dstyrb

Japan's surrender had absolutely nothing to do with the bomb.

And why does everyone think that without Einstein we would somehow enter a 100 year long dark age?

1.5% inherent * 187% from pills = 2.8% risk of autism.

Risk of having started a course of antidepressants for absolutely no reason = ~0%

Articles with headlines like these seem manufactured to lead the statistically ignorant into bad decisions. Clickbait science.

I'm an experimental physicist who did an undergraduate before my PhD and had to fight tooth and nail for my grades and did all that petty nonsense like going to class and after school tutoring and such. I'm not a rockstar, but I'm not a joke either -- I would give myself a "B" rating -- I definitely don't struggle for fellowships, but I'm not Nobel material.

I know from the inside that _these_ actions are the most probable path to success. If some hot shot high school student reads his note, I can see them deciding that they are "brilliant mind" material and then start pursuing this course of action seriously. In my opinion that is a borderline surefire path to failure. College campus is _the_ place to learn physics: you learn physics from casual bar discussions about the fluid dynamics of beer, telling a pretty girl why stars twinkle and planets don't, explaining to stoners why cigarette smoke is blue off the cig and then grey when you exhale, pre-exam pizza binges, adding strobe settings to your dorm lights, and late night campus laser graffiti with your mates and professors. Not from lone wolfing down a textbook with a blackboard.

It's perfectly possible for him to convey his message without "ordinary", "childish", "noisy", "rudimentary", "tiny portions" etc. And if he's just putting together a guidebook for entertaining your interest in Physics, then that's cool. But saying this is the way to get a Nobel is ridiculous... hence my original comment about dripping sarcasm.

Also my original comment was just getting down voted (and someone asked for clarification) so I expounded.

And no, I got a ride through college.

Basically the entirety of paragraph 3...

"set up only for those who wish to become theoretical physicists, not just ordinary ones" --- use of 'ordinary' instead of 'experimental' is intentionally condescending, hopefully for sarcastic effect

"very best, those who are fully determined to earn their own Nobel Prize. If you are more modest than that" --- I'm not sure if this is actual encouragement or a joke. But the following:

"finish those lousy schools first and follow the regular routes provided by educators and specialized -gogues who are so damn carefully chewing all those tiny portions before feeding them to you." --- Must be a joke. Nobel prizes are not awarded to individuals these days, they go to collaborations. There is no way to get into a collaboration, or likely a PhD program without an undergraduate degree in Physics. Legally not allowed in many European countries to join a PhD program...

"More than rudimentary intelligence is assumed to be present, because ordinary students can master this material only when assisted by patient teachers." --- if this isn't sarcasm, then this guy is a monstrous prick who just decided to insult the 'rudimentary' intelligence of all Physics undergrads who deigned to actually attend college. Again with the 'ordinary'.

The opening paragraph continues the authors apparent disdain for school in general:

"But what if you are still young, at School, and before being admitted at a University, you have to endure the childish anecdotes that they call science there? What if you are older, and you are not at all looking forward to join those noisy crowds of young students?"

Which is a bit humerus considering the importance he himself places on fundamentals with:

"solid foundations in elementary mathematics and notions of classical (pre-20th century) physics. Don’t think that pre-20th century physics is “irrelevant”"

If it isn't sarcasm, then I have no idea why the author has decided to be so acerbic in his notation. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he doesn't actually mean to insult basically the 99% of physicists who don't show up in "Brilliant Mind"-esque movies.

edit: From his CV:

* Gymnasium-Beta, Dalton Lyceum, The Hague, 1964 * Physics and Mathematics, University of Utrecht * Kandidaatsexamen N1, 4 July 1966 * Doctoraal examen Theoretical Physics, 10 October 1969 * Promotie (PhD thesis) on the subject "Renormalization Procedure for Yang-Mills fields", 1 March 1972

i.e. He did basically all this stuff he is brushing off as worthless. As in going to classes, with teachers, at an undergraduate university, before applying for a PhD program.

I find it strange that no one in this discussion seems to notice the dripping sarcasm...

I wish there was a way to put the text in the middle of my screen.

I think this really depends on your definition of appealing. Machines are already capable of _mimicking the aspects of songs which are currently popular_. I highly doubt that a machine could, say, invent a new genre of music that had widespread appeal.

