Recent content by snowjoke

I guess the speed limit (rather than the speed of light) has been pretty well measured by the people at CERN and other particle acceleration facilities, where they see the asymptote in speed as they add more energy to their particles, which go to within a tiny percentage of the speed of light.

If I have a large amount of data I can sample, with a several discrete variables, and I need to get an average of some function of that data, but it's too computationally intensive to do exhaustively... I want to do some sampling of the possible outcomes. I guess random sampling (Monte-Carlo...

& here's another quote from http://www.astroengine.com/?p=5795

I should probably add that neither I nor, I expect, anyone else in this thread has much of a real idea of the actual economics of asteroid mining, further than a general hunch. Maybe I was a bit hasty to denounce it. People will have done the studies already, and you should familiarise yourself...

There are still some indigenous peoples and ethnic groups / cultures and languages that are in danger of being wiped out through contact with the rest of the world and impingement on their territories, but the solution has nothing to do with sending them off into space. Indeed, if humans were...

Au contraire, it's your biggest problem. Insofar as with enough money and the will to do so, we could probably be mining asteroids within 10 years. But the cost is prohibitive, and no-one's going to throw billions of dollars at something which produces a resource at thousands of times the cost...

In my view, a PhD is a complete waste of time for most people. It is an apprenticeship into academia, but if you're not going into academia, you're better off getting stuck into whatever you want to do with your life. I know many people who have PhDs then have gone into the Civil Service...

Twofish - your advice is very good. Out of interest, and I'm sure you've explained before, briefly what's your experience? From your posts I'd guess you work on IT systems in an investment bank?

Going into Wall St is a fine objective to have as a physics undergrad, and I wish I had known more about this when I was an undergrad. You could do a PhD in physics, but I can't see why you would do this rather than a masters then PhD in financial maths, if you know your objective already. This...

There are different types of exchanges for different instruments. For very liquid instruments, you have an automated order book system, where buy and sell orders are placed (which can be at limit, where maximum/minimum price is specified, at best, where you fill the order based on what's already...

Trading isn't a scientific experiment. Markets are largely stochastic rather than deterministic. You're sometimes right and you're sometimes wrong. You make money if you're right fractionally more often than you're wrong...

You're right that for every winner there is a loser - that's what I meant by saying that not everyone can be better than average - but it's not necessarily random who the winners are. Being a good trader can range from not making mistakes, to acting on information more quickly than others. Ask...

Onamor - http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_29/b3842001_mz001.htm" to an interesting article I read recently about Steve Cohen, whose company makes millions of dollars per day from trading. It's a bit old and markets have probably changed, but it provides good insight into active...

If you're really interested in becoming a serious researcher, then you really should go for a PhD in a relevant field. But there's no reason you can't work for a year or two before starting your PhD. After working for a bit and interacting with people who work in astronomy, you'll probably have...

What if you don't want your opponent to fold? I mean, 90% of the time you'll be value betting rather than bluffing. From skim-reading the abstract, it seems to say that if you smile more they'll fold more, so I guess you need to keep that neutral expression if you're not bluffing...