Ilmari Karonen

1,076 reputation

211

bio	website	vyznev.net
	location	Helsinki, Finland
	age
visits	member for	1 year, 10 months
	seen	yesterday
stats	profile views	61

I like programming in Perl and C. I know Java and PHP too (I'm a MediaWiki developer), but I can't really say I like them. I keep meaning to learn Python some day, but never seem to get around to it.

I'm working on a Ph.D. in biomathematics. I also like programming puzzles and cryptography.

Please consider any (original) code I post to Stack Overflow (and other Stack Exchange sites) to be released under CC-Zero unless stated otherwise. You may do whatever you want with it and don't have to credit me in any way, although of course that would be nice.

	1,076 reputation	bio	website	vyznev.net	visits	member for	1 year, 10 months
211 badges		location	Helsinki, Finland		seen	yesterday

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Nov 13	suggested	suggested edit on Impact location that created the moon
Nov 12	comment	Download only physics and maths wikipedia pages for offline use @dmckee, David Zaslavsky: Looks like the folks at meta.webapps do think it's on topic.
Nov 12	comment	Download only physics and maths wikipedia pages for offline use Hard to say. The total article count I get from my query is a bit under 26,000. Assuming an average of 4 kB per article (which is close to the average for the whole Wikipedia, although I suspect that physics and math articles may be longer than average due to having fewer very short stubs), that would imply a BOTE estimated total size of around 100 MB. Note that that figure doesn't include any images; including them would most likely increase it by at least an order of magnitude.
Nov 12	revised	Download only physics and maths wikipedia pages for offline use add link to a prefilled CatScan form, note that most of the results will be talk pages
Nov 12	answered	Download only physics and maths wikipedia pages for offline use
Nov 12	comment	Download only physics and maths wikipedia pages for offline use @dmckee: Looks to me like this would be on topic for webapps.SE. Certainly there are some similar questions already there, like this one.
Aug 15	comment	Winding Rubber Band Pour soda out, install rubber band and weight, pour soda back in?
Aug 11	revised	Winding Rubber Band added 412 characters in body
Aug 11	answered	Winding Rubber Band
Aug 6	comment	Why are radians more natural than any other angle unit? Or, if Taylor series feel too esoteric for you, just consider the approximation $\sin\alpha\approx\alpha$ for small angles $\alpha$, which only holds if $\alpha$ is measured in radians. (Formally, of course, that approximation simply arises from truncating the Taylor series after the first-order term, so in a sense it's the same thing.)
Jul 30	comment	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain ... In fact, if I'm not mistaken, the distribution of the distances $D_0,\dotsc,D_{N_i-1}$ can be expressed as a conditional distribution given by the combination of $N_i$ independent geometrically distributed random variables with parameter $\rho$, conditioned on their sum being exactly $L$.
Jul 30	comment	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain @Josh: Well, they aren't: we know that there are exactly $N_i$ impurities and $L-N_i$ normal sites. This has several effects: for one thing, no distance between adjacent impurities can exceed $L-N_i+1$, at most one distance per run can exceed $(L-N_i)/2+1$, and so on. More generally, letting $D_1,D_2,\dotsc,D_{N_i-1}$ denote the distances between the adjacent impurities, and $D_0$ the "wrap-around" distance from the last to the first impurity, we have, for each realization of the system, the constraint $\sum_{k=0}^{N_i-1} D_k = L$.
Jul 26	comment	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain @Josh: This is what I get for $L=50$, $N_i=3$ with 10,000 repetitions. It's definitely deviating from the geometric distribution, as one would expect for such a small $N_i$, but I don't see anywhere near the variance in the simulation results that your plot shows.
Jul 26	comment	Would the ionic wind power fence actually work? ... Also, electrostatic generators usually produce high-voltage low-current DC power, which is not very convenient for most applications; thus, it needs to be converted to a lower voltage, with attendant conversion losses.
Jul 26	comment	Would the ionic wind power fence actually work? @endolith: To be honest, I'm no expert on this. I was mostly just going by Wikipedia, which says that "because of their inefficiency and the difficulty of insulating machines producing very high voltages, electrostatic generators had low power ratings and were never used for generation of commercially significant quantities of electric power." I'd guess, though, that part of the reason would be the efficiency of electromagnetic induction as compared to the physical transport of charge carriers up a potential barrier.
Jul 25	awarded	Organizer
Jul 25	revised	Calculating the time of dawn code formatting, add tags
Jul 25	revised	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain add code
Jul 25	comment	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain @Josh: If you're really getting a consistent blip, I'd say it's probably because, as Ron Maimon suggested, there's some bias in the way you're randomly distributing the impurities. The method I used to generate my plot was to place the impurities at uniformly chosen random positions from $0$ to $L-1$ until I'd successfully placed $N_i$ of them; I see no blip with that method.
Jul 25	answered	Calculating the time of dawn