One of my friends was an associate professor at CalTech; he left to become a full professor at Stanford. He says that it is easier to be hired as a professor at CalTech than admitted as a student; he says this with his tongue planted in his cheek but it does reflect the exclusiveness of CalTech.
A high school student who took the calculus sequence from me and took a year of ODE courses here applied to Harvard, MIT, CalTech and Stanford. He was admitted to Harvard and MIT but not Stanford; I do not recall but I think he was accepted by CalTech also. He decided to visit MIT and Harvard and pick one. He is now a senior math major at Harvard. So who is best? Stanford?
Now you are sounding like a serious person and not a troll. You said "More to the point, I don't think your arguments are very relevant.". I do not recall taking a position except this stuff is interesting. I originally said a colleague of mine in physics who does QM thought there might be sometime to this, I tried to point out that it might be difficult to find an experiment which differentiates between "ordinary black holes" and "dark energy black holes" (and my first idea of Hawking radiation would not work), one might try mathematical models of each and check mathematical (and physical) consistency, I wondered if I was talking to a physicist or a troll (hence the background question), etc. I think if you go back over your posts, you will see that they take a negative tone from the beginning (e.g. you seem offended that someone in QM might investigate black holes, you seem to think mathematicians only consider "pie-in-the-shy" theories which ignore reality, you seem offended that mathematicians would even comment on physics, etc.).
I do not "believe in" dark energy or in exotic dark matter and I have serious questions about inflation. Maybe someday I will discover a new conservation law which makes the initial universe extremely smooth and eliminates the need for inflation and win a Noble prize in physics?:-) (This is just a joke!)
Anyway, I seriously doubt that "dark energy black holes" exist but the idea is kind of interesting. Finally, there is a difference between people who have done independent research (and publication) in math or science and people who have not; I gave a little background information so that you could see that I know what research is and I wondered about your research record so I could see if you should be taken seriously.
Sorry, I do not claim to do physics research. One of my colleagues has two PhDs and was a physics professor (dissertation on statistical mechanics) before he got his second PhD and switched fields. I have several friends who are physicists. I try to follow physics but am not an expert. However, since I am in (mathematical) analysis, I probably know more about physics research in areas of my interest than I do about current research on ring theory or group theory. I was just curious about the person with whom I was "speaking"; you seem very defensive about physics. For example, I believe the only area of statistical mechanics which makes predictions roughly corresponding to observations is equilibrium statistical mechanics. Anyway, you do not seem to think much of quantum mechanics or mathematics and I am bored with you.
Some of this seems kind of pointless. Since you are posting AC, you might be some physics grad student at Berkeley trying (unsuccessfully) to get a PhD advisor. If I am going to waste my time on this thread, how about a little background info?
For me: PhD 1981 in math, served on a PhD committee at Stanford on February 28, 2005, spent the summer of 2003 at a Max Planck Institute, spent three weeks at ANU earlier this year, have a paper which received a Featured Review, etc. (It does not mean anything but my PhD advisor's PhD advisor received the Abel prize last year.)
In general, I agree with you. However, some things you say are obvious (e.g.
"That's true, but part of the consistency check is compatibility with existing theories" and "Mathematicians can invent infinitely many models, but unless they've got something to do with our universe, who cares?") and I did not think I needed to state the obvious. Of course, this needs to be taken in the same sense as in physics, where some accepted theories cannot predict observed effects (e.g. statistical mechanics and the macroscopic world).
I have doubts about dark energy in general and I agree with your comment
"Unless a mechanism can be demonstrated whereby it is plausible that compressed matter will undergo this kind of phase transition, it is more reasonable to assume that no transition will take place". However, your conclusion "and an ordinary black hole will form" reflects the historical accident that "ordinary black holes" were proposed first. GR has trouble with a singularity (i.e. an incomplete geodesic on a Lorentz manifold) and does not even recognize an "event horizon" except indirectly in terms of the escape (or failure to escape) of photons. Your comment "General relativity is expected to describe the interior of a black hole just as well as the exterior, unless you're very close to the singularity" represents a situation which cannot be experimental tested inside the event horizon (according to GR) and therefore has little value.
