bkcooper

7 ms·

1.
by bkcooper 1y ago
Addendum: having now had the chance to start on Silksong, strongly recommend Hollow Knight first. That's not because of story, but because Silksong seems like it's geared to be noticeably more difficult than Hollow Knight was, bot
2.
by bkcooper 1y ago
I mostly agree, and would say you should just play it blind. If you care about getting 100% (112% after the DLC) there are probably a couple of things where looking them up would be useful. It is also a very big world, so trying to do clean
3.
by bkcooper 1y ago
It is very much worth playing but you could probably skip it. As others have alluded to, the storytelling is very influenced by Fromsoft (Souls games, basically) and is pretty oblique. But, even without following it exactly, the gameplay it
4.
by bkcooper 1y ago
I would assume that's mostly a function of this being for a general audience. Yes, you absolutely can talk about quasiparticles using techniques adapted from QFT. I don't know if Landau originally conceived of it that way, but the
5.
by bkcooper 2y ago
In the article, "quiet" and "comfort" are bolded in that section, indicating that they are referring to Bose QuietComfort headphones
6.
by bkcooper 2y ago
The recommendations in this thread so far do suggest a lot of nice books - CS:APP and SICP - but given your description of previous struggles with more academic stuff, along with the request for "practical examples or projects", I
7.
by bkcooper 2y ago
Hadean Lands is also very cool
8.
by bkcooper 2y ago
Yeah, I would not point somebody unfamiliar with Stern-Gerlach trying to learn "the basic idea of quantum mechanics" at Sakurai. Feynman lectures vol. 3 maybe
9.
by bkcooper 2y ago
Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed. Except half of Fire Upon the Deep was characters on the same planet but it was actually cool. The f
10.
by bkcooper 3y ago
I spent quite a bit of time at the end of high school into early college playing on a Forgotten Realms themed MUD. It accomplished two valuable things: it durably increased my typing speed by 20-30 wpm, and it also inoculated me against the
11.
by bkcooper 3y ago
You might be interested in Kip Thorne (of Gravitation fame) and Roger Blandford's book Modern Classical Physics , which is designed to cover the elements of non-quantum physics that are generally ignored in the first year PhD curric
12.
by bkcooper 4y ago
I largely agree with your comments in this thread -- I'd been thinking about trying to express the same thing myself. I'd been guessing the motivation would be ML, where I feel that most people substantially overestimate how much
13.
by bkcooper 5y ago
When the conductor is grounded, the charge on the conductor is no longer constant. It can change until the total enclosed charge in any sphere surrounding the conductor is zero.
14.
by bkcooper 5y ago
Nocedal and Wright is good. +1 also to the suggestions for Boyd and Vandenberghe. I really like Boyd's writing in general; he has coauthored some good review articles on proximal algorithms and ADMM. A couple of other suggestions: Nest
15.
by bkcooper 8y ago
Concrete Mathematics Spivak Jaynes All good books, all pitched at a level that is very ill suited for what is being asked for. To the GP, "math for English majors" is a common enough course schema that I think looking at a few s
16.
by bkcooper 9y ago
This is false. A single particle can still be described by the maximum entropy probability distribution given its average energy . . . I'm not sure that construction makes sense. For a single particle not interacting with anything, i
17.
by bkcooper 10y ago
Matching memory games are something my daughter got into shortly before turning 4. We acquired a copy of Trouble from somebody and she likes that too.
18.
by bkcooper 10y ago
The bullet points this article (and the one by Chad Orzel it links to) mentions are the common most used things day-to-day by basically anybody doing physics. However, I think stopping at that level of mathematical background would make rea
19.
by bkcooper 10y ago
There's been a big push to shorten the game, constantly trimming out levels. I think some aspects of that turned out pretty well (I was skeptical of the D to D + Depths transition but ultimately I came around on it) but I actually like
20.
by bkcooper 10y ago
...the developers have "eliminate tedium" as a specific design goal. I think lots of good has come from that. At some point, though, it started to feel like a lot of what the dev team considered tedium I considered fun, and vice
21.
by bkcooper 10y ago
I was hoping that this would be a collection of ideas that failed.
22.
by bkcooper 11y ago
How does electric current through a (non-super-) conductor convert energy to heat? You have a coupling to other, non-electron/hole degrees of freedom in the system. The stronger that coupling is, the easier it is to transfer energy b
23.
by bkcooper 11y ago
We're far too obsessed about "relationships" with other walking-dead sacks of meat instead of what really matters, our legacy and the future. Who is this legacy and future for? "Other walking-dead sacks of meat"?
24.
by bkcooper 11y ago
I haven't finished it yet, but what I've read of Wasserman's All of Statistics I've liked. The chapters are a bit terse, so I'd plan on doing a bunch of the exercises. The good news is that there are lots of exerc
25.
by bkcooper 11y ago
Chapter 7 will eventually fill at least four volumes . . . assuming that I'm able to remain healthy. Apparently TAOCP has a lot in common with the Wheel of Time. I have a ton of respect for these huge, decades-long, life-defining pro
26.
by bkcooper 11y ago
If you got enough liquid in there, yes, but I think it's really unlikely you'd get that far. Until you've cooled things down, the liquid you put in is going to boil off, which has a corresponding volume expansion of almost th
27.
by bkcooper 11y ago
The current trend of trying to figure out trustless solutions for everything actually worries me. If you're worried about breakdown in the face of loss of trust, then these sorts of solutions seem like very important things to be loo
28.
by bkcooper 11y ago
The Wikipedia article on fractional calculus mentions that fractional derivatives are not local in the same way that integer derivatives are. Is that right? That seems profoundly weird in the context of differential equations.
29.
by bkcooper 11y ago
I believe Overleaf offers this service. I haven't dealt with it myself, but I have friends who like it a lot.
30.
by bkcooper 11y ago
Good comment. My addendum to follow is not directed to you, but to non-scientific readership. Yea, it's boring for professor on the thesis committee to read, but this sort of stuff is very valuable for students and postdocs, who often

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