At least half the comments on this story will boil down to one or more of the following:
String theory is bunk. I know this because I heard someone call it "string theology" once and I thought that was clever.
This idea is bunk because I think it contradicts something I vaguely remember from the Physics 101 course I took as a requirement for my CS degree ten years ago.
Everyone knows the unifying force that holds the universe together is not gravity, but electricity. We have books, too!
Ivory-tower egghead academics want to keep all their science locked away behind paywalls! How are we supposed to evaluate this if we can't read the paper?!?
Modern science is bunk. These stupid liberal academics should just read the Bible.
In my late teens we had dial-up web sites that would pass messages back and forth with each other as far as a local call would go.
You called them "web sites?" Really? We had these things called BBS's, which did something very similar to what you describe -- but you had actual web sites! Wow!
[shrug] Depends on how you define "expert," I suppose. I have one MS in CS and another in biostatistics, and am currently working on a PhD in bioinformatics, where I use the knowledge I've gained in both fields pretty much every day. If you think CS is "waaayy more interesting," that's fine for you; personally I find them equally interesting and valuable.
Resampling-based statistics haven't replaced parametric models, and I doubt they ever will, for one very simple reason: as the available processing power grows, so does the amount of data. In my field, bioinformatics, the size and complexity of the data sets follows a Moore's Law of its own, and I don't think bioinformatics is unique in this. "Just bootstrap it" is easy to say, and certainly there have been many times when dealing with an analytically intractable distribution when I've done just that, but if the analytical solution takes minutes and the bootstrap solution takes weeks, you have to take this into account.
Of course, resampling isn't the only way to look at problems non-parametrically. Often a good compromise is to go with rank-based statistics, which are fast and easy to calculate -- and you may not have an analytically tractable model for the distribution of the original data, but you don't have to, since by working with ranks you can define a distribution with good analytical properties. You still need to do some reality-checking exploratory data analysis, of course, but this is an approach that generally works well in practice.
"Lies, damn lies and statistics" is all you need to know about statistics.
This is right up there with "'click on the big blue e' is all you need to know about the internet."
Speaking as both a statistician and a computer scientist, I've seen the statistics-vs.-CS argument play out many times before, and the lack of knowledge on both sides is really striking, but not all that surprising -- both are hard subjects which take a lot of work to master. The lack of mutual respect is both infuriating and pathetic, and there's no excuse for it.
If you are programming a plane to land automatically on a runway, or a robot to place a chip on a board, then I want precision, not probability. (Although precision is probabilistic in itself.)
Your parenthetical statement is kind of the whole point here. There are a whole lot of problems which look deterministic, but aren't. And if you assume that the problem is deterministic, when the result you're actually dealing with is a spread of probability outcomes, you will be dramatically wrong. In the examples you gave, the uncertainty in the second case may be small enough that treating the problem as deterministic is reasonable; but in the first case, if you don't account for uncertainty in your inputs, the result will be a runway covered with corpses.
The court system is public by design. When you chose to file suit, you chose to expose certain information about yourself. I'm sorry if you're suffering for it now, but consider that the alternative is a court system where proceedings take place in secrecy. We have a few examples of this already as part of the "War on Terror," and most thoughtful people consider this to be a Bad Thing; you really, really don't want to live in a world where it's the norm.
This is true from the professors' and universities' POV, but not necessarily from the US government's. Grad student stipends in the sciences are often tied to grants from the NIH, NSF, etc., and that is very definitely seen as an investment: training the next generation of American scientists and engineers. If the government thinks it's not going to see some ROI, this may change, and the fallout could affect students from the US as well.
That's like the British government suing anyone who does things based on William Shakespeare because he was English.
Or for something even more absurd: the modern British government, which is descended from a system put in place by the Normans, suing someone who uses imagery from Beowulf.
Mexico is run by a culture and people primarily descended from the people who killed off the Aztecs. Yes, there are plenty of Indians in Mexico today, but they're pretty much at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The Mexican government is the heir of the Spanish Empire.
Or was it Apollo-Saturn with its promise of quick and dirty into space before the Soviets what destroyed the progression of the X-15/X-20 spaceplane program and stagnated space exploration for years.
This.