"Black Holes exist because this equation says they will"
If someone (e.g.
Dirac) said "Positrons exist because the (Dirac) equation says they do", would you disagree?:-)
" The best Chapline could do was some handwaving regarding a particular speculative Grand Unified Theory (for which we have no evidence), and we don't even know enough about that to do a real calculation."
As you should know, the real test (in physics) is an experiment which can differentiate between "classical" black holes and these "dark energy" black holes. It appears that the existence or nonexistence of Hawking radiation will not serve as this test. To the best of my knowledge, there are few reasonable theories of what happens inside the event horizon of a "black hole" (or "frozen star") and "classical physics" (i.e. the most commonly accepted theories in physics, not Newtonian mechanics) has none. If no experiment is possible (with our curent resources), then the next best test is the consistency of the mathematical models. I believe there are mathematicians (especially differential geometers) who might be able to combine functional analysis (i.e. quantum mechanics) with Lorentz manifolds and other topics in math to provide interesting mathematical models.
"When it comes to black holes, you'd be better off asking someone who does gravity, or astrophysics. What do quantum mechanics know about black holes?"
Actually, no one knows about (the interior of) "black holes". For example,
Hawking radiation depends on quantum mechanics and very intense gravity outside the event horizon (which sucks one of the virtual particles back into the "black hole"). (Note: This explaination of Hawking radiation may be completely wrong.) Quantum mechanics plays a huge role in this new theory and in Hawking radiation. By the way, did you read the article? For example: Quantum transitions
However, as long ago as 1975 quantum physicists argued that strange things do happen at an event horizon: matter governed by quantum laws becomes hypersensitive to slight disturbances. "The result was quickly forgotten," says Chapline, "because it didn't agree with the prediction of general relativity. But actually, it was absolutely correct."
This strange behaviour, he says, is the signature of a 'quantum phase transition' of space-time. Chapline argues that a star doesn't simply collapse to form a black hole; instead, the space-time inside it becomes filled with dark energy and this has some intriguing gravitational effects.
I showed this to my friend, who is chair of the physics department and works on quantum mechanics, and she said that this "feels right" and probably is important. As a mathematician, I do not do quantum mechanics; however, she always has NSF grants and seems pretty sharp to me.
You can get a reprimand, for example, if the peak of your bell distribution is on B instead of C.
I have never heard of this before and I am a professor at a state university (which offers degrees up to the PhD). I am good friends with faculty at Stanford, Texas A&M, Oregon State, U. Waterloo, Georgia Tech, U. Toledo, etc. and have never heard of this. I feel free to give all of my students As or Fs depending on the quality of their work and I have had classes where most students failed and other classes where most students got As. If the average in a graduate class is C, something is wrong.
This comment reminds me of a story by my (deceased) father-in-law. He got a perfect score on a quiz and received a grade of C; his last name started with the letter "R" and the professor had taken the class list (written in alphabetical order) and given perfect quizes grades of A until he/she had "used up" all the A grades, then had given perfect quizes grades of B until he/she had "used up" all the B grades, etc. down the class list. Your comment makes me think of this kind of stupidity.
As a professor, I have to think "students exchange sexual favors for grades" is very uncommon, not totally absent but not at all common. As a (male) undergraduate student (many years ago), I had an older (female) English professor come on to me; I played dumb and did not notice her hints but I met a guy later who slept with her once a week for a grade (A). There is no question that this kind of thing happens but a professor is risking her/his career and it is just not worth it. Some professor in the law school at the University of Kansas lost his job because of a blow job (10 years ago?). Faculty at UC Berkeley had some problems 10-15 years ago because of sexual issues. These are just the first two examples to come to mind; I would guess there are more ( well, the University of Colorado except no one lost a job because of rape - only the university president resigned). A faculty member would be crazy to trade a little sex for a career; most people in academia are not this dumb.
I doubt that a degree in math will ever be "in vogue" or "the popular degree for slackers." On the other hand, you will need to learn something to obtain a math degree and not every major requires this.
Does Sun own ECC? "Sun's elliptic curve cryptography in OpenSSL"
Neal Koblitz gave a talk about ECC at one of the
CCC
conferences. From here,
we find Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) was proposed by Victor Miller and Neal Koblitz in the mid 1980s.
