Recent content by gleem

That suggests salt. How close to the ocean do you live? IIRC, I have read that certain fastener warranties are voided if you use them within 10 miles of saltwater.

We should remind students that bad things can happen in real life if one does not pay attention to details, for example, the Mars Climate Orbiter (1999) failure when engineers used the incorrect units for the orbit calculations.

Could you provide a diagram or sketch of the device you envision?

Do you want to use the results of a square cross-section irradiator silmulation to use to build a cylindrical one?

I remain here because it is one of the few places where I can engage with others whose knowledge, opinions, and insights I respect.

Yes. The sensitivity and efficiency are independent of the decay rate, which is responsible for the variability in the rate of the radiation arrival at the detector. Geiger counters are particularly susceptible to large fluctuations in their reading at low decay rates.

I think some get the impression that the actual difference between successive decays is relatively constant and for high decay rates that is essentially true, but for very low count rates, it is very noticeably not true and an important consideration when performing a survey.

Yeah, I kinda did too, but focusing on the commonality of the two, only monitoring the actual end of the processes, they are comparable.

Top Men!

If you have ever monitored the decay of a radioactive isotope with a long half-life, you would note that the time between successive decays varies dramatically compared to the average. The decay rate is approximated by a Poisson distribution, which, for low decay rates, is extremely skewed...

Sounds like some AI have anterograde amnesia.

We argue against AI's creativity because we see how it functions. We argue for human creativity, but we do not know how it functions. So they must be different? In one of my previous posts, I gave a reference to a study that showed LLM could understand human emotions better than humans in a...

AI and LLM in particular are amazing. Beginning with ChatGPT3 making a splash on the web, detractors argued that it was just auto-complete. It was desired to emulate human neural networks, a guess of how we think they work. It worked pretty well without any specific reasoning capability. It...

MIT with Oak Ridge National Lab has released a report that found that 11.7% of US jobs are currently vulnerable to being replaced by AI. They have developed a simulation tool called the Iceberg Index to give a snapshot looking at the current layoff and role-changing information, the tip of the...

You should add AI to your toolbox, also. Getting back to employment, the American Institute of Physics has extensive information on the employment and careers of physicists in the US here. In particular, below are a few of their reports: Impacts of Restrictions on Federal Grant Funding in...