Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout • Hacker News Board

Re: Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout

#21

Post by kragen » Sun, Mar 06, 2011, 3:35 PM UTC

ZoFreX wrote: post #20

kragen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the 1970s until about 2001, the common fonts on Unix systems drew those two characters as something approximating ‘ and ’. This gave us Unix users a simple and easy way to put ‘single’ or “double” quotes into our man pages, our web pages, our TeX documents, pretty much everywhere we would put text. Unfortunately, the stupid losers at Microsoft and Apple never picked up on this, and eventually the glyph for the a…

> and they will work everywhere with no problems It's deliciously ironic that they do not display properly for me in your post (Chrome on Windows here).

Confession: I ran them through "recode latin1..utf8" before posting to simulate a website encoding problem. It's not the fault of the website or your browser or my browser. This time.

Re: Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout

#22

Post by cabalamat » Sun, Mar 06, 2011, 3:42 PM UTC

pekinb wrote: post #16

kragen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the 1970s until about 2001, the common fonts on Unix systems drew those two characters as something approximating ‘ and ’. This gave us Unix users a simple and easy way to put ‘single’ or “double” quotes into our man pages, our web pages, our TeX documents, pretty much everywhere we would put text. Unfortunately, the stupid losers at Microsoft and Apple never picked up on this, and eventually the glyph for the a…

what work do your "fuck"s and "shit"s do?

They are effective at conveying emotional state.

Re: Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout

#23

Post by codelieb » Mon, Mar 07, 2011, 2:02 PM UTC

splat wrote: post #10

Devilboy wrote: post #6

I know this is kinda off-topic but could someone explain why the wobble rate and the spin rate of the plate would have a 2 to 1 ratio? Is this somehow related to the spin numbers of elementary particles?

It's a little complicated, although not so complicated that it has anything to do with the spin of elementary particles. The basic reason is due to perpendicular axis theorem. If you have a plate, there is some moment of inertia about the axis perpendicular to the plate, and a different moment of inertia about any axis in the plane of the plate. The perpendicular axis theorem says that the moment of inertia about the…

For a similar, but more complete, description (with figures), see "Feynman's Tips on Physics," Section 4-10, The Spinning Disk, and "The Feynman Lectures on Physics," Volume I, Section 20-4 Angular Momentum of a Spinning Body.

Mike Gottlieb Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics Coauthor, Feynman's Tips on Physics

Re: Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout

#24

Post by YuriNiyazov » Mon, Mar 07, 2011, 9:12 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #15

pjscott wrote: post #8

This is completely off-topic, but I've been seeing this weird style of quotation marks occasionally for a while now. It uses two backticks at the beginning, and two apostrophes at the end: ``quoted''. If you're not using TeX, doing that will generally look pretty weird. So why do we still see it?

From the 1970s until about 2001, the common fonts on Unix systems drew those two characters as something approximating ‘ and ’. This gave us Unix users a simple and easy way to put ‘single’ or “double” quotes into our man pages, our web pages, our TeX documents, pretty much everywhere we would put text. Unfortunately, the stupid losers at Microsoft and Apple never picked up on this, and eventually the glyph for the a…

You should meet Kenny Tilton from comp.lang.lisp - the writing style of your comment made me think of him.