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This is a slippery slope, IMHO. It can easily get you to be the next "tactical tornado" of your team (cf. John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design).

Entanglement in the life of physics giant Chien-Shiung Wu

I also worked for 10 years at a small movie theater in Italy, and very much share what you described. The noises, the lights, the repetitive and almost ritual actions. A very nice illustration the projectionist's life is told in the excellent movie "Cinema Paradiso" [1,2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_Paradiso [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOgDcysdjN4

In what country are you located? In France there's a "médiateur" https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F14373 It might apply in your case...

Has anything changed significantly since 2014 that would make today's cellphones more efficient at detecting gammas? IIRC the tiny size of the cmos camera was the limiting factor...

It's just hard to do. But there are efforts in this direction e.g. https://analysispreservation.cern.ch/

src: I used to be in HEP

Hi! Interesting project, congrats! How does it compare to https://calmcode.io/human-learn/introduction.html ?

Your reply is fun to read and I really enjoyed it. Of course the descriptions of the "typical day" in the original blog post is idealized. I suppose this idealization is there to make the contrast between the highly-effective day and the low-effective day. That is just the blog post.

Leaving aside this funny idealization and its comic interpretation of the blog post, in real life there are good habits and bad habits that can make a team work more efficiently and less efficiently. I have had first-hand experience with developers from ThoughtWorks, the consulting company behind that blog, and I can tell that they are indeed trying to apply those principles and strategies in their projects.

The fact that they are a consulting company gives them an advantage when trying to apply these principles. They only need to worry about the "small picture" of the project they're consulting on. They don't have to deal with all the "big picture" issues that might affect the employees working within the company they're consulting for (e.g. company politics, technical legacies, etc.) So IMHO perhaps some of these techniques and strategies to become a more effective development team are less applicable if you're working in $BIG_CO rather than in $CONSULTING_CO.

From [1] (links therein might be more in-depth)

"stable matter, and therefore life and intelligent beings, could not exist if its value were much different. For instance, were α to change by 4%, stellar fusion would not produce carbon, so that carbon-based life would be impossible. If α were greater than 0.1, stellar fusion would be impossible, and no place in the universe would be warm enough for life as we know it."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Anthro...

Very much agree. I prefer"The Lessons of History" by Durant [1], more focused and less "fluffy" IMHO.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lessons_of_History

Just finished "Model Thinking" [1] taught by Scott E. Page.

I really enjoyed this class. It provided me with several very useful mathematical tools to think more clearly about important and frequent problems. Scott is a great teacher.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking

Street-Fighting Mathematics [1]

[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-098-street-fighti...

Fun story. In the Princeton Physics dept. corridors (ca. 2010) there were posters and papers talking about current research and results. One of them, not far from Anderson's office, was about broken symmetries and the Higgs boson. In it, a sentence described how "the mechanism of spontaneus symmetry breaking, proposed by Peter Higgs, explained the non-zero mass of the boson" (I don't remember the exact sentence...but it was something along these lines).

Someone had crossed out that sentence with a red pen, and corrected it by writing that the mechanism had been proposed by Anderson in 1962. I always wondered who had done that :-)

RIP

And his recent (2019-11-07) interview on France Culture https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des-matins/tr...

The conclusion of this study is not clear at all to me. From reading their executive summary, the CEBR researchers seem to take the global value added (GVA) of any physics-based industry, and consider it as a something like a contribution of physics to the society. That sounds like a gross overestimation to me.

As an example, they consider "Extraction of crude petroleum" as a physics-based industry. Naively I would consider that industry at least 33% physics, 33% chemistry, and 33% engineering. Aren't they largely overestimating their conclusion by neglecting chemistry and egineering?

Disclaimer: I am a former physicist. I really think that science funding is vital to Europe, that this kind of studies should help supporting the field... I would just like to better understand how the EPS and CEBR got to such a clickbait title. I have the impression that this kind of article could actually undermine the credibility of all the contributions that Physics research is actually bringing to society at large.

Same experience here. Ended up settling on app.getpolarized.io which seems to be less "intrusive."

A bit off-topic...is there any project to create one's own OCR engine customized to one's own handwriting?

> Because when things go wrong they really go wrong.

My impression is that the main reason is poor education and scaremongering, rather than actual causalities. When comparing nuclear with other energy sources, nuclear is still quite safe in deaths/TWh, see for example [1].

[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

Very sad news. Took one of his graduate courses, he was great.

Very thoughtful comment, thank you. Indeed the main difference between e.g. physics and economics (or medicine) is that in the former case one has the privilege of being able to experiment by toggling the parameters one at the time. And brute force things with experiments, as you write.

"In physics with 3 theories that can model 97% of the world. In economics you have 97 theories that can model 3% of the world."

I can't remember the source for this aphorism, but it resonates a lot with your comment :-)

[disclaimer: I'm a physicist]

For a reasonable rebuttal of her arguments, please take a look at this article on slate [1]. The main argument against her article is that progress in science is not just measured by how many particles you've discovered this year. (disclaimer: former HEP physicist here)

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/large-hadron-collider-f...

The Lessons of History, by W. & A. Durant changed my view on several "big topics" of history and society, such as biology, religion, economics, and war.

Thanks! interesting article...reminds me of planet.com The project website [1] has a lot more technical details.

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/deepsolar/home.html

"In high-energy and particle physics, projects are done by large international teams that can have upwards of 1,000 members. All participants are listed as authors as a mark of membership of the team, not for writing or revising the papers. We therefore excluded authors in physics."

One important point that the authors are missing is that most of the results published by those teams are null results. This doesn't happen in the other fields considered in the article, e.g. medicine, where there is often a positive-results bias, despite the lower number of publications per author.

I used to have it on the wall too; I don't know whether we were colleagues :-) https://xkcd.com/1205/

It was a horrible disaster. But, 30 years after the accident, this article is trying to get readers using punchy headlines, like "Children are still being born with severe birth defects". I would have expected a BBC article to be a bit more objective on such controversial conclusions [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...