The region was an excellent choice for me to get my education. It was easy to get a research assistant position throughout my studies at the various academic institutions and then advance to my career from there.
Cost of living is still quite cheap compared to other metropolitan areas.
Only thing that is missing is more bold risk-taking on new startups. Also the horrendous bureaucracy makes things slow-moving.
Otherwise they have everything they would need for a great hub. Smart and well educated students. A great university and cultural scene.
They are still doing plenty shots for the national ignition campaign and figuring out the target manufacturing process.
The official purpose of NIF has just been shifted to support security research.
I am not sure if they are aware of the Fediverse [1,2]. The Fediverse essentially rebuilds all the social-networking services but as federated services. This means each service can be hosted by multiple instances and instances can communicate with one another, but all still have their internal rules. I think they even used the "-verse" term before the whole Metaverse-hype.
They could move the tracker to a suitable Mastodon instance [3] or even host their own Mastodon instance in order to get a suitable exposure out there (Maybe even use one of the Blogging instances). This would also be a first test how robust the Fediverse is with respect to external pressure.
I really love the strong connection between statistical mechanics and information theory.
Before attending a statistical mechanics lecture I was not able to comprehend why entropy was a relevant quantity, beyond the definition of the second law of thermodynamics. My statistical physics professor motivated entropy, by saying: "We need something to measure how much information we can extract from a system. Let's call it entropy, and it should reach its maximum value in a closed system when we are only able to extract the minimum amount of information from the system". And this opened my eyes on how intertwined information theory and statistical mechanics is. In my opinion one of the most beautiful connections in physics!
This is absolutely devastating! His talk "The Mess We're In" was one of those talks which were incredibly funny and informative at the same time. I absolutely lost it, when he told the story of the single comment his coworker put into the Erlang code.[1]
Are there any papers already out which focus on the technical aspect of reconstructing the image? I heard that they analyzed 3.5 Petabytes of data for this.
Thank you for the interessting material! I have heard a lecture on the geometric and topological applications to solid-state physics. This is one of the things that excites me a lot that whole areas of physics can be "geometrized".
I once took an advanced seminar course on the mathematical foundations of electrodynamics in parallel to my theoretical electrodynamics course during my third bachelor semester. I did not have any clue about differential geometry and did not understand the advanced formalism the lecturer introduced in the seminar. But I was quite shocked how easily Maxwells equations can be derived and how compact the formula was. The article suggests that Gauge theory and fiber bundels are subjects, where math and theoretical physics seem to help each other, which is absolutely facinating!
The problem is getting worse as new jobs are mainly created in cities. They also offer a more attractive infrastructure such as fast internet speeds and shorter commutes, than rural areas. There are of course many other advantages, but I think these are some of the most significant ones. This creates an unhealthy growth, which we see now manifests in the completely out-of-control rents worldwide. The only way this problem can be tackled is to invest massively in the rural infrastructure and stop this disturbing trend towards growing megacities and sparsely inhabited rural areas. Rising rents contribute to an large extent on social inequality. As a renter will only get living space for each month but nothing else of value in return, as opposed to buying a house/flat. The calculation for renting has been fine in the past decades as renting was often cheaper than buying a house, but this changed as we see now.
Even if this would be the dream of a lot of theoretical physicists to replace experiments with simulations, this must not happen! Ever! Even if every complex system in the world could be simulated in reasonable time it would still require experiments to verify or falsify the simulation results. A simulation is essentially just a calculation from a model someone came up with to describe a system. In order to check how good the model is one has to check it against experimental data. Just expanding the models without experimental verification will not necessarily result in a good theoretical description. It would be like writing software without testing the components and expecting it to work correctly when you're done. There was recently an article on HN where economists were described as the astrologers of our time [1] since they do not verify their mathematical models to an extent where they can predict economical systems.
This is another example where more experimental data should be considered in order to falsify certain theories.
Those are the reasons why string-theorist will not (and should not) get any Nobel price in the next decades. Since its predictions are hard to measure on those small scales there's no way of telling if the model is any good until it is compared against suitable experimental data.
The text said that they begin in the age of 15 or 16, so the "duale Ausbildung" system is meant by that, because "Dualstudenten" are usually 17 or 18 when they start. The "Dualstudium" combines the practical "Ausbildung" with an applied science bachelors degree like CS, EE, mechanical engineering and so on, so it double the stress, but you'll also get a lot of work experience, a bachelors degree and an apprenticeship diploma. Also you will get paid.
I would not consider the language barrier as the largest obstacle. But the European scientific infrastructure can't even compete with Californias institutions and it gets much worse if you count in the whole US scientific infrastructure. Most of the world leading scientific institutions like Standford, Berkley, CalTech etc. are located in an area where scientific knowledge can get appropriate funding for a product. You simply cannot innovate or create something new without extensive research from universities or research labs. This is one of the problems.
The other problem is, in Germany at least, that the general population is not that well educated in computer science, since the educational curriculum is organized in a strict federal way. The German constitution even prohibits the state from cooperating with the federal education departments. CS should now be a major subject on the same level with math and physics, yet this kind of system makes it very hard to implement a curriculum for all of our pupils. This causes, that even a lot of young people are not that interested in CS and lack of basic CS knowledge.
Yes this is of course a regulatory burden and just a probably unrealistic solution. But the main problem remains, how can someone who is renting get at least some savings out of it?
The problem with renting is, that it will return to you a temporal value(a space to live in each month, after the month this value is basically gone), whereby buying a house will return a lasting value, which you can even use by selling the house. In order to tackle this, the law should be implementing mechanisms to return value to the renter, like the ability to buy the flat after living in it for a certain number of years(like 15-20 years) for a multipel of the monthly rent. This would encourage people to rent longer and would return a fraction of their paid rent to them. But the details would be very complicated, like how do you prevent the landlords using the contract to kick people out, when they've rented the flat almost long enough to buy it?
As rents were cheaper in the previous decades compared to the monthly income, this mechanism would not be necessary. But basically burning half of ones income in order to live somewhere must return some value or around the world not only in the US we will have very poor renters and very rich home owners. This can even lead to even more radical political movements.
IIRC macOs does not support OpenGL 4.5 or Vulkan. Also there is currently no high performance Apple Hardare to do things like CUDA or other GPGPU programming. CUDA on Linux is really an easy thing to do. For Game programming tools like Unreal Engine 4 are afaik alreasy supported on Linux, which gives you multiplatform support. For graphics, music or 3D modelling windows is currently the only solution.
Otherwise they have everything they would need for a great hub. Smart and well educated students. A great university and cultural scene.