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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • When I took some astronomy classes in the early 2000s, Jocelyn Bell was absolutely credited. In her own words:

    It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it - after all, I am in good company, am I not!

    That said, yeah, I think she absolutely should have been awarded the Nobel prize. But while she did not, she has the admiration --- rightly so --- of many a budding astronomer.



  • Ended up with the Yaesu FT710, with a G5RV Jr. in the attic. Internal tuner tunes 40-6 with the exception of 15m and 17m. Very pleased with it so far! Several digital DX so far (Australia, Brazil, Samoa, Japan, Alaska, Hawaii --- I'm at CM87/California).

    To-do list includes low loss coax (100ft run of who-knows-what currently); debug intermittent Ethernet issues (Ethernet runs parallel to feedline --- choke balun/better choking of feedline?); possibly get remote tuner (one step at a time...). Fun stuff!








  • Seems more analogous to clothes than housing --- clothes can be "too big" in the sense that the extra size is detrimental to the function, which is somewhat different from houses.

    And it's pretty common to have buy-nothing groups in cities or even at large companies. Got a loooot of hand-me-down clothes for my toddler from friends, family, and randos in the neighborhood.





  • For me, a hurdle to get over was trying to understand in the context of my experience of the world. Like, popsci has this whole "is X a wave or a particle? Scientists still don't know..." schtick. And our understanding at some level is, "here's the math to describe this system."

    Getting away from always mapping that onto the world we experience is, IMHO, really important. Not that it should be understood solely as math, by any means! But you really need to throw away intuition gained from the macroscopic world we interact with.

    My favorite example was looking at reflection coefficients and seeing that an "infinite wall" is the same as an "infinite cliff" --- you'll reflect off of both. Which makes zero sense if you imagine driving a bumper car into a wall (bounce back) vs. over an infinite cliff! But it does me make sense in its own way, and after building up intuition, so do other "weird" and counterintuitive things.




  • In an undergrad electronics lab class, the TA suggested I put the function generator leads on my tongue, and play with the parameters. Obviously I know what an applied DC voltage "tastes" like, but he suggested AC, sweeping the frequency. Sure enough, above a certain frequency (want to say 10s to 100s of Hz?), I couldn't feel it at all.

    Fun stuff.



  • I've used, and continue to use, Linux for a long time, and am very happy with it. Great for my desktop/laptop (Debian, i3).

    That said...it seems like it was a bad choice for these devices. It has no stable ABI, and not even a stable API (famously --- you can read the good reasons why this is the case). If a stable API/ABI was used, then I would think it would be trivial to keep up with security updates --- just run a mainline kernel with a few custom drivers for cell/touch/GPU/whatever. Those will need to be kept up with security updates, but any core kernel security would be automatically handled just by running recent kernels.

    Perhaps I'm missing something obvious --- probably just that everyone decided on Linux, so various vendors already have good Linux support (if only for a 5.10 or some other ancient kernel...).