Slashdot Mirror

it is nice to see that machine back on and working. I would have liked a bit more background, what actually has changed during the upgrade. It seems that this contained only in a ``premium article" in the new scientist. Fortunately there are other sources where on can look things up: 40 percent more sensitive machine leading to twice the volume of space to be observable. Some main mirrors were replaced, the laser power increased and a technique called ``squeezing" introduced which counteracts the now stronger distortion of the beam. Also new is that detections of events are publicly announced as soon as they are available. Here is the source: https://news.stanford.edu/2019...

Reminds me of the famous Donald Knuth quotation: Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

Please get this out there. There is a number of studies that demonstrate that H2 is bad, very bad, for the Ozone layer. The problem is that H2 is light, very light and it is subject to atmospheric escape (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape). On its way up and out it will pass through the Ozone layer where H2 is highly reactive to O3. The result is H2 + O3 > H2O +O2. So you end up with either water or hydrogen peroxide in the ozone layer. That is bad for 2 reasons. 1) it causes stratospheric cooling which impedes the production of ozone 2) Water at this layer interferes with the ozone production while providing not protection benefits.
http://web.stanford.edu/group/...
http://www.theozonehole.com/hy...
https://www.caltech.edu/about/...
https://sciencing.com/hydrogen...
https://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/~dst...

They're called lakes.

They're actually called aquifers. Overpumping them (which is what happens during drought) reduces their capacity, and causes sinkholes.

voting rights were very different then and now. Cities had large concentrations of _eligible_ voters. Today even ex-cons can often vote (as it should be, nothing should cause a person to lose their right to vote, if we have so many ax murders and pedophiles they can swing elections maybe we should do something about that first).

You are right about voting rights being different then. You had to be a landowner to vote prior to 1840. However, most of those landowners didn't live in the cities as you stated. They may have owned a place to live in the urban area but they lived on their plantations in the country. Most of the urban dwellers in that era were merchants who quite often didn't own land. Also, "A People's History of the United States" is rife with errors and bad historical analysis. I blame the popularity of that book for the lack of historical knowledge in Americans under the age of about 35 today.

Since I had to google it and I still have the tab open:

The Chinese Room Argument

I've been programming for the past ~40 years and I'll try to summarize what I believe are the most important bits about programming (pardon the pun.) Think of this as a META: "HOWTO: Be A Great Programmer" summary. (I'll get to the books section in a bit.)

1. All code can be summarized as a trinity of 3 fundamental concepts:

* Linear; that is, sequence: A, B, C
* Cyclic; that is, unconditional jumps: A-B-C-goto B
* Choice; that is, conditional jumps: if A then B

2. ~80% of programming is NOT about code; it is about Effective Communication. Whether that be:

* with your compiler / interpreter / REPL
* with other code (levels of abstraction, level of coupling, separation of concerns, etc.)
* with your boss(es) / manager(s)
* with your colleagues
* with your legal team
* with your QA dept
* with your customer(s)
* with the general public

The other ~20% is effective time management and design. A good programmer knows how to budget their time. Programming is about balancing the three conflicting goals of the Program Management Triangle: You can have it on time, on budget, on quality. Pick two.

3. Stages of a Programmer

There are two old jokes:

In Lisp all code is data. In Haskell all data is code.

And:

Progression of a (Lisp) Programmer:

* The newbie realizes that the difference between code and data is trivial.
* The expert realizes that all code is data.
* The true master realizes that all data is code.

(Attributed to Aristotle Pagaltzis)

The point of these jokes is that as you work with systems you start to realize that a data-driven process can often greatly simplify things.

4. Know Thy Data

Fred Books once wrote

"Show me your flowcharts (source code), and conceal your tables (domain model), and I shall continue to be mystified; show me your tables (domain model) and I won't usually need your flowcharts (source code): they'll be obvious."

A more modern version would read like this:

Show me your code and I'll have to see your data,
Show me your data and I won't have to see your code.

