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People have done experiments with "muonium" where a positive muon interacts with a negative electron. Note the muon lasts for about 2 microseconds, and given that the speed of light is about a foot per nanosecond it is practical to make the muons by colliding particles with a target, have them go through a shield that stops other background, then observe muonium doing its thing in a target.

The tau decays in about 3*10^-13 sec so at best it is going to make it a fraction of a millimeter. Now we regularly see muons travel at ultrarelativistic speed that extend their lifetime and range

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/muon.html

but (1) it is harder to get a tau going that fast, and (2) it will probably decay before it slows down enough from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung

to actually bind to an electron.

On the other hand if your collision energy is very close to the threshold to make a pair of taus they might stay bound after they're made which makes it possible to study it.

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Note the easiest high energy physics experiment you can do is set up a scintillator and look for two flashes of light that come, say, within 20 microseconds of each other and make a histogram of the time between them to measure the lifetime of the muon. In this case you get free muons cosmic ray shows. This was the most popular experiment in the graduate physics lab at my school, particularly for people who weren't that interested in doing experiments.


I feel it is that way much less than other plotting libs.

Maybe 80% of what I do is applications, 10% systems and 10% data analysis. Often I will spend two weeks making Jupyter notebooks and then not look at it for two months.

I find most plotting libs have a lot of arbitrary things to remember, they usually have several nano DSLs (strings that get interpreted in ways more complex than atoi.). On top of that most plotting libs have something wrong from my point of view in various areas like deciding the range of the axes or handling huge numbers of points or something.

D3 makes you do a lot yourself but the interfaces it provides to do that are conceptually straightforward. Instead of using someone else’s bloated and buggy general purpose code though an APi that feels like assembling a ship in a bottle you can just do it right with D3.js.


I agree and I think that’s why I end up re-learning d3 over and over.

But having to do it yourself is a lot of work so you have to make an executive decision between shoehorning some plotting library that can’t do a chart feature that honestly should be supported versus building an entire chart from scratch.


D3 is the first visualization toolkit that I really liked.


It’s funny because I dropped in on their Discord today for help debugging an app and there was a lively discussion I joined in to get their attention.

Looking at it closely I think the latest version of the react-router is better than previous ones, I upgraded the particular app I was working on because it is busted anyway and not very big but I can think of two or three other apps using RR I maintain that I am not going to upgrade any time soon, particularly some of those use class based components which won’t do the best with the current hook API anyway.

I see the appeal of the matching client-server environment it is a dream the web industry has been pursuing since 1998 or so but we already have a server and don’t need a new one.


If I was going to complain about Photoshop it is that it does most operations in the chosen color space (say sRGB) instead of linear light. This is certainly wrong for operations that are physically motivated like blurs even if people sometimes like the result.

I hated the dialects of Pascal we were using at school in the early 1980s because they didn’t really support systems programming but after I got a 286 machine I got into Turbo Pascal which did have the extensions I need and that I preferred greatly to C but I switched to C in college because I could write C programs and run them on my PC or on Sun workstations with a 32 bit address space.

Don’t crush that in a hydraulic press.

When it comes to the “oldest stars” there is reason to believe that very early there were very big Population III stars that formed very quickly and burned out fast leaving nothing but black holes and there is hope JWST will see some.

In general there are multiple recent observations that things seemed to happen much more quickly in the early universe than we expected so maybe what we think was the first 1 billion years was really the first 10 billion years or there is another big secret to be discovered in cosmology.


I've got a friend who keeps a cow in a barn full of chickens and chicken crap and she wonders why I won't drink her milk.

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