gradi3nt

So if I ask my ISP if they are selling my data do they have to admit it? Or can they now do it in secret?

You have to love pop sci headlines with phrases like "...promises possible..."

I promise you, BBC's Roland Pease, that it's possible the sun won't rise tomorrow and Linus Torvalds with announce that he will be Microsoft's next CEO.

So CKs brilliant talent for comedy had not so much to do with his ticket sales, eh?

That sounds like a sales pitch. Oh wait, scroll to the bottom, this is a sales pitch. Classic tactic of making the incredible sound easy, just pay a small fee!

Changing the zoom on this page is trippy.

This is a very nice argument!

Our senses are still only tuned in to detect portions of "reality" that are relevant to life on earth. For example, our eyes detect the band of EM radiation most useful during daytime on Earth. But even though are eyes are narrow band and highly non-linear sensors, they (+our other equally flawed senses) have served us pretty well as far as understanding the true nature of EM waves.

I guess my point is that our senses still aren't evolving to detect reality in some sort of true pure mathematical sense.

"You're a fucking moron if you use default browser styles." - Eleanor Roosevelt

So the Sell/Check/Recycle model only requires 33% of the labor compared to the Check only model. The author suggests that this means tripling production would be possible, but that depends on QA being the factories bottleneck. If QA isn't the bottleneck, than you might as well fire 2/3 of Quinn's QA workers. Hooray, the computer didn't take my job, but it took the jobs of the guy to my right and the gal to my left.

Here in the US we stand with you on the issue of BMW drivers.

Physics experiments have ruled theories like this out. They can put a very very small upper bound on how much the constants can change over a volume the size of the universe, and over the lifetime of the universe.

You don't, it's just that h-bar = h/2pi is the variety of planck's constant that is more useful in quantum mechanics.

The first name to show up when I search 'evil man' is 'Mr Rogers'...what the hell, reddit.

(first name, not first word, had to scroll down a bit, past words like 'Nazi soldier' and 'evildoer')

So that's wayyyyyyy outside our galaxy? Any idea how many galaxies fit into a 1 billion ly sphere around the milky way? I'm guessing a shit ton, which makes the detection of a bh merger seem more realistic to me.

That's some serious range!

What would us change about the letter? Commenter djcapelis above disagrees.

I'm turning 25 in two weeks. So this is it? 2015 was my last year of music? Damn...it went by so fast!

It's turtles all the way up.

That's just perfect

Scot Aaronson does understand this work very well, and he mentions several times (with citations) that there is no widely accepted proof or disproof that a quantum speedup will ever exist for quantum annealers.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2555

So then why is it important? What is the argument for encrypting all web traffic? Does it act as a sort of camouflage for the actually important encrypted traffic?

Ignorant question: If they are making getting a certificate easy for everyone, what is to stop "bad guys" from getting certificates for their sketchy sites? I usually look to the green "https" in my uri bar for reassurance when I'm on an unusual site.

Hah, Is this a joke or is there actually a doge service that does this?

brewer2mpl moved to: https://jiffyclub.github.io/palettable/

Great package, thanks for sharing!

There is at least one fundamental truth: obesity is on the rise. Why?

I think it is safe to assume that a rapid change in the human genome is not responsible for skyrocketing obesity rates around the world. From what I have read it seems that dietary shifts towards more processed and simple-carbohydrate rich food are the main culprit. Increasingly sedentary lifestyles are accomplices.

These effects are on a statistical and societal level. Also, they don't imply that and individual can just change their diet and easily loose weight. It is possible once someone gains weight their body irreversibly changes so that losing weight becomes much more difficult (I mean irreversible to imply hysteresis, not impossibility).

Is there a good alternative idea?

Anything that has an energy can be turned into a temperature by dividing by the Boltzman constant k_b (units: Joules/Kelvin).

The meaning of that temperature can be hard to interpret, though. Temperatures make the most sense when you are thinking about thermodynamics, not when you consider a single isolated particle.

But if they call it a quantum computer enough times it's almost like it is one, right?

Troyer's group has done some great work looking for any quantum speedup from one of these annealers, for example: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6195/420

Epic Systems (digital healthcare records) employs 5,000 people just outside Madison, WI. Soon to be 10,000 according to their roadmap. I wouldn't be surprised if other corporations looking to hire gobs of college grads start popping up (or already have popped up) near other small midwest cities.

This is a misleading headline! This 'hard drive' needs to be in a superconducting magnet and held at 2K. I'm not aware of any desktop chassis that comes with a a cryostat...

Very interesting. Life was seriously tough before series expansions were invented!

Imagine being inside of a closed box like an elevator. Without leaving the box there is no way to tell the difference from being in free fall towards Earth versus floating in interstellar space. Therefor, general relativity take the perspective that gravity is a fictitious force (like centrifugal force) that arises from the shape of spacetime.

This is basic science. It doesn't need to be directly useful. The possibility of creating lifeforms that use different base pairs in their DNA is fascinating. It has implications about how similar or dissimilar life that evolved separately elsewhere in the universe could be. I hope they keep up the good work!

How It's Made: Pencils (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5uUV9z7hfg)