The usage of machines in music currently leads to a proliferation of basically glammed out pop rock with pitch perfect voices metronome timed beats and wildly predictable song anatomy. The author mentions that Sinatra's voice has been reconstructed and has released new hits... But isn't 90% of Sinatra's appeal the broken, manly _imperfection_ of his voice?

In short, I hypothesize that machines could adequately "fill the void--" ie. play your running music, play your driving music, give you some background tunes to study or code to. But to anyone that actually pays attention to music it will be wildly subpar. Imagine a machine putting off the same lyrical heat as Kendrick Lamar or Ghostface? How can a machine possibly get on a novel level like that when it's basic coding is necessarily to average the means?

Silent Disco?

I, for one, am glad they split that article into two pages; I was getting a bit intimidated by the length.

How esoterically meta.

It's a very interesting project and quite attractive.

However as others mentioned it would be useful to see some sort of scale for the dots, scale for the colors, and specifics on those numbers. For example, I have no idea what "Blue corresponds to levels below the W.H.O. yearly recommendations, light blue is below the W.H.O. daily recommendations etc." means... Does that mean "In one day at a Blue dot you will breathe in a whole year's worth of particulates, while at a light blue dot for one day you will breathe in one day's worth of particulates?"

As it stands, I will stick with aqicn.org for my Chinese pollution forecast simply because it has much more, more specific, information for me -- including intra-city maps. It would be more useful to me if there was perhaps a radio button where I could change between PM2.5 and NO2 for example.

It is very cool to see this on a worldwide scale though. And don't US embassies have public air quality data that you can scrape to fill out things like Africa? Or is that just US embassies in China...?

Anyways, thanks for your efforts.

https://www.google.com.hk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=we...

It would fundamentally change the science case, not just slightly. You have E-ELT and GMT in the southern hemisphere. A major part of the TMT science case is its survey footprint in the north to augment these other 30-meter class projects.

Money is committed on the basis of time -- with the expectation that the telescope will be able to deliver the type of science that your institute wants to do -- so an institute doing astroseismology is probably not going to put in money to a spectroscopy project like 4most or weave.

Money is absolutely committed on the basis of expected performance. And part of TMT performance is its location.

I agree physically the telescope is not that specialized. But TMT the project _is_ that specialized.

a brief history of helvetica and arial, posted here a couple of weeks ago:

http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/the-scourge-of-ari...

You're right. I misspoke a bit; I mean all this type of work is Mauna Kea specific:

http://www.tmt.org/documents

Preliminary work on pipelines relating to the optics, PSFs, band throughputs, etc are simulated with Mauna Kea in mind.

Then that affects the possible science cases. And "survey strategy" at this point would mean allocation of time to contributors which is based on how much money they want to give for their projects by taking those prior simulations into account.

Perhaps the instrument isn't that specialized, but the project kind of is. TMT on Mauna Kea is essentially a completely different telescope from TMT at Apache Point.

I don't understand. They haven't been denied a permit, they had the permit. Construction had begun. They were given the go ahead, handshook on a deal with the state of Hawaii-- giving way more than any telescope before. And now, they've been cut off in the middle of full scale production.

It's a bit of a sucker punch because, for eight years, survey planning, software programming, building design, etc. have been underway with this specific site in mind. There are hundreds of people working on this. Tens to hundreds of thousands of man hours are wasted if this decision stands. PhD work on "site predictions for TMT" "Error estimations for TMT" "Optic Performance for TMT" etc. etc. are worthless.

This isn't a back-yard telescope you just prop up anywhere. This is a precision instrument that was designed for this exact spot. The optics designed Mauna Kea atmospheric seeing; the dome designed for Mauna Kea atmospheric temperature, air pressure and turbulence; the survey strategy planned for Mauna Kea weather patterns and sky visibility.

This site outlines the actions that tmt takes to improve Hawaii and science education in general... 300 jobs. 26 million per year in revenue. 1 million per year just in paying a lease, 800k of which is earmarked to pay for conservation of the mountain. The site was deliberately moved to a suboptimal location so that it would be less visible to people. Includes a statement regarding this HSC hearing.

http://www.maunakeaandtmt.org

I honestly don't see how telescopes are disrespectful to begin with. Stonehenge, the Pyramids, countless other ancient monoliths were astronomical temples... These are literally the temples of the one 'religion' all humanity shares-- the love of space and the stars.

Whatever. Good job random celebrities on twitter who have never even been to Mauna Kea; you've successfully done whatever this is. We will in fact “take [our] toys and play in another sandbox,” because some of us actually care about the past and future of humanity as a race and our place in the stars.