The importance of data can't be understated:

* Optimization STARTS with understanding HOW the data is being generated and used, NOT the code as has been traditionally taught.
* Post 2000 "Big Data" has been called the new oil. We are generating upwards to millions of GB of data every second. Analyzing that data is import to spot trends and potential problems.

5. There are three levels of optimizations. From slowest to fastest run-time:

a) Bit-twiddling hacks
b) Algorithmic -- Algorithmic complexity or Analysis of algorithms (such as Big-O notation)
c) Data-Orientated Design -- Understanding how hardware caches such as instruction and data caches matter. Optimize for the common case, NOT the single case that OOP tends to favor.

Optimizing is understanding Bang-for-the-Buck. 80% of code execution is spent in 20% of the time. Speeding up hot-spots with bit twiddling won't be as effective as using a more efficient algorithm which, in turn, won't be as efficient as understanding HOW the data is manipulated in the first place.

6. Fundamental Reading

Since the OP specifically asked about books -- there are lots of great ones. The ones that have impressed me that I would mark as "required" reading:

* The Mythical Man-Month
* Godel, Escher, Bach
* Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming
* The Pragmatic Programmer
* Zero Bugs and Program Faster
* Writing Solid Code / Code Comp

https://med.stanford.edu/sbfnl...

Y Maze Spontaneous Alternation Test

Y Maze Spontaneous Alternation is a behavioral test for measuring the willingness of rodents to explore new environments. Rodents typically prefer to investigate a new arm of the maze rather than returning to one that was previously visited. Many parts of the brain--including the hippocampus, septum, basal forebrain, and prefrontal cortex--are involved in this task.

Testing occurs in a Y-shaped maze with three white, opaque plastic arms at a 120Â angle from each other. After introduction to the center of the maze, the animal is allowed to freely explore the three arms. Over the course of multiple arm entries, the subject should show a tendency to enter a less recently visited arm. The number of arm entries and the number of triads are recorded in order to calculate the percentage of alternation. An entry occurs when all four limbs are within the arm. This test is used to quantify cognitive deficits in transgenic strains of mice and evaluate novel chemical entities for their effects on cognition.

yes and who paid for it

the free market fairy?

seems like your space religion has blinded you to simple facts

https://web.stanford.edu/class...

oops

i guess your brain is scrambled by the fact that nasa is a socialist organization and went to the moon 50 years ago while your precious free market is busy crashing the economy every ten years

now go drive home on your public highways and have a glass of municipal drinking water while you fume against socialism and open the door to the bailiffs the bank sent to seize your home

WWII was the largest driver of technology and who paid for that

"Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab." https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html

"Xerox was anxious to get a piece of the action and was more than willing to allow an Apple contingent to take a peek at PARC.

Wait a second - XEROX wanted Apple to see what they were doing to get more out of their investment? Doesn't that imply they basically told Jobs to take what he liked, because they knew he could actually sell that shit with some of the profit going back to them? How can anyone call that stealing?

"Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab."
https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html

"Xerox was anxious to get a piece of the action and was more than willing to allow an Apple contingent to take a peek at PARC. After all, an investment in Apple was likely to turn a handsome profit when the company eventually went public, whereas the stuff in the PARC labs was an intangible asset that would probably never make it to market—it had already languished for six years. Xerox signed an agreement never to purchase more than five percent of Apple's shares and invested $1 million by buying 100,000 shares at $10 each (within a year these split into 800,000 shares worth $17.6 million when Apple went public."
https://books.google.com/books?id=mXnw5tM8QRwC&pg=PA75&dq=%22xerox+signed%22#v=onepage&q=%22xerox%20signed%22

Where in a scene with a camera and a projector, the scene can be from the point of view of either the camera or projector.

Science may never tell us what lies round the next corner...

But it already has, here, on slashdot.

There is a lot of music out there, unfortunately, most of it is just plain bad. I honestly don't want to listen to a bunch of crap to maybe hear one decent song.