"Pu-Dunk Kansas"
I thought the story was about the state of Washington. (What was I smoking?) So I thought I would check and see how close or far from the truth was your comment. I found:
Wichita State University is home to the National Institute for Aviation Research, a major research site that includes crash test laboratories, as well as wind and water tunnels for aerodynamic testing.here,
NIAR also dedicated its new crash test lab. Tomblin says the old lab relied on the test sled hitting a brick wall. The new one has a system where the wall hits the sled. The test sled is accelerated from zero to 50 miles per hour in milliseconds.
"What this allows us to do is take advanced crashworthiness technology and put it in the aviation industry," Tomblin says. "Things like airbags, inflatable seat belts, new advanced seats that will survive crashes and use it to design cockpits for passengers and pilots to able survive crashes."
New research projects are scheduled to start in both facilities in February.
here
Looks like you don't know geography or crash testing.
I'm sorry but you sound like a complete idiot. The individuals who modded you Insightful must be smoking some good stuff.
"I actually think that HP's actual products have really improved over the past few years"
Have you ever heard of HP printers? Do you realize that the reputation of recent HP printers is very poor?
It is fashionable to berate university education. Perhaps a degree in film production isn't worth much. "20 years of real experience in a particular industry is better than 4 years of fake "experience" at a college anyway."
I spent three years getting a BA in math and then five years getting a PhD in math. My university education certainly constituted fake "experience";
after such a poor start, I was not able to get a position as a faculty member, become full professor or give lectures at ANU last fall. I surely will not be giving a lecture at Stanford in a few weeks. I certainly do not have a former student who wrote a professional math paper with me, attended a NSF-REU at Cornell and obtained a very nice job at Ernst & Young in NYC with only a BS in math. There are certainly not tens of thousands of really smart people "out there" with degrees in mathematics who use the education they received to succeed in their careers. (Who is this guy Don Knuth and why should we care about someone with a PhD in math?)
This would reduce the number of zombie PCs in the world, eliminate the MS Internet Explorer exploits, probably greatly reduce the number and severity of automatically spreading virus, worm, etc. exploits and assist in closing security holes. It would not eliminate all problems but would reduce them greatly.
I use Gentoo. Using "emerge sync", "etc-update", "emerge -u world", "emerge -u -d world", etc., it is possible to install the latest e-builds (with, hopefully, security patches for problems which are unknown to the user) in a simple and painless way. This is not perfect since suggested changes to config files can mess things up; I would like Gentoo to look into improving this for "mom and pop" users. Could an ordinary Windows user go through all of the Gentoo stages? I doubt it. Could they use a Live CD to install Gentoo? Maybe. Drivers are a big problem, of course. Trying to use Wine, "WineX", Win4Lin, etc would be a pain. People would have to give up many applications (e.g. games). I doubt that they would want to do this. However, the functionality of MS applications (e.g. email, web browsing, graphics) exists in FOSS now. I do not expect anything to change but the world would be better if it did.
Because of that Microsoft has been forcing it's employees to only drink Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey since 1984.
Now I know why they are so happy.
Re:Not Representative of MSFT
on
Microsoft in 2008
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
One of our current graduate students worked at MS for approximately ten years and was heavily involved in the development of one of their well known products. He said there were many extremely smart people at MS. These people generally had huge egos and did not accept criticism well. The end result was products which did not work well because person A and person B did not write compatable code but it all was put into the final product. He liked MS as a place to work but for whatever reason decided to get his PhD in math. (I know, math PhDs are really easy to get; you don't need to be smart to get one.):-)
When I was in Australia in October, I took the new US $50 bills I had picked up before flying to Canberra. The bank looked at them for about 20 minutes before exchanging money. (Waiting in LAX for my flight to Sydney, I had no trouble exchanging money, of couse.)
I will not go into a Best Buy. I think their business practices have been discussed in the past here; it is stupid to buy from them. (Bad personal experience with BB.)
