wmnwmn

I've perpetrated one which I felt crummy about. To set the background, I was a sophomore at college in 1986, and the campus is close to some bad neighborhoods. I had had a very scary incident involving several black people while I was riding through one of those areas. So later I'm standing inside the college gate when three teenage black guys come up and start asking me to let them in. Unfortunately, they had a strong accent (from Florida as it turned out) and I couldn't understand most of what they were saying. So I wasn't letting them in...and they were getting pretty pissed. At any rate pretty soon an older student came by, who understood immediately what they were saying. It turned they were relatives of someone I knew, but the way they pronounced her name I just couldn't get it. No doubt it's also because I was nervous and primed with racist preconceptions (which, as I noted, also had some basis in prior experience). Anyway he let them right in and I felt pretty darn bad about it. You come all the way from Florida to visit your cousin at an Ivy League school, and some white kid thinks you're there to steal stuff. (One irony is that later that same year I did witness a black person steal our neighbors' TV...I was so surprised, just watched him carry it down the stairs and out the gate.) All in all I would say that racism weaves a tangled web of preconceptions that can be reinforced by actual events that also are ultimately arising from racist history.

Well, regular intelligence isn't but so useful in business either. There are so many factors in business success, intelligence is just one, and usually not a very big one.

Record number of investors means dumb money, just like 2000. If you don't know who the greater fool is...it's you

Maybe what we need is a return to the very beginning, namely human curated web catalogs, aka Yahoo

Garageband.com

Silicon Investor

Groovetech

And let's not forget how exciting it was to explore around in the original Yahoo!

Although the web doesn't seem to be thing we all dreamed about anymore, it's still amazing. Remember how hard it used to be to learn about anything? Now it's so easy...but the amount of knowledge itself is oppressive.

Commentator appears to have a layman's understanding of quantum mechanics.

Loved this book when I was college age

I've felt that way for years. OO perhaps makes sense for certain things, mainly things that someone else writes and you use as a library. Using OO more widely leads to very inflexible code, and since specs are not inflexible, the result is disaster.

Haha wrong

Yes! How much time have I wasted chasing some stupid error that "just worked" in perl which C or Java would have blocked at the get go. Just say NO to languages that try to guess what you were probably trying to do.

Changed my mind on OO after seeing how difficult it is for ordinary humans to design objects that can withstand the spec changes that are inevitable in any real project. Bad procedural code is a mess but bad object code can be completely irreparable.

I find the opposite - many websites still don't seem to test properly on chrome.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

I signed up but I see they're using credit card payment...can this work?

E&M is far from "simple". It contains special relativity, for starters. Also it is incompatible with thermodynamics: solving this problem is why Planck invented quantum mechanics. Also point charges have infinite energy: this problem leads to renormalization theory. Also it introduces gauge invariance, an essential but complex part of all modern theories. And lastly, the mathematics of E&M is a big step up from Newtonian theory.

So, the driving force behind facebook is the newsfeed, which enables people to see everyone's updates without going one by one to each page. It's going to be hard to replicate this with personal sites, but maybe we don't want to anymore, now that we see the downsides of the addictive feed. Perhaps a person whose page you would not specifically visit once in a while, is a person who you aren't really friends with. But I'm not sure, because the feed really is fun at times. Politics degrades it as much as anything.

It's funny how nonphysicists (this author) and non-productive physicists (Hossenfelder) beat this drum most loudly. How about we do this: let the people who are obviously smartest make their own decision about what is most promising to work on, and have enough modesty to realize that their decision is better informed than our efforts to advise.

The market already doesn't allocate capital. Companies almost never issue new shares, indeed they buy them back. Given that dividends are also trifling, the market is mainly a large scale gambling scheme. Not entirely, but mainly.

You are right that it was a special and exciting feeling learning these things when these machines were brand new. When my friend's family bought a TRS-80 in 1978, it was like some kind of alien artifact that fell from space; we were utterly fascinated by it even though its capabilities were almost absurdly minimal. It had only 4k RAM and that required several minutes to load from the casette tape storage.

Nevertheless it ran BASIC and my friend and I learned to program on that machine. Subsequently we honed our skills on Apple II's at school, and later by hacking on the PDP-11 at school. In 1981 I built a simple Z-80 computer, roughly equivalent to the TRS-80 (note:"80"). At that time doing something like this literally caused newspaper reporters to come interview you. It was nice to learn these things sort of organically, albeit perhaps not optimally; I've made my living in software development and to this day have never taken any class in programming.

