Erm, it is. He's joking that saying that some spooky future force is preventing us seeing Higgs bosons 'for our own good' is about as scientific as saying that God hates the Chicago Cubs... and that there's as much proof for the latter as for the former.
He also says:
Admittedly, I haven't read the whole series of papers, which means my comments should be taken with a grain of salt, but I did skim, and the authors do make an argument for why a new unknown particle (they use Higgs as their poster boy for unknown theoretical particle) can do this and not the ones we know about, based on the experimental evidence we have on the known particles and the existence of yet another theoretically possible but experimentally undetected (not without trying) phenomenon, a magnetic monopole.
Aside from its hideous verbosity, this made me curious because there was an article a day or two about magnetic monopoles...
Good call. I left out the condition of adapting to new conditions; something at which idiot savants are traditionally poor. I should have said "adept at understanding and manipulating a complex, unfamiliar environment".
('Savant' on its simply means 'learned person'. An idiot savant is a person who 'exhibits an extraordinary ability in one subject (often mathematics) whilst being mentally retarded in all other fields'. - wiktionary.com)
Yeah, I had to chuckle a bit when I re-read it too, you should probably have gotten a +1 insightful.:) I was referring to things like school test results, university assignments, etc. rather than an off-the-cuff estimate of my own superiority. After leaving the educational system it gets harder to measure because we're generally not tested and given numerical results in everyday life. I seem to get pretty good results but I wouldn't trust that observation so the only thing that my "90-95%" includes is academic test results. I generally score around 130 in IQ tests - probably middle of the road for around these parts.
Hmm... I see the point you're making, however while a definition of intelligence is hard to pin down, I can't think of any reasonable definition that doesn't involve cognitive or problem solving ability. Contrariwise, I challenge you to find someone who's adept at understanding and manipulating a complex environment but would still fall under the label of 'stupid'.
But wait, you're producing helium? Think about the environmental impact! Millions of adults walking around talking like chipmunks all the time! Won't someone think of the children!?!
:-D
I'd guess a lot of people will be talking like the children, this may help them to think of them.;) That said, though, the first thing I thought when I saw that helium was a byproduct was "oh good, we need more of that".
Everyone else is just ignorant and refuse to learn. There fixed that for you.
I'm going to refer you to the Dunning-Krueger effect, although you exhibit it in an unusual way. If you can't accurately identify the incompetence of others, you yourself may not be quite as competent as you'd like to believe.
Most people are actually really stupid, and cannot understand the things that make geeks go 'glee!' They just don't have the required hardware. Hell, I'm pretty stupid, I can bang my head against a simple problem for a long while before the answer becomes obvious. And for my whole life I've fairly consistently outperformed ~90-95% of the general populace around me in cognitive and problem solving tasks (although that number's dropped over time, as I continue to meet and spent time with smarter people.:)
Some people are ignorant and refuse to learn. Most people who are ignorant are that way because they cannot learn. Geeks (including engineers, software developers, whatever) are a subset of people who are typically well above average intelligence and who enjoy flexing their mental strength. If a problem will stretch the cognitive resources of someone with an IQ of 130+, someone with a sub-100 IQ will probably never be able to understand the problem, let alone solve it.
Virtually no 'research' robots are autonomous, especially in the early stages. I'd imagine that it's a "robot" because unlike your remote controlled "bladders'n'shit yo" for special effects, it's controlled by a computer in response to sensors and commands, rather than being controlled by a human via a funky umpteen-axis remote control thing.
If, contrariwise, your special effects were algorithmically controlled (being on a MIDI-style preset pattern doesn't count) then they were robots too, whatever you call them.
I heard that they spent half the film's budget on a giant robot that was meant to be the Rover, and then a cable snapped and they dropped it in the ocean. Later that day they saw a weather balloon rolling along and thought "stuffit, that looks freaky enough to chase our hero".
I see what you mean, and I think in a roundabout way you may be agreeing with me, although I wasn't nearly rigorous enough with my wording.
