djaque

I'm sad that we don't have any modern equivalent of Bell labs and it looks like we won't have anything for quite a while. I had a chance to work with a scientist who was at Bell in its golden age and he said that you could just walk down the hall to the water cooler from your office and chat with the the leading researchers of the day in like five disparate fields.

This is one of those things where I wish I could just take a week out of my life and flip through these. Old school research is so cool.

I can empathasize with the argument to keep the film unmolested and not for snobby reasons like that.

I watched Peter Jackson's "They Shall not Grow Old" which is a collection of restored WW1 footage. Was super hyped going in, but when I saw the footage itself, it just felt off. Like the colors maybe weren't quite right or the motion was super messed up and the whole thing just felt weird and made watching it unenjoyable. I would have prefered to see it in black and white.

My other gripe with the film was that he also loaded it up with sound effects and even added not well mixed VFX like extra explosions and shingles falling off roofs that appear from nowhere (hence why I'm pretty sure they were added in post). Dumping that kind of cheap blockbuster action elements actually felt pretty disrepectful of the soldiers that got filmed. Kind of like they were using them as action figures to tell a story that wasn't quite what happened in reality.

Some more good discussion here -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24598923

Actually, I've heard that chemistry departments are a standout in terms of abuse and that seems true just from the students I've talked to at my institution. There's like this weird old school attitude of "this is the way we've always done it" so I'm going to pass you through the flames too. Add that to the motivation of "if I can just get through this then I can get a cushy pharma job".

Come to think of it, the news stories I remember (just off the top of my head) of advisors pushing their students to the point of suicide were chem. advisors.

For what it's worth, I've actually been warned against their physics department for grad school. The other rumour I heard is that Harvard is even worse (for physics grad students). Tons of toxic behaviour like sabotaging labmates in the name of competition and advisors holding onto students for like a year after they should have graduated to pump out that last paper from them.

Priming is one of the least reproducible effects out there and lies literally at the core of the reproducibility crisis [1]. I'm going to call BS on claims of some sort of spooky weaponization of it.

Edit: To add necessary context for those unaware, TikTok's audience in the US is politically liberal. The buy out of Trump rally tickets a few months ago was organized there [2].

It's true that we should be talking about the security implications of foreign control over our social media platforms. It's also true that we should be concerned about a targeted ban (instead of, say, a general crackdown on foreign social media) on what amounts to a meetinghouse for Trump's critics by the Trump administration itself.

[1] https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/07/07/tiktok-...

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

I'm sorry, but that just doesn't jive with my friend's real lived experience.

They grew up being told that they were broken and endured life long pain from that upbringing. My friend was literally disowned by her parents who still refuse to talk to her.

They (my friends) aren't Catholic. They are good people who didn't deserve to be put through that experience just because of one religion's sense of morality.

I hope that the church will change with the times, similar to the way their practices and beliefs with respect to racism have changed since the 60s [1].

However, I wouldn't take the pope's words as a sign of that change. I have friends who are gay or lesbian and formerly part of the catholic church. When he says that god loves them, I assume it is in the sense that god loves everyone, even sinners. From what I understand, gay people are seen kind of like drug addicts by the church. People who are worthy of pitty, but are still considered "sick".

Being told that you are sick from your earliest memories because of who you are attracted to, something you don't have control over, leaves lasting scars on a person. All of my gay friends who left catholicism grew up killing that part of themselves and pretending to be someone they are not for like the first two decades of their life. The rest of their life has been spent trying to rebuild themselves from that. From literally being taught to hate themselves for what they are.

The one friend I have who did come out as a teenager was dissowned by her parents and had to move in with a relative. She spent two years living out of a cousin's house and people like her who are less fortunate are out there without a home right now for the crime of being gay.

I really hope that the church will adapt and recognize the real damage they are inflicting on children, but like I said, I'm not very optimistic.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_race

It's also worth noting that at least for TikTok, its audience is young and left leaning. It is wildly popular with young people. It was where individuals organized buying up tickets to Trump rallies to inflate expectations during the pandemic [1], something which is known to have angered Trump.

Something as targeted as this ban seems like Trump deplatforming his critics under the excuse of national security. Plus, it's happening right before the election.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-...

The author affiliations are listed as "Rule of Law Society". A quick google search shows that it is a political non-profit dedicated to "investigating Chinese corruption" and is led by Steve Bannon of all people [1].

Given the extraordinary nature of the claims, the fact that this didn't see any peer review and isn't published in a real journal as well as the clear political motivations of the money behind the study, my BS meter is going off the charts. Even the name of the document "The Yan Report" makes it sound like a political hit piece cosplaying as a scientific article.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/steve-bannon-guo-wen...

That's not even ad hominem. It's a pretty relevant piece of info and does change how I look at the article.

It reminds me of a story about Max Planck [1] being told by his advisor to not pursue theoretical physics because it was only the small details that were left to work out. Of course, he went on to help start the revolution in quantum physics.