Of course that moment of novelty really was brief. Once the IBM PC came out in 1981, computers proliferated rapidly and they no longer seemed so special. Nevertheless I do think that our "Generation X" had sort of lucky timing with computer culture, since we were also just reaching working age when the Internet revolution hit (my first job out of grad school came from an ad which literally said "the Internet revolution is here and you can be part of it"...a small part to be sure but still part!)

But anyway every time period has its pluses and minuses! If you want to know how it really felt to grow up during that time, the truth is that we envied the 60's generation hugely and thought that everything we had was just kind of a pale imitation of what they did (for example, music). Take a look for example at the book called "Generation X", which is pretty dystopian, and really did express how many people felt. There's always something new happening!

Guess what, we don't need an internet of things. It's not going to happen and you can tell that because it's been hyped for a decade now and has not produced any product that anyone buys.

Every major advance in physics has arrived with a new paradigm of mathematics, usually more than one new paradigm. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but I doubt quantum gravity is going to be solved without the invention of major new mathematics. It's not going to be found by tweaking some kludj no matter how "ugly", nor hidden inside some long-familiar object (e.g., the E8 group...and for the record, Garrett Lisi is NOT a highly respected physicist.)

Very simple question that the article completely failed to address: does the process output more energy in the form of gasoline than it takes in? I am quite certain that the answer is, NO, which means that the factory ends up putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than it is taking out...unless the factory itself runs on renewable energy, in which case who needs it at all.

2 solutions: a) stop doing experiments that just look for correlation without any attempt to get at mechanism. Of course sometimes you can't avoid this and then 2) use lower p values. Don't waste thousands or millions (more) dollars following up 5% results.

Totally wrong from the get go. Cells do not use thermal energy to "ratchet" order out of chaos. That would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Cells create order by using energy from an already-ordered source, namely the food you eat. This source is in turn ordered ultimately by exploiting a very high temperature differential, namely between the sun and earth temperatures. Usable energy can be extracted from differentials; it cannot be extracted from a heat bath at one temperature. But since we do have the virtually unlimited energy from the sun, and some other sources, we can lower entropy in a fixed region as much as we like. There is no physics barrier to repairing every single atom of aging damage in a human body.

This is so true and I'm certain it's related to the noticeable downgrade in web performance and usability over the past five years. So many sites are flabby and slow now because they're retrieving countless packages from CDN's, each time of course with a ssh handshake, etc etc. You can see endless retrievals flashing on the bottom bar, sometimes literally never stopping, as the site keeps doing one thing after another to anticipate what you might want to do, load new content, or whatever. I find the web only barely enjoyable to use anymore. Even the simplest things seem to blow up now, e.g. very often I get "not found" for the Google homepage. Huh? That one's probably on me somehow, but I'm not doing anything different that I know of, but what has changed that I know of is the extreme increase in complexity of internet delivery and programming. And I will just vent one more pet peeve. Not EVERY part of a web page needs to pop something up in your face when you put the mouse over it. Thank you.

Because there is no biological law of aging. There is only a collection of biological accidents.

Sure, I can buy some btc and go buy something with it in some places. But where is my incentive to do that, rather than just go use my credit card or an ACH transfer? Btc is not more convenient, it's not cheaper, and whatever gain in privacy there currently is will not survive a transition to mainstream usage...although the first two problems ensure that there never will be mainstream usage.

Indeed I don't. Nor do most other people. That's one of the reasons why, to first approximation, zero people are using them. And even if lots more people suddenly begin needing to transfer non-reserve currencies internationally, these transfers are going to run into legal issues which, despite fantasies of bitcoin enthusiasts, are not going to be evaded just by putting "crypto" in a prefix.

Not only is BTC epicly badly designed (energy consumption=Denmark) but it doesn't solve a problem that anyone actually has (and neither do any of the other cryptos). Nobody uses them to pay for things, and nobody has any incentive to start doing so, because paying for things is not currently a problem. Compare with the Internet boom: along with the stock bubble, millions of people began using this new tool which changed their lives forever. Compare with the housing boom: tons of people got something, at least temporarily, that changed their lives, namely a house. Now look at cryptocurrencies. They having zero effect on ordinary life because they don't solve a problem that anyone has.

I read it as saying they've passed some development milestones on 50 which is certainly all one could expect before the release of the 20.