My father was a NASA engineer for Apollo. He and his colleagues were almost unanimous in their opinion that what they were doing was a neat trick, but a distraction from their real business of building spaceplanes. He also worked for what was then Martin Marietta on the early stages of the Shuttle design, in the "big bird / little bird" days, and pretty much left aerospace in disgust when he saw how things were going. We really ended up with the worst of both worlds -- an expensive, shoddily built spaceplane attached to a big dumb booster -- and frankly Apollo had as much to do with that as STS.
they should have fired and removed the pensions of those who ignored the warnings of those below them
That principle strictly applied would have required the impeachment of a President who, at the moment, was enjoying 80%+ approval ratings... which just wasn't going to happen.
Countries worldwide are lining up to fight water wars; some current civil wars, such as Darfur, can be traced directly to scarcity of water. Canada is making territorial claims to the Northwest Passage which a number of other countries dispute -- nobody cared before the ice started melting, but now it's a different story. This is the reality right now, not in 50 or 100 years; how is keeping track of it not part of the CIA's job?
This is just a guess, but I'm thinking you can look for spectral lines characteristic of certain elements and simple compounds, and see how far down the spectrum they're shifted, to determine the overall degree of redshift. Once you have that information, you have a pretty good idea how far away the galaxy is. Any astronomers want to jump in and tell me if this is right, wrong, or "not even wrong?"
... should add "Em" to the beginning of his last name. Either he's genuinely too stupid to understand how climate change is a national security issue, or he's grandstanding. I'm having a hard time deciding which. ("Both" is also a possible answer, of course.) I'm sure he was one of those who, during the Bush administration, thought anything the CIA did was just fine and dandy, since "Thou shalt not question the Executive Branch in Time of War(r)(tm)" was pretty much the Republican Eleventh Commandment until January 2009. How quickly things change.
Lost its water, sure, but not the rest of its atmosphere. What I'm wondering about is the overall mass and density of the atmosphere which a planet of a given size can maintain, and again, based on the example of Venus, it seems like neither Earth nor Mars can be anywhere near the upper limits for those numbers.
There has never, AFAIK, been a court ruling to the effect that a cop needs a warrant to walk by your house and look at at for evidence of illegal activity. Okay, he's not using an imaging device (except his own eyeballs) to do that -- but what if he wears glasses or contacts? Guess what, you're under surveillance with imaging technology.
Fundamentally, I agree with you; the idea of cops going around and pointing IR sensors at people's houses in a fishing expedition for "probable cause" pisses me off. But there is clearly a line beyond which a certain method of information gathering is no longer "unreasonable search," and I honestly don't think anyone knows exactly where that line is drawn.
any effort to seed the martian atmosphere would at best be a temporary(ok, a few million years) improvement.
A few million years would, of course, be more than enough time (by a factor of 10000 or so) for colonies to flourish and grow. And presumably, if we figured out a technique that we could use to do it once, our many-times-great-grandchildren could repeat the process if the air started to get a little thin.
Mars lacks the gravity to hold the atmosphere.
Okay, here's something I've always wondered about: Venus has a surface gravity of about 0.9g, yet manages to hold on to an atmosphere over ninety times denser than Earth's (and it does this closer to the Sun, too.) So while there's clearly an upper limit to the atmospheric density a planet with a given surface gravity can maintain, Venus suggests to me that Earth is nowhere near this limit... and that Mars with an Earthlike atmosphere wouldn't be either. Am I missing something?
I'm probably going to get modded down or flamed for being a heretic for daring to question modern scientific orthodoxy
Ah, the classic cry of the rebel without a clue.
Listen up, kid: you are not an iconoclast. You are not boldly speaking truth to power. You are not Martin Luther nailing his theses to the cathedral door. You are not a special snowflake.
Everyone who has ever worked in this project has thought of, and answered, every single one of your questions long ago. And those answers are easily available with a small amount of digging, which you would do if you had any interest in the actual answers instead of just self-aggrandizing puffery.
Slashdot calls itself "news for nerds," not "free stuff for nerds." There is no requirement that linked information be free. It's nice when it is, of course, but that's a bonus.
Again, do you have a problem with articles that discuss proprietary hardware or software? You can't, I hope you'll agree, get complete information on the latest offering from, say, Apple or Oracle, without buying and using it.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, you're right. I should have put that at the end of the first bullet point.
