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BaryonBundle

47 karma · joined February 17, 2014

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BaryonBundle··on Iron Is the New Cholesterol?
To complicate matters, not all iron should be considered equal per units mass, some forms of iron are considerably more bio-available, and in general the forms provided as supplement on cereals in are on the low end of bio-availability.
BaryonBundle··on New book suggests Arthur Conan Doyle based Moriarty on George Boole
I believe this to be a reference to a quote from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
BaryonBundle··on Learn Physics by Programming in Haskell
And the previous HN discussion on this exact topic had some good notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003898
BaryonBundle··on The State of JavaScript 2017
Angular 4/5 is simply the continuation of Angular 2, so it's more like 2/4/5. The Angular router had been up to a major version 3 so they skipped Angular 3 as a whole in the interest of keeping all of the parts of Angular in version sync.

Starting with the latest version of Angular is generally the best idea, though you may be tied to earlier versions depending on what other modules you want to use. For example, the npm version of ng-bootstrap is still tied to Angular 4 (though one can easily build one that does from the github repo). I would recommend starting with ng-cli as most (older) books will start you off with some other build system (e.g., system-js, an older webpack plugin).

BaryonBundle··on Magic mushrooms found to lift severe depression in clinical trial
Exactly that, though, the placebo effect of interest would only be induced on people who haven't tripped.

That aside, and of course accepting that states induced by psilocybin and other substances are unobtainable by any other means, you are still nowhere near saying that these same substances can _reliably_ be used to treat depression. Furthermore, this course of treatment also needs to _reliably_ not make depression worse or trigger other types of anxiety that could trigger other medical conditions. Clearly, exactly what a aperson does under the influence of these substances can remarkably impact the results of the studies, so the techniques being used are being judged in these experiments just as much as the substances being used.

One shouldn't be dismissive of these studies, but also one should understand that the techniques used aren't the end-of-the-line in terms of potential these substances may have. on the other side of the token, we must also tread carefully. We must first do no harm!

BaryonBundle··on Magic mushrooms found to lift severe depression in clinical trial
This study is attempting to show that psilocybin is effective in treating depression, not effective in inducing a 'trip'. For patients who have never experimented with psychotropics, there may be a placebo effect when they are told they are given a psychotropic substance. While I agree that psilocybin and other similar substances can induce powerful mental states unreachable by other means, it does not follow that there exists a clinical path by which these drug-induced states can be used to treat depression in a reliable way.
BaryonBundle··on Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
Since when is grace relevant at all? It's pretty apparent how effective Fox News is, graceful or not.
BaryonBundle··on What caffeine does to your brain
Evolution doesn't code for just optimal. During the time that we were actually evolving, there existed pressure, for example, to optimize our use of the small amount of food that we had access to, optimizing to be as incospicuous during the dark hours, etc. Signaling processes weren't optimized for access to post-scarcity (in the first-world) availability of sugars, proteins, and fats; sleeping for as long as we do isn't optimal at all (some people have genetics that improve on this, though), and not to mention that the very nature of genetics will definitely produce humans that are sub-optimal in ways that that won't necessarily lead to sterility but will no longer be removed from the gene pool of the species.

I'm not claiming that caffeine will make you super-human but the use of substances like these that may have decreased survivability in pre-historic years (e.g., due to increased metabolism, induced bowel movements that decrease nutrient absorption) may augment several aspects of human cognition (and worsen others) in a way that is towards optimal, for say, coding but suboptimal for, say, creative writing (I don't claim this is true, just provide this as a possible example). Many contemporary college students can definitely attest to both the positive and negative aspects for drugs such as amphetamines (e.g., Adderall) in a manner that one could describe (though misleadingly) as superhuman.

I do agree that use of many of these substances can have seriously deliterious effects with prolonged use, but all studies I have come across refute this possibility for caffeine.

BaryonBundle··on Denmark’s wind farms generated 140% of the country’s electricity needs yesterday
As with most renewables (e.g., wind, solar, wave), I would imagine that just because production of energy outpaced its consumption on a given day, the same may not be true on any other given day.
BaryonBundle··on Firemacs: Emacs keybindings for FireFox
Conkeror is a standalone browser (not to be confused with KDE's Konqueror) I've been using with a similar mission, though I look forward to trying this out and take advantage of FireFox's technologies (debug, pdf.js integration, etc.)
BaryonBundle··on My Position On The Disney Layoffs
This was posted 5 days ago...
BaryonBundle··on Rise of the Scientific Programmer
Nature is also important in Physics and Astrophysics.
BaryonBundle··on Millennium Falcon's SFX Demonstrated by Sound Designer Ben Burtt (1980) [video]
Special effects for Star Wars were through Industrial Light & Magic (associated with Lucasfilm), a part of which was bought off by Steve Jobs as Pixar. Now, both Pixar and all of Lucasfilm are owned by Disney...
BaryonBundle··on Previous: A NeXT emulator
From the last page of this forum thread, it looks like the project is currently dead:

> i have stopped my work on Previous during the last month. It is unlikely that i will continue development in the future. I'm sorry for the bad news. I hope someone else will pick up the project and complete it. I'd be happy to assist with informations.

