay you. That's to make sure there is sufficient funds available to properly make use of the data you proposed for.
wthomp | 3 years ago | on: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
If you were to fly into these nebula in some kind of spaceship they wouldn't be any brighter than they appear in the night sky from Earth. They would just look way way bigger.
The frustrating thing is that our eyes start to respond differently to colours when the light is really really faint.
So we would probably perceive them as a grayish green haze.
If the image was brightened artificiallythen we would see it as mostly red, with some browns and blues.
wthomp | 3 years ago | on: Running Julia bare-metal on an Arduino
This is really impressive, and a great write up. I’ve been following the work on static compiling Julia to x86 libraries from the GPUCompiler.jl folks but I didn’t expect to see Julia working on an Arduino any time soon.
With some kind of basic GC support (even if just using a bump allocator) it seems like a good fraction of the language could actually be available. Most tight loops hopefully don’t allocate so it would mostly just be necessary for creating initial arrays and mutable structs.
wthomp | 3 years ago | on: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy
As others have mentioned, this is similar to how the event horizon telescope works today!
However, there’s no free lunch. By using arrays of telescopes instead of a single filled dish/mirror, they are missing a lot of information. Imagine a telescope the size of the earth, but you only use light from a few dozen spots on the surface and let the rest fall through. This is why they had to do all that complicated image reconstruction processing to create the image shown in the papers.
wthomp | 3 years ago | on: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy
No, unfortunately those measurements have to be taken at the same time.
That said, as the Earth rotates the distance between any two pairs of antennas changes which can be used to add additional information to the images (those new pairs of measurements again have to be taken simultaneously).
From what I understand, this is less useful for looking at Sgr A* since the scene isn’t static and changes on a roughly 10 minute timescale.
wthomp | 3 years ago | on: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy
For those wondering if we could get sharper images with JWST, here’s the previously imaged black hole (same angular size as our own) compared to a single pixel from Hubble’s wide field camera 3:
https://twitter.com/alex_parker/status/1116070667068170240?s...
JWST will have smaller “pixels” but is in the same ballpark.
page 1
A little to my surprise, despite being a Julia fan, Turing really outperformed both the Python solutions. I think JAX should be competitive in raw speed, so it might come down to the maturity of the samplers we used.