I did just enough coding this morning to launch some jobs and let the computer do all the hard work from here on out.
Now I can lounge under the trees in my backyard and do other stuff.
@quietphysicist I remember when I did the physics I ran batch jobs and they waited for robots to mount tape cartridges of the collider observations.
@Ellico2020bis Cool! In my old days as an experimentalist, we also recorded data to magnetic tapes and brought them back with us to spin back and analyze. 🙂
@Ellico2020bis Ouch, I remember the cancellation of the SSC. One of the grad student in our dept was counting on data from that, and had to quickly change his thesis topic.
Good thing you were able to move over to internet stuff, that was definitely the way to go.
@quietphysicist I was surprised, but when that project's paper was accepted for publication in a very-niche collider-oriented journal, they asked me how I wanted my name to appear-- FORTRAN and numerical analysis algorithms made me a "published physicist," technically.😁
@Ellico2020bis Nice! numerical analysis algorithms is still good and honest physics work 😀
@quietphysicist Internet software, OTOH, is very messy and wasteful now. Nobody optimizes anything. It's always been a passion of mine, as a software person, to make things faster. I wonder how much carbon is released due to lousy software on computers and phones-- so much processing and memory to waste now unless working on the largest datasets.
@Ellico2020bis I hear you. Physics is moving toward exascale computing, and i wonder what environmental impact keeping those machines cool is going to have.
@quietphysicist I only did computational stuff, but I had hoped to continue doing it at SSC, but SSC canceled. Fortunately, the Internet took off, so I went that direction, since only university people knew anything about how to operate Internet stuff at the time.