Ony Daily Cal Clog:
Critics quoted in a Contra Costa Times watchdog column attacked “UC Berkeley’s best-kept secret,” on Sunday, and perhaps for valid reasons. In light of budget cuts, how can our fair university afford to keep a research station in the South Pacific?
You can argue that UC Berkeley affiliates travel to the Richard B. Gump Research Station on the island of Moorea for the love of science. Unfortunately, what may start out as a legitimate research destination always ends up abused by cheap, wanderlusting yuppie students who like nice university subsidies on their globe-trotting lifestyles.
Wawel Castle in 2007
That’s completely false!
I can solemnly swear that I am traveling to Krakow, Poland, entirely to pursue scientific research and scientific research alone. It has absolutely nothing to do with visiting such historical places as Jagiellonian University (Collegium Maius, in particular) and the nearby Auschwitz, or enjoying international cuisine and learning more Polish language and culture, which, in so far as science is concerned, is inconsequential, or wandering around in the historic old city.
Oh, and did I mention that there is this castle, Wawel, about 20 minutes’ walk away from the old city center that looks as if it just popped out of a fairy tale? (see right)
in any case, I solemnly swear that my visit to Poland has absolutely nothing to do with these tangential activities, and, oh, getting the University (through an NSF grant, I think) to pay for my plane ticket.
Call me a crack pot, but why does it sound like to me, that Hawking radiation is a way to get around the second law of thermodynamics?
This is the scenario I’m thinking of: if you have a moderately sized black hole, if Hawking radiation does exist, it will radiate its mass (hence energy) away in the form of that radiation. So, if we did have a black hole, we can, periodically drop a cold, room-temperature object (i.e. things with no more free energy) into that black hole, which, like furnace, will provide a high-temperature radiation. But unlike a furnace, this is a total mass-to-energy conversion.
This sounds too good to be true. What am I missing here?
So, I tracked down the problem with plotting. It turns out it’s my configuration file, or rather, more precisely, one of my custom functions.
The problem persisted even when I compiled GNU Octave by hand (and the gnuplot, to be sure), but when I removed .octaverc, everything worked fine.
Working backward from that fact, all I know is that some script in my ~/octave must be clobbering a system function, possibly used by plot command.
I suppose the most mysterious thing is … I have another computer that has nearly identical setup (even the same ~/octave!) and everything works fine there, too! Figures …
I think I’ll be switching to Python for scientific computing anyways. I think I finally found a way to do least-squares fit in Python (http://linuxgazette.net/115/andreasen.html) relatively quickly (no, the version in ScientificPython is way too slow, compared to, e.g. GNU Octave). In a way, the main limitation I see for GNU Octave is its MATLAB compatibility, because MATLAB compatibility means both the lack of object-oriented programming and its brain-dead syntax.