This is Sturgeon's law, indeed most things in given field of endeavour aren't good. Nonetheless, precisely because there is so much music, in absolute terms a vast quantity of really good music exists right now. Streaming platforms massively reduce the personal cost of exploring new genres or new acts: you don't worry about buying the wrong album, etc. Personally, I've found a massive change in my listening habits since I switched to streaming: I've discovered several genres new to me, developed new interests related to music, and literally learned things about myself I wouldn't have learned otherwise. Data indicate that broadening of musical tastes is a general trend amongst listeners of streaming platforms.

It's not idle speculation. There has been real scientific papers written about this. https://plato.stanford.edu/ent...

"Well, I just gave you the simplest, most direct solution. Prices are high because of corporate concentration, which led to a high concentration of high-paying jobs in a certain area. People like to live close to work, and if you put a lot of money in one area, there will be more competition for something in finite supply. It has also led to a concentration of billionaires. Thin the herd and the pressure goes down. Not the best solution maybe, but as I said, the most direct."

By your own account there was a housing shortage and so prices went up. Thank you for validating my point.

"Loosening zoning laws and zero-growth laws won't solve the problem. First, because the rich people who live there don't want those laws loosened except for themselves, if they want to build a new house for example. They don't want poor folks moving in around them and going to their kids' school. So what you get is a further concentration of wealth and kids going to private schools and poorer areas not having the tax base to support schools."

How does rich people won't vote for them mean loosening zoning laws won't work? That makes no sense, whatsoever.

"I prefer a combination of low-growth policies, with strict rent controls. And of course, a few billionaire heads on pikes just to raise everyone's morale. Not the billionaires morale, of course, but fuck them. They're the reason we're in this mess in the first place."

Rent controls are brilliant for those who get them. Meanwhile, developers are discouraged from building because they mess with their profit margins. A high rent area will also typically have high land values. Why would some one dump the massive sum of money buying a develop-able piece of property in the valley if you can't charge a rent that is inline with your costs? In fact, rental supply actually dropped in the few years following the institution of rent control in SF. "Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and
redeveloping buildings." ( https://web.stanford.edu/~diam...)

After that, I have no idea what your, "low-growth policies" are so I can't really comment on them but they do sound suspiciously nebulous.

You have no idea what logic is. Reason is, indeed, logic in the same sense that science is empirical. Logic does not "explain," it infers.

What you are considering is meaning and being.

Start here.

More like failed at nothing, since the demo asks: "...what's the product we're providing in this research? It is a sample augmentation system that is provided to augment computer system development. In addition the aim is to provide tools for generating further, improved augmentation systems--bootstrapping." -- THE DEMO

They had a whole lotta revolutionary stuff (for 1968) to demonstrate first before boring themselves and everyone else with navel-gazing about potential futures of computing. Failed at nothing.

Unfortunately the videos are in Flash format, but the annotations are quite informative and interesting:

https://web.stanford.edu/dept/...

to the rescue.., and if that's not enough.

Your grandma may have told you: be careful what you wish for.

1. If the claim of Chinese intellectual property violation is not exaggerated and that it will be fixed soon, then that would give American companies more incentives to do more research and development in China, tapping low cost engineers and other college graduates, instead of hiring expensive U.S. engineers.
2. China already files more patents than any other countries. The natural trend would be that there will be more patent trolls suing everyone including American companies, just like those opening up offices in East Texas.
3. once China enforce harder, their hi-tech industry will only become more competitive.

Eventually what happened was that, as China’s domestic copyright industries found themselves competing with cheap knock-offs of foreign goods, they pressed the Chinese government to fortify the IP enforcement process on its own. (To put this in perspective, this is also what happened a century earlier in the US, which until 1890 failed to protect foreign works, and then waited yet another century before joining the major international copyright treaty.)

Your grandma may have told you: be careful what you wish for.

1. If the claim of Chinese intellectual property violation is not exaggerated and that it will be fixed soon, then that would give American companies more incentives to do more research and development in China, tapping low cost engineers and other college graduates, instead of hiring expensive U.S. engineers.
2. China already files more patents than any other countries. The natural trend would be that there will be more patent trolls suing everyone including American companies, just like those opening up offices in East Texas.
3. once China enforce harder, their hi-tech industry will only become more competitive.

