In math and (theoretical) physics alphabetical is the presumed norm.

Is there any material difference between Edge and Chrome? I’m forced to use either of them for work and as far as I can tell they perform the same

Leaving academia was definitely one of the best choices I ever made for my (physical, mental and financial) health.

I don’t regret doing my PhD, but I definitely spent two years too many on the postdoc treadmill.

I definitely do not value having lifetime access to 99.999% of the media I consume enough to have to deal with hoarding physical copies.

In a way these observations cut more deeply into the foundations of cosmology than dark matter. Indeed, I’d argue that dark matter challenges the standard model of particle physics more than the standard model of cosmology.

These discoveries of large scale structures challenge the assumptions that the universe is homogenous at a large enough scale. This assumption, along with isotropy, are what lead to the FLRW family of metrics describing spacetime at cosmological scales. Dark matter and dark energy only come in to the picture once you try to fit the parameters of the FLRW metrics to our observed universe.

Oh, of course. He’s fine with child abuse as long as it is consensual.

Per day?!

Two words: pube loofah. The mons pubis is a great place to lather up. Then I just scoop up soap with my bare hands and bring it where it needs to be.

Mathematical notation was designed to be written by hand. It is at least as clear and descriptive as any syntax from a programming language. You’re pretending that the abstraction behind a for loop is somehow less than that behind a sum or product notation.

This post confuses me. Why would code be simpler than the math notation? Both involve symbolic abstraction of basically the same complexity

The language physicists use in describing this is the following: “The electron can turn into a virtual photon and a virtual electron, which then turn back into a real electron.” And they draw a Feynman diagram that looks like Figure 4. But what they really mean is what I have just described in the previous paragraph. The Feynman diagram is actually a calculational tool, not a picture of the physical phenomenon; if you want to calculate how big this effect is, you take that diagram , translate it into a mathematical expression according to Feynman’s rules, set to work for a little while with some paper and pen, and soon obtain the answer.

The emphasized part of this paragraph is such a good point. The way we talk about Feynman diagrams makes many students and working physicists think of them as representations of the actual physical process that is happening in QFT. In reality they are just graphical tools for representing the calculation of a power series (either formal or asymptotic).