#statistical physics

[myc0l0gy]

2 hour thermal physics speedrun time

[aromanrom]

Percolation in fortran

Introduction I thought I should add another project1 to my GitHub repositories and since I was mainly extending the Quantum Computing Simulator project I decided to implement something very simple, but still very rich, a model that despite being simple is still useful for many physical phenomena and also exhibits a phase transition… that is, something on Percolation theory. Because it is so…

[electrolumen]

Have to study statistical physics today... How's your day going?

[synelven]

my take on an arcane university au (jinx and ekko are top of the class)

[marioposssa]

'My dear' - a small continuation in numbers and pictures.

As I mentioned in my first post on temeraire statistics, Laurence pet name for Temeraire is consistently 'my dear', (with one exception of 'dear heart' in ToJ). And now, that my temeraire statistics tool(TM) is at a point where I am reasonably satisfied, I wanted to take a short look back across all books to paint a more complete picture over the usage of this pet name across all books.

Since this got a bit longer again, let's start with the overall numbers.

HMD: 22

ToJ: 9 (+ 1)

BPW: 11

EoI: 12

VoE: 3

ToS: 31

CoG: 10

BoT: 5

LoD: 16

or as a picture:

A more detailed write-up (and some more pictures) is under the cut

Let's start from the bottom of the high score.

The book where Laurence least uses the sobriquet is 'Victory of Eagles' with just 3 mentions and all of them heartbreaking.

The very first declaration of 'my dear' takes place when Laurence finally reunites with Temeraire after the other has believed him dead and the second follows soon after, two chapters later.

And then Laurence despairs over his role in Napoleons invasion of Britain and he mostly ceases to use non-formal modes of address altogether. Only after having overcome most of his immediate guilt at the very end of the book, when he reads to Temeraire out of the Principia Mathematica on their transport to australia, does he use the pet name again.

The usage curve over all books makes it look like this (some very sad peaks):

The second least mentions are in 'Blood of Tyrants' with 5 mentions overall. All of them appear only after Laurence gets his memories back at the end of chapter 14.

Unfortunately the book denies us a scene with Laurence and Temeraire reuniting after this event (where I would expect at least one my dear to have been uttered), but we see Laurence using the pet name again starting when Temeraire takes his leave from Mei and they travel on to russia.

On the other end of the scale we have 'His Majestys' Dragon' with 22 my dears and 'Tongues of Serpents' with a whooping 31! scenes where Laurence calls Temeraire by his pet name.

I already wrote in more detail on pet names in HMD, so I was initially very surprised by this result, as I had expected HMD to win overall. Why? Well, His Majestys Dragon is the book which introduces and defines Laurence and Temeraires' relationship, and while their bond is being tested in the other books as well, I would argue that most challenges are already played out in smaller but similar scenarios in HMD: Dayes' attempt at the captaincy vs Yong Shins 'seduction' of Temeraire in Throne of Jade; Temeraire coming to grasps with Choiseuls' execution vs Laurence death sentence in Victory of Eagles; Laurence coming to love Temeraire across the book vs Laurence coming to love Temeraire over the course of his amnesia in Blood of Tyrants.

Given this, it would have made sense that the first book also featured the most explixit verbal assurances of their bond through dialogue.

But on second look Tongues of Serpents is the book where the pair get fully taken out of the war for the first time.

Laurence has time to reflect on what retirement and a life outside of the corps looks like and, maybe most importantly, considers that Temeraire is part of the retirement deal as well. I would argue that Laurence adjusts his outlook accordingly well and finds a peace in this situation that is much a better mirror for what we see of their life at the end of League of Dragons than the mere acceptance of giving up his ideas of marriage and life with Edith in HMD. The pavilion and Australia is also specifically mentioned in their last scene in League of Dragons as well and is reoccurring reference when Laurence thinks about life after the war. So in conclusion, maybe Tongues of Serpents is the most domestic of the books?

Here's how the two books compare across chapters:

Looks pretty equal to me over all actually. *Tongues of Serpents * gets a few higher counts overall and also shows 6 counts in Chapter 7 alone, the chapter where the hunt for the stolen egg begins and the search groups starts their descend into the australian outback.

On a side note, we also see one other characteristic statistics thing here in the chart that you get with per book comparisions: books generally do not have an equal number of chapters. If we wanted to be more accurate we might want to account for the chapter amount , or even over all word lenght, factor of each book. I am not adding it here, because this is non-serious fun only statistics - and I haven't implemented that nice feature in the tool yet and am too tired to do it manually for all 9 books.

Overall Laurence calls Temeraire 'my dear' a grand total of 119 times over all books. If the two are not separated in the course of action - such as kidnapped, stranded, fighting for their lives against mobs or assassins, dealing with amnesia, clandestinely duelling for their honour or garnering the approval and ire of their fellow dragon or human- then Laurence does not sway from calling Temeraire 'my dear' alongside 'Temeraire'.

He starts using the sobriquet in the third chapter of His Majesty's Dragon, right after Temeraire rejects Dayes as substitute captain, and keeps using it until the very last mention in the very last dialog at the end of the final book, if that isn't devotion in bookends.