Happy to be of service.
At least half the comments on this story will boil down to one or more of the following:
There. That should save everyone some time.
In my late teens we had dial-up web sites that would pass messages back and forth with each other as far as a local call would go.
You called them "web sites?" Really? We had these things called BBS's, which did something very similar to what you describe -- but you had actual web sites! Wow!
You can only be expert in ONE of them. Period.
[shrug] Depends on how you define "expert," I suppose. I have one MS in CS and another in biostatistics, and am currently working on a PhD in bioinformatics, where I use the knowledge I've gained in both fields pretty much every day. If you think CS is "waaayy more interesting," that's fine for you; personally I find them equally interesting and valuable.
Resampling-based statistics haven't replaced parametric models, and I doubt they ever will, for one very simple reason: as the available processing power grows, so does the amount of data. In my field, bioinformatics, the size and complexity of the data sets follows a Moore's Law of its own, and I don't think bioinformatics is unique in this. "Just bootstrap it" is easy to say, and certainly there have been many times when dealing with an analytically intractable distribution when I've done just that, but if the analytical solution takes minutes and the bootstrap solution takes weeks, you have to take this into account.
Of course, resampling isn't the only way to look at problems non-parametrically. Often a good compromise is to go with rank-based statistics, which are fast and easy to calculate -- and you may not have an analytically tractable model for the distribution of the original data, but you don't have to, since by working with ranks you can define a distribution with good analytical properties. You still need to do some reality-checking exploratory data analysis, of course, but this is an approach that generally works well in practice.
"Lies, damn lies and statistics" is all you need to know about statistics.
This is right up there with "'click on the big blue e' is all you need to know about the internet."
Speaking as both a statistician and a computer scientist, I've seen the statistics-vs.-CS argument play out many times before, and the lack of knowledge on both sides is really striking, but not all that surprising -- both are hard subjects which take a lot of work to master. The lack of mutual respect is both infuriating and pathetic, and there's no excuse for it.
If you are programming a plane to land automatically on a runway, or a robot to place a chip on a board, then I want precision, not probability. (Although precision is probabilistic in itself.)
Your parenthetical statement is kind of the whole point here. There are a whole lot of problems which look deterministic, but aren't. And if you assume that the problem is deterministic, when the result you're actually dealing with is a spread of probability outcomes, you will be dramatically wrong. In the examples you gave, the uncertainty in the second case may be small enough that treating the problem as deterministic is reasonable; but in the first case, if you don't account for uncertainty in your inputs, the result will be a runway covered with corpses.
You just did an excellent job of proving TFA's point.
The court system is public by design. When you chose to file suit, you chose to expose certain information about yourself. I'm sorry if you're suffering for it now, but consider that the alternative is a court system where proceedings take place in secrecy. We have a few examples of this already as part of the "War on Terror," and most thoughtful people consider this to be a Bad Thing; you really, really don't want to live in a world where it's the norm.
This is true from the professors' and universities' POV, but not necessarily from the US government's. Grad student stipends in the sciences are often tied to grants from the NIH, NSF, etc., and that is very definitely seen as an investment: training the next generation of American scientists and engineers. If the government thinks it's not going to see some ROI, this may change, and the fallout could affect students from the US as well.
Nope, we'll pay all the royalties for all the Civil War movies in Confederate cash only.
That's like the British government suing anyone who does things based on William Shakespeare because he was English.
Or for something even more absurd: the modern British government, which is descended from a system put in place by the Normans, suing someone who uses imagery from Beowulf.
Mexico is run by a culture and people primarily descended from the people who killed off the Aztecs. Yes, there are plenty of Indians in Mexico today, but they're pretty much at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The Mexican government is the heir of the Spanish Empire.
Or was it Apollo-Saturn with its promise of quick and dirty into space before the Soviets what destroyed the progression of the X-15/X-20 spaceplane program and stagnated space exploration for years.
This.
