It's alsp really interested to see the differences in how they answer questions. I love it when people get asked really hard and broad questions: it's a great opportunity to demonstrate what they know, demonstrate their ability to think rationally beyond what they know, and admit when they can't reason their way any further. All great skills! But some students seem to really freak out at the prospect of open questions with no simple right/wrong answer
Watching our undergraduate research students give their final presentations, and *wow* there's a wide range of how much they've accomplished in their ~7 months of work: some make me feel keenly aware of the shortcomings of my PhD, and others seem like they've only really worked for the last month. Research is hard.
How #scifi author Greg Egan and an unknown 4-chan poster advanced a tricky problem in combinatorics.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/sci-fi-writer-greg-egan-and-anonymous-math-whiz-advance-permutation-problem-20181105/
#mathematics
@cocoron@sunbeam.city I find it interesting that most of the replies to this are focusing on social justice issues in activist spaces, while to me the educate/lmgtfy issue comes up most frequently when helping (grand)parents solve computer issues. In that context, I normally feel that it's more important to teach problem solving in the abstract than it is to teach how to adopt formatting in Word or whatever, even though answering that particular question is trivial
@headachebooth you ever… you ever thought about fucking a barrel of crude?
Update: I've just spent the last six hours repeatedly failing to solve a problem that turned out to just be DNS. In hindsight, that's pretty much what I should have expected
@geordie I'm thinking of just buying some sort of cheap bunny ears and seeing what I can learn from the software side, but that definitely seems like a real risk
@scarydan simultaneously, I'm trying to play some stuff with the girlfriend only to be reminded that my 19th-century concertina doesn't quite work with modern concert tuning
Arranging this morning. It's all going well until I put the woodwind and vocal parts together and CLASHY MCCLASHERSON 😂
I think the problem lies with the chord reference (an "official", but questionable, one) I found for the song online. I need to stop doing that and start just basing everything off what I hear in a song.
@geordie ah, nice! Is there much interesting non-ADS radio traffic to pick up in the Sydney area?
It's my first reasonably free Saturday in a while, and I think I'm going to spend some time playing around with my newly arrived raspberry pi! It's currently functioning as a basic Kodi media centre and nothing else, but it seems a good tool for learning a bit about Linux systems and networking. Things I'd like to look into:
• Always-on torrentbox: transmission with webclient, set up openvpn to tunnel torrent traffic but leave normal traffic. Seems a good way to learn some basic linux networking stuff
• LAMP server to host a WP blog or something. Not sure i really need this, but could be fun to set up.
And maybe later:
• ADS-B logging with RTL-SDR. I don't have the hardware at the moment, but SDR seems interesting and I'm sure it'd force me to learn new stuff about processing real-time datastreams.
What're you guys doing with SBCs? Anyone have any cool projects they'd like to share?
<< The mistakes that ruined GUIs forever — the rejection of composition, the paternalism toward users, the emphasis on fragile inflexible demo-tier applications that look impressive in marketing material but aren’t usable outside extremely narrow & artificial situations — weren’t invented at PARC but imposed by fiat by Jobs upon a team that already knew better than to think any of it was OK. >>
@Surasanji first day of summer, it's all downhill from here
@geordie the cursed season comes again
@kara@witchcraft.cafe @KaylinEvergreen "Twenty years on the ice, Mac. Twenty years, and that's enough: come the first flight of the summer, I'm goin' to Florida. It's been cold for too long."
<a single tear forms as he stares into the distance>
Also, this: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
PhD student working with visible-light photoswitches, supramolecular chemistry, NMR spectroscopy. Musician. Some politics.