I still think Whisper has the biggest Phoenix deployment in terms of traffic. It's a huge part of what makes our web development easy because our backend is all Erlang. Thanks Chris and José (and everyone else) for such a great set of tools.
I'm not actually there anymore, but I know they were moving a lot of stuff to Elixir and Phoenix and some of my friends have given a few talks on it... I went to the last two Elixirconf's but haven't really used it much professionally myself yet. Another media company called Inverse is using Phoenix and Elixir for a lot of their infrastructure. They're still small, but growing rapidly. inverse.com
We just bought a SAAS business via FE International last month (http://talentdesk.com). Process was incredibly smooth. I'm happy to answer questions privately if anyone has any on what it's like on the buyer side.
"If you’re in a car, you see watches outside the car go slower. They only go a little slower, so you wouldn’t notice it in your normal life; it takes the best watches in the world to even tell that it’s happening. But it really does happen."
The crazy thing about special relativity is that from the perspective of the observer in the car, they're sitting still and everyone else is moving. That means that the observer in the car will see the watches of people on the sidewalk ticking slowly, at the same time that the people on the sidewalk will see the car's clock ticking slowly.
Everyone sees everybody else's watch ticking slowly (unless they appear to be at rest). And yet it all hangs together in a beautifully consistent way. The catch is that moving observers don't just disagree on whose watch is running slow, they also tend to disagree on whether distant clocks are correctly synchronized or not. The disagreements about which clock is ticking too slow always perfectly balance out the disagreements about which clock chimed noon earlier.
In the path from special to general you have to give this point of view up.
More exactly, special relativity starts with the assumption that there are special inertial frames of reference, here is what they look like, and here is what they look like relative to each other.
General relativity starts with arbitrary coordinate systems, and ways of expressing physics such that whatever was measured in one coordinate system can be translated into what should have been measured in another. These coordinate systems can have any mixture of weird effects.
The physics involves something called a metric. General relativity is what falls out if you insist on the following statements:
1. "Locally" things behave like special relativity.
2. Given only low velocity and low mass, things behave like Newtonian gravity.
3. The terms of the metric satisfy a first order differential equation whose definition is independent of the chosen coordinate system.
This gives you general relativity up to an arbitrary constant of integration (the cosmological constant). And in the presence of mass it gives you the prediction that no truly inertial frame of reference exists over any region with matter in it. (The effects of gravity are all due to stuff being non-inertial.)
From that prediction we find that the point of view and understanding from special relativity is only a local approximation. You can't really describe any interesting system that way.
I've built dozens of Erlang apps and used ETS in every one. I've used Mnesia once, and it was not a pleasant experience. Most Erlang dev teams use ETS directly. It's possible to use Mnesia successfully but I see it far less often than ETS these days.
This type of use of H1-Bs is really frustrating for people that legitimately have developers who have a true need for the visa.
I've hosted FWD.us events, and I've applied for a number of H1-Bs (among other visas). It's hard to advocate for immigration reform when you see abuse like this.
Roughly 80% of the lift is generated above the wing in typical aircraft. Angle of attack is part of it and not a counterargument.
As the angle of attack is increases, the point of minimum pressure moves forward and the size of the adverse pressure gradient increases.
btw. In most most airfoils zero angle of attack and zero lift axis differ. The wing generates lift even without the angle of attack. Chambered wings are exception to this.
That's a weird text. At the beginning the author lists reasons why it's clearly Newton's third law, and then just basically says: "But then an 'authority' on aerodynamics waved hands around telling me it's not. The end." Maybe I misread something, but nowhere in the examples that are apparently inconsistent with Bernoulli's law, and for which the professor claims they actually support it, does he actually provide an explanation.
Sure. A follow-up question I would have asked: how do propellers work? By accelerating large volumes of air, force is generated according to Newton's Second Law. So do wings accelerate large volumes of air? Of course, as one can see at any airport, large vortices trail behind and below the wings of any airplane or glider. So how is a wing different than a propeller?
I didn't say it wasn't complicated. What I said was most lift is due to angle of attack.
The fact is that the percentage of lift that is attributable to angle of attack is far greater than that due to reduction in air pressure across the curved part of the wing.
I've been thinking about building a PID controller for it (I already have the equipment from a project I did for an embedded systems lab in college), but I'm worried I'll end up eating way too much barbecue.
I've built a couple of smokers out of cardboard boxes and they were fantastic.
I got a large box (like refrigerator might come in), cut the bottom out and cut a door leaving one side for the hinge. I then used a pencil to poke some hole and ran dowels through the box horizontally to put the racks on. An electric hotplate and a cast iron skillet full of apple wood chips provides the smoke. I put it on the concrete and put the box over the top of it. I put a meat thermometer in the top of the box. Warning: the first time I did this, the concrete under the box was also smoked and I had a large black square on my patio. Cover the concrete with tinfoil to avoid this.
This method produces a lot of smoke and not much heat. I've done salmon and a couple of turkeys like this. I let them smoke for 4 or 5 hours, then finish them off in the oven. Rave reviews on the turkey at thanksgiving. The whole thing cost like $10 to make (I already had the hotplate).
The cheaper kamado-style/big green egg clones are pretty good these days. I recently picked up a Kamado Kooker with stand for ~$300 vs. >$1000 for the similar size Big Green Egg and stand, and have been quite happy with it.
