symmetricsaurus

Well, that explains the horrible JPG quality.

Sweden actually has a goal of zero traffic deaths overall. http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/02/ec...

This is actually more delicate than that. It is not possible to split a proton into its constituent quarks because quarks can never exist on their own. As far as we know they only appear in pairs or three at a time as in the proton.

There is also the issue of baryon number conservation. This is physical law (as far as we know) that says that the number of baryons must be constant. A proton is a baryon and neuron is a baryon but there are lots more. Anti-particles count negative so we can destroy a proton by combining it with an anti-proton, if we would happen to have one. But we cannot outright split the proton into some smaller set of parts as with an atom.

I disagree with this. You're not normally in insert mode when using vim, you're in normal mode (the one vim starts in).

This means that it really is / for searching, 1G to go to the top of the file, w to go one word forward, f( to go to the next opening paren, and ci" to change everything inside the current "..." etc.

What this also means is that when inserting text you start by pressing i, type the text you want to insert and then immediately press ESC (or CTRL+[) to go back to normal mode.

The reason is that everything that is not directly inserting text is much quicker and faster to do in normal mode compared to insert mode once you learn a few of the commands.

I probably only spend a few percent of my vim-time in insert mode, most of it is spent in normal mode.

Is there anything wrong with the simple approach of just adding \<space> after the command? For example: \newcommand{\T}{Mike} \T\ is \T. Which will give you: Mike is Mike.

Perry actually won the Ignobel price for this essay: http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2011

(you may have to scroll down a bit to see it)

Forgot about the recent (mp) proposal. Maybe there will be a new debate on the length of a work day/week in time for the election then.

Currently there is not much discussion about a general reduction of the work day to 6 hours in Sweden.

If anything politicians are pushing for more work (though not longer days). Lower sick pay, later retirement and conversion of part time jobs to full time have been implemented or proposed.

(Also, it is not Volvo Cars that is downsizing, it is Volvo Group).

"Work from home is almost common in the US and basically non-existent in Europe."

It is not non-existent in Sweden.

"Somehow socialists are always one step behind Mother Nature, i.e. free markets."

The free market has nothing to do with "Mother Nature" (animals and plants don't trade at all). Sweden has a free market economy, much like the US. Not exactly sure what is meant by socialists here. Anyone who advocates shorter working hours?

I am fairly certain that trains do not need the slack between cars to get moving. Like others have pointed out, trains seem to be perfectly capable of starting on inclines where there would be no slack.

There is one assumption in the article that is certainly wrong: "...but it seems crazy to think that the train’s friction coefficient is 10 times more than the cars"

This does not make any sense. The forces we are comparing is the friction between the rail and the wheels in the case of the engine and the friction in the bearings of the axles in the case of the cars. There is of course some frictional force from the deformation of the track and the wheel as well but as they are both quite rigid (being made of steel) it should not be very significant.

I cannot speak for gp but I use tiling window managers when I use Linux. Usually they do not work so well with desktop environments, or it to much effort to get them to work properly.

The big advantage of tiling vms is that you always use the whole screen area without having to only use maximized windows. You can easily split the screen into several areas where you can put windows. Another advantage is that they are usually keyboard driven so that it is possible to launch, close and arrange windows without using the mouse.

The one I like best is wmii, which has a brilliant column system combined with tags instead of workspaces(i. e. a window can have several tags instead of only one workspace). Nowadays I use i3 since it is a bit more modern but so far I find that the usability is not quite as good.

Left clicking works for me to activate as well.

> The global reach of the internet is at risk here.

The Internet has up til now had a global reach and that may be at risk with recent developments.

Individual services such as Netflix, Youtube or Spotify have not had a global reach and may never have as long as the current structure for licensing and distribution of content persists.

Internet based distribution of content has always been under attack or limited by the traditional content distributors such as record labels, movie and tv studios and publishers. What is new is the attack from the ISPs from the other side.

I did like this. There is a certain elegance[1] to diagram based descriptions of mathematical/physical concepts.

Another that is maybe more similar in that it removes a lot of dummy variables(indices in this case) is the Penrose graphical notation[2] for tensors. I have actually never calculated anything using these diagrams so I don't know how practical they are.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram [2]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation

Europe is not on homogenous region.

When applying for jobs in Sweden I have not had any problems using a PDF.

Texmacs is quite nice actually. If you know emacs shortcuts and are willing to learn a few new Texmacs specific ones it is the fastest way I know to write mixed text and maths.

When I tried last time a few years ago it was not as complete as LaTeX is, atleast for me, who is much more proficient in LaTex.

Same for me. Running Firefox on Windows 7.

