I don't agree; where did you get that information? I imagine essentially no physicists believe that faster-than-light communication will be discovered using something as well-understood as quantum teleportation. It's not as if theory predicts FTL communication with this setup--it doesn't. FTL communication would indeed be epoch-making which is why the recent FTL neutrinos were such a big deal, but even there all the physicists I heard from didn't actually believe the result was real, and indeed it was not.
One of the articles does mention, "For quantum encryption [teleportation] to work, though, we need to be able to transmit entangled photons over a long distance". They do ignore the classical information channel, but probably because transmitting entangled photons is far more difficult and doing so basically solves the classical communication channel problem.
About teleporting over arbitrary distances, you need to get an entangled particle from person A to person B without it interacting with anything else, and it's difficult to prevent the particle from interacting with something on the way there. They're trying to reach distances that allow a satellite network to successively teleport quantum information in hopes of providing an almost perfectly secure communication channel, probably for key exchanges since the bandwidth will be quite low for a long time.
Here's a summary of the physics, including what a qubit is.
Quantum states Suppose some process produces two electrons. It happens that a particular measurement of a quantum property named spin always comes out as +1/2 or -1/2 for electrons. Now suppose the process that created the electrons must obey a conservation law which forces the sum of the spins of the two electrons to be 0--say the particles that interacted to make the electrons themselves had 0 spin. One electron must then be spin +1/2 and the other must be -1/2. However, until the measurement is performed, you have no idea which is which. More is true: a fundamental part of quantum mechanics is that particle properties can be in multiple states simultaneously right up until a measurement is performed, at which point the property collapses to a single definite value which is randomly chosen based on the relative fractions (actually amplitudes) of the states it used to be in. Thus you can perform a quantum mechanical experiment exactly the same twice without getting the same outcome both times, though you can at least calculate the outcome probabilities. A qubit is simply the state of an electron's spin property before a measurement is made, which in general can be a mix of +1/2 and -1/2. This generalizes to other particles and other two-state properties. (More technically a qubit is an element of a 2-dimensional Hilbert space acting as the state space of some quantum property.)
Entanglement Right after being produced, the two electrons are each in both the +1/2 and -1/2 states. They are "entagled", because if you measure the spin of one electron, from the conservation law you know what a measurement of the other electron's spin must be. Entanglement is actually a very simple consequence of the fact that quantum properties can be in multiple states simultaneously yet conservation laws still need to hold. It's an interesting exercise to try and get faster-than-light communication from this setup, though you'll be unable to. If you're familiar with the relativity of simultaneity, try to both blow up the earth and not by some set of decisions based on the entangled particles' measurements.
Quantum teleportation Using a setup I will not discuss in detail, person A has a qubit encoded in the spin of an electron, and she wants to send the qubit to person B--that is, she wants person B to have an electron with the same spin property in all its mixed-up multiple-states-at-once glory. The setup requires a classical communication channel and some extra entangled particles. Using it, person A can instruct person B to prepare an electron with the same spin state as person A started with. It happens that person A's qubit is destroyed in the process, so the information "teleports", though note that it jumps from one particle to another. The information is all that's teleported, not the particle, and it's not teleported faster-than-light because of the classical communication needed.
You'd have to beam particles through the earth to do what you suggest (not currently practical), at which point you might as well use classical methods.
While the rest of your post strikes me as rather crazy, the last sentence leads to a decent "case study" on the misuse of science by fundamentalists. Research is a theme in the anti-gay movement. Both the Family Research Council (FRC) [a leading anti-gay group] and the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) [a leading ex-gay group] have it in their names. The anti-gay people who reference studies usually focus on health and other social problems. Topics include higher incidence of HIV and various STDs, various intestinal parasites, anal cancer, domestic violence and murder, promiscuity, mental health problems and suicide, whether it's a choice or genetic, illegal drug use, and pedophilia.
Here's an article about the American College of Pediatricians [the comparatively tiny anti-gay offshoot of the mainstream American Academy of Pediatrics] distorting some research:
The ACP also claimed that the longer you can keep kids from identifying as gay, the less likely they are to kill themselves.... In this case, Remafedi says, the ACP missed the larger point: Kids who come out at a younger age are more likely to kill themselves because they are less able to deal with the stigma and isolation of being gay. If anything, the research shows the need for more support.
"It's obvious that they didn't even read my research," Remafedi says. "I mean, they spelled my name wrong every time they cited it."
It's easy to put up a front of respectability. Here's a nice example from the Family Research Council: an hour long lecture against gay marriage. It's offered by the "FRC University Library", which is almost as respectable-sounding as the American College of Pediatricians. The format is a traditional lecture given by a middle-aged guy in a suit. If you actually listen to him, he rambles incessantly and when he makes a point his reasoning is often highly flawed (for instance, listen to his discussion of the interracial marriage analogy around 48 minutes in; the circular reasoning is just sad). But if you just look at the trappings and believe his conclusions, you might get the impression that he was a trustworthy source to base your own views on.
As I said I love Hilbert space, so your comment is enough motivation for me to write up a brief explanation.