> in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes

[1] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2129/who-said-that-e...

I'm not really sure about crystallography (not my field), but I think it's maybe an issue with expectation management. Everyone is trying to sell the new technology as fix for every field. In reality XFEL experiments do have a lot of overhead associated with them and stuff like synchrotron light sources are probably better suited for "everyday" type measurements.

The real breakthroughs that I was talking about are for time resolved and "diffract before destroy" experiments for delicate samples. Those ones can't really be done at a synchrotron with long bunches.

I'm especially excited for femtosecond time resolved measurements of chemical reactions. It's going to be so cool to watch chemical reactions occur at an atomic scale.

I guess the other cool application is that there is so much light that you can perform diffraction off of single molecules when you want your sample in solution/gas phase or can't form crystals. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that the intensity of XFELs also enabled that.

I forget who said it, but there is a quote in physics along the lines of "we already have a theory of practically everything, but it is so complicated that we can use it to predict almost nothing."

All of basic principles that underlie our everyday experiences don't need quarks and gluons. They're governed by standard quantum mechanics which was fleshed out in the 20's. However, just because we have Newton's laws of the subatomic world doesn't mean we can answer interesting scientific questions with them. I'd even say that people that call something like the standard model a "theory of everything" are a little naive since you can never use to it make predictions outside of the most simple systems.

That area (pushing ahead away from model systems) is the complexity frontier of physics and is where I'm most excited for advancements. It's where we can write out the equation that describes high-TC superconductors, but it has so many dimensions that we can't solve it and make one that works at room temperature. Is that engineering or physics? I'd call the scientific problem of figuring out the laws that emerge from quantum mechanics for these complicated systems physics.

In a similar vein, Maxwell "discovered" the free electron laser in the 1800s. He wrote down the laws of E&M and then everything in the world was solved. That's clearly a dumb way to think of it though, and the new physics that was discovered were the emergent laws that fall out of it when you apply those laws to a system of relativistic particles.

In particular, the emergent phenomena that had to be discovered for the free electron laser (FEL) was the micro-bunching instability. It's a subtle interaction between relativistic particles and a field of photons that will feedback and cause them to bunch together while dumping their energy into the field of light producing the coherent laser radiation. It was that phenomena and the realization that it could be used to create a powerful laser that are the new physics here.

On the other side, the advancement of the FEL to the point that it could make x-rays requires a lot of other new physics to create the machine. This is where there is a bit of a blurred line between physics and engineering. However, I'd still call what we're doing (developing new laws of physics that govern complex systems) physics. Just because we use them to build a machine doesn't make them engineering any more than a solid state physicist discovering a new phenomena in semiconductors and then Intel taking advantage of it in their next generation of processors.

In order to REALLY understand our physical world, we can't write down reductionist laws and say that we're done. It's also notable that the two developers of the free electron laser are rumored to be in the running for the Nobel prize in physics, so it's not just me who thinks that they are physicists, not engineers.

Edit: BTW, here is a great paper that reviews the physics that makes a free electron laser work if anyone is interested.

Huang, Z., & Kim, K.-J. (2007). Review of x-ray free-electron laser theory. Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams, 10(3), 034801. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.10.034801

Yes, I have a friend who left plasma physics and is still salty about the situation with ITER. She also said that by the time they're done, the technology is going to be outdated since it all began in the 80's.

I'd disagree that they are there to pump money into administrators. Some of these problems are just really hard and requires monstrously large organizations to make headway. At worst, I'd say that they are misguided/focusing on the wrong scientific questions or in the case of ITER stuck on a path that should have been abandoned a while ago.

Whenever I see headlines like this, I'm reminded that physics has a communication problem where the public thinks that high energy physics is the only type (or the only worthy type) of physics out there. There's a lot more to the field than the next theory of everything, and those other fields aren't stuck

For instance, in just this decade human kind turned on the first x-ray free electron laser and increased the state of the art in the brightness of x-ray sources by 10 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE!!! I'm not sure I can fully explain how transformational that level of improvement was because I work on the accelerator side, not the user side. But, at least understand that there are entire subfields that now exist which didn't before. Not just physics, but in biology, chemistry, materials science, and numerous other fields. It's an instrument so powerful that every other scientifically advanced nation is now building their own. That instrument was developed by physicists and not high energy physicists.

I feel that this also gets at a sort of toxic notion that I've noticed some high energy physicists in my own department have (not all, but you probably know the people that I'm talking about). The notion is that if you aren't working on 12 dimensional quantum theories of gravity or the holographic principle and black hole physics, then you aren't a real physicist. Somehow they think that if your work has a real world impact, then it's tainted in some way. I'm not sure how it's gotten this way, but I've actually been told as much by another grad student that my field should be moved to the engineering department because we aren't doing real physics.

Is anyone else trying to decide if you should upgrade from 1080 ti's?

I have a box with four of them which have served me well for a while now, and based on just raw performance it looks like upgrading to two RTX 3080s would exceed the performance of my current system.