At first I didn't notice that they actually have STEM classes here.

The spiral does however have maths and sciences, the titles mislead me at first but it appears to go through calculus 1 and physics 2. Newtonian dynamics is covered, electromagnetism is covered...

However about a third of the advanced curriculum is devoted directly or indirectly to Astronomy. "Archaeoastronomy", "Maya Astronomy", "Islamic Astronomy" etc. etc. through "Cosmology"

Biology is covered with heavy heavy emphasis on human spirituality (I presume), with courses devoted entirely to the brain and mind. Evolution and Human anatomy are covered, but I'm guessing taxonomy and the boring stuff like how kidneys work or what ATP is pays the price.

Chemistry seems to have drawn the short straw here.

Not going to lie though, I'm jealous of that History schedule, that looks really tight.

At first I came in with a really judgmental statement, but I've eased back quite a bit. I still, however, would not send my child here.

As recently at 2000, major astronomical surveys (SDSS, York et al. 2000) would ship harddrives daily "via express courier" from the scopes to the processing computers.

That's the most recent I can think of. Although some surveys (2MASS) still offer data delivery "on a set of DVDs" if you can't handle FTP.

Some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10626123

how can I generalize? edit: Oh I see that's what the whole discussion here is about -_-

My solution was R=0 always.

So if A is positive, always guess B < A. If A is negative, guess B > A.

Does this not work?

    import numpy as np
    import random as rnd

    trials, correct = 100000000, 0
    for i in range(trials):

        a = rnd.random()-0.5
        b = rnd.random()-0.5

        if a >= 0. and b < a:
            correct+=1
        if a < 0. and b > a:
            correct+=1

    if correct > trials/2.:
        print 'winner: '+str(correct)

"Fletcher goes full kangaroo, drooping his head, hunching his shoulders, dangling his hands from his chest and zigzagging slowly forward."

This is my new dance, the 'full kanga.'

I have created a supplementary figure.

http://imgur.com/NG5cWmJ

This would be nicely accompanied by a photo-journal...

That's interesting. To me an overconfident presentation / paper is a huge red flag and I start to look even more carefully for things that are elided or brushed under the rug. In the PhD we would have rip sessions, where we take new publications from big names and just rip the analysis to shreds (with some post doc help)-- it was an important lesson on "no experiment is anywhere near perfect."

I vastly prefer presentations and articles where both sides of an argument are presented. "We are in agreement with camp A, however camp B using procedure 2 find ... in the future experiment X will help solve this discrepancy"

My impression of scientific presentations to the community is that it's mostly about _funding_. So they are want to make as bold a statement as possible then -- but then "these stars may have actually come from another galaxy!" turns into "Scientists find alien stars visiting the Milky Way from Andromeda!" I actually remember a group issuing a counter press release to their own press release when some reporter completely misinterpreted something and all of a sudden bbc news was reporting that the sun was from the Sagittarius galaxy.

The media is basically to blame for the pervasive myth that there exists some magic science box you just crank long enough to pop out "correct universal truths."

Scientists very rarely use the end-all-be-all language of the news reports. I still hear people saying that the accelerating universe (a nobel prize discovery) is 'quite probable' not 'didn't you know, we solved that, stop thinking about it.'

There are whole branches devoted to disproving big bang cosmology. Are they right? Probably not, but their presence and arguments are extremely valuable. Disagreement is the founding, basic principle of science! It's what separates scientific faith from religious faith. Seeing scientists argue and debate each other in a public forum is the best possible evidence that the process is in fact working properly.

This is one of the things most scientists envy physicists for. I would estimate 95% of those papers are copyrighted, and yet, since we have had this structure for so long, no publisher tries to pursue us for sharing our work with the public for free.

I don't know about other fields of physics, but in astro, most of the data is free access as well. I personally work only with public data and I'm paid to do it. A string attached to governmental funding from the Euro or NSF is usually a mandated free access database.

Sometimes I take for granted the fact that my morning ritual involves reading every publication in my field from the day before, without license. And then I download some free data, program in my free languages, write in my free latex editor, and then publish my work for free in a place anyone can read it. It's utopic.

edit: two archives with a lot of different missions data for example: http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/frontpage/ https://archive.stsci.edu

Agree, it's about possible reduction of harm. A notice that cars crash is not going to stop people from using cars. A notice that foreign travel is not safe will deter some people.

Great generalizations there.