mdturnerphys

There's an nice episode of a Wyoming PBS series that covers similar work in Wyoming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZyD74vNdcc.

Yes, the Slavic "хлеб", etc., appear to be cognates with the Germanic "loaf", etc. Wiktionary [0] says they both come from Proto-Germanic "hlaibaz" (reconstructed [1]).

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loaf#Etymology_1

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Reconstructed_term...

I did my PhD in the Eöt-Wash group [0] at the University of Washington, where many of the "world's best" torsion balance experiments have be done: tests of the equivalence principle, measurement of gravity at short distances, measurement of the gravitational constant, and others. The 3 professors in the group won the Breakthrough Prize in Physics last year.

When this article came out a few months ago I was surprised it got so much press. If I'd had any idea it would get so much attention (and merit a paper in Nature) I would have pushed for us to do it :) The authors did a great job doing the experiment and addressing the possible systematics--doing torsion balance experiments the right way is difficult--but there doesn't seem to be anything too new here.

[0] https://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/

[1] https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/09/10/four-uw-professor...

Apiezon sells a vacuum putty (Apiezon Q) that can be used for temporary seals down to 10^-4 torr. Best I can tell it's a mixture of bentonite clay and petroleum jelly.

Not just equipment you have to enter. This is used in situations with "stored energy" or other systems that need to be turned off or otherwise disabled for safe maintenance. There are multi-lock hasps that can be used if multiple people have overlapping needs to lock out the system, and other devices such as valve handles covers, etc., that help with locking out components don't have a built-in place for a lock.

If you're insterested in other scientific instruments built (mostly) from Legos, take a look at the watt/Kibble balance designed by former colleague of mine and his team at NIST: https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1119/1.4929898 and https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/kilogram/nist-do-it-you...

This was finally done away with in 2011. I only found out because I was surprised that our second child's SSN (issued in 2012) had a different prefix than that of our first child (2009).

Maybe in the US, but I've seen some horribly dirty waterways in other countries.

That's the cost for one-time use of the helium. If you're running a liquefier the cost is much lower, since you're recycling the helium, but it still "costs" ~400W to cool 1W at 4K.

Those are probably for food allergies, not allergies to cosmetics.

I just bought an Aroma pressure cooker [0] to replace our 15yo Aroma rice cooker that had reached its end of life after multiple uses per week (the cord and the lid latch both broke within a couple months of each other). It does a great job with the rice, but making a meal that requires both a pressure cooker and a rice cooker requires some advance scheduling.

[0] https://www.aroma-housewares.com/kitchen/appliances/MTC-8016...

At the bottom: "All times are shown in your local timezone unless otherwise noted."

You're getting downvoted because this isn't something that Peter is claiming to be an expert in. He's an attorney, not an economist.

(2019)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052

Fair enough. I did that because the grammars of Thai and English are quite different, in noun-modifier order, distinction between verbs and adjectives, and verb conjugation (those are just the relevant differences here). I could have said "blood-exiting fever" but that changes the word order.

I've had dengue fever. There are a few different strains and I had one of the milder ones but it was still enough to put me in the hospital for dehydration as an otherwise healthy 20yo.

In Thai it's known as hemorrhagic fever, but unlike in English, where "hemorrhagic" is a technical term where the meaning isn't clear or is softened, in Thai it's just three simple Thai words: ไข้เลือดออก, "fever [that makes] blood [come] out". Luckily I didn't have any hemorrhaging.

It's an extra-lame counterpoint because male mosquitos don't bite, and they're only releasing males.

I worked on torsion balances, gravity measurements, and gravity gradiometers for my PhD. Getting just a factor-of-two increase in sensitivity is significant--getting 4-5 orders of magnitude better would be incredible and also next to impossible, given the other factors to account for.

The author considers environmental gravitational noise, but you have to also consider that any movement of the instrument in a non-uniform gravitational field will create a signal. If you consider Earth as a perfect sphere, the gravitational signal of a B-2 that the author considers is equivalent to the change in gravity from a vertical displacement of 0.2nm. This is about the size of a water molecule. Vertical stability at that level is unachievable.

Correction: I missed the year on the linked article. He passed away in 2019, a year before the paper was submitted.

The news article mentions that the student on the paper has passed away. He died of suicide in his lab just a couple weeks after the paper was submitted to Nature [0]. Grad school is hard for a lot of people. Find someone to talk to if you're struggling.

[0] https://padailypost.com/2019/02/16/engineering-student-found...

I like this quoted response:

You have reached the required standard, but we are unable to offer you a job immediately. We have placed you on a reserve list from which future appointments may be made.

When I was leaving academia it took a number of rejections before I realized that I wasn't being rejected because I wasn't qualified, but because the company only had one spot and I wasn't their top choice.

Original source: https://www.gamesradar.com/tenet-christopher-nolan-747-plane...

What he actually said was "efficient" not "cost effective".

Couple of typos in the title.

It's unfortunate and potentially confusing to readers that they've used the Washington Monument and the Flatiron Building as illustrations in the article and suggested that their heights might change. The reference point for measuring a structure's height is its base, not the geoid. Unless the definition of a foot changes the height of these structures will not change.

As an illustration, see http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/

Previous discussion of source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23498185

For those new to geneology, https://www.findagrave.com/ is a great resource for finding grave locations and viewing photos of tombstones.

That's a good reference point. Cost for infrastructure projects usually isn't linear. I've seen an exponent of .6 used to extrapolate costs.

(3140km/27km)^.6 * $4.75B = $82B. Adjusting for inflation gives you something a bit over the $100B. They probably came up with the number in a similar fashion.

Do you know if your number includes the detectors? They would have contributed significantly to the total cost.

From the HN guidelines:

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html