The n-dimensional Hilbert space is the collection of length-n lists of complex numbers. One can add these lists and scale them, so for instance [1, i] + [2, 1] = [3, i+1] and 2*[i, -1] = [2i, -2]. Physically, each component of the list corresponds to a possible experimental outcome. More specifically, the probability of the outcome corresponding to the ith component is the square of the magnitude of the ith component. For the electron spin up/down experiment I talked about the wavefunction [1, 0] gives a |1|^2 = 100% chance of measuring spin up (and 0% chance of measuring spin down; this is called a pure state). [sqrt(1/3), sqrt(2/3)] corresponds to a 1/3 chance to measure spin up and 2/3rds to measure spin down. You may wonder why the magnitude-squared business is used at all (why not just keep track of the probabilities?) which is where the complex numbers come in to play. The state [sqrt(1/3), i * sqrt(2/3)] has the same experimental outcomes given this single measurement as the previous state, [sqrt(1/3), sqrt(2/3)] but it is fundamentally different from it since the two components are "out of phase". More elaborate experiments can detect the difference. In this case it turns out the result of the spin left/right experiment is encoded in the phase difference between the two components.
Hilbert space comes with an important operation called an inner product, which I'll denote by the term "dot". It can "single out" the entry at a particular position in a list. For instance, by definition [1, i] dot [0, 1] = i, singling out the second component. The operation is extended to more general lists on the right-hand-side by rules I won't discuss, and it has a physical interpretation in terms of probabilities--the magnitude of (A dot B) squared is the probability of measuring a particle with wavefunction A in the state described by wavefunction B, which fits what I said above in light of the computation |[sqrt(1/3), sqrt(2/3)] dot [1, 0]|^2 = |sqrt(1/3)|^2 = 1/3. Note that the sum of the squares of the magnitudes of the entries in the list must be 1 since the experiment will have some outcome with 100% certainty.
One can have infinite dimensional Hilbert space where the lists are allowed to have infinite length. Sequence space is a popular example: it contains [1/1, i/2, 1/3, i/4, 1/5,...] and [0, 1, 0, 0, 0,...]. We often restrict ourselves to lists where the sum of the magnitudes squared are 1 since these are the only physically meaningful wavefunctions, giving the so-called projective Hilbert space. [1, 1, 1,...] is certainly not in that space since it has infinite sum-of-squares. Actually, [1/1, i/2, 1/3, i/4, 1/5,...] doesn't work here either, but sqrt(6)/pi * [1/1, i/2, 1/3, i/4, 1/5,...] does work. (There's a beautiful proof using Parseval's theorem.) [1, 1, 1,...] fails particularly badly since it cannot be scaled to an element of projective Hilbert space as we were able to do with the other list, so we don't allow it in regular Hilbert space at all. Any other lists that have infinite sum-of-squares are similarly excluded. The inner product is extended in a natural way to infinite lists. That's all the structure one requires.
I should note that Hilbert space is more often defined as an abstract vector space over the complex numbers equipped with a positive-definite sesquilinear inner product which is moreover Cauchy complete with respect to the induced norm. Projective Hilbert space is usually defined as projective equivalence classes over a Hilbert space with semi-canonical norm-1 representatives. My definitions are equivalent, assuming the axiom of choice (everybody does), and they're obviously more accessible (though it's much less pretty IMO). I should also mention that wavefunctions and elements of Hilbert space are usually written with the bra-ket notation and as sums of pure states (as the paper does); my notation is from Python and was chosen considering the audience.
The article confused me greatly so I read some of the arxiv preprint linked above. Here's the idea and context as I understand it. I've included some basic quantum background since most people here don't have it.
* Intro to wavefunctions via an example. Electrons have a property called "spin" which has two states, "up" or "down". These can be measured in, for instance, the Stern-Gerlach experiment where those electrons with spin up are deflected up by a magnetic field and those with spin down go down. The wavefunction corresponds to a list of the probability of each outcome occurring. The probabilities evolve through time via the Schrodinger equation which allows predictions to be made. One might prepare an electron where its spin wavefunction corresponds to the list [1/3, 2/3], so 1/3 of the particles go up and 2/3rds go down. [I've oversimplified; wavefunctions are actually elements of an abstract Hilbert space and complex-number amplitudes are used instead of real-number probabilities. I love Hilbert space but it's too much to explain here.]
* Spin is not a classical property. One can measure spin "left" and "right" in addition to "up" and "down" by rotating the Stern-Gerlach (SG) device mentioned above and measuring left/right deflection. Suppose you run a stream of electrons through an up/down SG device which gives 80% of them "up". You then run those "up" electrons through a left/right SG device--it will always come out with 50% "left" and 50% "right". Even more strangely, if you then run the "left" electrons through another up/down SG device, the probabilities will now be 50%/50%, even though you selected only spin up electrons at the first stage so you'd expect 100%/0%. The act of going through the left/right device altered the spin up/down state somehow.
* Hidden variables. Perhaps the electrons above have definite "spin vertical" and "spin horizontal" properties before the experiment starts. The act of going through a device must change the other property, though everything might be deterministic if there is some further hidden property controlling which electrons have their spin up/down states altered in which ways by passing through the "left" SG device. The alternative is that there are no definite properties which determine the wavefunction; the wavefunction is all there is, reality is somehow fundamentally probabilistic, and the wavefunction is "real" instead of a statistical construct.
* Bell's theorem. Suppose spin up/down and spin left/right are definite properties and some hidden variables explain the above results. Using entanglement (which I'll leave undefined) and the assumption that information cannot travel faster than light, one can measure both the spin left/right and spin up/down values of a particle before the hidden variables have a chance to act (note: they might act in a very bizarre, perhaps even non-deterministic, manner, but we get to measure things before they have that chance). This gives a testable prediction which differs from quantum mechanics. If the experiment is performed, the "definite property" theory does not predict reality while the use of wavefunctions does predict reality. This is strong evidence for the reality of wavefunctions, though it's not completely conclusive.
