Ilmari Karonen

1,076 reputation

211

bio	website	vyznev.net
	location	Helsinki, Finland
	age
visits	member for	1 year, 10 months
	seen	22 hours ago
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	22 hours ago

summary answers questions tags badges favorites bounties reputation activity

107 Actions

suggestions reviews revisions comments badges posts accepts all

Jul 25	suggested	suggested edit on Calculating the time of dawn
Jul 25	revised	What isotope has the shortest half life? I'm pretty sure linking to an /edit URL is not what was intended here
Jul 25	suggested	suggested edit on What isotope has the shortest half life?
Jul 25	comment	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain @RonMaimon: You may be onto something in asking about how the impurities were distributed. The method you described is what I used for my own code, and yields a uniform sample from the space of possible impurity locations, conditioned on there being exactly 10 of them among the 200 sites. However, using some other, biased method of placing the impurities could indeed affect the distance statistics.
Jul 25	comment	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain @Ron: Ps. I'm pretty sure the OP did not consider the distances between all pairs of impurities, but only the distances between nearest pairs. If he'd done the former, he would've obtained a plot that looked nothing like what he had. (In fact, the frequency-distance plot would've been approximately linear.)
Jul 25	comment	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain @Ron: Well, I'd say the answer to that is either bad luck and not enough samples, or a bug in his code. Without seeing the code, it's hard to tell which.
Jul 25	revised	The trajectory of a projectile launched from a hilltop add backslashes before trig function names
Jul 25	revised	Does the wind gust over the ocean? fix link, courtesy of Google
Jul 25	suggested	suggested edit on Does the wind gust over the ocean?
Jul 25	suggested	suggested edit on The trajectory of a projectile launched from a hilltop
Jul 25	awarded	Critic
Jul 25	revised	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain added 394 characters in body
Jul 25	revised	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain added 540 characters in body
Jul 25	answered	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain
Jul 25	comment	Average Neighbouring Impurity Separation in a Random 1D chain You might have better luck asking this on math.SE; there's nothing inherently physical about this question, it's just abstract probability theory.
Jul 24	comment	Will a hole cut into a metal disk expand or shrink when the disc is heated? (In fact, it occurs to me that, in the absence of a convenient free-fall cookie oven, one might be able to conduct an equivalent experiment by (slowly) deep-frying the annular cookie instead. Hmm... it might be time for some science, here.)
Jul 24	comment	Will a hole cut into a metal disk expand or shrink when the disc is heated? The reason why cookies don't expand uniformly when baked has probably more to do with the fact that they're in semi-adhesive contact with the baking tray, which is both much stiffer than cookie dough and expands much less during the process, and which thus provides an external force counteracting the dough's expansion and deforming it. I suspect that, if you were to bake a cookie with a hole in free-fall, suspended in air without a tray, the hole would expand.
Jul 24	answered	Superposition of electromagnetic waves
Jul 24	awarded	Commentator
Jul 24	comment	How does Newton's 2-prism experiment help to explain why light does not get dispersed into 7-colors in a parallel glass slab? @alvas: A zero-width film (or a film of negligible width, if you prefer) has no net effect on light passing through it. (It does have an effect on any light that might be reflected from it, but that's irrelevant to this question.) Yes, the light does refract when it enters the film and then immediately refract again when it leaves it, but those two effects occur at (nearly) the same time and place and exactly cancel each other out. It's just as if, while walking, you were to first turn, say, 30° left and then immediately 30° right: you end up going in the exact same direction as before.