I’ll make him rue the day he was born. I will make the kerning on the copy of my dissertation I send him just slightly weird so that it gives him uncanny discomfort while reading it. Any plots I cite from his work will be slightly lower resolution. He won’t know what hit him.

I thought I was hot shit with a low-priority B name, but the Adams in my collaboration showed me just how truly mid I am. If he wasn’t on my dissertation committee… and also a cool dude… and a good scientist…, I would have some choice words for him!

Rant about people like this incoming:

I am a few months away from defending my PhD in Particle and Nuclear Physics and this is such an omnipresent issue with many of the people I interact with regularly. Poorly paraphrasing Dan Olson of Folding Ideas: Because they understand one really complicated subject (particle physics), they see all other subjects as lesser, easily understood and interpreted through the lens of their area of expertise.

I know at least one professor, well respected in his field, who is a vaccine conspiracist and happy to tacitly endorse right wing conspiratorial thought, despite being an expert on mathematical modelling of complex systems. He should understand the rigor involved in modelling and solving a problem like covid, but instead assumes that because it is complicated, the immunologists and virologists must just not be able to arrive at a conclusion he deems good enough to challenge his simplistic view of the situation.

Many professors, however well intentioned, try and reduce labor issues to math problems instead of considering the human element that is really the core of the problem. They build their perspective around explotative capitalist rhetoric, even when graduate students are struggling to afford food and rent. Then they turn around and wonder why enrollment is declining and pursuing academia is falling in popularity

People like Sabine and these professors I have dealt with loudly perpetuate whatever worldview they already hold, assuming that because they must be intelligent enough to grasp difficult math and physics concepts, they couldn’t be ignorant enough for their unrelated ideas to be wrong. It is infuriating because it adds a unearned veneer of authenticity to the concepts, despite a transparent lack of knowledge. Then there is feedback, where people use this support as their evidence for embracing these ideologies and as a building block for furthering their agenda.

These people are also, generally, stale in terms of their own academic output, for I think the same reason as their uneducated takes on other topics. They assume that they understand what they need to and stop grasping for better understanding. My PI is constantly seeking out new experiments to get involved with to try and widen his understanding, and is also a great proponent of progresssive issues. I don’t think this is coincidence. My scientific role model, another advisor of mine, is trying to develop a better academic system that would make education on the most pressing issue today (global warming) better included and more competently taught in university curriculum, regardless of degree topic. He seeks out as many opinions from students and experts as possible in furtherance of this goal. This is despite being one of the key innovators in our field, where his word might be taken as gospel, but because he hasn’t lost his fundamental curiosity about the world, he still seeks out more informed opinions in this endeavor.

The really great scientists keep this curiosity and question their own expertise constantly. The Sabines of the world become comfortable in their own knowledge, and by extension, their own ignorance.

My PI has 2 walls covered in cork board in the hall outside our meeting room. Every paper we publish gets pinned there. It is the “Profesional” equivalent of getting your report card put on the fridge, we have a whole pinning ceremony and everything.

Totally lost my sense of smell for about 2 weeks, but it came back pretty quickly. The worst long term symptom has been a substantially heightened gag reflex. Talking while chewimg gum has become a balancing act or I start heaving, just brushing my molars is enough to trigger gagging some days, and brushing my tongue after my teeth is a sprint to avoid puking. It’s trash.

It is for your own sake. In the time it would take to utter one letter of their name, a trillion cosmoes would flare into existence and sink into Eternal Night!

I didn’t know the European Space Agency organized E3. Learn something new every day.

It is interesting, but it feels like there are too many compromises made at the expense of observational data.