Eventually what happened was that, as China’s domestic copyright industries found themselves competing with cheap knock-offs of foreign goods, they pressed the Chinese government to fortify the IP enforcement process on its own. (To put this in perspective, this is also what happened a century earlier in the US, which until 1890 failed to protect foreign works, and then waited yet another century before joining the major international copyright treaty.)

Really showing off your ignorance here with fast and loose word usage.

Start here.

Consider that "what works" will be dependent on intrinsic values, what that means, and what people ought to value. Things engineers do not study at all, but philosophers do.

If "evolution wins," why is rape bad? Why is killing sometimes good and sometimes not. Why, when striking a pedestrian, a person should not kill all witnesses? Isn't that a practical solution to the problem of potential lawsuits? Show me the engineering formulas for that.

Morality matters. Morality isn't part of engineering. This is the same problem as climate change denial. Scoffing at experts.

The sample are people who cared enough about net neutrality to submit comments to the FCC.

There were 22 million comments submitted. Of those the researcher cited by TFA accepted only 800K — 3.6% — as valid. Of these 800K, he found 99.7% to oppose the abolition.

We know neither the criteria he used to pick the 800K, nor how exactly he discerned the commenters' point from those he did pick... It is impossible for him to have read them all — so he must've used software to parse the comments. The actual blog-post mentions using "data science", without much detail — and without the code we could use/audit ourselves. It is even harder to understand, how he concluded, that the commenters "understand the issue".

"Are you sure you guys are smart?"

You sure aren't, coward...

She didn't lie, the results are out. Shes 1/32 to 1/512 Native American. ... Depending on how you read the results.

DNA counselors sounds like a terrible idea. I don't trust them to get it right for right reasons or wrong reasons.

Bullshit.

She "consultant shopped" until she found a shill willing to pimp himself out and give her the answer she wanted.

Instead of finding a recognized geneology expert, she used a non-expert who was on the Harvard faculty with her. Why not use a real genealogist?

Why did Harvard drop mention of a Native American faculty member when Fauxcahontas's lies were exposed?

Why did Fauxcahontas herself claim that she knew she was Native American only because of her "high cheekbones" if she wasn't lying to Harvard in order to get ahead?

Why won't Fauxcahontas answer questions about whether or not she's ever used other DNA services if she didn't go "DNA shopping"?

All men are however at risk of a false accusation.

The important question is how great a risk is it?

You could be hit by lightning. There might be a sniper randomly picking people off today. Your house might be built over a sinkhole. These are all things that happen from time to time but you don't worry about them much because they are rare.

On the other hand people do worry about things like terrorism, even though the probability of being caught up in a terror attack is tiny. Much lower than being killed crossing the road. And it's mostly due to terror attacks getting so much publicity, but road accidents rarely making the news.

Stanford says that false rape claims run to about 2%, similar to other types of crime. According to the Equal Opportunity Commission the number of sexual harassment claims has actually /fallen/ since the 90s., and the number of complaints last year puts the chance of being accused at 1 in 14,000. Of course it's actually much lower because many of those complaints are against the same person for multiple incidents.

And of course that's all complaints, not just the false ones.

For comparison the chances of being in a motor vehicle accident are about 1 in 8,000. You are several times more likely to be poisoned by something you eat than falsely accused in the absolute worst case.

The post above is a very good & accessible introduction to Poincaré's conventionalism.

https://news.stanford.edu/2018...

Research is starting to pick up on small design reactors, molten salt cooled reactors, and melt down proof reactors.

These have been promised literally my whole lifetime, yet still nobody has come up with a good design for one. If you think molten salt is a good idea, just imagine what happens when that system fails. And it will, because of corrosion. (That link is pro-nuclear, yet even it states that alloys have only been "relatively effective" at reducing this corrosion.) And small reactors are economically inefficient because there are both scalable costs and fixed costs.