What I meant was that (assuming conservation of electric charge, and assuming that the universe's overall charge is zero, which are both in line with 'most evidence' according to wiki) you can't have an electron without an equal positive charge existing somewhere. I didn't mean that it had to be anywhere nearby. I'd read GGP as implying that he wanted a 'free' magnetic monopole without an associated opposite monopole existing somewhere.
The only thing new here is the current, not the "magnetic charge" from the monopole. And it's theoretical physics ridiculously far from being used in magnetic storage or computing.
The monopole is at most a month old, so it's not like we're talking particularly old news. At worst it's an update on ongoing research.
Simple, we're pack animals. And like any other pack animal, when we don't have at least one other person in our current 'pack', we feel very uncomfortable.
@ mackyrae - yeah, I can see it getting annoying.:/ We need a gender-neutral pronoun so we can stop weirding grammar by twisting 'them' and 'they' to be third person singular.
It still sounds to me like you're talking for all women with the indefinite article-ness and the 'we' and soforth, but fair point.:) Anyway, I guess what I was saying was that assumption of gender based on domain isn't sexist in and of itself unless you inherently consider one sex to be better than the other. It's just a sensible default.
Exactly! Or maybe women are just wired differently to men and don't get enough kicks out of building stuff. Of course I have nothing to base this on except the entire course of human history.
Only until you reverse the polarity of the elephant and you have a Reverse Polish Elephant. They're real, I've seen them after too many scotch-and-cokes.
I can't speak for my gender as whole (unlike you, apparently) but I tend to assume people on technical web sites are male until proven otherwise because there's high odds that they are. If I'm corrected then I will switch to using female pronouns. If I signed up on, say, a scrapbooking forum with a gender-ambiguous handle I would naturally expect to be assumed female. Same thing here.
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He also says:
Admittedly, I haven't read the whole series of papers, which means my comments should be taken with a grain of salt, but I did skim, and the authors do make an argument for why a new unknown particle (they use Higgs as their poster boy for unknown theoretical particle) can do this and not the ones we know about, based on the experimental evidence we have on the known particles and the existence of yet another theoretically possible but experimentally undetected (not without trying) phenomenon, a magnetic monopole.
Aside from its hideous verbosity, this made me curious because there was an article a day or two about magnetic monopoles...
Good call. I left out the condition of adapting to new conditions; something at which idiot savants are traditionally poor. I should have said "adept at understanding and manipulating a complex, unfamiliar environment".
('Savant' on its simply means 'learned person'. An idiot savant is a person who 'exhibits an extraordinary ability in one subject (often mathematics) whilst being mentally retarded in all other fields'. - wiktionary.com)
Yeah, I had to chuckle a bit when I re-read it too, you should probably have gotten a +1 insightful. :) I was referring to things like school test results, university assignments, etc. rather than an off-the-cuff estimate of my own superiority. After leaving the educational system it gets harder to measure because we're generally not tested and given numerical results in everyday life. I seem to get pretty good results but I wouldn't trust that observation so the only thing that my "90-95%" includes is academic test results. I generally score around 130 in IQ tests - probably middle of the road for around these parts.
Hmm... I see the point you're making, however while a definition of intelligence is hard to pin down, I can't think of any reasonable definition that doesn't involve cognitive or problem solving ability. Contrariwise, I challenge you to find someone who's adept at understanding and manipulating a complex environment but would still fall under the label of 'stupid'.
Or for those of us who are Amphoteric Nazis, that happens to hydrogen hydroxide, thank you very much.
It's so dangerous, it's the only chemical in the world that is both an acid and a base!
If you hit a moron atom with high-speed nerdtron you get two hilarions.
125000 is even, not odd ;)
But wait, you're producing helium? Think about the environmental impact! Millions of adults walking around talking like chipmunks all the time! Won't someone think of the children!?!
:-D
I'd guess a lot of people will be talking like the children, this may help them to think of them. ;) That said, though, the first thing I thought when I saw that helium was a byproduct was "oh good, we need more of that".
Everyone else is just ignorant and refuse to learn. There fixed that for you.
I'm going to refer you to the Dunning-Krueger effect, although you exhibit it in an unusual way. If you can't accurately identify the incompetence of others, you yourself may not be quite as competent as you'd like to believe.
