{"id":943,"date":"2014-10-20T14:46:09","date_gmt":"2014-10-20T19:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/?p=943"},"modified":"2014-10-20T14:47:25","modified_gmt":"2014-10-20T19:47:25","slug":"training-the-next-generation-of-nitpickers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2014\/10\/20\/training-the-next-generation-of-nitpickers\/","title":{"rendered":"Training the next generation of nitpickers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my students just submitted his first bug report to Wolfram. I&#8217;m so proud.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/files\/2014\/10\/Screen-Shot-2014-10-20-at-3.38.01-PM.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-944\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/files\/2014\/10\/Screen-Shot-2014-10-20-at-3.38.01-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"702\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/files\/2014\/10\/Screen-Shot-2014-10-20-at-3.38.01-PM.png 702w, https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/files\/2014\/10\/Screen-Shot-2014-10-20-at-3.38.01-PM-300x225.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 702px) 100vw, 702px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is arguably not a bug, but it&#8217;s certainly unexpected, nonstandard, and undesirable behavior. \u00a0Wolfram Alpha is calculating the norm of a vector as the square root of the sum of the squares of the vector&#8217;s components (i.e., the usual Pythagorean relation). But when the vector has complex numbers, that&#8217;s not the right thing to do: you have to use absolute squares. Otherwise, you get absurd results like these, and your norm isn&#8217;t even a norm.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my students just submitted his first bug report to Wolfram. I&#8217;m so proud. This is arguably not a bug, but it&#8217;s certainly unexpected, nonstandard, and undesirable behavior. \u00a0Wolfram Alpha is calculating the norm of a vector as the square root of the sum of the squares of the vector&#8217;s components (i.e., the usual &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2014\/10\/20\/training-the-next-generation-of-nitpickers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Training the next generation of nitpickers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}