Slashdot Mirror
One of my friends was an associate professor at CalTech; he left to become a full professor at Stanford. He says that it is easier to be hired as a professor at CalTech than admitted as a student; he says this with his tongue planted in his cheek but it does reflect the exclusiveness of CalTech.
A high school student who took the calculus sequence from me and took a year of ODE courses here applied to Harvard, MIT, CalTech and Stanford. He was admitted to Harvard and MIT but not Stanford; I do not recall but I think he was accepted by CalTech also. He decided to visit MIT and Harvard and pick one. He is now a senior math major at Harvard. So who is best? Stanford?
Now you are sounding like a serious person and not a troll. You said "More to the point, I don't think your arguments are very relevant.". I do not recall taking a position except this stuff is interesting. I originally said a colleague of mine in physics who does QM thought there might be sometime to this, I tried to point out that it might be difficult to find an experiment which differentiates between "ordinary black holes" and "dark energy black holes" (and my first idea of Hawking radiation would not work), one might try mathematical models of each and check mathematical (and physical) consistency, I wondered if I was talking to a physicist or a troll (hence the background question), etc. I think if you go back over your posts, you will see that they take a negative tone from the beginning (e.g. you seem offended that someone in QM might investigate black holes, you seem to think mathematicians only consider "pie-in-the-shy" theories which ignore reality, you seem offended that mathematicians would even comment on physics, etc.).
:-) (This is just a joke!)
Anyway, I seriously doubt that "dark energy black holes" exist but the idea is kind of interesting. Finally, there is a difference between people who have done independent research (and publication) in math or science and people who have not; I gave a little background information so that you could see that I know what research is and I wondered about your research record so I could see if you should be taken seriously.
I do not "believe in" dark energy or in exotic dark matter and I have serious questions about inflation. Maybe someday I will discover a new conservation law which makes the initial universe extremely smooth and eliminates the need for inflation and win a Noble prize in physics?
Sorry, I do not claim to do physics research. One of my colleagues has two PhDs and was a physics professor (dissertation on statistical mechanics) before he got his second PhD and switched fields. I have several friends who are physicists. I try to follow physics but am not an expert. However, since I am in (mathematical) analysis, I probably know more about physics research in areas of my interest than I do about current research on ring theory or group theory. I was just curious about the person with whom I was "speaking"; you seem very defensive about physics. For example, I believe the only area of statistical mechanics which makes predictions roughly corresponding to observations is equilibrium statistical mechanics. Anyway, you do not seem to think much of quantum mechanics or mathematics and I am bored with you.
Some of this seems kind of pointless. Since you are posting AC, you might be some physics grad student at Berkeley trying (unsuccessfully) to get a PhD advisor. If I am going to waste my time on this thread, how about a little background info?
For me: PhD 1981 in math, served on a PhD committee at Stanford on February 28, 2005, spent the summer of 2003 at a Max Planck Institute, spent three weeks at ANU earlier this year, have a paper which received a Featured Review, etc. (It does not mean anything but my PhD advisor's PhD advisor received the Abel prize last year.)
In general, I agree with you. However, some things you say are obvious (e.g. "That's true, but part of the consistency check is compatibility with existing theories" and "Mathematicians can invent infinitely many models, but unless they've got something to do with our universe, who cares?") and I did not think I needed to state the obvious. Of course, this needs to be taken in the same sense as in physics, where some accepted theories cannot predict observed effects (e.g. statistical mechanics and the macroscopic world).
I have doubts about dark energy in general and I agree with your comment "Unless a mechanism can be demonstrated whereby it is plausible that compressed matter will undergo this kind of phase transition, it is more reasonable to assume that no transition will take place". However, your conclusion "and an ordinary black hole will form" reflects the historical accident that "ordinary black holes" were proposed first. GR has trouble with a singularity (i.e. an incomplete geodesic on a Lorentz manifold) and does not even recognize an "event horizon" except indirectly in terms of the escape (or failure to escape) of photons. Your comment "General relativity is expected to describe the interior of a black hole just as well as the exterior, unless you're very close to the singularity" represents a situation which cannot be experimental tested inside the event horizon (according to GR) and therefore has little value.
"Black Holes exist because this equation says they will" :-)
If someone (e.g. Dirac) said "Positrons exist because the (Dirac) equation says they do", would you disagree?
