Viewing profile — fraserphysics

The second law of thermodynamics implies that one must spend energy as work to move thermal energy up a temperature difference. So the net effect of an air conditioner is to increa…

For a long time I've been reading that the closure of Hormuz is going to constrain consumption soon. I understand the economic theory that reducing supply of an inelastic commodity…

It was so long ago that I've forgotten most of it. I was impressed that it was based on evidence based literature. Here is a link to the training now https://carpentries.org/instru…

I signed up for software carpentry instructor training at the SciPy conference in 2015. I expected to learn about their curriculum. Instead, I found that they taught pedagogy. Ther…

When I worked at Los Alamos, the head of counterintelligence was a former CIA ops guy. He seemed warm and intelligent; just an all around good guy. In presentations, he explained t…

This article was in Springer's The Mathematical Intelligencer in 1980. The next article in that volume was "Strange Attractors" by David Ruelle. When I read Ruelle's article in the…

Helium will leak out of some structures that hold methane. Shale will trap methane and let helium escape. Layers of salt trap both. Thus horizontal drilling and fracking to recover…

Tracy Kidder's father and grandfather (Henry M. and Henry M. Jr.) were partners in the law firm that's now Seward and Kissel. My great grandfather was a partner in the firm when he…

Thank you for articulately describing an ugly part of the world of science that I've seen over the last 40 years. I appreciate your "There but for the grace of God" thought. If I w…

After free UNIX and Linux became available on affordable home computers, I found it was no longer necessary to be at a company to do interesting projects. That was before 1995.

Encouraged by the replies here, I tried to get quickemu to setup macOS on my AMD based desktop. The emulated machine crashed trying to boot macOS, and I gave up after a couple of h…

I thought that macOS was proprietary, and that apple only allowed it to be run on apple hardware. Just last month, I used incus to test a software package in 6 Linux distributions.…

I'm polishing up the second edition of "Hidden Markov Models and Dynamical Systems." The book explains several state space models and connects them to ideas about chaos. Here's a l…

This is a draft of a second edition of this book from SIAM https://epubs.siam.org/doi/book/10.1137/1.9780898717747?mobi... There are three things to show: 1. A pdf of the draft: ht…

Yes! There's more oil in the ground than we should ever burn. The places where it's cheap to get out are ruled by unpleasant people. Shale limits the price they can charge. Yea sha…

I read the NY Times article about this earlier this morning. I thought it was not very good. I came to HN to see if it had something better. It did. The linked article is also at s…

Please take a look at the most recent draft of my book "Hidden Markov Models and Dynamical Systems" https://www.fraserphysics.com/book.pdf In the first chapter I talk about a chaot…

I think it was Larry Summers.

One way to characterize the cost of cooling is entropy production. As you say, cooling is proportional to difference in temperature. However, entropy production is also proportiona…

I started getting migraines in the 1960s. Thanks for the link. While a cup of coffee often helped me feel better in years past, I've found eliminating coffee from my diet has reduc…

I think the result for Gaussian channels is in R^n.

Don't Shannon's channel coding theorem and rate-distortion theorem establish bounds on possible sphere packing?

Thank you for your reply. I am also not a doctor. I have an appointment with a specialist MD. My PCP was initially alarmed, but after some research and consultations believes that …

I wore a heart monitor for a month and want the data. I've called and exchanged email with "Bio Telemetry, a Phillips company", and all I've received is a stack of paper with a "Da…

The units of resistivity are ohm * cm not ohm/cm. (I worked at Fairchild a long time ago.)