alexei — Fri, 12/09/2008 - 13:14
Sigh … waiting for linux to boot up. With 20:20 hindsight it was stupid to run linux as a virtual process in windows, I’ve now got the most fragile linux distribution on the planet. Firefox in particular has a nasty habit of bringing down my entire linux instance if I, for example, scroll a page too quickly with the mouse wheel.
Firefox is dead!
Long live Chrome!
alexei — Sun, 07/09/2008 - 12:19
I would be great to have an online annotation program where someone can post a draft of a paper and others can annotate it right there in the browser. I know there are commercial sites that do this but an open-source solution would be better. Read more »
alexei — Tue, 22/07/2008 - 12:31
I like software to be configurable and not designed for idiots. I want to be able to shoot myself in the foot. I was put off gnome when they went the simpler-is-better (I-know-better-than-you) approach and the new kde seems to be taking a similar road.
A lot of key bindings are preassigned (not bad) and can not be changed (bad) because to do so would clash with some git’s preconceived notion of how to use a computer. Take assigning Ctrl-arrow to move around desktops which I’ve been using since before kde. Try to assign this in kde4 and you get an error: Read more »
alexei — Thu, 26/06/2008 - 16:35
Yet more surprises marking exams … a question on friction … a number of answers began with
F = μ N
followed on the next line with
N = 6.02 x 1023 …
What?! This one threw me for a bit. After some searching I realised that Avogadro’s number was listed with other constants on the front of the exam. But, N was never used for the normal force in the notes or the textbook …. more searching found it in the formula sheet at the back of the exam. Read more »
alexei — Thu, 26/06/2008 - 16:12
I’m in the middle of marking exams for a course and have had a few suprises.
It’s pretty common for students to interpret or tackle a question in a way you hadn’t foreseen, and this is fine, you err on the side of the student. What I’ve just realised is that you shouldn’t offer life tips as part of the question as the context can got spectacularly awry: Read more »
alexei — Thu, 19/06/2008 - 11:39
One of the main currencies for academics is citations. For better or worse, reputation, funding, jobs and promotions ride on publications and citations. It’s popular to use citation based metrics such as the h-index to rank people. Highly cited papers increase a journals impact factor, making the journal desirable to publish in, and in turn, publishing in high-impact journals increases the perceived importance of the work and researcher …
alexei — Thu, 05/06/2008 - 23:30
Just figured out how to do some pretty neat Bloch sphere's in Mathematica 6, using Sphere[], Graphics3D and ParametricPlot3D. They're interactive too.
The following code defines "bloch" which is a Graphics3D object that can be later used again, it's a bit more complicated than strickly necessary since I've added ket labels to the axes and other tweaks to make it look nice.
alexei — Thu, 22/05/2008 - 13:04
I recently acquired four physics textbooks and was shocked to discover that they cover exactly the same material in exactly the same way. Sure the diagrams are different and the problems are different, but not that different. Looking for something more original I started searching for stuff online…
Here’s two sites I’ve found that have collections of free textbooks: Read more »