* The paper. It derives Bell's fundamental contradiction from fewer assumptions. In its own words,
The result is in the same spirit as Bell's theorem, which states that no local theory [i.e. one without faster-than-light communication] can reproduce the predictions of quantum theory. Both theorems need to assume that a system has a objective physical state L such that probabilities for measurement outcomes depend only on L. But our theorem only assumes this for systems prepared in isolation from the rest of the universe in a quantum pure state [e.g. a particle measured as spin "up" right after the SG experiment above]. This is unlike
but the point is that it continues to pick up steam
Really? I see one active contributor on these five SciRuby repos (who is responsible for the "flurry of activity" you describe) with an overall trend downwards. The port you linked is also essentially inactive, though it may simply be complete. By contrast there's half a dozen different contributors on the first numpy commit page I linked alone.
OT: Nice Bach piece by the way. Why did you pick it?
I agree that since this doesn't have a lot of contributors it isn't a huge waste of time, though that's not a good argument. The question is if it's worth the resources to reinvent the wheel (even just porting entails a lot of work, and I'm not sure that's what they're after here) just so people can use their preferred language. I would say no since the difference between the languages isn't enormous. It's unfortunate, but tradeoffs need to be made and not every language can have nice numerical and algebraic libraries. Oh well.
As for (in)activity, the fellowship is quite small ($1500 stipend) and the nmatrix commits you mention have essentially one contributor. That's also the current most active SciRuby repo with the others being essentially flatlined for months.
If you actually like the project, perhaps you should contribute. It seems they could use people badly. You may be right about innovation; one never knows.
First and least, Ruby is a language with a sense of humor.
But more importantly, numerical computation and visualization can be done much better in Ruby, for a number of reasons:
''Everything returns a value.'' Ruby's better object model means better chaining of computation.
''Iterators'' are way better than ''for'' loops (each_slice, each_cons, etc.).
''Readability.'' Ruby is incredibly readable, which makes it uber-maintainable.
''Metaprogramming.'' Sometimes the simplest solution is to write a [http://github.com/wycats/thor code generator]. Sometimes, eigenclasses are the cleanest.
''Integration into Rails.'' The influence of Rails on Ruby is undeniable. Web-based visualization for scientific projects is the future.
''R is nice but clunky.'' The learning curve is enormous. It does some things very well, and others not very well at all (try doing a multi-line plot in R).
Unfortunately it ignores the alternative of just using Python.
There's also a (I'll be charitable) silly discussion in this vein on the same page:
Ruby has no equivalent to the beautifully constructed numpy, scipy, and matplotlib libraries for Python. We believe that the time for a Ruby science and visualization package has come and gone. Sometimes when a solution of sugar and water becomes super-saturated, from it precipitates a pure, delicious, and diabetes-inducing crystal of sweetness, induced by no more than the tap of a finger. So it is, we believe, with the need for numeric and visualization libraries in Ruby.
IMO, this is a misguided waste of time and it's nearly inactive anyway.
The fellowship is a summer long with only a $1,500 stipend. The most recent commit is from December 1st, 2011. The wiki and issue tracker appear to be similarly inactive. Even if the project does something, it probably won't do much; contrast it with numpy commits which are recent and numerous.
This story should never have been accepted. There are a million minor projects like this that similarly aren't newsworthy enough to discuss.
As I said, "Of course, neither is it at all conclusive. I only bring up this argument to illustrate [other points]".
Also, the probability that we happen to be exactly in the X% of the human history we actualy are is zero. That doesn't bring any information about the longevity of our species.
While true, this is unhelpful. The same can be said of the position of a baseball as it flies out of a stadium, even though given a reading of a clock on the in-flight baseball one could compute with some confidence the probability distribution of which % of the flight the baseball was actually in when the reading took place. The speciousness of my original argument lies elsewhere.
Oddly enough we seem to agree. I find your post annoying and your reading comprehension poor; here's why.
Annoying: I admitted the weakness of my reasoning yet you still felt the need to sarcastically deconstruct it. I would hope your main objection--selection bias--is completely obvious to anyone, so I didn't feel the need to bring it up. There are other objections to my argument, like how it displays broken behavior in the limit as civilization lifespan goes to infinity and the impossibility of properly weighting lifespan lengths for computation of the relevant expected value. I meant not "at all conclusive" literally: one cannot draw real-life conclusions from it. I went on to say that I only brought it up to illustrate other points. A specious argument can still have value, not in proving its conclusion, but in other ways.
I also find the phrases "specious BS", "downright spooky", and "deeply paranoid" annoying since they hide content--in each case it would have been more informative to expand them to actual sentences. I'm particularly curious what you meant by "deeply paranoid", since I haven't read any sci-fi with the premise you mention.
Poor reading comprehension: I was discussing the "(im)probability of contact with aliens", so the question is not whether there is "other intelligent life anywhere in the universe" (as the bulk of your post discusses), but whether other life will contact us. Some estimates of the Drake equation give on the order of 1 civilization we're capable of communicating with in our galaxy, so maybe there's just nobody out there for us to talk to right now. Other estimates vary wildly and there are serious objections to the Drake equation, but the uncertainty is the key thing. We actually seem to agree there--"There's simply not enough information to draw conclusions either way about the (im)probability of contact with aliens". There is probably enough information to say with reasonable confidence that some other intelligent life exists somewhere in the universe, but that's not what I was talking about.
The article title, subtitle, and "the gist" didn't do a good job of engaging my own attention since they all talked about very standard genetic evolution. How it was written rather than its actual content was more interesting. Your second paragraph is the reverse, though; thanks for the link.
