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Invisible wrote:
> The question is: Do you think I should do a PhD?
>
> Yes?
>
Yes!
>
> Why?
>
What do you have to lose? You could always become a professor at the
university, teaching people signal processing theory or some such.
> 1. I am insufficiently intelligent to actually acheive a PhD. (I nearly
> failed my BSc as it is!)
I call BS on this one.
> 2. I have insufficient money. (I'm still paying for my BSc. Very slowly.)
Possible, but there are loans and grants.
> 3. I don't think I can spare the time. (I have a job to do, sucky as it
> is.)
Make time!
> 4. It is *highly* unlikely that having a PhD will make any kind of
> positive change to my employment situation. Nobody is impressed by a
> BSc, and I doubt a PhD will be any different. Everybody wants
> "experience" and/or "people skills".
It couldn't hurt.
> 5. Presumably a PhD is a serious amount of hard work. It's not exactly a
> pleasure cruise. So I'd need a good reason to do one.
Right lots of work, but you'll learn a lot and could be an interesting
journey.
> 6. I rather doubt that you can get a PhD in "doing cool stuff".
> Presumably it must be something rather more specific than that.
Depends, You'd need to do lots of research and such. But, you could pick
something that interests you and pursue that.
> 7. Where the hell am I going to do a PhD anyway?
At a university, of course!
> 8. Are you mental?
Yes, yes I am.
--
~Mike
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>>> Estimate the mass of air in this room.
>>
>> 3 grams?
>
> Estimate, not guess!
Well, with no actual data to estimate with, it's kinda hard. :-P
> You'll never make an Engineer if you can't tell
> when your calculations are off by several orders of magnitude.
Heh. Well, I have no idea what the volume of this room is. I don't even
"really" know how big a meter is. It used to be the length of my arms,
but they're a tad bigger now. ;-)
> BTW a
> cubic metre of air is about 1kg, so you must be in a very small room.
Really? I was under the impression that all gasses are absurdly light.
(E.g., off the top of my head Oxygen is supposed to be something silly
like 0.000004 g per cubic meter or something.)
> I think it's safe to assume the external temperature is lower than the
> internals of the bird, but anyway the point of this one was that for
> cylinders below a certain radius lagging them actually makes them
> release more heat rather than less, because the surface area increase
> has more affect than the lagging. Useful to know if you ever think
> about insulating thin pipes :-)
Now, see, I was under the impression that lagging traps air, and hence
the "effective" surface area would still be the same.
>> ...oh, wait, maybe you meant the *graph* of this?
>
> Har har.
Aww, c'mon! I thought that was a really neat drawing! :-D
>> Hmm. Well two cubed is 8, while three squared is 9, so I'm going to go
>> with pi^e being larger.
>
> Wrong!
>
>> Presumably "proving" this would simply involve slightly more
>> arithmetic. :-P
>
> http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/53916.html
...OK, I am now completely bemused. Apparently e^3 is roughly 20. I
cannot work out how that can possibly be. 2^3 is clearly 8. My head
hurts just thinking about it.
As an aside, I notice the difference turns out to be especially tiny. :-P
>> I don't know why it took me so long; it's really quite
>> simple when you look at it. I think I just confused myself too much to
>> see it...
>
> That was the story of my whole thermodynamics course at university!
I think you need... THERMITE!! 8^D
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> Yes!
o_O
>> Why?
>
> What do you have to lose?
My mind? My livelihood? My youth? My virginity?
Oh, wait...
> You could always become a professor at the
> university, teaching people signal processing theory or some such.
LOL! As if anybody would care...
>> 4. It is *highly* unlikely that having a PhD will make any kind of
>> positive change to my employment situation.
>
> It couldn't hurt.
There is such a thing as "over-qualified". Apparently.
>> 5. Presumably a PhD is a serious amount of hard work. It's not exactly
>> a pleasure cruise. So I'd need a good reason to do one.
>
> Right lots of work, but you'll learn a lot and could be an interesting
> journey.
Well, I guess it depends on finding a good subject.
>> 6. I rather doubt that you can get a PhD in "doing cool stuff".
>> Presumably it must be something rather more specific than that.
>
> Depends, You'd need to do lots of research and such. But, you could pick
> something that interests you and pursue that.
Certainly all the stuff the OU is looking at seems to be socially based.
"How can we make computers more cuddly?" I really don't give a fig.
>> 8. Are you mental?
>
> Yes, yes I am.
Ah, I'm glad we sorted that one out. :-)
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> Well, with no actual data to estimate with, it's kinda hard. :-P
The point is you are meant to have a rough understanding of density of
gases.
> Heh. Well, I have no idea what the volume of this room is.
Usually best to simplify it to a shape that it is easy to calculate the
volume of, ie a cuboid.
> I don't even "really" know how big a meter is. It used to be the length of
> my arms, but they're a tad bigger now. ;-)
You can estimate though, I suspect you can tell if your room is 2 metres
long or 10 metres long, or 50 metres long. Remember you are about 2 metres
tall...
> (E.g., off the top of my head Oxygen is supposed to be something silly
> like 0.000004 g per cubic meter or something.)
Wikipedia tells me it's 1.429 kg per cubic metre...
> Now, see, I was under the impression that lagging traps air, and hence the
> "effective" surface area would still be the same.
No, because the lagging has thickness, and the outer surface of the lagging
is the effective surface area for radiating the heat. Even though the
surface temperature will be less with the lagging, for small radii the
surface area increase is enough to overcome the effectiveness of the
lagging. Obviously the exact radius depends on the situation, but there
will always be a minimum value where lagging works (below that it has the
opposite effect than you probably imagined).
