Scala Macros: "Oh God Why?"

willvarfar · 2 months

Doesn't really sound like he's complaining, or bitching as you would have it. Sounds more like criticism. And constructive at that.

Constructive criticism is a valuable contribution to a project.

berkman_nate · 2 months

I'd say spend some time with their group (their other students, postdocs, technical staff, admin staff etc) and see if they seem like the sort of people you could get on with. It's pretty hard to figure out what a person will be like as a supervisor, but less hard and almost as useful to figure out whether you'd fit in with the sort of people who do get along with that person as a supervisor.

ink_13 · 2 months

They wrote a paper on it:

http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

retardo · 2 months

I'd be more inclined to discuss it with you if you weren't, you know, rude about it :-)

retardo · 2 months

I dont' really find that it works like that, but each to their own :-)

retardo · 2 months

I find that I'm not limited by my typing, copying and pasting, or looking things up speed. It's the thinking that slows me down, and no development environment really seems to make that easier!

JonyEpsilon · 3 months

Hopefully answers some of those questions about what it was all about!

Original discussion here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/ouooa/the_pendulum_experiment_a_massparticipation/

Poromenos · 3 months

All the performance of a relational database with all the great data integrity guarantees of MongoDB!

Kryptopf · 3 months

Guessing, but maybe we can imagine it this way:

Imagine in the lab frame you had some spins rotating in a constant magnetic field. If you transformed to a frame rotating with the spins then they'd appear static. So in that frame it would be reasonable that there's no magnetic field. Suggesting that the rotation introduces an effective field which cancels the static field?

Dunno whether that's right - always a bit worried about any argument with rotating frames in! The only real option is to write down the equations and break out the sin and cos :-)

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

I think you're taking it too seriously :-)

And working off some assumptions that aren't necessarily true.

The privacy policy is quite explicit about what data is collected, and what might be done with it. I'd like to think it's clearer than most of the legalese privacy policies that you get from sites that collect a lot more personal information.

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

Interesting.

I'm hoping the website doesn't subject anyone to enough risk that informed consent is an issue!!!

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

Hey, a lot of good science has been done settling bar bets!

That's not the thing that I set out to check :-)

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

Yeah, I know I spotted that in testing, but already had a test dataset from my colleagues and didn't really want to change it. The "period" in the code is actually the real period over 2 pi, which is isn't the same as angular velocity (I not sure that has a name!) Let's just call it partial obfuscation ...

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

I think you think I'm looking for a different kind of things than I know I am.

Jony

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

Thinking about this more, here's a good example of the blurry line between the practice of science and psychology/sociology from contemporary science: expectation bias and blind analysis.

I work on an experiment to precisely test one of the basic laws of physics. We're extremely careful to never reveal the results to ourselves during the data collection and analysis processes. We go to quite some lengths to enforce this blinding. This is to mitigate a well-known property of humans, namely that we are psychologically and sociologically pressured to agree with the previous results of important people.

There's a great paper on this by Jeng, which I'd recommend as interesting, and fun, reading to anyone interested in the science of measurement:

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0508199

Jony

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

That's an interesting way of looking at it. But, to put a counter-argument:

If a human is unavoidably part of the measurement system - as was the case for much of science's history - then perhaps the line is a little more blurred than you make out?

Wouldn't a thorough investigation of all parts of the measurement system be necessary to fully establish the best experimental protocol, and to assess the uncertainties properly?

Jony

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

No psych background, pure physics. I have in mind a few things I want to test - with one in particular being the main point of it, personally. Not defining what a swing is is deliberate.

I'm also trying to leave it as open as possible, in general, in case anything else useful can be found in the data. And also because I like the minimal vagueness of it all.

Don't know why you'd think it is sloppy - perhaps my online reputation doesn't give a good impression for rigour!

Jony

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

I'm keeping deliberately vague on that at the moment because I don't want to bias the results.

In fact, I'm trying to leave it all as free as possible, as there might be other interesting analyses people want to do with the data, and I don't want to bias their results either :-)

I appreciate that it does make it all seem a bit pointless. But hey, that could be part of the appeal!

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

I'm keeping that deliberately vague at the minute, as I don't want to bias the results!

Jony

JonyEpsilon · 4 months

Any questions, just ask. Any feedback welcome!

Devataa · 5 months

Ahaah. Didn't get that far ...

Devataa · 5 months

My guess would be that it uses an accelerometer to measure wheel orientation (by looking for the modulation from the earth's gravitational acceleration). Accelerometers are cheap and don't require and contacts/magnets.

Then, if you've got a signal that can tell you the wheel frequency, you just need to flash the lights on and off in sync with that.

JonyEpsilon

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