Recent content by phyzguy

Polaris is "up" from the north pole. North is a direction along the surface of the Earth.

One possibility, known as the Hartle-Hawking no boundary proposal, is that if you go backward in time towards the big bang, you reach a point where space and time cease to exist. In this proposal, asking, "What was there before the big bang?" is similar to asking "What is north of the north...

It's called a sun dog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog

There are a lot of red dwarfs out there, and they live for a very long time. The flares tend to decrease as the stars age. Given the probably hundreds of billions of red dwarfs out there in our galaxy, I don't think you can categorically write them off by saying, "Planets around red dwarf...

In what sense are current Large Language Models (LLMs), which are based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), algorithmic? Do you think your brain is algorithmic? If not, why would you think ANNs are algorithmic?

I've never understood why people say this. Depending how far the planet is from the red dwarf star, the temperature on the side facing the star could be perfectly hospitable. Why does it have to "roasting"? I could imagine life that evolved on such a planet saying, "A planet like Earth is...

So, @Line_112 , are you just going to ignore the many redshift measurements of GRBs that have been made? These measurements firmly place them at cosmological distances. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/astronomy-and-space-sciences/articles/10.3389/fspas.2023.1124317/full

Why do you think this? It is an equal area projection. So dots of the same area will cover the same area of the sphere.

Here is an equal area projection map of the Earth, similar to the GRB map. Areas are not distorted, but of course shapes are. It's not possible to map a spherical globe on to a flat sheet of paper without distorting something. But these equal area projections have the advantage that area is...

What's your point? It's well known that gamma ray bursts are extra-galactic. Look at the Wikipedia page, which says, "In gamma-ray astronomy, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are extremely energetic events occurring in distant galaxies which represent the brightest and most powerful class of...

What is done here is to release a huge number of sterile male flies. The females then mate with the sterile males and lay unfertilized eggs, which don't hatch. Eventually the screwworm files are all wiped out, at least in a region. What did you want to use this technique on, besides "mere...

We're building a new factory in Texas with the capability to produce 300 million sterile male screwworm flies per week. This is how we eradicated this pest before, and it should work again...

I strongly agree with the importance of unit tests. But there is more to it than that. I have had cases where the code writer said, "It passed the test suite, so it's good," and never tested the code on the actual application. It's important to run unit tests AND test the code as it is...

Yes. Typically you will not be charging a capacitor with a constant current.

I've found that when I'm documenting my code, one of the main people I'm writing the documentation for is me. So that when I come back years later and ask myself, "What the hell was I doing?" I get some sort of answer.