> Aww, c'mon! I thought that was a really neat drawing! :-D
Yes I have to admit it was pretty cool.
> ...OK, I am now completely bemused. Apparently e^3 is roughly 20. I cannot
> work out how that can possibly be. 2^3 is clearly 8. My head hurts just
> thinking about it.
Think about 2^3 and 3^3, then e^3 doesn't seem so bad.
> As an aside, I notice the difference turns out to be especially tiny. :-P
Would have been cool if e^pi = pi^e
> I think you need... THERMITE!! 8^D
Unfortunately this was one of the few lecture courses with no fun examples
shown off by the lecturer - we had boomerangs, magnetic guns, launched
ping-pong balls etc, but sadly no model jet engine :-( The whole course was
spent studying the thermodynamic cycles of various types of heat engines,
combined cycle power stations, pressures, velocities, energies argghh my
head hurts just thinking about it.
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On 20-2-2009 16:07, Invisible wrote:
>>>> Proposition #6 from my thesis: the use of FFT to extract clinically
>>>> relevant parameters should be forbidden in the field of cardiology.
>>>
>>> Uh... I was under the impression that most of the useful information
>>> in a cardiagram is in the time-domain anyway...?
>>
>> Spot on.
>
> Uh... so you're telling me I know more about cardiagrams than the people
> attempting to interpret them? o_O
Of course not. Perhaps just that you would not be confused by shiny
buttons into forgetting a basic fact. I wouldn't trust you to find a WPW
in between a bunch of infarctions and normal ECG's. The guy who wrote
that paper could do that, but would probably not be equipped to
understand how that specific potential was caused by what part of the heart.
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>> Well, with no actual data to estimate with, it's kinda hard. :-P
>
> The point is you are meant to have a rough understanding of density of
> gases.
>
>> Heh. Well, I have no idea what the volume of this room is.
>
> Usually best to simplify it to a shape that it is easy to calculate the
> volume of, ie a cuboid.
This room *is* a cuboid! ;-)
>> I don't even "really" know how big a meter is. It used to be the
>> length of my arms, but they're a tad bigger now. ;-)
>
> You can estimate though, I suspect you can tell if your room is 2 metres
> long or 10 metres long, or 50 metres long. Remember you are about 2
> metres tall...
If I had to guess, I'd say this room is 3 m by 3 m by 3 m.
>> (E.g., off the top of my head Oxygen is supposed to be something silly
>> like 0.000004 g per cubic meter or something.)
>
> Wikipedia tells me it's 1.429 kg per cubic metre...
Really? Wow, that's pretty crazy... I'm *sure* when I looked it up it
was way less than that.
Ah, here we go: H2 is "0.08988 g/L". Apparently air itself is heavier
than that.
(You would, of course, *expect* air to be heavier than the lightest gas
in the universe. But not thousands of times heavier...)
>> Now, see, I was under the impression that lagging traps air, and hence
>> the "effective" surface area would still be the same.
>
> No, because the lagging has thickness, and the outer surface of the
> lagging is the effective surface area for radiating the heat. Even
> though the surface temperature will be less with the lagging, for small
> radii the surface area increase is enough to overcome the effectiveness
> of the lagging. Obviously the exact radius depends on the situation,
> but there will always be a minimum value where lagging works (below that
> it has the opposite effect than you probably imagined).
Heh. So does it matter which bird then? A hummingbird has different size
legs to an ostrich. ;-)
>> Aww, c'mon! I thought that was a really neat drawing! :-D
>
> Yes I have to admit it was pretty cool.
WIN! :-D
>> ...OK, I am now completely bemused. Apparently e^3 is roughly 20. I
>> cannot work out how that can possibly be. 2^3 is clearly 8. My head
>> hurts just thinking about it.
>
> Think about 2^3 and 3^3, then e^3 doesn't seem so bad.
If I could actually compute 3^3 mentally I'd probably agree with you. ;-)
>> As an aside, I notice the difference turns out to be especially tiny. :-P
>
> Would have been cool if e^pi = pi^e
I can't find it now, but I'm pretty damned certain there's a quote on
Bash.org where somebody claimed this was true, and some poor sap spent
hours trying to figure out why their math implementation was wrong...
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On 20-2-2009 17:01, Invisible wrote:
>
> If I could actually compute 3^3 mentally I'd probably agree with you. ;-)
What exactly is so difficult about 3x3x3?
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>> If I could actually compute 3^3 mentally I'd probably agree with you. ;-)
>
> What exactly is so difficult about 3x3x3?
I don't know what 3x9 is? If I had pen and paper I could work it out,
it's just not something I happen to know off the top of my head.
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> Ah, here we go: H2 is "0.08988 g/L". Apparently air itself is heavier than
> that.
>
> (You would, of course, *expect* air to be heavier than the lightest gas in
> the universe. But not thousands of times heavier...)
Only seems like a factor of 10 difference to me. You do realise that 1g/L
is 1kg/m^3...
> I can't find it now, but I'm pretty damned certain there's a quote on
> Bash.org where somebody claimed this was true, and some poor sap spent
> hours trying to figure out why their math implementation was wrong...
Yeh sounds familiar.
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> I don't know what 3x9 is? If I had pen and paper I could work it out,
> it's just not something I happen to know off the top of my head.
Try 9+9, then +9 again...
On second thoughts maybe you shouldn't do a PhD :-)
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