Steuard (u/Steuard) - Readit News

Steuard commented on Stinkbug Leg Organ Hosts Symbiotic Fungi That Protect Eggs from Parasitic Wasps bioengineer.org/stinkbug-... · Posted by u/gmays

happytoexplain · 2 months ago

I suppose the image is genai, but they don't credit it as such, despite crediting the images on all the other articles below it as genai. However, they don't provide any image credit on the linked article, so presumably they just forgot to add it.

It's sickening that a science website uses genai specifically for images of things that are ostensibly real in the context of news about that thing. E.g. this stinkbug, and some kind of fruiting plant in a lower-down article. As opposed to only using it for clearly artificial renderings.

Steuard · 2 months ago

The article feels like LLM output, too. (And they don't actually credit an author in the byline.) Is there another source out there that this was based on? Can we read that instead, and skip the extra layer of interpretation/distortion?

Steuard commented on Understanding Motion and Relativity with Spacetime Diagrams steuard.github.io/spaceti... · Posted by u/Steuard

Steuard · 3 months ago

I'm a physics professor who regularly teaches about special relativity in my Modern Physics course. I've made a web app for drawing spacetime diagrams (technically, two-observer Minkowski diagrams), which are one of the best ways I know for building intuition about how relativity works. The link points to an introduction to the diagrams, including a brief explanation of some key relativity concepts based on diagram illustrations. (It's meant to be at least halfway understandable to people who haven't studied physics before, though it'll be clearer the more you already know.)

Read through the linked page if you want the basics, or if you're eager to just jump straight in, follow the links to use the main app and play with that. (It has multiple predefined scenarios that you can load, each with a brief explanation, but you can design your own scenarios as well.)

[Aside: I feel really good about the UI I've got for this so far, but my last significant JavaScript work before this project was back in 2005 or so. I've had to learn a LOT.]

Steuard commented on Brandon's Semiconductor Simulator brandonli.net/semisim/... · Posted by u/dominikh

amelius · 7 months ago

Thanks but I was thinking more about how fields drop off in 2D space versus 3D space. Simple electrostatic example: consider a 1D string of identical resistors. Voltage drops linearly as you go along this string. Now consider a 2D grid of resistors: voltage does not change linearly anymore if you move between two points (current will move in a more complicated spread-out pattern). So the dimensionality changes how fields behave.

Steuard · 7 months ago

Ah, I see what you're getting at. My instinct here is that (exactly as you've pointed out) fields like E and B will fall off like 1/r instead of 1/r^2, but that all of the qualitative behavior will be basically the same. So I wouldn't trust this simulation to predict the precise behavior of a real circuit (even one whose shape was basically planar), but I suspect that it will behave more or less right.

Looking at the examples, it seems like you can make 1D and 2D strings/grids of resistors here in much the same way you would in a 3D model; you just can't make a 3D grid (or non-planar circuits). My general experience working with and teaching basic circuits is that it's rare that we consider current flow in a genuinely 3D medium: the vast majority of problem-solving examples approximate wires as simple 1D paths for charge to follow, and more careful treatments that talk about where charges accumulate to guide current flow around corners, etc. still almost always illustrate their points in 2D diagrams/examples.

So my impression is that this simulation is likely to give a pretty solid qualitative sense of how these systems work, despite its 2D framing.

Steuard commented on Brandon's Semiconductor Simulator brandonli.net/semisim/... · Posted by u/dominikh

amelius · 7 months ago

I wonder how they simulate EM in only 2 dimensions.

I also wonder why the simulator only allows to show E and D fields, and not H and B.

Steuard · 7 months ago

I don't pretend to know what this simulation is doing, but for the record, electromagnetism works just fine in 2D. You might be thinking "but magnetic fields are intimately tied to cross products, which only work in three dimensions." But you can set up the equations of electromagnetism just fine either using differential forms or bivector magnetism (https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02548), and it works in any dimension you'd like. (The cross product version is really a narrow and sometimes misleading special case.)

Possibly related: there are options to "View B" and "View H" in the scalar dropdown, not in the vector one. That may be closely related to the fact that in two dimensions, the magnetic field has just a single component. Whether you describe is as a 2-form or a bivector, the magnetic field is an antisymmetric rank-2 tensor: an antisymmetric matrix. In 3D, that means 3 independent components, and there's a one-to-one mapping to vectors (more or less). But in 2D, an antisymmetric matrix has just one independent component. (And in 4D, it's got six: this is precisely the relativistic electromagnetic field tensor, that in 3D splits into an electric part and a magnetic part. My paper has more details.)