1. The first issue is the reliance on a ~2eV neutrino to compensate. While sterile neutrinos could theoretically be that massive, we have yet to find conclusive evidence of steriles and don’t know the absolute masses or the mass ordering of the neutrinos mass eigenstates we have observed. (I am in neutrinos, so this is the point I am most familiar with.) While the discovery of steriles could occur, my buddy works on a search for eV scale sterile neutrinos and all of his findings have shown that there is no preference for any sterile signal at or around 1-100eV. Normal neutrinos also can’t work: While we don’t know the masses of each neutrino mass eigenstate individually, we know the sum of the neutrino masses, ~0.06-0.1eV, eliminating normal neutrinos from contention as well. This is a core failing, as it relies on the presence of an equally unproven particle as DM, but isn’t as good a fit as DM in many ways, leading into point 2…

2. It has a hard time fitting to galactic cluster data. The Bullet cluster is one of the best observational proofs of DM, and MOND doean’t offer a good explanation for what we see. It also doesn’t account for gravitational lensing, which is a problem given we can see that quite clearly. Since it is only effective at huge scales and can’t be easily checked in a lab, it needs to at least consistently describe observations before I can consider it over DM, which does an excellent job of describing observation. This leads into my final point…

3. There isn’t really any way to experimentally verify/refute it. I am an experimentalist, and while not every theory needs to have a labrotory confirmation, it seems like there is no way to falsify MOND. DM experiments have long proposed models that allow for some DM particle interaction mechanism, however infrequent, with barionic matter that would confirm/deny those models. While far from exhaustive, it at least allows for the ruling out of certain models if the expected flux isn’t there. MOND seems opaque to even this sort of experimental checking.

There are other issue too, but I am not well versed in GR, which is where many other tensions exist. Overall, it seems like an interesting math problem, but I can’t take it seriously until it gives us something to test or describes what we see much more accurately.

Sometimes stuff does. Othertimes, it is more open for debate. As a rule, I like to imagine that stuff might, but only if it will make stuff more confusing.

This is the truth. I am a few months away from getting my PhD in particle physics and the core questions being raised in all levels of the field at the edges of our decent big-picture understanding are so exciting.

Not just guitar audio! I own a tube amp for my guitar and 2 tube amps for driving my higher-end headphones! They are neat little pieces of electronics history, not just in how they run, but also because most of the best tubes are old military surplus. My oldest pair are from 1945 and were made for early army/navy radar systems.

1945 JAN-6AK5 tubes

Regarding not being familiar with LaTeX, I have already successfully used this template alongside chatGPT to convert items from a block of poorly formatted text to a finished card in just a few minutes. All you have to do is feed chatGPT the item’s description and the contents of the TeX files contained in the package (itemcard.tex, itemCommands.tex, tcolorboxSettings.tex) and it will do a pretty bang up job of formatting your item to match the template.

Sometimes, mainly when it is stuff that isn’t rooted in true or false. If I am factually wrong, it isn’t usually concious and I tend realize my mistake after the fact. If I am in the wrong in an emotional/moral way, I tend to realize my mistake while I am still emotionally charged, so I am not always ready to acknowledge it or effectively communicate my apology, though I still try to either admit fault or tell the other person I’d like to discuss it after I have calmed down.

Either way, I usually allow some amount of time for self reflection, which I think is better for me. It allows me to formulate my reasoning for apologizing/admitting my mistake, calm down, and let go of the ego. I have found that even if there is a long pause, the other person almost always will take the follow up discussion with kindness and respect, and appreciates the emotional/intellectual honesty and vulnerability. Nobody has ever rubbed it in my face. Which helps encourage the practice going forward.

It also, in general, facilitates better real-time admission of incorrectness to practice in this way.

I have struggled against this for a long time. I tend to be a pretty prideful person and the urge to shift blame when I fuck up and deflect when faced with being wrong is something that has I have to actively work to correct. The difference for me came when I was younger in dealing with my parents: My dad was far from perfect and there were plenty of times he was in the wrong, but always made sure to sit down with me and apologize if he fucked up. My mom, for the most part, was better at avoiding being in the wrong in the first place, but when she was, I never once got her to apologize or admit her mistake. Of the two, I was hurt far more by the latter, and make it a point to be willing to admit my shortcomings.

