You mentioned ham radio — definitely fun! It’s a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF (“walkie talkie”-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power (“QRP”) it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup…

There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.

Good luck!

“…and there are no comments, because it’s Self Documenting™”

Modern bots are bad, but the old school IRC (maybe early Battle.net?) bots… I’m cool making an exception for them if you are.

With coherent detection I think the separation between eyes would allow for this.

Except that this problem doesn’t specify distance between horseman, so I think it’s a bit bogus — no need to resolve an individual person to be able to tell that they’re there. And for hair color, if you make assumptions about the clothes being worn, you could perhaps infer color of hair, even if the hair isn’t resolvable (a person being a “single pixel” would have a different hue depending).

Dipoles are, effectively, not — so if you have a charged bit and another opposite charged bit, while an inverse relationship might exist between either one, the net effect is that it drops off much faster.

The thing with gravity is it tends to go one way, unlike, say, charge.

This is the real big brain hack with decibels — you can use a linear scale, it’s just that the units are logarithmic instead.

(Yes I know most people would call a dB axis logarithmic, it’s just a silly comment.)

I was writing up my problem set answers once, and it involved the (complex analysis) residue. I wasn’t sure if there was a shortcut (as opposed to \mathrm); googling latex residue did not produce the search results I was hoping for…

This is obvious though — currently, you might test a drug on mice, then on primates, and finally on humans (as an example). It would be faster to skip the early bits and go straight to human testing.

…but that is very, very, very wrong. Science of course doesn’t care about right and wrong, nor does it care if you “believe” in it, which is the beautiful thing about science — so a scientifically sound experiment is a scientifically sound experiment regardless of ethical considerations. (Which does not mean we should be doing it of course!)

Now, taking a step back, maybe you’re right that, in the long run, throwing ethics out the window would actually slow things down, as it would (rightfully) cause backlash. But that’s getting into a whole “sociology of science” discussion.

This is all based, most likely, on Griffiths’ textbook. Quoting here from this post https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1b97gt/magnetic_fields_do_no_work_but_magnetic_cranes/ :

The statement “magnetic fields do no work” is incorrect. Griffiths has mislead a generation of physics students on this. A correct version of the statement is that “magnetic fields do no work on objects with no magnetic moments” which is rather trivial. One could also correctly make the same statement about electric fields. However, electric monopoles are very common, so a situation in which there are no electric moments never occurs in normal circumstances.

tl;dr: use Jackson ;)

I can only remember this because I initially didn’t learn about xargs — so any time I need to loop over something I tend to use for var in $(cmd) instead of cmd | xargs. It’s more verbose but somewhat more flexible IMHO.

So I run loops a lot on the command line, not just in shell scripts.

Newer macOS is not Unix certified.

It’s UNIX 03 compliant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

One or two Linux distros were (are?) UNIX certified, though.

I think mplayer has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believe youtube-dl can output to stdout.

The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.

Sounds like he was a mantis and was posting while copulating.

Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).

If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.

To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.

You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches

But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).

I have one SSID with pihole (which I use), and one without. Works pretty well, if you’re ok with a VLAN-aware network.

Ah, good point!