Steuard commented on First Known Photographs of Living Specimens inaturalist.org/projects/... · Posted by u/Morizero

mutagen · 9 months ago

From the About Section of the page:

This project is designed to showcase the first known photographs of living specimens of any species. Note that by 'first known' I'm referring to the first known photographs of a species anywhere, not just the first photographs to be submitted to iNaturalist.

Two types of observation will be included: 1) First photographic records of undescribed species e.g. this Gasteracantha sp. 2) First photographic records of already described (but obviously relatively uncommon or cryptic) species e.g. this wasp fly.

If the male and female of a species are sexually dimorphic, then both are valid to be added to the project. So too if a species has distinct life stages (eg caterpillar/chrysalis/butterfly), they are all valid to be separately added to the project (assuming the other rules apply).

Please only add observations depicting live organisms; this therefore excludes specimens such as pinned insects.

If you see an observation currently in the project that you know is not the first photograph of that species, and you can show the earlier photograph, please do not hesitate to message me and I'll remove it.

Steuard · 9 months ago

I think that the previous poster's point is that historical photographs are not in-scope to be added to this project: for example, this project will never include the first known photo of a living platypus (or a living cat, as noted), because such photos existed before this project began. The project collects photos posted to iNaturalist that meet the specified criteria.

It's a cool collection of modern observations of rare or remote species! But the title could also describe an entirely different research project, focused on historical media rather than modern exploration. That could also be very cool.

Steuard commented on Mapping the University of Chicago's 135-year expansion into Hyde Park and beyond chicagomaroon.github.io/d... · Posted by u/speckx

asteinhart · 9 months ago

this is mine! thanks for the share. code for the project is all open source here: https://github.com/chicagomaroon/data-visualizations/tree/ma.... this was my first larger custom story project. maplibre for the map, waypoints for scroller helper and the rest just vanilla js/html/css. hosted on github pages. i have another project that has lots of other examples of cool viz i like (filter to about visualizations) https://content-we-love-54fa79867044.herokuapp.com/

Steuard · 9 months ago

Is there a place to submit an issue with the data? The final map makes it look like a bunch of properties around the neighborhood were purchased by the University between 2004 and 2005. But I recognize one of them (5125 S. Kenwood, just south of Hyde Park Blvd/51st St.) as my first grad school apartment: I lived there throughout the 1998-99 academic year, and it was definitely a university-owned/managed building at the time.

Steuard commented on Among top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds chemistryworld.com/news/a... · Posted by u/crescit_eundo

Steuard · 10 months ago

It's quite possible that there's a real effect here. But while I've only had time to skim parts of the paper, I don't see any indication of whether the authors have accounted for the different norms in different fields when analyzing their data for potentially fraudulent or deceptive behavior.

Just for example, physics papers produced by large international collaborations (e.g. every single paper from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN) routinely have hundreds of authors (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567): everyone who has made substantial contributions to the design and operation of the facility is listed, as is everyone on the data analysis teams. (My understanding is that people in those specific fields all recognize that "number of citations" is a mostly meaningless number for those involved, and other metrics for productivity are well-known in those communities and routinely used.) I hear that some genomics papers have broken 1000 authors as well.

I could easily imagine that the high end of observed publication numbers and coauthor counts would be dominated by those giant collaborations, even though there is absolutely no attempt to mislead anyone in the process. Can anyone tell from this article to what degree its conclusions might be influenced by this factor?

Steuard commented on NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy

WesolyKubeczek · a year ago

There is still a difference between actually doing hard work to help disadvantaged and marginalized folks and thinking that “being annoying about one’s pronouns” or “making lists of coworkers who are not woke enough” (both examples are quotes from self-proclaimed social justice activists) solves any problems.

However, thinking that this crop of politicians would take a nuanced stance on anything at all is idiocy at its purest.

Steuard · a year ago

Sure! There are always people out there who obsess over linguistic and behavioral purity, and they tend to be very loud. I'm not certain that I've ever met one of them in person. (I've certainly met people who might say (e.g.) "Here's why I've started including pronouns in my email sig," but I think that's not what you're talking about.)

If the current "anti-woke" movement were just about shutting down those obnoxious purists, I think it would be a lot less controversial. But from what I've seen, the political rhetoric (and the associated policy positions now being implemented) strikes just as hard or harder at the folks actually trying to do the hard work.

Steuard commented on NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy

WesolyKubeczek · a year ago

It's the first time I'm seeing accessibility put under the same umbrella as DEI. Is "DEIA" in the executive order, or is NSF overreacting, or... is being disabled and wanting to have some quality of life "woke" now?

Steuard · a year ago

Accessibility has always been part of DEI. (Certainly it's been a repeated topic of conversation in my campus's Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board.) And yes, any effort that involves spending time or money to make sure that every person gets to "have some quality of life" falls under this same umbrella. That is literally what people are referring to when they call things "woke".