That is good but insufficient. Non-drinkers ARE a very special group. Drinking is pretty much the norm (especially in the UK) and people who never drink often have a reason. Apart from previous alcoholism, reasons may be strong religious belief or health problems. Also, non-drinkers have different habits. They probably don't drink or eat nothing at parties or romantic dinners. There may be increased consumption of soft drinks or fatty foods. Hell, it could even be that people stay in bad relationships for longer because they don't crash and burn while drunk... The possibilities are endless.
Non-drinkers are special in many ways. It would be almost impossible to take all possible factors into account in a large study such as this one. RCTs would be great but impossible due to the lengths involved and possibly unethical if we believe a bit of alcohol is good.
It would be interesting to see studies from countries or populations where drinking is not the norm.
No, limited precision would correspond to quantization. That is, you can't take a smaller step than 1e-308 meters or such.
Heisenbergs uncertainty principle would rather be like using a deallocated pointer. Sometimes you get the same result as before but if the computer has reused the space for something else, you may get a different result. Still, that would be random and buggy behavior while Heisenbergs principle is very specific about the limits.
Quantum behavior would be tricky to simulate. I guess a strong argument against simulations would be that the world we perceive is very much classical and Newtonian which is extremely simple compared to Relativity and QM. Why would any sane programmer add such ridiculous complex systems both at the very small and very large scale? Job security?
You are responsible for reading and learning. You are responsible for staying up-to-date with the industry and the technology. Too many programmers feel that it is their employer's job to train them. Sorry, this is just dead wrong. Do you think doctors behave that way?
I just can't stop thinking about the stupidity of this.
Doctor: Hey, patient, would you like to try some new meds I read about on the internet yesterday while my kids were screaming? I haven't tried them or read any scientific studies and I am unsure about the use-case compared to existing drugs but they are very popular in some facebook groups.
Navy Officer: Hey, we're getting a new aircraft carrier next year so I expect all of you to go home and read up on it and start practicing at home. We'll call you when there is a war and your skills are needed. You'd better be self-trained experts by then!
University head: What's all this "research" I keep hearing about? Take some responsibility for your own careers and stay up to date in your spare time! Now, go back to work. We need more folded napkins!
I sort of agree but I think you're being a bit too defensive. It is the job of the professional to explain the importance of clean code, fixing bugs etc to your boss. After you, as a technical specialist, has explained the importance of doing things the right way, it is up to your boss to make the business decision of playing safe or taking a risk. Often, risks are not just in the code. If the release is delayed (again), the customer may loose confidence (again) and leave. It is the job of the boss to weigh risks against each other. (Yes, I am well aware many many bosses do not understand what bossing is about and are tragically unable to understand the concept of risk).
I agree the initial list is idealistic bullshit but it is the responsibility of a professional to explain the importance of best practices anyway. If you'd add a "try" to every sentence, the list would be much better. See:
Professionals try to take responsibility for the code they write. They try not to release code unless they have good reason to believe it works.
Professionals try to avoid big bug lists.
If you are a professional, then you try to be responsible for your own career. You are sorta responsible for reading and learning. You are maybe not responsible for staying up-to-date with the industry and the technology. Not enough programmers understand that it is their employer's job to train them. Sorry, this is just dead zombies. Doctors behave that way
No, sorry. That didn't work out. It is still pretty dumb. Big bug lists are fine if the bugs are non-essential. You should work on what is important to your users; if they don't mind bugs in the "About" window, don't fix them. Clean and bug free code is an ideal that we strive toward but it is an ideal and not reality. If you've ever had to fix bugs or add functionality to a decade old bowl of spaghetti bolognese, it won't be clean, you won't be proud of your work and you know it will fail again.
I would like to disagree. I don't know how many times I've lost a 2 somewhere in the calculation. Either because of brain malfunction like "right angle = pi/4", forgetting a 2 in 2*pi*r or even adding a 2 in pi*r^2/2 just because the integral of r = r^2/2. I think most engineers and mathematicians have made similar mistakes.
Making sound choices to prevent stupid mistakes is important. Pi is an unnecessary evil.
