Viewing profile — bkcooper

Addendum: having now had the chance to start on Silksong, strongly recommend Hollow Knight first. That's not because of story, but because Silksong seems like it's geared to be not…

I mostly agree, and would say you should just play it blind. If you care about getting 100% (112% after the DLC) there are probably a couple of things where looking them up would b…

It is very much worth playing but you could probably skip it. As others have alluded to, the storytelling is very influenced by Fromsoft (Souls games, basically) and is pretty obli…

I would assume that's mostly a function of this being for a general audience. Yes, you absolutely can talk about quasiparticles using techniques adapted from QFT. I don't know if L…

In the article, "quiet" and "comfort" are bolded in that section, indicating that they are referring to Bose QuietComfort headphones

The recommendations in this thread so far do suggest a lot of nice books - CS:APP and SICP - but given your description of previous struggles with more academic stuff, along with t…

Hadean Lands is also very cool

Yeah, I would not point somebody unfamiliar with Stern-Gerlach trying to learn "the basic idea of quantum mechanics" at Sakurai. Feynman lectures vol. 3 maybe

Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed. Except half of Fire Upon the Deep was chara…

I spent quite a bit of time at the end of high school into early college playing on a Forgotten Realms themed MUD. It accomplished two valuable things: it durably increased my typi…

You might be interested in Kip Thorne (of Gravitation fame) and Roger Blandford's book Modern Classical Physics , which is designed to cover the elements of non-quantum physics tha…

I largely agree with your comments in this thread -- I'd been thinking about trying to express the same thing myself. I'd been guessing the motivation would be ML, where I feel tha…

When the conductor is grounded, the charge on the conductor is no longer constant. It can change until the total enclosed charge in any sphere surrounding the conductor is zero.

Nocedal and Wright is good. +1 also to the suggestions for Boyd and Vandenberghe. I really like Boyd's writing in general; he has coauthored some good review articles on proximal a…

Concrete Mathematics Spivak Jaynes All good books, all pitched at a level that is very ill suited for what is being asked for. To the GP, "math for English majors" is a common enou…

This is false. A single particle can still be described by the maximum entropy probability distribution given its average energy . . . I'm not sure that construction makes sense. F…

Matching memory games are something my daughter got into shortly before turning 4. We acquired a copy of Trouble from somebody and she likes that too.

The bullet points this article (and the one by Chad Orzel it links to) mentions are the common most used things day-to-day by basically anybody doing physics. However, I think stop…

There's been a big push to shorten the game, constantly trimming out levels. I think some aspects of that turned out pretty well (I was skeptical of the D to D + Depths transition …

...the developers have "eliminate tedium" as a specific design goal. I think lots of good has come from that. At some point, though, it started to feel like a lot of what the dev t…

I was hoping that this would be a collection of ideas that failed.

How does electric current through a (non-super-) conductor convert energy to heat? You have a coupling to other, non-electron/hole degrees of freedom in the system. The stronger th…

We're far too obsessed about "relationships" with other walking-dead sacks of meat instead of what really matters, our legacy and the future. Who is this legacy and future for? "Ot…

I haven't finished it yet, but what I've read of Wasserman's All of Statistics I've liked. The chapters are a bit terse, so I'd plan on doing a bunch of the exercises. The good new…

Chapter 7 will eventually fill at least four volumes . . . assuming that I'm able to remain healthy. Apparently TAOCP has a lot in common with the Wheel of Time. I have a ton of re…