@design_law @mckra1g Oh of course. And it’s so far in the past, I doubt it matters.

@mckra1g Which is nice

@hfalcke Maybe there was some rule about patents going to lab employees and not interns, idk. Since then, many places that run REUs have established policies that give students equal ownership rights for their work. But absent that sort of explanation, probably the most like reason to leave a student off a patent (and not tell them) is not having to pay them if it sells.

@spacerog A Fire Upon the Derp :)

@AlanSill Any chance that was ORNL?

Obviously my advisor (Protopescu) belonged on the patent just as much as me. I wouldn’t have done the work without his guidance and input! The other two names? Not so much. One was the division head, the other taught me how to use pointers in C. Neither contributed to the system itself.

I heard that they shopped it around. Not sure if it ever sold.

And by “funny,” I mean completely enraging. I made the diagram in the application with an early Visio-type program.

Funny story: This was my work, patented by my supervisors at my first summer research position. They waited until I was out of the country for a gap year, and never told me they had patented and possibly even sold it.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5479513A/en

@cstross @ZachWeinersmith (That being said, the astonishing thing to me was that no one at the big publishers who were putting out their books -- Harper Collins, Penguin, etc -- was referencing *any* kind of meaningful analysis of what drove sales. Nothing they knew was rooted in data. It was all throw-it-at-the-wall-and-hope-something-sticks. Even the 3k-5k numbers were partly vibe based. They saw which books made it, and knew their sales, but no one in contact with the authors knew for sure.)

@cstross @ZachWeinersmith Charlie knows far more about this, of course, I just want to offer a corroborating data point. My wife is both an author and also worked in publishing for a while, and her circle of friends is about half-and-half bestsellers and mid-list authors. About 12 years ago, when her first book came out, the conventional wisdom was that 3k-5k of sales in that first week or so would land you on the NYT list.

A day late for an #OTD boost, but it’s always fun to look through a thread of Ralph McQuarrie concept art!
https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/110537520573170629

“Look on my works, be kind, and rewind!”
https://mastodon.social/@tomw/112588444560506691

"We are making likes private for everyone because one of us -- definitely not the boss! I never said that! -- is tired of people noticing when we like posts by Nazis and racists and whatnot."

The visualizations in this (also very well written) article by Bartosz Ciechanowski are 👨🍳🤌💋.

Not sure if they are roll-your-own or what, but wow.

https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

RIP Lynn Conway.
https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/111686812388366623

Notably, the section on hypersurfaces formed by a unit vector has been expanded to include both the spacelike and timelike cases. The same goes for the corresponding parts of the section on small variations of the metric.

There are a few results in here that I use quite often, that afaik don't show up anywhere else. (At least not in this form, which is suited to the sorts of calculations that come up in my field.)

Let me know if spot an error (not likely!), think of an interesting addition, or use this reference while working on a project -- published or otherwise.

If you do publish something that references this page, there are instructions for adding a citation via BibTeX or REVTeX.

Are you a physicist, mathematician, or enthusiastic amateur who often works with curvature tensors, hypersurfaces, and other concepts that show up in GR, high energy theory, and related fields?

Sick and tired of dropping a minus sign or factor of 2?

Fed up with hunting through references to find how the extrinsic curvature changes under a small perturbation of the metric?

Check out my recently updated collection of Conventions, Definitions, Identities, and Formulas:
http://jacobi.luc.edu/Useful.html

@Ralph058 But no algemetric geobra!!

Riemann's work, which built on ideas of Gauss, Lobachevsky, and others, freed mathematicians from rigid notions of space and geometry. Via Marcel Grossman, it provided Einstein with the mathematical framework needed to express the ideas of general relativity.