Viewing profile — RK

Here's another interesting "radiation enthusiast", who visits nuclear sites and collects radioactive memorabilia. He actually works as a nuclear engineer. http://carlwillis.wordpre…

I don't know how we are in relation to Czechs, but one of things I hear as an American is that we are often too quick to talk about politics. Whereas, in many cultures, politics is…

As a grad student in the 2000's I was told by a professor that the department would take into consideration the expected attrition rate (typically ~50%) when admitting grad student…

graduate school admissions were ridiculously competitive in 2003-05 This was true in my experience as well. I applied to grad school for 2004 and heard lots of crazy stories from p…

If you're interested in the chemistry of Uranium, here's a do-it-yourself guide. The uranyl compounds are what fluoresce: https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/uranium-chemis…

Which country are you discussing?

The ANU Quantum Random Numbers Server: http://150.203.48.55/index.php

My advisor in grad school once gave the following advice algorithm for making a decision: 1. Flip a coin. 2. If the result of the coin flip makes you hesitate at all, you know that…

In theory the rule is that you're supposed to refer to people by what name they prefer (e.g. "Little people"). Here's what Wikipedia says: * The terms used to refer to Native Ameri…

I visited Melbourne for about a month a couple of years ago and was excited to use the train to get around, but people there routinely said I was crazy for doing that. People often…

My best friend had one of these as a kid and we made epic backyard GI Joe movies. Incidentally he now works as a film editor.

No write-up, but people I know have left physics for: * Quantitative finance * Insurance (working on models that were beyond what the actuaries were trained to do) * Data science *…

I'm under the impression that it has only gotten worse. Anecdote: A super smart friend of mine from physics grad school finished in 2008 and went on to post-docs at Caltech and Har…

You could make a plot like Figure 1. Look for the turning point (do some calculus if you can, i.e. d(perf)/d(dim) = 0).

Los Alamos is in the middle of nowhere, but Sandia is smack in the middle of a metro area of ~1M people (Albuquerque).

I'd like some UI element that lets me know how long it's been since I read/used a tab. I tend to open lots of tabs and then browse them as is convenient later. Sometimes this means…

Many Irish already had their names Anglicized by the English before they left Ireland.

I'm not that familiar with military aircraft development timelines, but this stuck out as my favorite part: A hypersonic plane does not have to be an expensive, distant possibility…

Nice reference. 1.29 happened to be exactly what I was looking for: for subset in itertools.chain(*(itertools.combinations(a, n) for n in range(len(a) + 1))) I spent way too much t…

I just checked put my sites using elinks and fortunately they came out pretty well. One is based on bootstrap and one on skeleton. I just made some links that are icons (github, tw…

On the other hand Mel Gibson was Aussie and became American. He's not claimed anymore. According to Wikipedia, Mel Gibson was born in the US to American parents and moved to Austra…

For those wondering: Linaro is a not-for-profit engineering organization that works on consolidating and optimizing open-source software for the ARM architecture, including the GCC…