That for as long as the universe has been kicking around and as big as it's managed to get, we've yet to see the faintest signs of this happening on any other planet?
Eh, it's not necessarily that surprising. Perhaps most civilizations destroy themselves quickly. If humans will last for 10 million years, it's highly improbable that you and I would happen to be in the first ~0.05% of human history, with significantly lower odds if our population explodes with colonies on other planets during that time. The only evidence we have for the longevity of humanity is not encouraging.
Of course, neither is it at all conclusive. I only bring up this argument to illustrate the wild uncertainty in our knowledge of both ourselves and the universe, and to illustrate the arrogance of humans' silly sci-fi-esque concept of alien civilizations. There's simply not enough information to draw conclusions either way about the (im)probability of contact with aliens. Honestly, if you want to believe in intelligent design, go for it, just don't let it affect your opinion on social matters and we'll get along fine.
The mechanism failed in its task, no matter whether that mechanism itself was designed or evolved
If the mechanism was designed, it was designed to fail sometimes so that humans would result--an intentional failure is not a mistake. If the mechanism evolved, it evolved to fail sometimes since once in a while those failures are beneficial mutations which is a mechanism that would have already proven its usefulness via natural selection--again this is not a mistake.
The term "mistake" is probably attention-grabbing journalistic crap (the article is titled "Did a Copying Mistake Make Humans So Smart?") since using "mistake" instead of "error" tells a slightly more compelling story with the implication of an anthropomorphic actor doing the copying. The main article text in fact uses "error". Of course the title and subtitle may simply be imprecise. Perhaps they're the result of someone who didn't write the article proper, considering the change in term. The subtitle also has a stylistic difference from the article text--it has no comma or other punctuation. Every sentence of comparable length in the rest of the article (around 15 of them) has a comma, colon, dash, etc., with only one exception, supporting my "someone else wrote the title and subtitle" theory, perhaps someone more interested in page views than providing information.
With C#.NET you have two choices for UI's: WinForms (old style, higher adoption) and WPF (new style, lower adoption). WPF has a steep learning curve, a lot of powerful features, and a lot of quirks--in my experience (as a rule of thumb) older people don't like it, younger people do.
If you're looking for a way to make Windows-only GUI-based apps, C#.NET Express is a great way to go. If you're looking for a challenge and some interesting ideas, go WPF, if not go WinForms.
Or are you suggesting it's ok to get caught in a lie as long as the accuser has a motivation other than pure honesty for calling you on it?
Nope. I must have been unclear since another person in these comments inferred the same thing. The person lying and the accuser's actions are separate. In this particular case the lie itself matters very little--it's not like he would be a much more qualified CEO because his undergraduate degree ~30 years ago was in CS rather than accounting. The real issue is the clumsy act of deception. Whether or not the accuser himself was dishonest doesn't change how the CEO should be dealt with.
As for honesty, perhaps you're right and most CEOs are honest (most people are, yes; I was imagining the CEO job attracts dishonest people), though in either case I want competence in a CEO in whatever they do, including their lies.
My issue with Loeb is misrepresenting his motivations--he was described as just an "activist" in the first article I read, whereas here he's a shareholder wanting new leadership. Simply wanting a change in company leadership isn't inherently wrong, and exposing a lie of the current leadership to bring about that change is also not inherently bad. Just be up front about it--"I think Jimbo is a terrible CEO and will squander my investment. Kim here would do better. As evidence that Jimbo is awful, he lied on his resume."
Digging up dirt on a guy you want to see gone and then publicly posting it on the internet while posing as the good guy who's just fighting for the truth (as opposed to a shareholder with a personal stake in things) is worse in my book than lying about your college major after graduating decades ago and leading another tech company in the meantime.
I'd like to say I don't necessarily believe TFA's version of events, at least not without a second source corroborating it and Loeb getting a chance to have his say, but getting to the truth of this matter is so unimportant to me personally that I'm willing to just roll with it for the sake of discussion.
Man, in light of the above, I really need something to fill my time. I should get a boyfriend. Or a dog.
The summary missed perhaps the most interesting part of the article:
The guy who broke the news about the phony degree is Dan Loeb, a hedge-fund manager and activist shareholder whose company owns a 5 percent stake in Yahoo, making it the largest outside shareholder. He’s been pushing Yahoo to get rid of some board members and put him and three other nominees on the board instead. Yahoo won’t do it. So now Loeb creates a public-relations nightmare for them, and maybe this will help his chances of getting his board seats.
The point being that everyone is dishonest, and while this guy got caught in a particularly clear-cut case of dishonesty, it's not very important, and it's not at all as bad as what the guy who accused him is doing. I agree with him there. The only thing I wonder about is the intelligence of a guy who felt the need to lie about his degree when it matters so little given his work experience and which can easily be checked. Sadly I question the competence of a CEO who can't lie well. Maybe that's what the board is really investigating.
Everything different grates on someone's old ears; forgive me, but I don't really care. If your only objection to something is no more than a vague distaste, you should at least keep your opinion to yourself and not try forcing it on others. Either have a good reason to dislike something or stay out of it.
I haven't heard a single substantive argument for barring singular "they" and "them"--calling their use "incorrect" or "ungrammatical" is not sufficient. On the other hand, there are a number of good reasons to allow this usage: it fills a genuinely useful niche in language, it avoids the subtly sexist gender-neutral "he", and most English speakers use it in everyday life already.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree; where did you get that information? I imagine essentially no physicists believe that faster-than-light communication will be discovered using something as well-understood as quantum teleportation. It's not as if theory predicts FTL communication with this setup--it doesn't. FTL communication would indeed be epoch-making which is why the recent FTL neutrinos were such a big deal, but even there all the physicists I heard from didn't actually believe the result was real, and indeed it was not.