The most difficult part after I identified it as an issue is to not let my willingness to apologize/admit my mistake become a carte blanche for continuing the behavior. If I fuck up, apologizing only means something if I work on the mistake. If I am wrong about somethimg, I should learn about both the thing and where my misconceptions came from.

For a lot of people, realizing it is an issue is difficult, because you first have to let go of the pride by acknowledging it. Shame isn’t a good motivator, as it makes most people double down on pride.

This was discounting the truly lazy ones where I just add -boy, -girl, and -cat to the end which adds an infinite supply of stupid names. We took Gyaos to a different vet than our normal one once (for a paw he cut on some glass he shattered) and they acted like Mouse was the weirdest nickname in the world. We didn’t return to them ever again.

I have in my menagerie of cats:

Gamera: Guardian of The Universe; Nicknames- Gambi, Gambini, Gamberooni, Grayby

Gyaos (pronounced Gauss); Nicknames- Gyaos-a-mouse, Mouse, Goose, Goose-a-moose, Moose

Drax The Destroyer; Nicknames- Droopy, Droops, Droopy-poopy, Drax-attacks, Drakattaka

Marceline the Vampire Queen; Nicknames- Marcy, Moops, MooMoo, Marmie, MooMoo Bean the Stinky Queen

Cookie; Nicknames- Cook, Cookie-Books, Bookie, Book

I see your Cookie and raise you a Cookie of my own.

These look super good! I have a little PPTSD (Post Pepper Traumatic Stress Disorder) from stuffed peppers: a few weeks ago my mom asked if my fiancee and I wanted them when we were visiting for dinner. I figured she’d make 2-4, since bell peppers upset my parents’ stomachs and they were just for me and my SO. She made 12 absolutely massive ones, took up a whole casserole dish, each was softball sized, and they were stuffed with quinoa and rice for maximum carbs. We had to eat all of them, as we don’t waste food in our house. My fiancee and I ate stuffed pepper every day for a whole week, multiple times a day, since there were so many and they were so big and calorie dense.

Just Egg for breakfast? Fry up a half a pepper each. Tacos? Side of stuffed pepper. Barbecue? Stuffed pepper. Ice cream? Stuffed pepper for dessert. Walking through the kitchen? Take a bite of pepper.

It sucks and makes dealing ith the illness so much worse. Ironically, stress is a trigger for Crohns/UC and the stress of dealing with this has been responsible for multiple flareups of mine. Luckily, a lifeline might be on the horizon for autoimmune disorders like Crohns, Celiacs, and MS

A new (anti?)vaccine is being tested that can rewrite the immune system to take the body’s normal, healthy cells off its kill list. Fingers crossed that before I turn 35 I can just be done with this horseshit before it causes any lasting damage to my insides

https://scitechdaily.com/new-vaccine-can-completely-reverse-autoimmune-diseases-like-multiple-sclerosis-type-1-diabetes-and-crohns-disease/

I got my Crohn’s diagnosis about 3 years ago. While it has been worth it, the amount I have spent on medication, procedures, doctor’s visits, etc has kept my credit card near its limit for years and is a constant source of anxiety. This is with decent insurance. I have a job that is flexible with hours, but between flare ups and infusions, I have to miss work semifrequently and someone not in my position could be in a very tenuous state with their employer. Not to mention the stress of fighting the insurance for coverage of medications that are thousands of dollars per dose and dealing with systemic incompetence of the people involved in every stage of the process. They all fail (doctor’s office, infusion clinic, insurance, etc) to communicate in anything resembling a timely manner without my constant pestering and prodding. It is torturous, and only marginally better than the symptoms themself, and I understand exactly why people forego treatment if they have deal with any one of these issues individually, let alone with all of them. Just so BCBS/UHC/etc can turn a profit off our suffering.