robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
But why would the liquid start roiling in the first place? Liquid surface tilt and pot tilt are obviously coupled resonators, so practically you will get both oscillating if you get either.
I don't think it rocked less, but we didn't really test it for too long, because unless you held it it would splash its contents out at a surprisingly high throughput.
I really should find a pot to break. :)
That is a reasonable alternative hypothesis (that we basically get white-ish noise that pushes a dampened pendulum around, so the pendulum will end up with some amplitude of resonant oscillations). It should be easily verifiable if I had such a pot (basically insert a membraneless speaker with the axis oriented radially, play white noise, and see what happens). Perhaps I should find an old pot and reshape it that way with some wood and a hammer.
I realized that I'm actually not sure how a harmonic oscillator driven by noise from e.g. a Wiener process (but without damping) should behave (would its amplitude diverge? probably not).
@_thegeoff who specifically might find it interesting
Consider a pot with a convex bottom (i.e. it will stand on its midpoint) with sufficiently large radius of curvature to make it stable when filled to any level. When you put such a pot on an electric hotplate and get it boiling, it starts rocking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB_szsLa3zk
I have a hypothesis on what's going on (the pot rocks away from the area where the boiling is more intense due to density difference, contact with hotplate increases rate of heating, so there's more heating on the side that's currently lower and thus any rocking gets amplified). Sadly, I don't have the pot anymore and didn't thing at that time of any experiments that could falsify this hypothesis.
How does that work? Is that a polymer/something with different mechanism of adhesion to concrete vs internal cohesion?
Yes.
What makes no sense is to expect a good solution that takes a long time to implement to increase the metric gradually while it's being developed/deployed.
Such assumptions lead people to create metric that measure progress of a solution instead of state of the issue, which causes (a) people to declare success when the "progress" metric reaches some threshold lower than 100% (b) fixation on a particular solution.
A particular example of same-mold thinking I was thinking of was wanting a metric for "how well a given problem is solved right now" and expecting it to be slowly varying over time, which ignores problems where any partial solutions are worthless or nearly worthless.
TBF people often try to work under the assumption that the problems businesses solve can be squashed into the same mold too. In my anecdotal experience assuming this and assuming that everyone works the same way is correlated, so much so I assumed without thinking that they have the same cause.
Also, thanks for making me look at https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Flags, which contains the following statement, which IMO is self-ridiculing:
> Although a pair of REGIONAL INDICATOR symbols is referred to as an emoji_flag_sequence, it really represents a specific region, not a specific flag for that region.
@kouett What's the gate for at all?
The thing that I complain about is that I can write a piece of text that, when rendered, has some meaning, and the rendering of that very same byte sequence (e.g. in message logs) later will convey a different meaning.
A text encoding can choose carefully how the symbols that can be encoded are defined, so that they won't be misused (as I suppose you'd call using regional-s regional-y to represent the Assad regime) in ways that will be unambiguous at one point in time and have unambiguously different meaning at another point in time.
We have a practical case of #Unicode encoding of country flags causing problems.
To recap, flags are encoded as sequences of codepoints corresponding to letters in the country's ISO code (so, Polish flag is <flag-p> <flag-l>). There is no heed paid to their mutability over time.
The Syrian flag will at some point start being rendered differently. Then, all the previous statements about Assad's government that used the flag will start rendering as if they were about the rebels.
I'm sad at Unicode's failures to fully and immutably encode the meaning of whoever wrote the text (see Han unification for counterexample to "fully").
@glent This also looks borked? I can't imagine how you could get pH of 0.2 in a water treatment plant.
But that only applies to things that are likely to be present at a jobsite, so people who don't work next to a workshop/lab/something like that will still have the same problem with stuff like assorted resistors.
An electronics parts store in Kraków that I frequented used to do that for stuff like connectors or resistors that would normally be packed in units of ~100.
Ah, you mean the wastewater plant?
@regehr I think there were many worse zoom catastrophes in courts (well, catastrophies for the person in question but often arguably better results for the society).
Seconded.
On a similar note, it should be easy to find pirated Kongsberg simulators of an engineering plant of a ship with Diesel main engine and steam TG paired with a shaft motor-generator.
If you don't mind me asking, I'd like to better understand how people think of special tableware. (I myself don't feel a need to use/have special tableware.)
My best approximation of why people like to have and use special tableware is similar to reasons for using makeup or aesthetically pleasing clothes. Is that a roughly reasonable comparison or very off?
I would expect that, given this is mostly about visual aesthetics, the desire to use special tableware would often cooccur with desire to make/serve visually aesthetically pleasing food. Am I roughly correct?
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
