Howdy, everyone!

Hey everyone, I'm plasmon, a physics undergrad.

or on my neocities page (which is undergoing maintenance thanks to what I think is something with the API).

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.

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Replies

~tracker wrote:

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

~inquiry wrote:

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?

~immy wrote:

Welcome! I hope you enjoy your time here at the pub

~zampano wrote (thread):

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?

~turboblack wrote:

Cohost its a new Github?

~ew wrote (thread):

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!