Most people are actually really stupid, and cannot understand the things that make geeks go 'glee!' They just don't have the required hardware. Hell, I'm pretty stupid, I can bang my head against a simple problem for a long while before the answer becomes obvious. And for my whole life I've fairly consistently outperformed ~90-95% of the general populace around me in cognitive and problem solving tasks (although that number's dropped over time, as I continue to meet and spent time with smarter people. :)
Some people are ignorant and refuse to learn. Most people who are ignorant are that way because they cannot learn. Geeks (including engineers, software developers, whatever) are a subset of people who are typically well above average intelligence and who enjoy flexing their mental strength. If a problem will stretch the cognitive resources of someone with an IQ of 130+, someone with a sub-100 IQ will probably never be able to understand the problem, let alone solve it.
Virtually no 'research' robots are autonomous, especially in the early stages. I'd imagine that it's a "robot" because unlike your remote controlled "bladders'n'shit yo" for special effects, it's controlled by a computer in response to sensors and commands, rather than being controlled by a human via a funky umpteen-axis remote control thing.
If, contrariwise, your special effects were algorithmically controlled (being on a MIDI-style preset pattern doesn't count) then they were robots too, whatever you call them.
Don't you mean, "Please tell me this research is being done on a remote island", in case something goes wrong?
I don't know, aren't remote islands the perfect place to develop our first ever Shoggoths?
I heard that they spent half the film's budget on a giant robot that was meant to be the Rover, and then a cable snapped and they dropped it in the ocean. Later that day they saw a weather balloon rolling along and thought "stuffit, that looks freaky enough to chase our hero".
I see what you mean, and I think in a roundabout way you may be agreeing with me, although I wasn't nearly rigorous enough with my wording.
What I meant was that (assuming conservation of electric charge, and assuming that the universe's overall charge is zero, which are both in line with 'most evidence' according to wiki) you can't have an electron without an equal positive charge existing somewhere. I didn't mean that it had to be anywhere nearby. I'd read GGP as implying that he wanted a 'free' magnetic monopole without an associated opposite monopole existing somewhere.
Look no further! I've got one right here in my kitchen (driving my microwave oven).
I thought magnetic monopole was a way to play monopole during long family roadtrips.
Wake me up when I can buy a north magnetic monopole, and not get the south magnetic monopole with it.
Wake me when I can buy an electron that doesn't have a proton somewhere out there waiting for it.
The only thing new here is the current, not the "magnetic charge" from the monopole. And it's theoretical physics ridiculously far from being used in magnetic storage or computing.
The monopole is at most a month old, so it's not like we're talking particularly old news. At worst it's an update on ongoing research.
Simple, we're pack animals. And like any other pack animal, when we don't have at least one other person in our current 'pack', we feel very uncomfortable.
:/ We need a gender-neutral pronoun so we can stop weirding grammar by twisting 'them' and 'they' to be third person singular.
@ mackyrae - yeah, I can see it getting annoying.
Damn, you are correct, sir or madam. Donnie Darko was the 'smurfs are asexual' rant. :P
It still sounds to me like you're talking for all women with the indefinite article-ness and the 'we' and soforth, but fair point. :) Anyway, I guess what I was saying was that assumption of gender based on domain isn't sexist in and of itself unless you inherently consider one sex to be better than the other. It's just a sensible default.
Exactly! Or maybe women are just wired differently to men and don't get enough kicks out of building stuff. Of course I have nothing to base this on except the entire course of human history.
Only until you reverse the polarity of the elephant and you have a Reverse Polish Elephant. They're real, I've seen them after too many scotch-and-cokes.
I can't speak for my gender as whole (unlike you, apparently) but I tend to assume people on technical web sites are male until proven otherwise because there's high odds that they are. If I'm corrected then I will switch to using female pronouns. If I signed up on, say, a scrapbooking forum with a gender-ambiguous handle I would naturally expect to be assumed female. Same thing here.
I get really sick of subversive PC behavior...
Get a Mac?
(Wow, it felt weird saying that!)
+1 Donnie Darko :D
Porn? It's Playboy, you buy it for the articles!