One of the articles does mention, "For quantum encryption [teleportation] to work, though, we need to be able to transmit entangled photons over a long distance". They do ignore the classical information channel, but probably because transmitting entangled photons is far more difficult and doing so basically solves the classical communication channel problem.
About teleporting over arbitrary distances, you need to get an entangled particle from person A to person B without it interacting with anything else, and it's difficult to prevent the particle from interacting with something on the way there. They're trying to reach distances that allow a satellite network to successively teleport quantum information in hopes of providing an almost perfectly secure communication channel, probably for key exchanges since the bandwidth will be quite low for a long time.
Here's a summary of the physics, including what a qubit is.
Quantum states
Suppose some process produces two electrons. It happens that a particular measurement of a quantum property named spin always comes out as +1/2 or -1/2 for electrons. Now suppose the process that created the electrons must obey a conservation law which forces the sum of the spins of the two electrons to be 0--say the particles that interacted to make the electrons themselves had 0 spin. One electron must then be spin +1/2 and the other must be -1/2. However, until the measurement is performed, you have no idea which is which. More is true: a fundamental part of quantum mechanics is that particle properties can be in multiple states simultaneously right up until a measurement is performed, at which point the property collapses to a single definite value which is randomly chosen based on the relative fractions (actually amplitudes) of the states it used to be in. Thus you can perform a quantum mechanical experiment exactly the same twice without getting the same outcome both times, though you can at least calculate the outcome probabilities. A qubit is simply the state of an electron's spin property before a measurement is made, which in general can be a mix of +1/2 and -1/2. This generalizes to other particles and other two-state properties. (More technically a qubit is an element of a 2-dimensional Hilbert space acting as the state space of some quantum property.)
Entanglement
Right after being produced, the two electrons are each in both the +1/2 and -1/2 states. They are "entagled", because if you measure the spin of one electron, from the conservation law you know what a measurement of the other electron's spin must be. Entanglement is actually a very simple consequence of the fact that quantum properties can be in multiple states simultaneously yet conservation laws still need to hold. It's an interesting exercise to try and get faster-than-light communication from this setup, though you'll be unable to. If you're familiar with the relativity of simultaneity, try to both blow up the earth and not by some set of decisions based on the entangled particles' measurements.
Quantum teleportation
Using a setup I will not discuss in detail, person A has a qubit encoded in the spin of an electron, and she wants to send the qubit to person B--that is, she wants person B to have an electron with the same spin property in all its mixed-up multiple-states-at-once glory. The setup requires a classical communication channel and some extra entangled particles. Using it, person A can instruct person B to prepare an electron with the same spin state as person A started with. It happens that person A's qubit is destroyed in the process, so the information "teleports", though note that it jumps from one particle to another. The information is all that's teleported, not the particle, and it's not teleported faster-than-light because of the classical communication needed.
You'd have to beam particles through the earth to do what you suggest (not currently practical), at which point you might as well use classical methods.
While the rest of your post strikes me as rather crazy, the last sentence leads to a decent "case study" on the misuse of science by fundamentalists. Research is a theme in the anti-gay movement. Both the Family Research Council (FRC) [a leading anti-gay group] and the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) [a leading ex-gay group] have it in their names. The anti-gay people who reference studies usually focus on health and other social problems. Topics include higher incidence of HIV and various STDs, various intestinal parasites, anal cancer, domestic violence and murder, promiscuity, mental health problems and suicide, whether it's a choice or genetic, illegal drug use, and pedophilia.
Here's an article about the American College of Pediatricians [the comparatively tiny anti-gay offshoot of the mainstream American Academy of Pediatrics] distorting some research:
The ACP also claimed that the longer you can keep kids from identifying as gay, the less likely they are to kill themselves. ...
In this case, Remafedi says, the ACP missed the larger point: Kids who come out at a younger age are more likely to kill themselves because they are less able to deal with the stigma and isolation of being gay. If anything, the research shows the need for more support.
"It's obvious that they didn't even read my research," Remafedi says. "I mean, they spelled my name wrong every time they cited it."
It's easy to put up a front of respectability. Here's a nice example from the Family Research Council: an hour long lecture against gay marriage. It's offered by the "FRC University Library", which is almost as respectable-sounding as the American College of Pediatricians. The format is a traditional lecture given by a middle-aged guy in a suit. If you actually listen to him, he rambles incessantly and when he makes a point his reasoning is often highly flawed (for instance, listen to his discussion of the interracial marriage analogy around 48 minutes in; the circular reasoning is just sad). But if you just look at the trappings and believe his conclusions, you might get the impression that he was a trustworthy source to base your own views on.
As I said I love Hilbert space, so your comment is enough motivation for me to write up a brief explanation.
The n-dimensional Hilbert space is the collection of length-n lists of complex numbers. One can add these lists and scale them, so for instance [1, i] + [2, 1] = [3, i+1] and 2*[i, -1] = [2i, -2]. Physically, each component of the list corresponds to a possible experimental outcome. More specifically, the probability of the outcome corresponding to the ith component is the square of the magnitude of the ith component. For the electron spin up/down experiment I talked about the wavefunction [1, 0] gives a |1|^2 = 100% chance of measuring spin up (and 0% chance of measuring spin down; this is called a pure state). [sqrt(1/3), sqrt(2/3)] corresponds to a 1/3 chance to measure spin up and 2/3rds to measure spin down. You may wonder why the magnitude-squared business is used at all (why not just keep track of the probabilities?) which is where the complex numbers come in to play. The state [sqrt(1/3), i * sqrt(2/3)] has the same experimental outcomes given this single measurement as the previous state, [sqrt(1/3), sqrt(2/3)] but it is fundamentally different from it since the two components are "out of phase". More elaborate experiments can detect the difference. In this case it turns out the result of the spin left/right experiment is encoded in the phase difference between the two components.
