Baley shrugged. He would never teach himself to avoid asking useless questions. The robots knew. Period. It occurred to him that, to handle robots with true efficiency, one must needs be expert, a sort of roboticist. How well did the average Solarian do, he wondered?
I ended up building a nice charging station right near the entrance. It has storage for keys, wallet, and other things to grab when heading out. It has an abundance of wired and wireless chargers for all devices.
Then I got a dumb (but nice) alarm clock for the bedroom.
Then I noticed that a common reason to pick up the phone is to check the calendar. I ended up hanging a monitor on the wall, displaying the family month/agenda calendars. It’s read only, but it prevents a lot of device checking.
Cannot recommend enough restructuring physical reality to not have device on your person at home. It also helps the kids to put theirs away and learn good habits.
You come off as snarky, but I kind of agree. We tried this first.
It turns out digital collaborative calendars are pretty great for us in general, there is no chance in hell I could keep the analog one up to date, so it was definitely worth having a screen on the wall.
Not the GP but I use a simple wake up light alarm that was a game-changer for me in winters when a blaring alarm yanking me awake to a pitch-black room was not a great way to start the day, especially before going out into the -40° cold to scrape my car off.
A half hour before the alarm goes off, it slowly gets brighter which I find simulates the sun rising enough to be a more pleasant waking experience. Plus I set the alarm sound itself to bird chirps, starting with 1 or 2 birds and growing into a whole chorus (I'm usually up before then)
I personally use the Braun, because it does not have a snooze function. Just one big button on the top to turn it on/off. Run on a single AAA battery for months. Only problem is no backlighting, so no way to read time in the middle of the night. For me that's a feature not a bug.
https://us.braun-clocks.com/collections/clocks/products/bc12...
Not op but I just got a home-pod mini and just ask Siri “Hey Siri - set an alarm for …” or “Hey Siri - what time is it”. Added benefit of not having a glowing LED light in my room at night
great until I add something to my digital calendar when im out and I forget to update it, or my wife adds something to her calendar and doesnt use the shared calendar :/
The combination of a 17th century poet and far future sci-fi is, at first, rather absurd. But the simple and deep connection to topics on love and humanity, something only poetry can provide, is a a beautiful complement to fantastic and terrifying sci-fi concepts in Hyperion. Empathy, love and human connection are the underlying message of the books despite the fun sci-fi facade. I love this series and recommend it to all.
I couldn’t make it through this long article but loved reading about Severn, Fanny Brawne, and Keats— all beloved characters from the hyperion series.
Are there good ways for US companies to host international grad students in their internship programs? How hard is it for them?
Specifically I had a conversation with a few administrators at universities in Sweden and this question came up on behalf of their students.
Thanks for regularly showing up here. I went EB2NIW some years ago and still get ptsd reading these threads. Hang in there everyone struggling with immigration.
The US companies don't have to do anything - J1 is applied by the student, he just needs a signing letter from you (German here who did this twice in 2007 and 2009). I did not have an attorney or help; just apply at the US Embassy and follow the procedure.
The path will depend on if these are paid or unpaid internships: if paid, then the J-1 visa is probably the best option; if unpaid, then the B-1 business visitor visa is an option. For the J-1, there's really no need for a lawyer to execute the application, just to provide advice at the outset; for the B-1, I would recommend getting legal advice and support but this won't be expensive at all.
This seems like a young talent that we’ll see more of. I like your to the point writing style and obvious passion for mathematical clarity. Keep it up and best wishes for your phd studies.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on the case where the f_i are optimizable: f_i(t) = K(t, z_i), i=1..m << N. Like the representer thm but much fewer terms than you have data points to fit. The points z are usually called inducing points and may be optimized by gradient descent.
There is literature on approximating exact GP inference with (something like) these objects when m << N (variational inference).
However, I’m not aware of anyone drawing a clear picture of the other direction, starting from the optimization picture and explaining it in terms of inference, similar to what TFA does.
In TFA the number of functions is large, so the system is underdetermined. In the variational inference the system is overdetermined and I wonder what inference, if any, gradient descent does..
Caveat: 1am and a few drinks deep so if I’m not making sense that’s ok
“in order to settle any lingering unease about using such tools in physics” spoken like a true mathematician :D
I enjoyed the post a lot (at least the parts that didn’t pass right over my head). But I never met a physicist with lingering unease about dimensional analysis. We get that beaten into us until it’s as natural as breathing.
> But I never met a physicist with lingering unease about dimensional analysis.
There is very little that physicists have lingering unease about when it comes to (ab)using maths to get their way with the physical world.
Examples abound, and have actually led to many a new avenue in math.
Distributions (as in the Dirac distribution) are a very good example of this (IIRC convolution didn't have an identity and they needed one, and they just made up "functions" that were allowed to have infinite values as long as they had finite sums or something along those lines).
Math is just a tool, as long as the objects behave in the ways you need you can do whatever you want with math.
If your math objects breaks other properties of math that you don't use then it doesn't matter, you don't use those so your math is still correct.
A programmer analogy would be that you implement a special kind of list for your project, but don't implement the whole list interface because you don't need the rest. That makes the mathematicians fume, "it isn't a list!!!", and they invent a new interface name for your implementation, like "distribution" instead of function.
Speaking as former physicist, can only agree with you.
However, regarding the Dirac delta function an other generalized functions, even though they were introduced by physicists (I think Heaviside was an early proponent) in a hand wavy fashion, they were later put in rigorous mathematical footing in the theory of distributions. Distributions are nowadays used by mathematicians without any hesitation.
This also not the first instance of something like this, and it won't be the last. Physicists have come up with ad hoc methods that work, but they can't justify why with rigor. Some time later mathematicians formalize it and it becomes part of their tool set.
> they were later put in rigorous mathematical footing in the theory of distributions
Yeah some French dude called Laurent Schwarz that got the Fields medal for it.
IIRC he built the set of distributions as the dual vector space of the tiniest vector space he could think of: extremely well behaved functions (C-infinite functions with finite support - weird mathematical beasts that go to zero at the extremities of their support with all derivatives also going to zero there as well).
I never really managed to grok the intuition behind the formalization of Schwarz, whereas the hand-wavy physicist way is pretty straighforward to understand.
Yes, there is an often overlooked unit 1 at the heart of dimensional analysis.
It counts discrete things that combine as integers, but are not convertible (commensurate) between different instances of the unit, like apples and oranges.
A hen lays 3 eggs a week (1egg/T), and a car factory makes 4,000 cars a week (1car/T). Dimensional analysis says they are both 1/T, but we know they are really not commensurable.
P.S. Things that do not combine as integers: water drops (1+1=1); rabbits (1+1=2^t for some time constant t).
I use a split keyboard with custom layers and find it fine to use a normal keyboard such as when on the laptop directly. They seem to activate different modes in my brain somehow.
I have much bigger problems switching between dvorak and qwerty on either keyboard, to the point where I'm considering properly relearning qwerty despite being fluent in dvorak over a decade.
Baley shrugged. He would never teach himself to avoid asking useless questions. The robots knew. Period. It occurred to him that, to handle robots with true efficiency, one must needs be expert, a sort of roboticist. How well did the average Solarian do, he wondered?