We use water as a coolant for basically everything for many, many reasons. And fission is a bad idea for many, many reasons as well. We already have a fission reactor to make use of, and you can gather energy from it with extremely simple devices. They are called solar panels, and unlike nuclear reactors, you can deploy them anywhere without causing hazards for anyone but the installers. And if you install them in intelligent locations, they don't even do much of that.

Bram founded a new company, https://chia.net/ which is making a new bitcoin-derived crypto-currency based on Proof of Space and Time. Basically it fills the unused space on your drive with entropy, and uses this like a set of lottery tickets instead of Proof of Work mining. They're also focusing on features of the crypto-currency that will enhance "Layer 2" (like http://lightning.network/) to enable scalability. In an economic sense this construction shifts the costs of mining toward capital expenditure (for storage) instead of electricity consumption.

He and a collaborator recently won Best Paper at Eurocrypt 2018 for a Zero Knowledge Proof of Time https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1... (presentation: https://cyber.stanford.edu/sit... )

Interesting things are coming from Bram.

no, these have been going on since algae has existed

imagining "x or y might increase the severity" without a shred of proof is just scare mongering.

seriously, these are natural. they've been going on since algae existed...for *billions* of years!

Read this news. Want more? Here is another one for you. When you said "without a shred of proof," it demonstrates that you are ignorant because there are plenty of "shred of proof" but you aren't trying to even look for one.

It's not a blanket exception.

Of the four factors listed here, this seems to fail 1 and 3.

No, that wasn't your claim I took issue with. We both know that, see your post was here:

Oh, I'm sorry, with your flurry of insults, non-sequiturs, and ad hominems, I really can't keep track of what happens to raise your heckles right now. So here you go:

Claim: Unfortunately, a lot of the social sciences these days just teaches a view of history in which the Enlightenment, the Roman Empire, and technology are just tools of the male patriarchy to suppress women and Africans

An obvious example that most educated Americans would recognize is Zinn's history textbook, pretty much the de-facto standard, but given your background, it's not surprising that you are unfamiliar with it.

Link: Zinn's influential history textbook has problems, says Stanford education expert

There are plenty of other examples. For example:

Link: Yale ‘decolonizes’ English dept. after complaints studying white authors ‘actively harms’ students

Of course, since you don't actually ever ask questions and instead just launch into personal attacks when statements don't match your personal beliefs, it's hard to address your various confusions.

"People are about twice as productive as they were 60 years ago. That's not all chalked up to machines & computers. A lot of that is just plain less downtime all around."

Working longer doesn't tend to increase productivity. As people work more hours their productivity rate decreases such that they get about the same amount of productive work completed, and sometimes even less.

A sample of sources:
source 1
source 2
source 3

Since fracking doesn't contaminate ground water, it's $0 to clean up the water near a fracking site

Yeah, about that...

https://news.stanford.edu/2016...

https://www.scientificamerican...

You're not wrong, but there's a fair bit of debate that goes on about "superficial choice." If the choice has no consequences, is it really a choice, or is it just virtue signalling for the player?

Millennia old problem related to free will. Liberty of spontaneity and liberty of indifference. Does a person have the ability to perform a specific act if they choose to do so and does a person have the ability to act or not to act. If both are not present, there is no free will and all choices are irrelevant.

You are using the greatest source of information our species has ever created and you use pedantic snickering over a typo as your guide to truth?

Odd how you did not refute the claim of his golden penis but balk at beans. Shows where your mind is at.

I pity you. You are pitiful.

Knowledge
is
everywhere.
Stop
trolling.

Where the fuck do you get "Christian" from? White male, yes (in the US and Europe), but the vast majority of computer scientists I've met are atheist—particularly the white, male ones. Obviously the field attracts people who tend to be very analytical and rational. Of course you get the occasional religious freak, but it's rare.

Maybe your social circle is limited, or maybe you aren't widely read.