Also, we should switch to base 6. People make too many mistakes with 6,7,8 multiplication.
Yes! The point of the test should be to see an example of problem solving. Not to check for static knowledge like "yes, I have heard that name before and memorised the meaning.".
For example: You: Write an algorithm to sort a list of names. [Candidate writes down some simple sort or uses std::sort] You: Well done. The list of names has now grown a lot and your sort algorithm is a bottleneck. Can you make it faster? Discuss.
The first questions shows they know at least a bare minimum of programming, The second question shows if they can solve a simple "realistic" problem by taking the given constraints into consideration.
Also, a candidate who writes a recursive bucket sort after the first question fails by overcomplicating things.
Programming languages are as interchangeable as toolboxes.
If you've ever tried to repair something at a friends house, you know what I'm talking about. You say "That's easy to fix, just get me some tools" and they bring you a shoe box with twine, paper clips and a flat screwdriver. Sure, it's possible to remove phillips screws with a flat screwdriver but it's annoying as hell. Mending stuff with twine and paperclips is better than nothing but if you know of glue guns and rope, it can be a very frustrating experience.
I had exactly the same feeling when writing numerical code in C#. Everything had to be improvised or created from scratch since there were no relevant libraries and the existing ones could not be applied (sure, there was a binary search but it threw an exception if the element wasn't found. I needed something like upper_bound in C++). Anyway, this was 10 years ago. Maybe things have changed but back then it was definitely the wrong toolbox for the job.
By, the way, I counted the hammers in my toolbox at home: 5. Very small, small, regular, small sledgehammer and rubber mallet.
If it was Hitler (R - authoritarian nationalist) vs. Stalin (D - communist), most would still cling to the idea that a third-party candidate was a wasted vote and choose their candidate by party.
This! The really scary thing about this election was that it was such an ordinary election despite extraordinary candidates. About 90% of traditional republicans voted for Trump and about 90% of democrats for Hillary.
Voting for a third candidate IS a waste because of the way your system is constructed. Why didn't Trump go as an independent? Because the right wing votes would have been split between him and the republicans and basically given the democrats the presidency. He would never have won as an independent despite having the same ideas, policies and interesting retorics.
There are so many things wrong with the system. The electoral college is one but the presidency itself is another. The presidency is a winner-takes-all competition where voting for a third party only increases the chance that your worst enemy becomes president instead of the dude you just dislike.
Switching to popular vote isn't enough. Candidates should be allowed to form coalitions after the vote is cast. That is, let all candidates run and if no one gets more than 50%, they can join forces and whatever group gets a majority decides on the presidency. Third, fourth and fifth candidates are not actively discouraged and all votes count. Having only two choices, isn't much of a choice at all. Especially when choosing between Stalin and Hitler.
A two party system is only one party away from being a dictatorship.
How is this different from a Google search? Google spends a lot of time trying to figure out how sites and searches are related to one another. Mozilla thinks they can do it better because they can "harvest" data directly from the browser? I doubt it. And, that's ignoring the privacy issue of sending my full time stamped browsing history to a private company...
I suppose the security company could sound the alarm if the contact with the robot is broken. That would be effective against both faraday cages and signal jammers...
That was precisely my thought. It is of course a bullshit article but it raises so many interesting questions:
Where did they get country based IQ data? Is it normalised to 100 over the entire sample?
Why do most countries in their scatterplot have an IQ less than 100? The only counterweight of significance is China.
Who did they test? China has higher IQ than pretty much the entire western world. I very much doubt that since china is HUGE and mostly rural.
What IQ test did they use? Note that five countries have scores of about 70 or below. Are they really suggesting about 90 million people in Nigeria (NGA) are mentally retarded? There's 180M people in Nigeria, half should be above 70 and half below, i.e. mental retardation (assuming normal distribution). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_disability
Could you be more specific? There are plenty of successful marriages of GR and QM. For example quantum field theories such as QED, QCD etc.
- GR does not fully describe black holes (particularly their horizon and the singularity)
No one has seen the event horizon or the inside of a black hole so we don't know if the GR predictions matches reality or not. (And, if GR is correct, nothing beyond the horizon can be studied). The things we have checked (like gravitational waves) matches.
- GR is incomplete with regards to explaining the expansion of the universe (the discrepancy is called Dark Energy)
Dark Energy is a proposed solution to make the observations match the predictions. So, if dark energy is found there is no conflict with GR. Calling GR incomplete is a bit unfair since it isn't a theory of everything (and isn't supposed to be), just a theory of the interaction between matter/energy and spacetime. It makes no predictions of how much or which type of matter should exist.
I'd say the original statement holds. No cracks have been found yet.
I was surprised to see Apple on the list. Most of their revenue (69%) comes from one product single line, the iPhone. People change phones every couple of years and if it goes out of fashion, the fall of Apple could be very quick. They would probably lose a lot on all their other sales as well since the main point of buying a Mac/iPad is the common ecosystem/vendor lock-in. Apple has basically put all eggs in one basket and if it breaks, they could be of no importance in no time.
Really, the more I think of it, Apple has nothing that could not be replaced in a couple of years. Compare that to Microsoft. People are still buying their stuff despite Microsofts best efforts at stopping them (W8 and 10, ribbons etc).
In the thread you linked to, John Layt (KDE dude near the bottom of the thread) explains how the Outreach Program for Women actually worked. No money was "blown" on the program. It was just a timing mismatch of the cash flows from the sponsors to the interns which Gnome used it's own money to cover. So, a "cost" one year should be matched by a "income" next year (as long as the sponsor pays up).
The problem was that the program got too popular for the foundation to handle with their existing routines (see some of Sri's posts). It seems the cash flow problem had nothing to do with Karen but with inadequate administration.
News for nerds? Only if they have frikkin lasers on their heads. Stuff that matters? Let's see. Black holes, keyboard layouts, kids dying from malaria, 3D printed guns... nope. It's not one of those.
Post it on facebook. I'm sure it will get lots of likes.
I wish I had mod points! That's one of the simplest solutions I've heard of yet and I will give it a try. I have a slight case of emacs pinkie and would even consider switching the left and right hands to get all the important keys in the middle (asdf on right hand, jkl on left). That would of course require some serious mental gymnastics to get used to though...
Do you have any examples of small keyboards with GOOD keys?
I thought the main point of the copenhagen interpretation was the instrumentalist approach. That is, the mathematical description should not be considered a description of reality but just a tool for calculating probabilities of real events. So, these supposed issues with 'conscious observers' do not apply. There is no real wavefunction and no real collapse. It's just a mathematical description.
But, even if you take a realist approach to the standard QM theory and argue that the wavefunction is real, conscious observers are still not required. It is a well known and tested fact that you do not need a conscious observer to collapse a wavefunction. Take your classical double slit experiment, put a measuring device by one of the slits to force a collapse of the wavefunction (and thus no interference pattern). Now, put a piece of tape over your measuring devices display so no conscious observer can see it. The result doesn't change.
Yes, a philosopher or someone taking the collapse notion a bit too seriously would argue that the entire system (detector, double slits, measuring device etc) is in a mixed state until the observer checks the output on the detector but that is quite a stretch. (See the whole Schrodingers Cat debate)
All measuring devices are huge from a quantum mechanical standpoint. We can barely make calculations on large objects like molecules (and that with rather heavy approximations) and measuring devices typically consist of lots and lots of molecules. It is currently quite impossible to write down a quantum mechanical description of even a simple experiment with a simple measuring device. If we could, maybe we would see that the that the addition of a measuring device causes a mixed state to evolve into a pure state, just by the laws of QM. No conscious observers would then be necessary and the 'collapse' would be just a consequence of the theory. However, making those calculations is way too complicated and far from what we can currently do.
So, neither the instrumentalist or realist interpretation of standard QM theory requires conscious observers.
Could this really be that great? I remember how difficult quantum field theory was and I have always wished for an easier way to do it (so I could actually understand more of it). But, if these methods have been around since the 80s, why haven't I heard about them before?
"When the volume of the amplituhedron is calculated in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, it perfectly describes the scattering patterns of subatomic particles."
OK, sounds good.
"Since the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory is a toy theory that does not describe the real world, the relevance of this theory to the real world is currently unknown, but it provides promising directions for research into theories about the real world."
Oh, crap. So, it's just another toy theory with promising properties which has not been applied to the real world yet? That's not very interesting since there are plenty of such toy theories. It would be really cool if one of them turned out to work for the real universe as well but that seems to be a very hard nut to crack. I personally hope Lisis E8 theory would be the right one just because Lie groups are fun and the pictures are pretty.
In short, people were bad at guessing who won the competition when they could only hear the music and not see the performers. Professional judges were just as bad as novices (worse when they could see the performance but just as bad when they could only hear it).
I for one like the idea of an optionally typed language. I work with hybrid C++/Python programming so I have experienced the pros and cons of typed vs untyped languages.
In general, I much prefer Python to C++ because of the ease and speed of implementing stuff. But, Pythons performance is lacking so I need C++ for that. My perfect language would have the speed of C++ but the ease and implementation speed of Python. Cython is one such language which is basically compiled Python with optional types. The optional types allows for a lot of extra compiler optimisations and it gives a huge performance boost. I haven't used it for anything "real" though because it uses language extensions and is thus incompatible with pure Python. Once I've converted something to Cython, I'm stuck with the much slower debug/compile/run cycle and I've lost some of Pythons speed and ease. Ideally, Python would some day add optional type info so I could run cython code in the (slow) Python interpretor and compile it once I'm ready to release it. For the moment, I prefer the approach of Shedskin but that's another story.
So, my perfect language would have optional typing and optional compiling when maximum performance was needed. I have no idea if Dao is such a language though.
"All research results in this news brief have not yet been published. The research has been completed, so this news brief is a synthesis consisting of both published and thus far unpublished findings. In consultation and collaboration with the researcher, the Research Council has chosen to release this news at the completion of the research project because the project is of general interest. However, the Council releases this news with the caveat that the findings outlined in this news brief have yet to be verified and that the results will only become significant once they are confirmed by other studies. For further information please visit CICERO"
Slashdot Mirror
That is good but insufficient. Non-drinkers ARE a very special group. Drinking is pretty much the norm (especially in the UK) and people who never drink often have a reason. Apart from previous alcoholism, reasons may be strong religious belief or health problems. Also, non-drinkers have different habits. They probably don't drink or eat nothing at parties or romantic dinners. There may be increased consumption of soft drinks or fatty foods. Hell, it could even be that people stay in bad relationships for longer because they don't crash and burn while drunk... The possibilities are endless.
Non-drinkers are special in many ways. It would be almost impossible to take all possible factors into account in a large study such as this one. RCTs would be great but impossible due to the lengths involved and possibly unethical if we believe a bit of alcohol is good.
It would be interesting to see studies from countries or populations where drinking is not the norm.
No, limited precision would correspond to quantization. That is, you can't take a smaller step than 1e-308 meters or such.
Heisenbergs uncertainty principle would rather be like using a deallocated pointer. Sometimes you get the same result as before but if the computer has reused the space for something else, you may get a different result. Still, that would be random and buggy behavior while Heisenbergs principle is very specific about the limits.
Quantum behavior would be tricky to simulate. I guess a strong argument against simulations would be that the world we perceive is very much classical and Newtonian which is extremely simple compared to Relativity and QM. Why would any sane programmer add such ridiculous complex systems both at the very small and very large scale? Job security?
I just can't stop thinking about the stupidity of this.
Doctor: Hey, patient, would you like to try some new meds I read about on the internet yesterday while my kids were screaming? I haven't tried them or read any scientific studies and I am unsure about the use-case compared to existing drugs but they are very popular in some facebook groups.
Navy Officer: Hey, we're getting a new aircraft carrier next year so I expect all of you to go home and read up on it and start practicing at home. We'll call you when there is a war and your skills are needed. You'd better be self-trained experts by then!
University head: What's all this "research" I keep hearing about? Take some responsibility for your own careers and stay up to date in your spare time! Now, go back to work. We need more folded napkins!
I sort of agree but I think you're being a bit too defensive. It is the job of the professional to explain the importance of clean code, fixing bugs etc to your boss. After you, as a technical specialist, has explained the importance of doing things the right way, it is up to your boss to make the business decision of playing safe or taking a risk. Often, risks are not just in the code. If the release is delayed (again), the customer may loose confidence (again) and leave. It is the job of the boss to weigh risks against each other. (Yes, I am well aware many many bosses do not understand what bossing is about and are tragically unable to understand the concept of risk).
I agree the initial list is idealistic bullshit but it is the responsibility of a professional to explain the importance of best practices anyway. If you'd add a "try" to every sentence, the list would be much better. See:
No, sorry. That didn't work out. It is still pretty dumb. Big bug lists are fine if the bugs are non-essential. You should work on what is important to your users; if they don't mind bugs in the "About" window, don't fix them. Clean and bug free code is an ideal that we strive toward but it is an ideal and not reality. If you've ever had to fix bugs or add functionality to a decade old bowl of spaghetti bolognese, it won't be clean, you won't be proud of your work and you know it will fail again.
I would like to disagree. I don't know how many times I've lost a 2 somewhere in the calculation. Either because of brain malfunction like "right angle = pi/4", forgetting a 2 in 2*pi*r or even adding a 2 in pi*r^2/2 just because the integral of r = r^2/2. I think most engineers and mathematicians have made similar mistakes.
Making sound choices to prevent stupid mistakes is important. Pi is an unnecessary evil.
Also, we should switch to base 6. People make too many mistakes with 6,7,8 multiplication.
Yes! The point of the test should be to see an example of problem solving. Not to check for static knowledge like "yes, I have heard that name before and memorised the meaning.".
For example:
You: Write an algorithm to sort a list of names.
[Candidate writes down some simple sort or uses std::sort]
You: Well done. The list of names has now grown a lot and your sort algorithm is a bottleneck. Can you make it faster? Discuss.
The first questions shows they know at least a bare minimum of programming, The second question shows if they can solve a simple "realistic" problem by taking the given constraints into consideration.
Also, a candidate who writes a recursive bucket sort after the first question fails by overcomplicating things.
Programming languages are as interchangeable as toolboxes.
If you've ever tried to repair something at a friends house, you know what I'm talking about. You say "That's easy to fix, just get me some tools" and they bring you a shoe box with twine, paper clips and a flat screwdriver. Sure, it's possible to remove phillips screws with a flat screwdriver but it's annoying as hell. Mending stuff with twine and paperclips is better than nothing but if you know of glue guns and rope, it can be a very frustrating experience.
I had exactly the same feeling when writing numerical code in C#. Everything had to be improvised or created from scratch since there were no relevant libraries and the existing ones could not be applied (sure, there was a binary search but it threw an exception if the element wasn't found. I needed something like upper_bound in C++). Anyway, this was 10 years ago. Maybe things have changed but back then it was definitely the wrong toolbox for the job.
By, the way, I counted the hammers in my toolbox at home: 5. Very small, small, regular, small sledgehammer and rubber mallet.
This! The really scary thing about this election was that it was such an ordinary election despite extraordinary candidates. About 90% of traditional republicans voted for Trump and about 90% of democrats for Hillary.
Voting for a third candidate IS a waste because of the way your system is constructed. Why didn't Trump go as an independent? Because the right wing votes would have been split between him and the republicans and basically given the democrats the presidency. He would never have won as an independent despite having the same ideas, policies and interesting retorics.
There are so many things wrong with the system. The electoral college is one but the presidency itself is another. The presidency is a winner-takes-all competition where voting for a third party only increases the chance that your worst enemy becomes president instead of the dude you just dislike.
Switching to popular vote isn't enough. Candidates should be allowed to form coalitions after the vote is cast. That is, let all candidates run and if no one gets more than 50%, they can join forces and whatever group gets a majority decides on the presidency. Third, fourth and fifth candidates are not actively discouraged and all votes count. Having only two choices, isn't much of a choice at all. Especially when choosing between Stalin and Hitler.
A two party system is only one party away from being a dictatorship.
