Viewing profile — lewis500

I write little academic papers for a living as a professor. I think this is good advice on how to write like cormac mccarthy. More important is to pick an academic writer whose jou…

Me too. I think that because of the meta programming capabilities we’re going to see a lot more development in that direction. Recently I started using Turing.jl, which uses a sort…

I just thought it might be nice if you did a breakdown of the physics of traffic and maybe how you coded that part. As for teaching, I think it could be used to teach about like si…

Do you have a writeup of the traffic simulation rules that you're using? I peeked in the code and saw the intelligent driver model is being used for acceleration. I suppose you als…

I agree I would recommend industry to almost everyone. In fact, engineers ask me about grad school several times per year and I almost always discourage them. Too many people think…

I don’t think they’re excuses. They’re explanations of how things happen. The asymmetrical relationship especially explains how professors can get away with treating students badly…

I’m a professor. I have a few thoughts about this. First, the grad student/professor relationship is inherently asymmetrical, much more so than most employer/employee relationships…

If supply and demand matters then it would seem employment does not exist because of societal wish for people to justify their existence with madeup jobs, but rather because of man…

“We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery…. He must justify his right to exist.” This is a framing designed to g…

Why isn't it a flying three-wheeler?

This is the type of decision-making the authors of the Green New Deal need to grapple with. E.g., the Green New Deal calls for high speed rail everywhere. But when you actually try…

The weird thing is that, even though a lot of policy is oriented toward making you a conscious consumer (high deductibles, coinsurance) in many cases you just can’t do it,at least …

Normally when markets have so much unsold inventory, prices fall to clear it out. But prices can be "sticky" and won't go down. All this unsold inventory makes you wonder why the p…

It’s inaccurate to say that we “can’t” escape it. The federal reserve has been raising interest rates to slow inflation and growth in employment, and for years they have paid inter…

I think this mainly makes a difference with regard to reading the code. I'm looking at a struct in someone's code and ask myself "How does this thing get used?" With classes I'll b…

> Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers? I don't really think the teaching part at most universities oriented toward training worker…

wow this is brutal. thanks for sharing. I had mused on the idea of pitching them an opinion piece about my field, traffic, but not anymore.

Why does it say "homes" when the first sentence says "urban housing stock"?

Why would a country want to buy up only shares of companies in that country? You could have a large sovereign wealth fund, but most countries are very small and it would not make s…

Don’t get me wrong. I think the actual activities parents get their kids to do can be wonderful experiences, especially if you undertake them on your own. What I’m skeptical of is …

Latex lets you write equations quickly. Whether that makes it worthwhile to learn depends on how many equations you write and how quickly you want to be able to change them. I also…

Looking back on my own childhood, I'm skeptical how much anything alleged to "enrich" the children actually made a difference. I recall most of all piano lessons. When I was a kid,…

I don't understand why Musk is so invested in the idea of cars in tunnels. Does he really have a substantially better tunnel boring machine/tunnel boring workflow? If so, there are…

There is a network effect. Imagine if you made a ridesharing app with only one driver. No one would use the app due to high wait times. That's an edge case but it gets the point ac…