My father was a NASA engineer for Apollo. He and his colleagues were almost unanimous in their opinion that what they were doing was a neat trick, but a distraction from their real business of building spaceplanes. He also worked for what was then Martin Marietta on the early stages of the Shuttle design, in the "big bird / little bird" days, and pretty much left aerospace in disgust when he saw how things were going. We really ended up with the worst of both worlds -- an expensive, shoddily built spaceplane attached to a big dumb booster -- and frankly Apollo had as much to do with that as STS.
they should have fired and removed the pensions of those who ignored the warnings of those below them
That principle strictly applied would have required the impeachment of a President who, at the moment, was enjoying 80%+ approval ratings ... which just wasn't going to happen.
Countries worldwide are lining up to fight water wars; some current civil wars, such as Darfur, can be traced directly to scarcity of water. Canada is making territorial claims to the Northwest Passage which a number of other countries dispute -- nobody cared before the ice started melting, but now it's a different story. This is the reality right now, not in 50 or 100 years; how is keeping track of it not part of the CIA's job?
This is just a guess, but I'm thinking you can look for spectral lines characteristic of certain elements and simple compounds, and see how far down the spectrum they're shifted, to determine the overall degree of redshift. Once you have that information, you have a pretty good idea how far away the galaxy is. Any astronomers want to jump in and tell me if this is right, wrong, or "not even wrong?"
... should add "Em" to the beginning of his last name. Either he's genuinely too stupid to understand how climate change is a national security issue, or he's grandstanding. I'm having a hard time deciding which. ("Both" is also a possible answer, of course.) I'm sure he was one of those who, during the Bush administration, thought anything the CIA did was just fine and dandy, since "Thou shalt not question the Executive Branch in Time of War(r)(tm)" was pretty much the Republican Eleventh Commandment until January 2009. How quickly things change.
Lost its water, sure, but not the rest of its atmosphere. What I'm wondering about is the overall mass and density of the atmosphere which a planet of a given size can maintain, and again, based on the example of Venus, it seems like neither Earth nor Mars can be anywhere near the upper limits for those numbers.
There has never, AFAIK, been a court ruling to the effect that a cop needs a warrant to walk by your house and look at at for evidence of illegal activity. Okay, he's not using an imaging device (except his own eyeballs) to do that -- but what if he wears glasses or contacts? Guess what, you're under surveillance with imaging technology.
Fundamentally, I agree with you; the idea of cops going around and pointing IR sensors at people's houses in a fishing expedition for "probable cause" pisses me off. But there is clearly a line beyond which a certain method of information gathering is no longer "unreasonable search," and I honestly don't think anyone knows exactly where that line is drawn.
any effort to seed the martian atmosphere would at best be a temporary(ok, a few million years) improvement.
A few million years would, of course, be more than enough time (by a factor of 10000 or so) for colonies to flourish and grow. And presumably, if we figured out a technique that we could use to do it once, our many-times-great-grandchildren could repeat the process if the air started to get a little thin.
Mars lacks the gravity to hold the atmosphere.
Okay, here's something I've always wondered about: Venus has a surface gravity of about 0.9g, yet manages to hold on to an atmosphere over ninety times denser than Earth's (and it does this closer to the Sun, too.) So while there's clearly an upper limit to the atmospheric density a planet with a given surface gravity can maintain, Venus suggests to me that Earth is nowhere near this limit ... and that Mars with an Earthlike atmosphere wouldn't be either. Am I missing something?
I'm probably going to get modded down or flamed for being a heretic for daring to question modern scientific orthodoxy
Ah, the classic cry of the rebel without a clue.
Listen up, kid: you are not an iconoclast. You are not boldly speaking truth to power. You are not Martin Luther nailing his theses to the cathedral door. You are not a special snowflake.
Everyone who has ever worked in this project has thought of, and answered, every single one of your questions long ago. And those answers are easily available with a small amount of digging, which you would do if you had any interest in the actual answers instead of just self-aggrandizing puffery.
Virtually all people with education and skills want to live in the suburbs
In most American metro areas, this hasn't been true since at least the early 90's. Pay attention.
Nobody is "taxing your ass off to save flies." If you think they are, you've been sadly misinformed.
Slashdot calls itself "news for nerds," not "free stuff for nerds." There is no requirement that linked information be free. It's nice when it is, of course, but that's a bonus.
Again, do you have a problem with articles that discuss proprietary hardware or software? You can't, I hope you'll agree, get complete information on the latest offering from, say, Apple or Oracle, without buying and using it.