Books in Print by Donald E. Knuth - 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated - Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Bacon, Bayes, Euler, Galileo, Leibniz, Maxwell, Newton, Pascal, Riemann . . . I could go on. I doubt you will illuminate STEM in the way they did, and they believed in God. It seems atheism is not a requirement for rational thinking, let along science and mathematics. That is a conceit that seems to be popular on Slashdot, but there is little to it.

List of Christians in science and technology

It really does take a lot to get some people out of the brainwashing they recieve a child. There is not a single thing about the god story that makes sense and any adult who truly believes it is either dealing with some serious cognitive dissonance or is actually a fucking idiot.

Where the fuck do you get "Christian" from? White male, yes (in the US and Europe), but the vast majority of computer scientists I've met are atheist—particularly the white, male ones. Obviously the field attracts people who tend to be very analytical and rational. Of course you get the occasional religious freak, but it's rare.

Maybe your social circle is limited, or maybe you aren't widely read.

Books in Print by Donald E. Knuth - 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated - Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Bacon, Bayes, Euler, Galileo, Leibniz, Maxwell, Newton, Pascal, Riemann . . . I could go on. I doubt you will illuminate STEM in the way they did, and they believed in God. It seems atheism is not a requirement for rational thinking, let along science and mathematics. That is a conceit that seems to be popular on Slashdot, but there is little to it.

List of Christians in science and technology

It really does take a lot to get some people out of the brainwashing they recieve a child. There is not a single thing about the god story that makes sense and any adult who truly believes it is either dealing with some serious cognitive dissonance or is actually a fucking idiot.

Where the fuck do you get "Christian" from? White male, yes (in the US and Europe), but the vast majority of computer scientists I've met are atheist—particularly the white, male ones. Obviously the field attracts people who tend to be very analytical and rational. Of course you get the occasional religious freak, but it's rare.

Maybe your social circle is limited, or maybe you aren't widely read.

Books in Print by Donald E. Knuth - 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated - Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Bacon, Bayes, Euler, Galileo, Leibniz, Maxwell, Newton, Pascal, Riemann . . . I could go on. I doubt you will illuminate STEM in the way they did, and they believed in God. It seems atheism is not a requirement for rational thinking, let along science and mathematics. That is a conceit that seems to be popular on Slashdot, but there is little to it.

List of Christians in science and technology

It really does take a lot to get some people out of the brainwashing they recieve a child. There is not a single thing about the god story that makes sense and any adult who truly believes it is either dealing with some serious cognitive dissonance or is actually a fucking idiot.

Where the fuck do you get "Christian" from? White male, yes (in the US and Europe), but the vast majority of computer scientists I've met are atheist—particularly the white, male ones. Obviously the field attracts people who tend to be very analytical and rational. Of course you get the occasional religious freak, but it's rare.

Maybe your social circle is limited, or maybe you aren't widely read.

Books in Print by Donald E. Knuth
- 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated
- Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Bacon, Bayes, Euler, Galileo, Leibniz, Maxwell, Newton, Pascal, Riemann . . . I could go on. I doubt you will illuminate STEM in the way they did, and they believed in God. It seems atheism is not a requirement for rational thinking, let along science and mathematics. That is a conceit that seems to be popular on Slashdot, but there is little to it.

List of Christians in science and technology

Where the fuck do you get "Christian" from? White male, yes (in the US and Europe), but the vast majority of computer scientists I've met are atheist—particularly the white, male ones. Obviously the field attracts people who tend to be very analytical and rational. Of course you get the occasional religious freak, but it's rare.

Maybe your social circle is limited, or maybe you aren't widely read.

Books in Print by Donald E. Knuth
- 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated
- Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Bacon, Bayes, Euler, Galileo, Leibniz, Maxwell, Newton, Pascal, Riemann . . . I could go on. I doubt you will illuminate STEM in the way they did, and they believed in God. It seems atheism is not a requirement for rational thinking, let along science and mathematics. That is a conceit that seems to be popular on Slashdot, but there is little to it.

