jgorham

I agree with you that there's no real imperative for a sports league to need to "keep up" with technology.

But one possible way to look at this is as a regulation on what technology coaches can or cannot use currently as they please. E.g., defenses playing against teams who run no-huddle offenses usually have no time to call plays or change the defensive scheme, and thus allowing the defensive captain to update and change plays at the line could be a huge plus for teams that _wanted_ to do this but currently cannot.

Forcing coaches to use iPads on the sideline for the hell of it is silly; prohibiting teams who want to analyze film in realtime on the sideline or instantly communicate plays on the fly who wish to do so is a bit different.

I wonder if in his installation of R he has ATLAS build in as the linear algebra workhorse. That seems to be optimized for something like this- I wonder how this would affect R's speed.

The average American eats twice as many kilograms of meat than the next nationality (last time I checked it was the British). As the article states, beef is by far the most environmentally draining; it turns out in terms of protein and calories, pork is nearly the same as beef with a much smaller amount of energy required to produce that meat. If the US had a better food culture [I'm not counting fast food here], we might be able to actually change the mindsets of the public that they dont need a meat entre with every meal.

I don't know if this is a fair recapitulation of his "argument" - the three categories you are alluding to above were more criteria he offered for how you might judge the worth of college as an institution. I'm fairly certain the author of this isn't a "desperate man who does not understand humans or what education is."

That being said, people on HN are obsessed with discussing the ROI of undergraduate education when referring to the "bubble," without really discussing the role that a liberal education should play for those who aren't engineers. I think the really interesting point the author made was that professor's incentives have goes awry, as they are better off if they assign easier coursework so that they don't get docked on student reviews at the end of the term.

I don't know if Ramsey's theorem really says anything as grand about disorder as Maxwell's demon and the like, but it does express something quantitative about the existence of subsets containing some specific properties as the size of the graph increases.

For me, Ramsey's theory is particularly interesting its rare that an open problem in mathematics can be explained to anyone with relatively little background in mathematics or logic for that matter. Mathematicians have discovered some bounds on R(n), but an exact solution looks like its no where in sight.

While I appreciate Mike Rowe's sentiments and general argument, this speech reminds of politicians who lament the loss of manufacturing jobs as America's backbone. Economists have regularly pointed out that as a country becomes wealthier and more educated, the share of the economy devoted to manufacturing falls. This isn't really a good or a bad thing, its just a reflection of how that country's resources fit into the global economy. This loss of manufacturing is only a problem when people are losing these jobs in a "race to the bottom" situation, much like Mexico and Asian countries during the 1990's.

However, I do acknowledge that the current education system frowns upon pursuing vocation degrees, when many of my friends would have excelled in these programs during high school if given the opportunity. The important distinction here is that we want jobs that are "skilled," not jobs that are manufacturing per se.

One interesting fact regarding population growth is that worldwide, having children on aggregate is a inferior good: if parts of Africa and Southeast Asia can make some significant gains in the next few decades, we will likely see population peak sometime this century.

While I don't doubt that in the future there may be some machine that can crunch logic at a ridiculous pace, Watson still seems far off from the AI the author here is alluding to. Machine learning of Watson's nature (classification problems, feature selection, etc.) is able to take data generated from the world and find interesting patterns to make a prediction. This is nowhere near the creation of new ideas, like Galois' insights into field theory or the work Perelman contributed toward the concept of a Ricci flow. I haven't yet heard how to create a machine whose thoughts "can wander" in a way that isn't hopelessly inefficient. That would be a big leap toward this type of AI.