I'm wondering if I should rush to sell off the cards on the used market before the prices crash and then use that money to swap over to Ampere.

Then, there's also the question of if there will be an RTX 3080 TI which will blow away the RTX 3080 and be a viable card for the next five years like the 1080 TI.

I'm really uncertain about what to do and wonder the calculus other people have done on this decision.

I think all of the comments here that say "McCarthyism and cancel culture have taken over our universities!" miss the point.

The real story is that in the US, we are politically polarized enough to buy into the dean's story that this is the only reason for the suspension.

Universities are run as businesses nowadays and I can assure you that they don't care about angry students unless there is money or prestige to be made in appeasing them. At a past university I attended, class enrollment was horribly broken causing people to miss out on courses they needed to graduate. Basically the whole student body was mad and made it known and sent around petitions, but nothing changed. The fix being pushed by students would literally just require changing a config file somewhere and sending some emails, but nobody cared.

If universities won't lift a finger for issues that cause campus wide outrage, why would I believe that they'd suspend someone after a twitter minority gets unreasonably angry about something like this. I'm at one of the super liberal universities in the US and I can promise you that it really is a minority. Even in the liberal arts classes I've attended, everyone I've met would be like "yeah, that's an unfortunate mistake and at most you should probably just inform him that the word sounds like a slur". I have literally never met someone that would call for a firing except for on twitter. I've also taught classes here and never met one, so I know it isn't a selection effect where I'm in a bubble. I don't get to choose the students I teach.

There is 100% more going on than what the dean is claiming. Maybe it's administrative drama. Maybe the professor wasn't pulling in enough grant money. Maybe the university was eyeing his salary and knew about an adjunct that will do it cheaper and thought that this would be a nice excuse to make a change. From everything I know about universities and from currently working at one, the guy didn't get fired for something as outlandish as saying a word that sounded like something else. It just doesn't make sense.

Scientists have been getting by pretty well for all of the "writing failure" that you're claiming.

I'm guessing that you think scientific papers are bad because you have a hard time reading them. In reality, you were probably never the intended audience. They're designed for another experienced researcher in the same field.

You can't cram a year's worth of highly specialized research into three pages without it becoming incredibly dense.

That was very explicitly the point. We now have top Nixon advisors explaining that they couldn't make hippies or black people illegal, but they could do it by proxy with "the war on drugs" [1].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-adviser-ehrlichman-ant...

The problem right now is that camera footage is handled by the police departments. Any oversight requires the police to operate in good faith. Thinking back to how many news reports I've seen where the footage was "lost" or "the cameras were not switched on" I don't have any trust in that type of system.

We really need third party monitoring.

Yes, I'm amazed at how quickly things have changed. My sister who is only five years younger than me has a friend who is gay and went to the same high school that I did. In only half a decade the culture shifted from just clear and open homophobia (including some teachers) to him being able to be out and open in HS without too much of an issue.

The problem isn't really out in the open harassment anymore though. I haven't been in HS for a bit now, but I'm a grad student in a fairly progressive university. Nobody would really think we have homophobes here anymore. But, in reality they exist and just learned how to hide it better.

To give an anecdote, I'm quite straight passing and it came up that I had a boyfriend at a bar with some other students while at a conference. For the rest of the week, this one guy in my cohort would make comments to me once everybody else got out of earshot. Stuff like how "sneaky" I am or how he wondered why they let people like me into the conference. I just ignored him and it eventually stopped.

Are you gay? Because, if you're not, then you might just not be experiencing the homophobia head on any longer since it isn't so much out in the open.

Not sure how old you are, but even in 2010 when I was in high school our boy scout troop played smear the queer and the first time I learned the word gay was as an insult. Didn't really help with the whole growing up gay thing.

Darn, I wish this was available a few months ago. I just went through the effort of assmbling my own PD Buddy sinks because they are currently out of production.

Too bad they didn't give it an infinite wooden tape :)

I hope they make it out all right. I got the chance to visit a few years ago and was one of my favourite museum experiences.

Everything is set up similar to how it was during the war and you can basically just walk up the desk Turing sat at. Like, I could probably have touched it if I wanted to.

I also didn't realize how many famous names in graph theory came from there.

Hello fellow accelerator physicist!

Yes I understand how seeding PRNGs work and I personally do that for my own code for debugging purposes. My point was that not using a fixed seed doesn't invalidate their result. It's just a cheap shot and, to me, demonstrates that the lockdownskeptics author doesn't have a real understanding of the methods being used.

Also, to be clear, I support open science and have some of my own open-source projects out in the wild (which is not the norm in my own field yet). I'm not arguing against releasing code, I'm arguing against OP arguing against this particular piece of code.

The point is that as a scientist your code is a tool to get the job done and not the product. I can't spend 48 hours writing unit tests for my library (even though I want to) if it's not going to give me results. It's literally not my job and is not an efficient use of my time