Howdy, everyone!
Hey everyone, I'm plasmon, a physics undergrad.
In any case, I'm pretty happy to be here—it's cool to have a hidden spot on the net, and I plan on just hanging out and chilling. Owing to a lack of math typesetting and stuff, I don't think I'll be able to do much of anything talking about some in-depth physics or math, but that's alright—I wouldn't want to risk ruining the napkins here with my chicken-scratch.
My main interests are
- Physics (shockingly) – mostly condensed matter physics, strongly correlated systems in particular, but quantum optics is also quite interesting. You could just say I'm interested in quantum many-body problems, but that's a tad too general.
- Music – I've been listening to a lot of Coil and Autechre recently, if that's any indication.
- Video games – My favorite game of all time is *Deus Ex*, but I've been playing a metric shit-ton of *Need for Speed Underground 2* lately (and I might write a review on the game).
In any case, I hope you're all doing well tonight.
Replies
Hi ~plasmon, and welcome to the Midnight!
You can type your posts in Gemtext here, and it turns out that there is a way to post mathematical notation in this format. You just create a preformatted text section (surrounded by lines containing triple backticks as in Markdown), and then place ASCII-art rendered math formulas and plots inside it.
Here's an example:
pprint(Integral(sqrt((1+x)/(x**2+3)),x)+Sum(1/j**2,(j,1,n)))
n
____
⌠ ╲
⎮ ________ ╲ 1
⎮ ╱ x + 1 ╲ ──
⎮ ╱ ────── dx + ╱ 2
⎮ ╱ 2 ╱ j
⎮ ╲╱ x + 3 ╱
⌡ ‾‾‾‾
j = 1
plot(sin(x),(x,-2*pi,2*pi))
0.99830 | ... ...
| / \ / \
| / . / .
| . .
| . .
| . .
| . .
| . .
0.05872 | -------------.--------------------------.--------------
| . . . . /
| . .
| . .
| . .
| . .
| . .
| . / . /
| \ / \ /
-0.9983 | ... ...
-6.28319 0 6.28319
Welcome, plasmon!
I've not done any reading along the lines of physics in quite a while, so this is the first time I've seen the term "quantum optics". Care to share a brief take on it?
Welcome! I hope you enjoy your time here at the pub
Welcome to the party! I usually find the occasional bits of physics I stumble across to be fun, but I lack the background to get into the more esoteric stuff that I find more interesting. Maybe one day :)
Our music tastes definitely overlap, at least as far as those two go! I’m an old (in both senses of the word) goth, so like a lot of their ilk. Sometimes more aggressive stuff, depending on my mood, of course.
Deus Ex is a classic for a reason! Meanwhile, I actually picked up one of the more recent-ish NFS games on PS5 due to it being like $2 or something. Haven’t played it yet, as the backlog is real (and large).
Finally, a question: how have you found Cohost? I’ve avoided Twitter like the plague I believe it to be, and while I dabbled with Mastodon, I never really got into the habit of using it. It’s too easy to feel like shouting into an empty room, y’know?
Cohost its a new Github?
Good morning ~plasmon, welcome to The Midnight!
~bartender? Coffee with cream an sugar --- its too early in the morning for experiments. Thanks!
Physics. Yes. I have spent a good part of my lifetime with that. I did venture into the realm of astrophysics. Symbiotic double stars, äh, white dwarfs accreting hydrogen-rich material from their companion red giant or similar. The dwarf grows a skin of "degenerated" matter, and at some point nuclear fusion can set in an produce a giant surface explosion. One of these objects, T Cor Bor, is expected to trigger soonish. So yes, even in astronomy your favorite comes in quite easily :)
However, I have changed fields towards computing, working at the blurry line which separates hardware (like wires, components, and controllers), enhanced with funny things like FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays; which are configurable hardware, if you will), and pure software (starting at obscure boot loaders, loading a not so obscure boot loader, loading and starting an operating systems kernel and it's associated user land).
Wherever you go, have the appropriate amount of fun!
Cheers!