My goal for the summer was to finish my PhD. I defended on Friday and am now Dr. Drail, so I actually accomplished my summer task for once. I sacrificed all my sleep and sanity to do so, as I was told at the 11th hour to redo a major analysis that made up 1/4 of my dissertation, but I fucking got it done.

Everything should just be in eV. Particle physics natural units are the best.

Not to dunk on word, if I need slightly more flexibility than a native .txt reader, it will do in a pinch. That being said:

Word: Oh, you want a table? Good luck getting your excel sheet to cary everything over properly, and god forbid you change a formula. You want to write it natively in word? Lol no.

Latex: tabularx goes brrrr

Word: Equations? Have fun properly tracking equation numbers and manually formatting your text to center justified every time.

Latex: $ $, \( \), and \begin{equation} go brrrr.

Word: Figures? Hope you anchored everything properly, it would be a shame if your entire document layout got shifted…

Latex: What the fuck is an anchor? top, here, bottom, those are your options. Add an exclamation mark if you’re feeling spicy.

My former colleague and I both decided on the same template for our dissertation, but hers looked wonky with the default margins. Sacrificing that lamb to have slightly tighter margins was worth it, even if the eldritch ramblings keep me awake at night.

I did all my Quantum Field Theory homework in Latex, the professor required it. My classmates would write everything out by hand and then transcribe it, meanwhile my officemate and I could think/write/math in Latex, so we only had to write our homework once. The prof lifted the requirement halfway through the semester after everyone else complained, but I never looked back.

The only thing that prevented a 100% Latex-only semester was the goddam section where we had to draw Wick diagrams. There just wasn’t a reliable way to draw them on my computer, as the Feynman diagram tools stuggled with the nuances of Wick diagrams. I still included the hand-drawn versions as figures in Latex, but it felt like cheating.

I did figure out how to write the Wick’s theorem bracket notation in Latex though (not that I’ll ever need to again), so that made up for it a bit. I wager that I spent more time researching obscure Latex packages than actually solving the problems that semester.

I love Latex so much, I even made a template for generating profesional looking DND item cards for my table that I submitted to overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/d-and-d-item-card-template/ndfdspmmxnrn

The OP is such a loser. I can’t even imagine spending anywhere close to this much energy just to look so pathetic and weak. If they aren’t a bot, they probably need to thrash out here just to feel like anybody cares about anything they have to say.

My boss read the first chapter I turned in, decided I know what I am doing, gave me some basic feedback, and has completely checked out since then lol.

I am half way done with mine, which means I only have 3/4 left to write, then I will be 90% done.

To be fair to the post, it is describing how to tell people who wear all black apart, not categorizing them goth subtypes. Punk is also not goth.

Neutrello sounds good, but it is actually pretty…

weak

Rimshot, crowd moans

In physics- Like “quart” with a k In the Joyce novel- rhymes with park.

Gell-Mann said it sounds like “quart”, Joyce rhymed it with Park, it is a silly word and the pronunciation is as fluid as you desire.

Physics is a mixed bag with this stuff. Gell-Mann came up with the name quarks after a line from Finnegan’s Wake because Joyce referenced them as coming in three. It was a nonsense word inserted just to rhyme with Mark, Park, etc, so its pronunciation in physics isn’t even correct, but it was fun and physicists were just having a good time with it.

Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

Then we got the strange/charm and top/bottom (which was originally the beauty/truth, so bullet dodged there) so the quarks really got all the fun names. Strong Force physics in general gets the good stuff: Axions were named after a detergent because they helped “clean up” the strong CP-violation problem of the standard model. Fantastic, no notes.

Neutrinos (my field of study), had so much potential for fun, stupid naming that was squandered. The neutrino was originally proposed with the name “neutron” by Pauli, but then the actual neutron was discovered and observed first, so the name got pinched. To remedy this, the electron neutrino was dubbed “neutrino” or little neutron (they didn’t know that other flavors of neutrino existed). Meanwhile, the muon neutrino was originally supposed to be the neutretto (before they realized that the neutral leptons were related by the different particle generations), so we could have had a world where each generation of neutral lepton was just another combination of neutron + diminutive italian suffix.

1. Neutrino
2. Neutretto/neutronetto
3. Neutrello/neutronello

Then, when the mass eigenstates were confirmed, we could have diversified and gone with big suffixes to indicate that neutrinos have mass.

1. Neutroni
2. Neutrachione/neutronachione
3. Neutrozzo/neutronozzo

But noooooo, particle physics decided to just give neutrinos the lamest possible names, electron/muon/tau neutrinos for flavor states and m_1/m_2/m_3 neutrino for mass states. I am ashamed of my predecessors for what they’ve done.

Don’t even get me started on the J/Psi debacle…

As one of the most senior grad students in my dept, holy fuck this hits hard.

I see your dramatic girl and raise you a dramatic crazy boy: