seano

seano, 27 days ago to ADHD

Good news, the medication I started for my #Narcolepsy is helping a lot! I feel more awake and energized than I’ve felt in the past ten years! :) And I just like, have the energy to do tasks, which is really nice.

Bad news, my #ADHD is so much worse now lmao. I am getting distracted way more easily, and I’ve been really frustrating in serious conversations because of that. So I’m gonna try to figure out what to do about that, but hey, at least this is progress?

4sphere, 1 month ago to random

For many reasons, this week has been especially unpleasant for me; I'd like to recover some of the feeling of living in a universe that's capable of ✨Beauty✨ (the capital/emojis aren't necessary, but they help).

If you have a moment, please respond with your favorite X that gives you what you judge to be an analogous feeling, and an explanation of what's cool about it.

Suggestions that have worked for me before:

beautiful theorems, proofs, or visualizations/intuitions;
neuro-spicy special interests;
scientific discoveries (all fields: fundamental physics to animal behavior);
clever puzzle solutions;
a historical event that's happy for more than just bigots;
a difficult to translate word or phrase and some of the best ways it can be used;
an unusual grammatical feature of some language you know (of) or culture you're a part of that just makes sense.

Things you just think are neat and what you like about them.

Thank you

johncarlosbaez, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

There's a bunch of bigshots on YouTube who pontificate about string theory, the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and other profound issues in physics. But you can't really learn much physics from most of them. It's just chat.

Angela Collier here is so much better! So much more humble - and so much more fun if you really care about physics. I actually learned something: how to estimate the distance of a pulsar!

When pulses of radio waves from a pulsar move through space, they get smeared out as they go, and you can use this to guess how far away the pulsar is. Why? Because waves of lower frequency move a bit slower. Why? Because they interact more with the ionized gas in the Milky Way.

But how much slower, and why? That's what she explains - and actually this part, how radio waves interact with ionized gas, is what will stick with me.

This is the first episode of a series she calls Coffee and The Problem:

"We have coffee and I solve a problem, and the idea is that it's like a cozy weekend morning and you pull out your notebook and you solve the problem right along with me. I will give you time to pause and solve it yourself if you want and compare your answer with mine if you want. That's the game! That's the fun."

This time she's solving a problem about estimating the distance of pulsar. The problem just hands you a formula. But she's good. She doesn't just use the formula, she shows how to derive it from more fundamental principles! And also, at the end, she raises the question I was worrying about all along: how reliable is this method in practice? So she's not blindly solving a problem: she's thinking about physics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iox8Z-NGGS8

seano, 3 months ago to random

Welp, I’m burnt out. I’m kinda realizing I really only survived undergrad cause there would always be some extenuating reason why I actually made it through each year. The first year it was cause covid hit and made the spring classes all pass/fail. The second year covid still resulted in more lenient pass/fail options both semesters. Third year I studied abroad a semester and took it easy then. And fourth year I actually did get burnt out at the end but that didn’t matter as I had already gotten into a PhD program and was still going to graduate so it wasn’t as bad and I recovered well from it.

But now, with the personal hell that was last semester and the rough start this semester in terms of course-load and personal medical issues, I’m realizing I just can’t sustainably perform at the level I did in undergrad, cause I couldn’t even sustainably do that then. I can’t have enough time and energy and spoons to do research, go to class, and do homework on time, let alone have any kind of social life outside all that. Right now I’ve been compromising on all of them, and so I’m underperforming everywhere and am tired and anxious all the time.

So I’ve finally messaged the uni disability services pleading for them to give me unlimited flexibility for course deadlines and stuff, and I’ll see how that goes. I really think that will take a lot of the stress away for me, because rn I’m having multiple days a week where I get less than an hour or two of work done, and most of that is spent on the weekly coursework. But it’s still about nine weeks away from my sleep study to get officially diagnosed with narcolepsy, so let’s just hope they don’t make me suffer until then to actually give me accommodations.

BartoszMilewski, 10 months ago to random

If every coin toss produces both heads and tails (as in zero gravity), there's no sense in assigning probabilities. If I'm ending up in both universes, after a quantum experiment; probability loses its meaning. Probability only makes sense if one outcome excludes the other.

mariyadelano, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to fediverse

Alright. Gonna write a piece on the impact of #neurodivergent users on our culture in the #Fediverse

So let’s start with a poll. Boost please!

Are you neurodivergent?

(Self-diagnosis is valid, I know how freaking hard it can be to get the official one!)

@actuallyautistic #ADHD #AuDHD #Autism #ASD #neurodiversity

SECOND POLL WITH MORE TYPES OF NEURODIVERGENCE: https://hachyderm.io/@mariyadelano/110753113559931102

BartoszMilewski, 11 months ago to random

I wonder if somebody studied neutrino stars. To first approximation, one would have to solve the Schroedinger equation for (r^2) (gravitational) potential. I think that's known, since it's a spherical harmonic oscillator. This assumes that the mass is distributed uniformly inside a ball. From there, one could estimate the size of such a star, assuming all energy levels are occupied by neutrinos. It's like an atom, but with a harmonic potential.

johncarlosbaez, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to random

Peter Woit exposed the problems with string theory. Then Sabine Hossenfelder brought the news to a bigger audience. Now, in this hilarious video, Angela Collier brings it to the Gen Z gamer crowd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E

Yes, she shreds the repeated grandiose claims of string theorists while gaming!

I agree with her main points. Some pedants (like me) will notice mistakes. I think they arose because she has a PhD in astrophysics, not particle physics. Also, she said she didn't want to talk about the physics, just the sociology. None of these mistakes affect her actual point, but just to keep up my nerd cred:

1. The pion was not one of the particles whose existence was predicted by the Standard Model. Yukawa predicted it way back in 1935, and it was found in 1947.

2. The cost of the never-finished Superconducting Supercollider would have been $11 billion, not $200 billion. I think she was just being flip here. By the way, the US spent $2 billion building it before giving up.

3. There are 5 superstring theories, not 10.

4. Bosonic strings work best in 26 dimensions, not the numbers she haphazardly guessed.

A bit more importantly, I think she said the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled much later than it actually was: October 1993. So this gums up her chronology a bit.

Still, I enjoyed this a lot!