jsdodge.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy
Physics professor @ Simon Fraser University. Experimental research in quantum materials and optical spectroscopy.
[bridged from https://fediscience.org/@jsdodge on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
98 posts
26 followers
4 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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@rwg
So do you use the Proton suite? I’ve been using the free email but am starting to approach my storage limit and am wondering if it’s worth it to get a paid plan. Also looking at Element as a Slack alternative. Curious to know what you think are the better alternatives for people who don’t […]
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@trigonella
I link to this Veritasium video in my introductory electricity and magnetism class because it does a great job of addressing a common misconception. He did a follow-up that is also good. People make mistakes so 100% is an unrealistic bar but I’d recommend his videos to anyone […]
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@aram @admin1 @nik @ubiquity75 @rwg @tstruett @paufder @atomicpoet
Interesting — I just tried the same prompt for myself and it directed me back to the platform. Any idea what causes the difference? I used the GPT-4o through DuckDuckGo.
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@dimpase
Just added my +1. Thanks for raising the issue!
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@vicgrinberg
That particular occasion. Everyone in my group is comfortable with Git so it’s not a big deal for internal use. I’ve used Overleaf with collaborators. The problem was with using both.
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@vicgrinberg
We had a problem with this last fall and we decided to abandon Overleaf in favor of git. The problem seemed to have been that one of us pushed a commit to Overleaf while another was typing in the Overleaf interface. This corrupted the git repo beyond my limited ability to repair […]
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@johncarlosbaez @dougmerritt
I would read that essay!
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@dougmerritt @johncarlosbaez
I hope it was clear that I wasn’t suggesting that John meant it as a slight—I know he likes condensed matter! But historically, there were definitely people who put down condensed matter physics because they viewed it as mere application of more fundamental […]
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@johncarlosbaez
Those are choice words about the Higgs discovery! 😂
(In my circles, we call it the Anderson-Higgs mechanism. And the first observation of the Anderson-Higgs mode in a superconductor was in 1980, through Raman scattering!)
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@johncarlosbaez
My condensed-matter sensibilities bristle at the association of “fundamental” with the Standard Model and GR here, but I appreciate that you put it in scare-quotes and acknowledge the limitations of this definition. But rather than gripe about it, I guess I should try to come up […]
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@johncarlosbaez
Happy New Year!
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@johncarlosbaez
But seriously, I hadn’t realized that M-theory isn’t renormalizable. Staying tuned for your discussion of the 10^500 (give or take) ways to reduce it to something that looks like the Standard Model.
I’m interested in the perspective that you’re laying out about the Great […]
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@johncarlosbaez
You’ve given me a challenge for 2025: publish the phrase “huge pain in the ass” in a peer-reviewed journal to justify a simplification
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@johncarlosbaez
I suspect Zangwill’s treatment won’t satisfy your desire for a more systematic derivation, but it does show how these limits are useful for practical problems.
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@johncarlosbaez
Andy Zangwill discusses these limits in his graduate E&M textbook, Modern Electrodynamics. I’m surprised that these were only identified in the 70s—surely people recognized them earlier? […]
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@xankarn
This has been the craft brew norm in Vancouver for years. Each can is 473 ml, however
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@FMarquardtGroup
This is impressive, but my basic problem with such anecdotes is that they basically demonstrate that the LLM has (a) included relevant text in its training data and (b) received training that enables it to respond well to the prompts in the specific context, without (1) telling […]
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@j_bertolotti
In case of emergency, break selection rules
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@MartinEscardo
I submitted my grades earlier this week with great relief, only to spend the next day fielding questions from students—all respectful, some pointing to important clerical errors that I needed to fix, and a few just grade-grubbing. This is after I introduced changes to make my […]
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@rwg
This is something that @mekkaokereke was just commenting on (again)
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@rwg
And do it ruthlessly
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@vicgrinberg
It’s as if they think “real” scientific experiments must always be planned thoroughly in advance and that anything that emerges from exploratory investigation is somehow suspect. I understand the rationale, but it takes a practical, context-dependent guideline and converts it into […]
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@vicgrinberg
It’s amusing to me that social scientists have a bunch of methodological divisions that seem misplaced to a physical scientist like me. The Wikipedia article flatly asserts that in the “traditional scientific model of research… the researcher chooses an existing theoretical […]
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@vicgrinberg
My wife wrote a book chapter about grounded normative theory, if you’re interested
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848925.003.0004
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@johncarlosbaez @acollierastro @feynmanlectures
This quote from the letter would go nicely in the dictionary definition of “ad hominem”:
“Some people, who perhaps feel inferior, perhaps because they don't have much of anything positive to contribute, draw attention
to themselves by dissing […]