" The best Chapline could do was some handwaving regarding a particular speculative Grand Unified Theory (for which we have no evidence), and we don't even know enough about that to do a real calculation."
As you should know, the real test (in physics) is an experiment which can differentiate between "classical" black holes and these "dark energy" black holes. It appears that the existence or nonexistence of Hawking radiation will not serve as this test. To the best of my knowledge, there are few reasonable theories of what happens inside the event horizon of a "black hole" (or "frozen star") and "classical physics" (i.e. the most commonly accepted theories in physics, not Newtonian mechanics) has none. If no experiment is possible (with our curent resources), then the next best test is the consistency of the mathematical models. I believe there are mathematicians (especially differential geometers) who might be able to combine functional analysis (i.e. quantum mechanics) with Lorentz manifolds and other topics in math to provide interesting mathematical models.
"When it comes to black holes, you'd be better off asking someone who does gravity, or astrophysics. What do quantum mechanics know about black holes?"
Actually, no one knows about (the interior of) "black holes". For example, Hawking radiation depends on quantum mechanics and very intense gravity outside the event horizon (which sucks one of the virtual particles back into the "black hole"). (Note: This explaination of Hawking radiation may be completely wrong.) Quantum mechanics plays a huge role in this new theory and in Hawking radiation. By the way, did you read the article? For example:
Quantum transitions
However, as long ago as 1975 quantum physicists argued that strange things do happen at an event horizon: matter governed by quantum laws becomes hypersensitive to slight disturbances. "The result was quickly forgotten," says Chapline, "because it didn't agree with the prediction of general relativity. But actually, it was absolutely correct."
This strange behaviour, he says, is the signature of a 'quantum phase transition' of space-time. Chapline argues that a star doesn't simply collapse to form a black hole; instead, the space-time inside it becomes filled with dark energy and this has some intriguing gravitational effects.
I showed this to my friend, who is chair of the physics department and works on quantum mechanics, and she said that this "feels right" and probably is important. As a mathematician, I do not do quantum mechanics; however, she always has NSF grants and seems pretty sharp to me.
You can get a reprimand, for example, if the peak of your bell distribution is on B instead of C.
I have never heard of this before and I am a professor at a state university (which offers degrees up to the PhD). I am good friends with faculty at Stanford, Texas A&M, Oregon State, U. Waterloo, Georgia Tech, U. Toledo, etc. and have never heard of this. I feel free to give all of my students As or Fs depending on the quality of their work and I have had classes where most students failed and other classes where most students got As. If the average in a graduate class is C, something is wrong. This comment reminds me of a story by my (deceased) father-in-law. He got a perfect score on a quiz and received a grade of C; his last name started with the letter "R" and the professor had taken the class list (written in alphabetical order) and given perfect quizes grades of A until he/she had "used up" all the A grades, then had given perfect quizes grades of B until he/she had "used up" all the B grades, etc. down the class list. Your comment makes me think of this kind of stupidity.
OK, give me some examples.
As a professor, I have to think "students exchange sexual favors for grades" is very uncommon, not totally absent but not at all common. As a (male) undergraduate student (many years ago), I had an older (female) English professor come on to me; I played dumb and did not notice her hints but I met a guy later who slept with her once a week for a grade (A). There is no question that this kind of thing happens but a professor is risking her/his career and it is just not worth it. Some professor in the law school at the University of Kansas lost his job because of a blow job (10 years ago?). Faculty at UC Berkeley had some problems 10-15 years ago because of sexual issues. These are just the first two examples to come to mind; I would guess there are more ( well, the University of Colorado except no one lost a job because of rape - only the university president resigned). A faculty member would be crazy to trade a little sex for a career; most people in academia are not this dumb.
I doubt that a degree in math will ever be "in vogue" or "the popular degree for slackers." On the other hand, you will need to learn something to obtain a math degree and not every major requires this.
Does Sun own ECC? "Sun's elliptic curve cryptography in OpenSSL"
Neal Koblitz gave a talk about ECC at one of the CCC conferences. From here, we find
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) was proposed by Victor Miller and Neal Koblitz in the mid 1980s.