BaryonBundle··on The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page
Many of the normal rules aren't implemented (flips in the air, jumping off of rocks if you click at the right time, etc.).
BaryonBundle··on An Introduction to Tensors for Students of Physics and Engineering (2002) [pdf]
There is also a similarly titled, much longer (92 pages vs. 29 pages) introduction to tensors by the same author, also hosted by NASA, and released ~3 years later: Foundations of Tensor Analysis for Students of Physics and Engineering With an Introduction to the Theory of Relativity

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2005017...

The pdf.js in my Iceweasel 31.2 seems to be choking on the pdf document, though it looks fine in other readers.

BaryonBundle··on Half of stars lurk outside galaxies
The Drake Equation[0] is probably the most famous attempt at a "resolution" to the Fermi paradox and I haven't seen any that realistically try to implement a term involving the likelihood that a civilization might colonize neighboring star systems. Would a civilization that has colonized multiple near-by star systems be considerably noisier/more-detectable than one confined to a single star system?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

BaryonBundle··on Decades-old scientific paper may hold clues to dark matter
It definitely is, and is a powerful tool in the determination of mass for very massive galaxies and galactic clusters. That being said, I don't think this contradicts anything I mentioned in my post -- gravitational lensing doesn't affect galactic kinematics.
BaryonBundle··on Decades-old scientific paper may hold clues to dark matter
Neutral hydrogen in space is actually quite readily observed via radio telescopes as the famous spin-flip 21cm line. This signal has been very useful in mapping the distribution of neutral hydrogen within our own galaxy and those of our galactic neighbors.

In addition to this, there exist many arguments in favor of classifying normal matter and dark matter separately.

BaryonBundle··on Decades-old scientific paper may hold clues to dark matter
To start off, nothing about dark matter contradicts GR. All contemporary cosmological models of the Universe, which are constructed from GR, include dark matter.

The "surprise" that is attributed to the discovery of dark matter involves estimates of the mass of a galaxy due to contributions from stars, gas, etc., that fall woefully short of mass estimates obtained from observations of galaxy rotation velocities (kinematics). That is, we know how much mass there is there because of our understanding of gravity, but other methods of measuring the mass don't come close to this figure.

At galactic size scales GR adds virtually nothing to the Newtonian kinematics, the general relativistic corrections are substantial only when the gravitational field is very strong (e.g., binary neutron stars/black holes, very very near super massive black holes). GR is used in cosmology to model the universe on very large scales; scales so large that the "clumpy" universe that we see comprised of stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, actually starts to look very, very smooth. Again, even within galaxy clusters, modeling the evolution of the mass in a cluster via GR doesn't change much compared with a model using Newtonian gravity.

There currently exists no experiments which contradict GR, and a great amount of data (including observations of stars near the Milky Way's supermassive black hole) which directly supports it. Most people cite special relativity as the correction method behind time-dilation effects for satellites in orbit (e.g., GPS) but strictly speaking, special relativity is only completely accurate in the absence of a gravitational field.

BaryonBundle··on Hacker News API
Can't get it to work, e.g., for `hn.top_stories()` I get:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      File "hackernews.py", line 23, in top_stories
        return r.json()
    TypeError: 'list' object is not callable
Tried in both python 2.7.3 and python 3.2.3

EDIT: You need a relatively new version of requests for this to work. The version packaged with Debian Wheezy is too old. Use pip.

BaryonBundle··on KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
This reminds me of a comment[0] by a math grad student, Chao Xu, who extended markdown documents parsed by pandoc to ennumerate Proofs, Lemmas, etc., leading to blog posts that feel like part of a math text. One starts with a line beginning with, e.g., {proof}, and any content that follows and is indented (until non-indented text) is included with this section.

EDIT: also wanted to add that most markdown parsers that I've used (pandoc, python markdown) have support for footnotes and tables, though footnotes are compiled at the end of the document instead of at the end of individual 'sections' or 'subsections', which is a major pain for longer documents.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913498

BaryonBundle··on Academic Urban Legends
You probably mean carbonic acid. Carbolic acid is an organic compound also known as phenol.
BaryonBundle··on Debian and the PHP license
Just to add to this, Google recently open sourced the PDF rendering engine in Chrome [1], so I imagine that it'll be included in Chromium soon.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7781878

BaryonBundle··on Trashing Chromebooks
I feel like the NVIDIA Jetson TK1 would be a better alternative to the odroid products.

https://developer.nvidia.com/jetson-tk1

BaryonBundle··on I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time
While the 16 Parallella can run with just passive cooling, you still need to ensure proper airflow over the unit.

Units have been known to overheat with just passive cooling, and they even advise that you install a fan with the official case (that they sell on their store/provided to backers), even though there is nowhere to screw a fan in, etc.

Cases and Cooling: http://www.parallella.org/2014/04/30/cases-and-cooling/ (parallella.org) April 30, 2014

The point that a cluster of parallellas is relatively easy to cool is definitely aided by the form factor.

BaryonBundle··on The fastest pulsar spins at 716Hz; its equator spins at 24% the speed of light
The quoted example admits that it ignores strong fields and non-relativistic matter, which we have already established to be dealing with. The angular momentum of an element of volume in the neutron star likely contains enough kinetic energy to affect the Einstein field equations in a significant way. General relativity can't be ignored, but the Newtonian approximations has this habit of being nearly right more often than not.

I know that for rotating black holes the Kerr solution to the Einstein equations offers the best way to test these metric-based questions but I'm not sure if that's what you'd use for a Neutron Star.