Seemingly trivial things that intrigue you
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I didn't get the job, which is a shame because I could be earning £45k by now.
They turned me down because we were discussing something about biochemistry right around the time Charles was talking to plants, and I made a joke about asking one of them what they thought.
The interviewer was a humourless shell 9f a person who thought I would be an inappropriate person to speak to academics,.who might get offended by such things.
I shit you not.
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Still, I got turned down for a few other jobs for even better reasons.
When I was first trying to join the patent profession, one pair of interviewers thought that getting people to figure out the purpose of obscure mechanical devices was a good way to test candidates.
They had some in cabinets in their board room. So they pointed one out and asked me to look and tell them what I thought.
I answered immediately and correctly.
They were astonished so asked how I'd figured it out.
I said there was a label on it.
Neither looked happy. Shame, because it's all about attention to detail, my job.
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If you were going to have to work with said person, probably just as well you didn't get the job, whatever the salary was. A working life where humour was not allowed would be hell for me.
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If you have a sense of humour, you are in the wrong generation.
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I was looking at a job a few years ago where I could use my experience in a different way with a very well known organisation. I was slightly surprised to get an interview and from the process to that point I wasn’t 100% sure what exactly they wanted from the role. I asked at interview and they effectively said they didn’t really know and it was a chance to make the role my own. They didn’t even give vague aims of what was expected. The feedback I received from their internal recruiter was that I didn’t seem engaged in the process. I pointed out it was hard to engage with something no-one could define.
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Yeah. That’s with lots of things though. We all intuitively know how swinging doors operate but it takes 1st year undergrad maths mechanics to model it and even then it’s a massive approximation.
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You aren't getting it. Even the basic concepts, at hand wavy first year introductory lecture level make you want to spend half an hour in a darkened room. Was it Feynman or Einstein who said if you aren't shocked, you haven't understood it?
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Fair enough.
I think the “if you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it” is not particularly correct most of the time.
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It's the pop-sci one but it's not correct.
We can use the model of a particle or the model of a wave to explain observed behaviour, but that doesn't mean that the 'objects' are both.
(If you know what it is, there are some boys at CERN who'd be grateful if you told them)
We're in danger of confusing passion with incompetence
- @ddraver0 -
I'm not entirely clear whether it's that or you're just not a visual person. I'd say the bottom right sketch is not a bad representation of what you wrote.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
It's the wrong way around. Or the right way around. Or half right. Either half.
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How would you draw the energy level of electrons being changed then? Bearing in mind that all models are approximations.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
I don't know, depends on the audience or context. Flight of stairs, floors of a building, or ponds at different height. If you are talking about discrete molecules, the former is more helpful, but if you are talking about semiconductors or metals, the latter is more helpful. In either case, the nature of the transition that takes place lends itself to regarding the incident light as a particle.
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The diagram you criticised not show three individual photons approaching the target? Any model or diagram of anything is incomplete - and therefore 'wrong' by definition. There's always a choice of which aspects to illustrate and which to omit.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Photons aren't waves, right?
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They're not circles with straight arrows either: it's a diagram.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
And the question is whether the diagram is any use in explainin wave particle duality.
It isn't. It isn't entirely useles for explaining th photovoltaic effect I suppose.
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Having the Ars v Liv moneyball playing away in background - was v tedious, do I switch back to cyclocross catch up?, has got a little better in 2nd half - and intrigued by seeing repetitive 'Visit Rwanda' ads running on the annoying ads boards. Visit Rwanda? Really? Who they targeting? Gammons? Asylum seekers? Who's paying for the ads? HiRisk's bunch of muppets?
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I know someone who is going there to work for the F.O.
I did joke that at least one of the flights would have A passenger. 🤣
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
Arsenal more notably played in white today as part of the no more red campaign.
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I wonder which school this Telegraph writer attended, or whether they skipped maths. And I wonder why they chose 2021, not 2023... was there something going on then?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/08/stop-following-covid-rules-send-sniffly-children-school/
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I saw a video of it with very little context and was pretty confused!
- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
Ooh, we've got a new Telegraph target... the new 'establishment class'. Not quite as catchy as 'the Blob', but...
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And they aren't particles either. But somehow are both at the same time. I learned to accept particle-wave duality as a consequence of our experiences as humans, where some phenomena are wave-like (e.g. sound), some others are particle-like (e.g. snooker). It just happened once we dug deep enough, neither was absolutely true.
Photons and electrons are very different but, ironically, it has nothing to do with wave/particle. Photons are massless, carry the electromagnetic force, and can "clump together" (boson), and electrons are massive, are subject to other forces and obey Pauli's exclusion principle*** (fermion).
My not really current (mis?)understanding is that "vacuum" might be seen as a blank canvas where particles with mass appear as excitations (think a vibrating drum). Interactions, like electromagnetism, are caused by massless particles called gauge bosons. Photons are one kind of these. And the Higgs boson is there to make sure the former ones have mass through a process I don't understand.
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Photons aren't massless I don't think. But I'm not a physicst. Chemists don't need to know the difference between bosons and fermions.
Have a horrible suspicion that there is no such thing as vacuum in the sense we all imagine, or at least that vacuum is a term to describe a macroscopic phenomenon.
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Part of this discussion is only concerned with semantics. It might be thought that it would be better to regard the mass of the photons to be their (nonzero) relativistic mass, as opposed to their (zero) invariant mass. We could then consistently talk about the light having mass independently of whether or not it is contained. If relativistic mass is used for all objects, then mass is conserved and the mass of an object is the sum of the masses of its parts. However, modern usage defines mass as the invariant mass of an object mainly because the invariant mass is more useful when doing any kind of calculation.
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