I have tried downloading it again and it still looks bad when previewing the font.

In Word it looks ok but I'm not sure if selecting Comic Neue and italics will use the oblique version or not?

The oblique *.ttf files where last modified March 14 in the file I downloaded.

The oblique versions don't work on Windows(7). The letter shapes are severely deformed and the sizes are all over the place.

Otherwise I think it could be a usable font (if not for the prevailing opinion about comic sans).

This is hilarious. This probably won't be, but should be the final entry in the series of 2048 clones.

I guess that you could de-servicify it and create own2048, not that I know how it would differ from the original version...

Pretty cool! But the performance is too sluggish for there to be any 3d illusion on my 2013 nexus 7.

With a more subtle effect and better response time it could work.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics!

The differing quantities on the y axes of the graphs make them quite misleading. In particular between the first and tend second where the first is a relative increase and the second is in absolute income. This gives the immediate impression that the 0.01% is pulling ahead of the 0.1% at a high rate. Looking instead at the last graph we see that the 0.1% is keeping up kinda OK.

This change in quantities also makes it impossible to compare the first and second graph at all.

Using graphs is supposed to aid understanding, not impede it.

Vi Hart made an excellent series of videos related to plants and Fibonacci numbers. Here is the first one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0. Links to the other ones can be found in the description.

Very nice visualization.

Reading these old proofs is quite tedious but having this visualization makes it much easier to follow.

Still, trying to understand Euclid makes you thankful for the more than 2000 years of advancements in mathematical notation and theory.

It really depends on where you are in Sweden. Different regions have different public transport providers.

Never thought I would defend Västtrafik(public transport in south west Sweden) but here I go.

Their webpage http://www.vasttrafik.se/ is quite usable. It finds good routes and you can fiddle around with different parameters such as times for changes etc. You can say that you are willing to walk or take a bike part of the way as well. Overall pretty good as long as you are on a computer.

On a phone the default app is not so good. Instead use ResOplanerare which has a very minimal and slick interface.

Of course, that's why I said it was a crude estimate.

On the other hand, since the Tesla S is a quite high performance car, you could expect it to get into more accidents than the average car.

What I actually want to know is if you had the same number of other average cars driving the same distance as the Teslas, how many people could you expect to be killed in these cars.

Here is my crude estimation. If we consider that there are 3.2 * 10^-4 people killed in traffic per car per year[1] and that there are 20000 Tesla Model S on the road[2], then we get that there should have been about 6 deaths.

Now most of the Teslas have not been on the road for a whole year probably so I'm not sure how valid this estimation is.

This seems to be some indication that zero deaths is very low for this number of cars but to be sure I think one would need to make a more detailed estimate. Doing some statistical analysis would also be good.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=traffic+deaths+per+car... [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S

"With a track record of zero deaths or serious, permanent injuries since our vehicles went into production six years ago, there is no safer car on the road than a Tesla."

I don't doubt that the Tesla Model S is a very safe car as tests have shown. With that said, how many deaths and serious injuries would have been expected considering the same number of miles driven with normal cars? Are Teslas actually substantially safer than other cars or are there just few enough out there that no serious injuries have happened?

Roller coaster design is one of the areas where you can actually use the 3rd time derivate of position, the jerk, to good effect. So the jerk is the change in acceleration over time. A typical motion with high jerk is when you are riding in a car and the driver turns the wheel quickly, not a very comfortable experience.

The same is true for roller coasters; high jerk motions are uncomfortable. So you have to not only take the limits of comfortable acceleration into consideration but also try to minimize the jerk.

As others have said this game has nothing to do with physics except for the names of the tiles.

If the progression followed particle masses it would make a tiny bit more sense but it doesn't. The neutrinos for example, are much lighter than their counterparts. I guess that masses would not make sense to use since the Higgs boson is not the heaviest known particle at 125 GeV, that distinction goes to the top quark at 173 GeV.

A more realistic game based 2048 and physics might be hard to make. Colliding particles does not work according to some recipe like: electron+positron makes a muon or something like that.

Instead there are a large number of possible recipes(Feynman diagrams) for every collision. In fact we have can have any reaction that is allowed as long as you conserve energy, momentum, angular momentum, electric charge and a few other exotic quantities. Each of these reactions can be assigned a probability and you cannot know beforehand what the outcome of a certain reaction will be. Adapting this into a 2048-style game is not obvious.

A game that would actually work is adding up neutrons and protons into atomic nuclei. Having a nucleus with 2048 nucleons is of course not very realistic but if you add in the decay of unstable isotopes only reaching Uranium-238 may be hard enough.