Hilbert space comes with an important operation called an inner product, which I'll denote by the term "dot". It can "single out" the entry at a particular position in a list. For instance, by definition [1, i] dot [0, 1] = i, singling out the second component. The operation is extended to more general lists on the right-hand-side by rules I won't discuss, and it has a physical interpretation in terms of probabilities--the magnitude of (A dot B) squared is the probability of measuring a particle with wavefunction A in the state described by wavefunction B, which fits what I said above in light of the computation |[sqrt(1/3), sqrt(2/3)] dot [1, 0]|^2 = |sqrt(1/3)|^2 = 1/3. Note that the sum of the squares of the magnitudes of the entries in the list must be 1 since the experiment will have some outcome with 100% certainty.
One can have infinite dimensional Hilbert space where the lists are allowed to have infinite length. Sequence space is a popular example: it contains [1/1, i/2, 1/3, i/4, 1/5, ...] and [0, 1, 0, 0, 0, ...]. We often restrict ourselves to lists where the sum of the magnitudes squared are 1 since these are the only physically meaningful wavefunctions, giving the so-called projective Hilbert space. [1, 1, 1, ...] is certainly not in that space since it has infinite sum-of-squares. Actually, [1/1, i/2, 1/3, i/4, 1/5, ...] doesn't work here either, but sqrt(6)/pi * [1/1, i/2, 1/3, i/4, 1/5, ...] does work. (There's a beautiful proof using Parseval's theorem.) [1, 1, 1, ...] fails particularly badly since it cannot be scaled to an element of projective Hilbert space as we were able to do with the other list, so we don't allow it in regular Hilbert space at all. Any other lists that have infinite sum-of-squares are similarly excluded. The inner product is extended in a natural way to infinite lists. That's all the structure one requires.
I should note that Hilbert space is more often defined as an abstract vector space over the complex numbers equipped with a positive-definite sesquilinear inner product which is moreover Cauchy complete with respect to the induced norm. Projective Hilbert space is usually defined as projective equivalence classes over a Hilbert space with semi-canonical norm-1 representatives. My definitions are equivalent, assuming the axiom of choice (everybody does), and they're obviously more accessible (though it's much less pretty IMO). I should also mention that wavefunctions and elements of Hilbert space are usually written with the bra-ket notation and as sums of pure states (as the paper does); my notation is from Python and was chosen considering the audience.
The article confused me greatly so I read some of the arxiv preprint linked above. Here's the idea and context as I understand it. I've included some basic quantum background since most people here don't have it.
* Intro to wavefunctions via an example. Electrons have a property called "spin" which has two states, "up" or "down". These can be measured in, for instance, the Stern-Gerlach experiment where those electrons with spin up are deflected up by a magnetic field and those with spin down go down. The wavefunction corresponds to a list of the probability of each outcome occurring. The probabilities evolve through time via the Schrodinger equation which allows predictions to be made. One might prepare an electron where its spin wavefunction corresponds to the list [1/3, 2/3], so 1/3 of the particles go up and 2/3rds go down. [I've oversimplified; wavefunctions are actually elements of an abstract Hilbert space and complex-number amplitudes are used instead of real-number probabilities. I love Hilbert space but it's too much to explain here.]
* Spin is not a classical property. One can measure spin "left" and "right" in addition to "up" and "down" by rotating the Stern-Gerlach (SG) device mentioned above and measuring left/right deflection. Suppose you run a stream of electrons through an up/down SG device which gives 80% of them "up". You then run those "up" electrons through a left/right SG device--it will always come out with 50% "left" and 50% "right". Even more strangely, if you then run the "left" electrons through another up/down SG device, the probabilities will now be 50%/50%, even though you selected only spin up electrons at the first stage so you'd expect 100%/0%. The act of going through the left/right device altered the spin up/down state somehow.
* Hidden variables. Perhaps the electrons above have definite "spin vertical" and "spin horizontal" properties before the experiment starts. The act of going through a device must change the other property, though everything might be deterministic if there is some further hidden property controlling which electrons have their spin up/down states altered in which ways by passing through the "left" SG device. The alternative is that there are no definite properties which determine the wavefunction; the wavefunction is all there is, reality is somehow fundamentally probabilistic, and the wavefunction is "real" instead of a statistical construct.
* Bell's theorem. Suppose spin up/down and spin left/right are definite properties and some hidden variables explain the above results. Using entanglement (which I'll leave undefined) and the assumption that information cannot travel faster than light, one can measure both the spin left/right and spin up/down values of a particle before the hidden variables have a chance to act (note: they might act in a very bizarre, perhaps even non-deterministic, manner, but we get to measure things before they have that chance). This gives a testable prediction which differs from quantum mechanics. If the experiment is performed, the "definite property" theory does not predict reality while the use of wavefunctions does predict reality. This is strong evidence for the reality of wavefunctions, though it's not completely conclusive.
