econophys

Preface: My team has been using quip for the past 6 months (and switched from google docs). The value is in the collaboration tools.

Quip has inline comments and document level comments, chat rooms, private chat, and the ability to tag people and documents anywhere. It's a really powerful collaboration mechanism especially for remote teams, and cuts down on emails.

It's extremely intuitive for digital natives, but completely turns how one views documents (as static and entirely separate from the comments on them) on it's head. It's less friendly to people who are long time MS Office users.

I spent a summer working at an accelerator physics lab, where a constant problem was degaussing large beam steering magnets. We always used a DC current to drive the magnet through smaller Hysteresis loops, until the magnetization is roughly zero. Is there a better way?