How is this different from a Google search? Google spends a lot of time trying to figure out how sites and searches are related to one another. Mozilla thinks they can do it better because they can "harvest" data directly from the browser? I doubt it. And, that's ignoring the privacy issue of sending my full time stamped browsing history to a private company...
I suppose the security company could sound the alarm if the contact with the robot is broken. That would be effective against both faraday cages and signal jammers...
Had to read a bit more. It is based on the IQ data from this book. The "Reception and Impact" section was fun to read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
That was precisely my thought. It is of course a bullshit article but it raises so many interesting questions:
Where did they get country based IQ data? Is it normalised to 100 over the entire sample?
Why do most countries in their scatterplot have an IQ less than 100? The only counterweight of significance is China.
Who did they test? China has higher IQ than pretty much the entire western world. I very much doubt that since china is HUGE and mostly rural.
What IQ test did they use? Note that five countries have scores of about 70 or below. Are they really suggesting about 90 million people in Nigeria (NGA) are mentally retarded? There's 180M people in Nigeria, half should be above 70 and half below, i.e. mental retardation (assuming normal distribution). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_disability
- GR breaks down when you go to quantum levels
Could you be more specific? There are plenty of successful marriages of GR and QM. For example quantum field theories such as QED, QCD etc.
- GR does not fully describe black holes (particularly their horizon and the singularity)
No one has seen the event horizon or the inside of a black hole so we don't know if the GR predictions matches reality or not. (And, if GR is correct, nothing beyond the horizon can be studied). The things we have checked (like gravitational waves) matches.
- GR is incomplete with regards to explaining the expansion of the universe (the discrepancy is called Dark Energy)
Dark Energy is a proposed solution to make the observations match the predictions. So, if dark energy is found there is no conflict with GR. Calling GR incomplete is a bit unfair since it isn't a theory of everything (and isn't supposed to be), just a theory of the interaction between matter/energy and spacetime. It makes no predictions of how much or which type of matter should exist.
I'd say the original statement holds. No cracks have been found yet.
I was surprised to see Apple on the list. Most of their revenue (69%) comes from one product single line, the iPhone. People change phones every couple of years and if it goes out of fashion, the fall of Apple could be very quick. They would probably lose a lot on all their other sales as well since the main point of buying a Mac/iPad is the common ecosystem/vendor lock-in. Apple has basically put all eggs in one basket and if it breaks, they could be of no importance in no time.
Really, the more I think of it, Apple has nothing that could not be replaced in a couple of years. Compare that to Microsoft. People are still buying their stuff despite Microsofts best efforts at stopping them (W8 and 10, ribbons etc).
In the thread you linked to, John Layt (KDE dude near the bottom of the thread) explains how the Outreach Program for Women actually worked. No money was "blown" on the program. It was just a timing mismatch of the cash flows from the sponsors to the interns which Gnome used it's own money to cover. So, a "cost" one year should be matched by a "income" next year (as long as the sponsor pays up).
The problem was that the program got too popular for the foundation to handle with their existing routines (see some of Sri's posts). It seems the cash flow problem had nothing to do with Karen but with inadequate administration.
Haven't found any scientific article yet but here is the news page from UCLA:
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/relea...
In short, they found graphite in a crystal and the graphite has a carbon 12 to carbon 13 ratio which indicates biological origin.
So, the current status is "plausible" but if someone comes up with another explanation it is "busted".
News for nerds? Only if they have frikkin lasers on their heads.
Stuff that matters? Let's see. Black holes, keyboard layouts, kids dying from malaria, 3D printed guns... nope. It's not one of those.
Post it on facebook. I'm sure it will get lots of likes.
I wish I had mod points! That's one of the simplest solutions I've heard of yet and I will give it a try. I have a slight case of emacs pinkie and would even consider switching the left and right hands to get all the important keys in the middle (asdf on right hand, jkl on left). That would of course require some serious mental gymnastics to get used to though...
Do you have any examples of small keyboards with GOOD keys?
Thanks for the suggestions!
I would love to. Care to share some interesting links?
I hope you're not implying that a piece of tape can stop the inexorable march of entropy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information ;)
Do you not have faith in duct tape? Enough duct tape can stop anything!
I thought the main point of the copenhagen interpretation was the instrumentalist approach. That is, the mathematical description should not be considered a description of reality but just a tool for calculating probabilities of real events. So, these supposed issues with 'conscious observers' do not apply. There is no real wavefunction and no real collapse. It's just a mathematical description.
But, even if you take a realist approach to the standard QM theory and argue that the wavefunction is real, conscious observers are still not required. It is a well known and tested fact that you do not need a conscious observer to collapse a wavefunction. Take your classical double slit experiment, put a measuring device by one of the slits to force a collapse of the wavefunction (and thus no interference pattern). Now, put a piece of tape over your measuring devices display so no conscious observer can see it. The result doesn't change.
Yes, a philosopher or someone taking the collapse notion a bit too seriously would argue that the entire system (detector, double slits, measuring device etc) is in a mixed state until the observer checks the output on the detector but that is quite a stretch. (See the whole Schrodingers Cat debate)
All measuring devices are huge from a quantum mechanical standpoint. We can barely make calculations on large objects like molecules (and that with rather heavy approximations) and measuring devices typically consist of lots and lots of molecules. It is currently quite impossible to write down a quantum mechanical description of even a simple experiment with a simple measuring device. If we could, maybe we would see that the that the addition of a measuring device causes a mixed state to evolve into a pure state, just by the laws of QM. No conscious observers would then be necessary and the 'collapse' would be just a consequence of the theory. However, making those calculations is way too complicated and far from what we can currently do.
So, neither the instrumentalist or realist interpretation of standard QM theory requires conscious observers.
Could this really be that great? I remember how difficult quantum field theory was and I have always wished for an easier way to do it (so I could actually understand more of it). But, if these methods have been around since the 80s, why haven't I heard about them before?
So, first stop Wikipedia
"When the volume of the amplituhedron is calculated in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, it perfectly describes the scattering patterns of subatomic particles."
OK, sounds good.
"Since the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory is a toy theory that does not describe the real world, the relevance of this theory to the real world is currently unknown, but it provides promising directions for research into theories about the real world."
Oh, crap. So, it's just another toy theory with promising properties which has not been applied to the real world yet? That's not very interesting since there are plenty of such toy theories. It would be really cool if one of them turned out to work for the real universe as well but that seems to be a very hard nut to crack. I personally hope Lisis E8 theory would be the right one just because Lie groups are fun and the pictures are pretty.
It reminds me of this:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21583974-top-musicians-are-judged-much-their-movements-their-melodies
In short, people were bad at guessing who won the competition when they could only hear the music and not see the performers. Professional judges were just as bad as novices (worse when they could see the performance but just as bad when they could only hear it).
Interesting stuff.
I for one like the idea of an optionally typed language. I work with hybrid C++/Python programming so I have experienced the pros and cons of typed vs untyped languages.
In general, I much prefer Python to C++ because of the ease and speed of implementing stuff. But, Pythons performance is lacking so I need C++ for that. My perfect language would have the speed of C++ but the ease and implementation speed of Python. Cython is one such language which is basically compiled Python with optional types. The optional types allows for a lot of extra compiler optimisations and it gives a huge performance boost. I haven't used it for anything "real" though because it uses language extensions and is thus incompatible with pure Python. Once I've converted something to Cython, I'm stuck with the much slower debug/compile/run cycle and I've lost some of Pythons speed and ease. Ideally, Python would some day add optional type info so I could run cython code in the (slow) Python interpretor and compile it once I'm ready to release it. For the moment, I prefer the approach of Shedskin but that's another story.
So, my perfect language would have optional typing and optional compiling when maximum performance was needed. I have no idea if Dao is such a language though.
So, why does the Research council of Norways own article say (close to the bottom, UPDATE in bold):
"All research results in this news brief have not yet been published. The research has been completed, so this news brief is a synthesis consisting of both published and thus far unpublished findings. In consultation and collaboration with the researcher, the Research Council has chosen to release this news at the completion of the research project because the project is of general interest. However, the Council releases this news with the caveat that the findings outlined in this news brief have yet to be verified and that the results will only become significant once they are confirmed by other studies. For further information please visit CICERO"