List of Christians in science and technology

Where the fuck do you get "Christian" from? White male, yes (in the US and Europe), but the vast majority of computer scientists I've met are atheist—particularly the white, male ones. Obviously the field attracts people who tend to be very analytical and rational. Of course you get the occasional religious freak, but it's rare.

Maybe your social circle is limited, or maybe you aren't widely read.

Books in Print by Donald E. Knuth
- 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated
- Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Bacon, Bayes, Euler, Galileo, Leibniz, Maxwell, Newton, Pascal, Riemann . . . I could go on. I doubt you will illuminate STEM in the way they did, and they believed in God. It seems atheism is not a requirement for rational thinking, let along science and mathematics. That is a conceit that seems to be popular on Slashdot, but there is little to it.

List of Christians in science and technology

Maybe too early to tell, some children born to survivors of hiroshima etc are born with birth defects http://large.stanford.edu/cour...

You are simply wrong. From Stanford's admissions' site:

For the application process, we require test scores from either the ACT with Writing or the SAT with Essay. If you take the ACT, the writing section is required. If you take the SAT, the essay section is required. Test scores without writing/essay will not complete the testing requirement for the application.

https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/freshman/testing.html

I will only be surprised on how long it takes for them to admit that they had a drop in incoming student quality.

Stanford hasn't required the SAT for some time, and I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a drop in incoming student quality.

This is technically true, but not really representative of the actual requirement. From the Stanford website: "For the application process, we require test scores from either the ACT with Writing or the SAT with Essay. If you take the ACT, the writing section is required. If you take the SAT, the essay section is required. Test scores without writing/essay will not complete the testing requirement for the application."

Nuclear battery pacemakers used to be a thing. It seems doctors feel that having a newer, modern device every decade outweighs the disadvantage of surgery. Replacing a pacemaker is a relatively minor operation, they are implanted in an accessible location and the new device typically reuses the original leads.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/degraw2/

Didn't he get a PhD from Stanford and teach at Stanford?

https://profiles.stanford.edu/...

Not to worry, we'll run out of tellurium long before those solar panels produce much waste.

The threat from within
February 21, 2017

Former Provost John Etchemendy, in a recent speech before the Stanford Board of Trustees, outlined challenges higher education is facing in the coming years. Following is an excerpt from that talk.

"Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country – not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines – there, we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for. It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers, while we fail to notice the echo chamber we've built around ourselves.

This results in a kind of intellectual blindness that will, in the long run, be more damaging to universities than cuts in federal funding or ill-conceived constraints on immigration. It will be more damaging because we won't even see it: We will write off those with opposing views as evil or ignorant or stupid, rather than as interlocutors worthy of consideration. We succumb to the all-purpose ad hominem because it is easier and more comforting than rational argument. But when we do, we abandon what is great about this institution we serve. It will not be easy to resist this current. As an institution, we are continually pressed by faculty and students to take political stands, and any failure to do so is perceived as a lack of courage. But at universities today, the easiest thing to do is to succumb to that pressure. What requires real courage is to resist it. Yet when those making the demands can only imagine ignorance and stupidity on the other side, any resistance will be similarly impugned.

The university is not a megaphone to amplify this or that political view, and when it does it violates a core mission. Universities must remain open forums for contentious debate, and they cannot do so while officially espousing one side of that debate. But we must do more. We need to encourage real diversity of thought in the professoriate, and that will be even harder to achieve. It is hard for anyone to acknowledge high-quality work when that work is at odds, perhaps opposed, to one's own deeply held beliefs. But we all need worthy opponents to challenge us in our search for truth. It is absolutely essential to the quality of our enterprise.

I fear that the next few years will be difficult to navigate. We need to resist the external threats to our mission, but in this, we have many friends outside the university willing and able to help. But to stem or dial back our academic parochialism, we are pretty much on our own. The first step is to remind our students and colleagues that those who hold views contrary to one’s own are rarely evil or stupid, and may know or understand things that we do not. It is only when we start with this assumption that rational discourse can begin, and that the winds of freedom can blow."