* The paper. It derives Bell's fundamental contradiction from fewer assumptions. In its own words,
The result is in the same spirit as Bell's theorem, which states that no local theory [i.e. one without faster-than-light communication] can reproduce the predictions of quantum theory. Both theorems need to assume that a system has a objective physical state L such that probabilities for measurement outcomes depend only on L. But our theorem only assumes this for systems prepared in isolation from the rest of the universe in a quantum pure state [e.g. a particle measured as spin "up" right after the SG experiment above]. This is unlike
but the point is that it continues to pick up steam
Really? I see one active contributor on these five SciRuby repos (who is responsible for the "flurry of activity" you describe) with an overall trend downwards. The port you linked is also essentially inactive, though it may simply be complete. By contrast there's half a dozen different contributors on the first numpy commit page I linked alone.
OT: Nice Bach piece by the way. Why did you pick it?
I agree that since this doesn't have a lot of contributors it isn't a huge waste of time, though that's not a good argument. The question is if it's worth the resources to reinvent the wheel (even just porting entails a lot of work, and I'm not sure that's what they're after here) just so people can use their preferred language. I would say no since the difference between the languages isn't enormous. It's unfortunate, but tradeoffs need to be made and not every language can have nice numerical and algebraic libraries. Oh well.
As for (in)activity, the fellowship is quite small ($1500 stipend) and the nmatrix commits you mention have essentially one contributor. That's also the current most active SciRuby repo with the others being essentially flatlined for months.
If you actually like the project, perhaps you should contribute. It seems they could use people badly. You may be right about innovation; one never knows.
The SciRuby Manifesto does discuss the question, "Why Ruby?"
Why Ruby?
First and least, Ruby is a language with a sense of humor.
But more importantly, numerical computation and visualization can be done much better in Ruby, for a number of reasons:
''Everything returns a value.'' Ruby's better object model means better chaining of computation.
''Iterators'' are way better than ''for'' loops (each_slice, each_cons, etc.).
''Readability.'' Ruby is incredibly readable, which makes it uber-maintainable.
''Metaprogramming.'' Sometimes the simplest solution is to write a [http://github.com/wycats/thor code generator]. Sometimes, eigenclasses are the cleanest.
''Integration into Rails.'' The influence of Rails on Ruby is undeniable. Web-based visualization for scientific projects is the future.
''R is nice but clunky.'' The learning curve is enormous. It does some things very well, and others not very well at all (try doing a multi-line plot in R).
Unfortunately it ignores the alternative of just using Python.
There's also a (I'll be charitable) silly discussion in this vein on the same page:
Ruby has no equivalent to the beautifully constructed numpy, scipy, and matplotlib libraries for Python. We believe that the time for a Ruby science and visualization package has come and gone. Sometimes when a solution of sugar and water becomes super-saturated, from it precipitates a pure, delicious, and diabetes-inducing crystal of sweetness, induced by no more than the tap of a finger. So it is, we believe, with the need for numeric and visualization libraries in Ruby.
IMO, this is a misguided waste of time and it's nearly inactive anyway.
The fellowship is a summer long with only a $1,500 stipend. The most recent commit is from December 1st, 2011. The wiki and issue tracker appear to be similarly inactive. Even if the project does something, it probably won't do much; contrast it with numpy commits which are recent and numerous.
This story should never have been accepted. There are a million minor projects like this that similarly aren't newsworthy enough to discuss.
Python already has a single-line if:
if (not checkedUp()): checkUp()
if (not checkedDown()): checkDown()
is valid Python. I've never felt constrained by Python's indentation style. My experience isn't extensive, though; maybe a few thousand lines.
As I said, "Of course, neither is it at all conclusive. I only bring up this argument to illustrate [other points]".
Also, the probability that we happen to be exactly in the X% of the human history we actualy are is zero. That doesn't bring any information about the longevity of our species.
While true, this is unhelpful. The same can be said of the position of a baseball as it flies out of a stadium, even though given a reading of a clock on the in-flight baseball one could compute with some confidence the probability distribution of which % of the flight the baseball was actually in when the reading took place. The speciousness of my original argument lies elsewhere.
Oddly enough we seem to agree. I find your post annoying and your reading comprehension poor; here's why.
Annoying: I admitted the weakness of my reasoning yet you still felt the need to sarcastically deconstruct it. I would hope your main objection--selection bias--is completely obvious to anyone, so I didn't feel the need to bring it up. There are other objections to my argument, like how it displays broken behavior in the limit as civilization lifespan goes to infinity and the impossibility of properly weighting lifespan lengths for computation of the relevant expected value. I meant not "at all conclusive" literally: one cannot draw real-life conclusions from it. I went on to say that I only brought it up to illustrate other points. A specious argument can still have value, not in proving its conclusion, but in other ways.
I also find the phrases "specious BS", "downright spooky", and "deeply paranoid" annoying since they hide content--in each case it would have been more informative to expand them to actual sentences. I'm particularly curious what you meant by "deeply paranoid", since I haven't read any sci-fi with the premise you mention.
Poor reading comprehension: I was discussing the "(im)probability of contact with aliens", so the question is not whether there is "other intelligent life anywhere in the universe" (as the bulk of your post discusses), but whether other life will contact us. Some estimates of the Drake equation give on the order of 1 civilization we're capable of communicating with in our galaxy, so maybe there's just nobody out there for us to talk to right now. Other estimates vary wildly and there are serious objections to the Drake equation, but the uncertainty is the key thing. We actually seem to agree there--"There's simply not enough information to draw conclusions either way about the (im)probability of contact with aliens". There is probably enough information to say with reasonable confidence that some other intelligent life exists somewhere in the universe, but that's not what I was talking about.
The article title, subtitle, and "the gist" didn't do a good job of engaging my own attention since they all talked about very standard genetic evolution. How it was written rather than its actual content was more interesting. Your second paragraph is the reverse, though; thanks for the link.
That for as long as the universe has been kicking around and as big as it's managed to get, we've yet to see the faintest signs of this happening on any other planet?
Eh, it's not necessarily that surprising. Perhaps most civilizations destroy themselves quickly. If humans will last for 10 million years, it's highly improbable that you and I would happen to be in the first ~0.05% of human history, with significantly lower odds if our population explodes with colonies on other planets during that time. The only evidence we have for the longevity of humanity is not encouraging.
Of course, neither is it at all conclusive. I only bring up this argument to illustrate the wild uncertainty in our knowledge of both ourselves and the universe, and to illustrate the arrogance of humans' silly sci-fi-esque concept of alien civilizations. There's simply not enough information to draw conclusions either way about the (im)probability of contact with aliens. Honestly, if you want to believe in intelligent design, go for it, just don't let it affect your opinion on social matters and we'll get along fine.
The mechanism failed in its task, no matter whether that mechanism itself was designed or evolved
If the mechanism was designed, it was designed to fail sometimes so that humans would result--an intentional failure is not a mistake.
If the mechanism evolved, it evolved to fail sometimes since once in a while those failures are beneficial mutations which is a mechanism that would have already proven its usefulness via natural selection--again this is not a mistake.
The term "mistake" is probably attention-grabbing journalistic crap (the article is titled "Did a Copying Mistake Make Humans So Smart?") since using "mistake" instead of "error" tells a slightly more compelling story with the implication of an anthropomorphic actor doing the copying. The main article text in fact uses "error". Of course the title and subtitle may simply be imprecise. Perhaps they're the result of someone who didn't write the article proper, considering the change in term. The subtitle also has a stylistic difference from the article text--it has no comma or other punctuation. Every sentence of comparable length in the rest of the article (around 15 of them) has a comma, colon, dash, etc., with only one exception, supporting my "someone else wrote the title and subtitle" theory, perhaps someone more interested in page views than providing information.
With C#.NET you have two choices for UI's: WinForms (old style, higher adoption) and WPF (new style, lower adoption). WPF has a steep learning curve, a lot of powerful features, and a lot of quirks--in my experience (as a rule of thumb) older people don't like it, younger people do.
If you're looking for a way to make Windows-only GUI-based apps, C#.NET Express is a great way to go. If you're looking for a challenge and some interesting ideas, go WPF, if not go WinForms.
Or are you suggesting it's ok to get caught in a lie as long as the accuser has a motivation other than pure honesty for calling you on it?
Nope. I must have been unclear since another person in these comments inferred the same thing. The person lying and the accuser's actions are separate. In this particular case the lie itself matters very little--it's not like he would be a much more qualified CEO because his undergraduate degree ~30 years ago was in CS rather than accounting. The real issue is the clumsy act of deception. Whether or not the accuser himself was dishonest doesn't change how the CEO should be dealt with.
As for honesty, perhaps you're right and most CEOs are honest (most people are, yes; I was imagining the CEO job attracts dishonest people), though in either case I want competence in a CEO in whatever they do, including their lies.
My issue with Loeb is misrepresenting his motivations--he was described as just an "activist" in the first article I read, whereas here he's a shareholder wanting new leadership. Simply wanting a change in company leadership isn't inherently wrong, and exposing a lie of the current leadership to bring about that change is also not inherently bad. Just be up front about it--"I think Jimbo is a terrible CEO and will squander my investment. Kim here would do better. As evidence that Jimbo is awful, he lied on his resume."
Digging up dirt on a guy you want to see gone and then publicly posting it on the internet while posing as the good guy who's just fighting for the truth (as opposed to a shareholder with a personal stake in things) is worse in my book than lying about your college major after graduating decades ago and leading another tech company in the meantime.
I'd like to say I don't necessarily believe TFA's version of events, at least not without a second source corroborating it and Loeb getting a chance to have his say, but getting to the truth of this matter is so unimportant to me personally that I'm willing to just roll with it for the sake of discussion.
Man, in light of the above, I really need something to fill my time. I should get a boyfriend. Or a dog.
I'm sorry but I have to ask: is your handle intentionally similar to "virgin anus"?
The summary missed perhaps the most interesting part of the article:
The guy who broke the news about the phony degree is Dan Loeb, a hedge-fund manager and activist shareholder whose company owns a 5 percent stake in Yahoo, making it the largest outside shareholder. He’s been pushing Yahoo to get rid of some board members and put him and three other nominees on the board instead. Yahoo won’t do it. So now Loeb creates a public-relations nightmare for them, and maybe this will help his chances of getting his board seats.
The point being that everyone is dishonest, and while this guy got caught in a particularly clear-cut case of dishonesty, it's not very important, and it's not at all as bad as what the guy who accused him is doing. I agree with him there. The only thing I wonder about is the intelligence of a guy who felt the need to lie about his degree when it matters so little given his work experience and which can easily be checked. Sadly I question the competence of a CEO who can't lie well. Maybe that's what the board is really investigating.
Ah sure, my experience is 4.0.
Everything different grates on someone's old ears; forgive me, but I don't really care. If your only objection to something is no more than a vague distaste, you should at least keep your opinion to yourself and not try forcing it on others. Either have a good reason to dislike something or stay out of it.
I haven't heard a single substantive argument for barring singular "they" and "them"--calling their use "incorrect" or "ungrammatical" is not sufficient. On the other hand, there are a number of good reasons to allow this usage: it fills a genuinely useful niche in language, it avoids the subtly sexist gender-neutral "he", and most English speakers use it in everyday life already.