Finally, I'll leave you with this overview over all datapoints across all books:

[secondwheel]

Rounding up and down

[zorlaza-art]

doodle dump lol

[moonlight-n-moondust]

day 70/100

finished reading thru discrete random variables notes

finished discrete random variables tutorial (9 qns)

finished dc circuits mcq (44 qns)

i legit don't understand tf is gg on in this topic

they will go thru soon in tuition so gg

ill clarify the stuff i got wrong in tuition on thurs (im so cooked hahahahaha)

got back compre + compo pract

so close to an A rjwkskwksndnwnnewn

i clarified what i need to do to push the last 2 marks so gg

ill try harder for my hw this week

~5 hours 52 min on ypt~ (i wish i didn't suck ass at phy RIP)

[fisherrprince]

i appreciate people making it known that chiropractors aren't real doctors, but massage therapists aren't doctors either! Usually, you need a license, but you're not seeing a doctor in either case. Massage therapy is just much safer overall, like going to see a hairdresser for styling compared to seeing a hairdresser for implants.

[chronicallycouchbound]

I can’t live in over 99% of housing.

This is not an exaggeration.

“Less than 1 percent of all units are equipped with features that would allow a wheelchair user to live independently.” HUD.gov

My experiences of homelessness are inherently tied to this.

[jabronibaloney]

I gotta say, the Titan submersible DID have several trips to the Titanic without imploding.

Now, using American pandemic logic, that means that the majority of trips were FINE and you have NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.

So go ahead. Take a dive. Statistically you'll be safe. 🤷‍♀️ It's science.

[miss-biophys]

There are many postdocs in academia, but not so many permanent researchers.

A new paper shows a statistics on where hundreds of Biomedical Sciences PhD graduates eventually ended up 10 years or more after graduation.

What strikes me there:

1. Sooo many postdocs go to administration positions after their postdoc is finished.

And it's true! I know so many people in administration who were good scientists before!

The following graph shows that from 418 PhD graduates, 325 went for a postdoc and 93 didn't. 145 administration/management/operation (AMO in the graph) positions in the end is for me a bit shocking.

2. The time for a postdoc in academia to actually get a permanent/non trainee position can be up to 13 years!

Only half of the people makes it in 6 years after PhD graduation. That's much longer than getting a permanent job in administration. I do not want to be 13 years postdoc. This is also one of the reasons people quit academia.

There are many more facts in the original article. Go read it if you're interested.

[secondwheel]

Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics...

[teet-swea]

Particles* I work with as a theoretical chemist, from most typical to wildest:

Proton - Positive vibes, pretty quarky. A classic.

Neutron - Like the proton, but neutral. Sometimes simplicity is best.

Electron - Less than 1/1000th the mass of our first 2 particles. Less mass means more quantum weirdness, which means more fun. At this point, wave-like behavior is becoming pretty significant.

Atom - A particle created from the combination of a nucleus of protons and neutrons and orbiting electrons, atoms are a chemist’s bread and butter. Otherwise, these are pretty straightforward. For simplicity, I’ll be excluding ions from this list, as they’re just atoms either with more or less electrons than they’re supposed to have.

Molecules - Created from several atoms bonded together by shared electrons, molecules are like atoms, but a little more complicated. They can rotate, vibrate, and much more. Molecules can have anywhere from 2 atoms to millions, and it’s molecules that describe most chemical systems.

Photon - The particle form of light. Photons are massless packets of energy that can be freely created or destroyed. This is about the point where things are really getting weird. Let’s see how.

Phonon* - The particle form of lattice vibrations. In a solid, vibrations of individual molecules are not independent of each other; however, these collective vibrations can be separated into a series of fixed patterns with their own energies. Those patterns can then be treated as particles in their own right, creating a “gas” of phonons. At this point, the particle definition is getting stretched quite a bit, but to deal with a system like this, this particle treatment works quite well to simplify the math and make it reasonable to deal with the system.

Hole* - One of the few of these that doesn’t end in “-on”, the hole represents an empty space where an electron should be on a material’s surface. The remaining particles on this list, much like the phonon, are designed to deal with solids in a convenient way. In this case, because the surface is made up of positively charged nuclei with negatively charged electrons on top, removing the electron leaves a positively charged space behind. Turns out, we can say this hole behaves like a particle itself, which moves as electrons shift across the surface. It should also be noted that electrons on a surface are treated differently than in free space, so one could argue that a surface electron is also its own kind of particle*.

Exciton* - We’ve seen that pairing a nucleus and electrons creates an atom, but what if we try to create the surface equivalent? Normally, putting an electron where a hole is would just move the hole, but what if we were to excite the electron so that it orbits around the hole? These are excitons. Excited, neutrally charged hydrogen-like particles on the surface of a solid. This is what my research focuses on.

Plasmon* - As our final particle, we’ll briefly talk about plasmons. I don’t know these particles too well, but from discussion with some colleagues who work with them, a plasmon is the particle form of oscillating electrons either on a surface or in a plasma. These are notably rather similar to phonons, in that we’re just treating the movement of many electrons by dividing them into collective states that we can treat as particles. At this point, the definition of a particle has been stretched pretty well beyond the typical limit, but for these kinds of system, mathematical convenience is beyond just desirable. It’s essential.

This list is not a list of every possible particle or quasiparticle. I’ve omitted antimatter, quarks, and many elementary particles in the standard model on one end, and on the quasiparticle end, I’ve omitted things like polarons (excitons + phonons) and polaritons (excitons/plasmons/phonons + photons). Maybe I’ll discuss these at another point, but there is still much I would like to learn about these kinds of systems. Either way, until next time, byyyyyyeeeeeee.

*Not all of these are “particles” in the traditional sense. Several are just mathematical constructs designed to turn complicated systems into easy things we know. In such cases, one could refer to these as quasiparticles, which can behave like particles well enough for us to model them as such. For clarity, I’ll try to mark all quasiparticles with an asterisk.

[myc0l0gy]

notes from 7pm vs notes from 9:30pm

[4gravitons]

Cosmology has its own standard model. But a model is not just a model, and the Standard Model is a different kind of thing: