MooMooMilkParty

Joined 10 years ago

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Comment · 3 years ago
There is actually an energy cost to evaporation which takes some of that energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization

So, this, as well as ocean mixing is how the surface temperature is "moderated", in addition to the heat capacity that others have brought up.

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Yes, absolutely. Most climate models run on supercomputers, same with molecular dynamics, large scale fluid dynamics, energy systems simulations and of course a whole lot of weapons research.
Comment · 4 years ago
Related I also gotta recommend "Uncommon Carriers" by John McPhee. It's got a chapter that follows a barge operator on the Illinois river that's pretty great.
Comment · 4 years ago
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Comment · 5 years ago
My guess is if you're posting here you're not necessarily the target market for this product. You might be better with just a Sawyer squeeze or other off the shelf filter. If you're looking for clarifying turbid water you could get a bottle of alum from the grocery store and use that as a flocculant. Or if you wanted heavier duty there's "Water Wizard for River Runners" which is made of stuff which is often used for wastewater treatment.
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Scientific computing is what I would be interested in for these types of hardware.
Comment · 6 years ago
I'm a little bit curious here. My understanding is that the wave function has complex values and the "state" is described by the wave function times its complex conjugate. Couldn't they have meant the factor of -1 to be on the imaginary portion and then things still work out to have the same probability distribution?
Comment · 6 years ago
Posting this verbatim from my reddit comment, but I ran a few quick fits and the (arbitrarily scaled) Planck distribution looks better than standard fits of some other distributions. Of course I ran absolutely no statistics on these or tried any sort of real analysis that should have been included in the paper in the first place, so take it with multiple grains of salt:

I fit a few distributions to the data and actually the Planck distribution at 9000K seems to be noticeably better. I did no further statistics and haven't even looked at the fitted parameters for this. Note: I am an earth scientist, not a physicist. https://imgur.com/Qg4ixF2

Edit: More distributions: https://imgur.com/IrF6lsV

Edit: Filtering out sodium and potassium to try to account for some of the low-wavelength counts doesn't seem to help fitting the distributions either: https://imgur.com/dHDUS9Z

You can get the data here: https://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/ASD/lines_form.html

And here's the (garbage) code to reproduce my plots:

    %pylab inline
    import pandas as pd
    import scipy
    import scipy.stats
    
    mpl.style.use('seaborn-muted')
    mpl.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (18, 12)
    mpl.rcParams['font.size'] = 16
    df = pd.read_csv('nist.csv')
    
    def filter_string(x):
        x = str(x).replace('=', '').replace('"', '').replace('*', '').replace('+', '').replace('(', '').replace(')', '')
        if len(x) == 0:
            x = 'NaN'
        return x
    
    asl_comp = df['ritz_wl_vac(nm)'].apply(filter_string).astype(float)
    asl_ver  = df['obs_wl_vac(nm)'].apply(filter_string).astype(float)
    sp_num = df['sp_num'].astype(float)
    
    df_neutral = df[sp_num == 1]
    asl_comp = df_neutral['ritz_wl_vac(nm)'].apply(filter_string).astype(float)
    asl_ver  = df_neutral['obs_wl_vac(nm)'].apply(filter_string).astype(float)
    sp_num = df_neutral['sp_num'].astype(float)
    
    asl_ver = asl_ver[~asl_ver.isna()]
    
    def planck(wav, T=9000.0):
        h = 6.626e-34
        c = 3.0e+8
        k = 1.38e-23
        a = 2.0*h*c**2
        b = h*c/(wav*k*T)
        intensity = (a / ( (wav**5)) * (1 / (np.exp(b) - 1.0) ))
        return intensity
    
    
    dist_names = ['beta', 'lognorm', 'pearson3', 'gumbel_r']
    x = np.arange(0, 1500, 5)
    intensity = planck(x / 1e9)
    size = len(asl_ver)
    
    yvals, xvals = np.histogram(asl_ver, bins=300, normed=True)
    
    for dist_name in dist_names:
        dist = getattr(scipy.stats, dist_name)
        param = dist.fit(asl_ver)
        pdf_fitted = dist.pdf(x, *param[:-2], loc=param[-2], scale=param[-1])
        plt.plot(x, pdf_fitted, label=dist_name, linewidth=4,)
    
    plt.hist(asl_ver, bins=300, density=True, color='grey');
    plt.plot(x, intensity / 1.1e17, linewidth=4, color='red', linestyle='--', label='scaled planck (9000k)')
    plt.legend()
    plt.xlabel(r'$\lambda (nm)$')
    plt.ylabel('Density')
Comment · 7 years ago
Aha! As far as persisting calculations, this makes sense. I guess in my head I was thinking "pure" data where everything opened was precomputed. Forgive my ignorance about database solutions, but do they not implement something similar?

But now you've got me thinking, it would be nice if libraries like Dask could allow for flagging of symbolic operations like this to be written to disk for quickly saving metadata where intermediate steps don't explicitly need to be saved.

Comment · 7 years ago
You're blowing my mind here a little bit. I don't use MySQL but do use Excel and the R/Python data science stacks quite a bit. I regularly open data with tens or even hundreds of thousands of columns in the latter by using lazy computations. Is this not the case with database approaches? What kind of hardware are we talking? Presumably Excel has to load everything into memory at once since it's immediately viewable, right?
Comment · 8 years ago
I hope this capability gets to maturity. It consistently seems like anything I want in a language is in progress in Julia; new scientists in 15 years are going to be very spoiled if Julia becomes mainstream.

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