Ask the Philosophers

[Jon Miller]

here is the thread to ask the philosophers all the questions yuo ever wanted to ask them

I will start by asking them what the charge distribution is on a bump on a conductor with a charge above the bump

Jon Miller

[Jon Miller]

actually, I think I will have that one shortly

ok

how would you make supersymmetric theory and a positive cosmological cosntant work together

Jon Miller

[Asher]

I'd like to know the value of the keyboard. How does it affect the way we live, how does it relate to other input methods, etc.

[Jon Miller]

tha's one they will probably like

I was trying to ask them something useful

(since they claim all usefull ideas come from them)

Jon Miller

[loinburger]

I'd like to know how I can avoid catastrophic roundoff error at t = 65, knowing that I still receive the exact same error after I've increased the minimum precision of Mathematica to 50.

I'd also like to know how many peppers are in a "peck."

[monolith94]

Who do I miss you like the desert misses the rain?
Why do I miss you like a masochist misses pain?
As it right to hide my shame?
Is my mother really to blame?

[Shi Huangdi]

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

[Zylka]

It is said that we actually do subjectively experience our time faster as we grow older; known as "time just flies by as you get older" - leaving the average halfway point of our lives at 20 years old

By what units do you measure this changing flow?

[Giant_Squid]

How and why was the Universe created, and what, if any, were the ramifications of this event?

[SpencerH]

I'd like to know how to get the ****ing windshield wipers off my acura without breaking the wiper arm by exerting enough force to lift the car. What a nightmare! None of these damn things are the same.

[KrazyHorse]

At first I thought you meant to pull the wiper off the windshield because it had frozen there overnight. But then I realised you live in Alabama.

[Alex]

Ok, here we go.

- Jon Miller: don't know (both questions)
- Asher: don't know either
- loin: don't know (hmm we have a trend here)
- monolith: I could discuss this, but, well... nice poem.
- Shi: there are known limits to how much wood... hmm, this is far to complicated, never mind.
- Zylka: you're sedated, don't worry about this
- Giant Squid: once again, too complicated...
- SpencerH: check out the manual, page 54.

[KrazyHorse]

I'd like to know how I can avoid catastrophic roundoff error at t = 65, knowing that I still receive the exact same error after I've increased the minimum precision of Mathematica to 50.

Use Maple instead.

[loinburger]

Tried that, got roundoff error at the exact same place. There's something terribly wrong with the equation, and my professor can wrap around my ass. (He was willing to give me the hint that it was roundoff error that was killing me, which is a relief considering that I'm already using a 16th order method.)

[loinburger]

Actually, I'm almost willing to bet that my professor is wrong on this one. I've run my method using a timestep of 1/8, a timestep of 1/32, and a timestep of 1/128, and I get the exact same solution for all three timesteps (well, the same solution to within about 10^-12 or so). There's no way that that could happen if I were suffering from roundoff error, truncation error, or any other kind of error, other than "incorrect answer key" error.