So what does Sun have to do with all this?
"Pu-Dunk Kansas"
I thought the story was about the state of Washington. (What was I smoking?) So I thought I would check and see how close or far from the truth was your comment. I found:
Wichita State University is home to the National Institute for Aviation Research, a major research site that includes crash test laboratories, as well as wind and water tunnels for aerodynamic testing. here,
NIAR also dedicated its new crash test lab. Tomblin says the old lab relied on the test sled hitting a brick wall. The new one has a system where the wall hits the sled. The test sled is accelerated from zero to 50 miles per hour in milliseconds.
"What this allows us to do is take advanced crashworthiness technology and put it in the aviation industry," Tomblin says. "Things like airbags, inflatable seat belts, new advanced seats that will survive crashes and use it to design cockpits for passengers and pilots to able survive crashes."
New research projects are scheduled to start in both facilities in February. here
Looks like you don't know geography or crash testing.
I'm sorry but you sound like a complete idiot. The individuals who modded you Insightful must be smoking some good stuff.
"I actually think that HP's actual products have really improved over the past few years"
Have you ever heard of HP printers? Do you realize that the reputation of recent HP printers is very poor?
It is fashionable to berate university education. Perhaps a degree in film production isn't worth much.
"20 years of real experience in a particular industry is better than 4 years of fake "experience" at a college anyway."
I spent three years getting a BA in math and then five years getting a PhD in math. My university education certainly constituted fake "experience"; after such a poor start, I was not able to get a position as a faculty member, become full professor or give lectures at ANU last fall. I surely will not be giving a lecture at Stanford in a few weeks. I certainly do not have a former student who wrote a professional math paper with me, attended a NSF-REU at Cornell and obtained a very nice job at Ernst & Young in NYC with only a BS in math. There are certainly not tens of thousands of really smart people "out there" with degrees in mathematics who use the education they received to succeed in their careers. (Who is this guy Don Knuth and why should we care about someone with a PhD in math?)
Sounds great. Maybe it (using Linux) is easier than I suggested.
This would reduce the number of zombie PCs in the world, eliminate the MS Internet Explorer exploits, probably greatly reduce the number and severity of automatically spreading virus, worm, etc. exploits and assist in closing security holes. It would not eliminate all problems but would reduce them greatly.
I use Gentoo. Using "emerge sync", "etc-update", "emerge -u world", "emerge -u -d world", etc., it is possible to install the latest e-builds (with, hopefully, security patches for problems which are unknown to the user) in a simple and painless way. This is not perfect since suggested changes to config files can mess things up; I would like Gentoo to look into improving this for "mom and pop" users. Could an ordinary Windows user go through all of the Gentoo stages? I doubt it. Could they use a Live CD to install Gentoo? Maybe. Drivers are a big problem, of course. Trying to use Wine, "WineX", Win4Lin, etc would be a pain. People would have to give up many applications (e.g. games). I doubt that they would want to do this. However, the functionality of MS applications (e.g. email, web browsing, graphics) exists in FOSS now. I do not expect anything to change but the world would be better if it did.
How about if we make everyone use Linux?
Because of that Microsoft has been forcing it's employees to only drink Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey since 1984. Now I know why they are so happy.
One of our current graduate students worked at MS for approximately ten years and was heavily involved in the development of one of their well known products. He said there were many extremely smart people at MS. These people generally had huge egos and did not accept criticism well. The end result was products which did not work well because person A and person B did not write compatable code but it all was put into the final product. He liked MS as a place to work but for whatever reason decided to get his PhD in math. (I know, math PhDs are really easy to get; you don't need to be smart to get one.) :-)
When I was in Australia in October, I took the new US $50 bills I had picked up before flying to Canberra. The bank looked at them for about 20 minutes before exchanging money. (Waiting in LAX for my flight to Sydney, I had no trouble exchanging money, of couse.)
I will not go into a Best Buy. I think their business practices have been discussed in the past here; it is stupid to buy from them. (Bad personal experience with BB.)
Earth and that comet are both places where humanity is invading, waging war, and making a total nuisance of itself... :-)
That's right; go team go.