My understanding is that the plan is for a BFR launch to be cheaper than an F9 launch in absolute terms - as in launching a tennis ball to LEO will be cheaper in a BFR than an F9, thanks primarily to the fully recoverable second stage. Of course, that's the plan - reality might take a while to catch up.
It seems to me the Heavy accomplishes several things: nothing necessarily indispensable, but potentially worth the investment when combined:
First the non-technical strategic benefits:
It substantially boosts the maximum available launch capacity in existence, exceeding anything available in several decades. Great PR, and probably helps inspire complimentary businesses (Bigelow Aerospace, etc) to be ready to make use of the BFR.
It lets SpaceX start getting considered by the bureaucracies that currently demand heavy launch capacities, so with luck SpaceX will already be at the table ready to offer their bigger/better/cheaper rocket once it's ready to go to work.
So basically it helps create a market for BFR once it gets here. Yeah, it could go around just delivering F9 payloads cheaper, except it's probably going to need a lot of flights under its belt before the up-front costs are paid off.
And then there's the technical benefits - it gives them a test platform for coordinating large numbers of engines using comparatively cheap reused engines, as well as letting them experiment with multi-rocket linkages, which will quite possibly eventually be incorporated into the BFR design if things really take off.
The Heavy is a launch platform, and is not intended as an interplanetary rocket, certainly not with there-and-back capability, though I think it's supposed to be able to deliver a small enough payload to Pluto (orbit, I presume). Return capability will come with the the BFR. And even the BFR will need refueling facilities on the surface of the destination planet, though the plan is to be able to make it to the moon and back if fully refueled in a high Earth orbit first, which should put most other moons in range too, if transit time isn't an issue so that gravitational slingshots can be used.
And it has been proven useful - it delivered a substantial payload to a beyond-Mars transfer orbit. That the payload was useless is immaterial - the Heavy isn't a space probe, it's a launch system - the quality of its functionality begins and ends with the orbital characteristics it can impart to its payload.
As I see it, the Heavy is a stopgap solution and technology development platform. - It gives SpaceX the greatest current launch payload available on the planet, by a substantial margin. Good for PR, inspiring complementary businesses (Bigelow Aerospace for example), and helping them get their foot in the door with bureaucracies that have occasional heavy launch needs. - It also gives SpaceX a platform to refine their multi-core launch technology - because you know that sooner or later they're going to want to do the same thing with the BFR - why have to stop to refuel on the way to the moon? Might even be able to make it to Mars and back without any infrastructure with enough extra engines strapped on - refuel right before landing, and again once back in orbit? Might work, and would make those first few outpost construction landings a lot less do-or-die.
Or more accurately, your orbit needs to intersect its orbit, which is a far larger set of orbits that allow for collisions. Every time you pass through the intersection on your orbit, it will be at a slightly different place in its own orbit, and sooner or later you will collide.
Orbits also don't remain constant - interaction with the magnetosphere, solar wind, gravitational anomalies, trace atmosphere fluctuations, etc. all chaotically manipulate everything's path so that nothing ever stays in the orbit where you left it. You you have to actively track everything to keep track of where it really is.
Non-minimalist adds seem pretty rare on their pages, and while the page itself and all the data they track is growing ever larger, I think the ads are still the primary way they monetize all that surveillance data.
This is mostly true - except for the fact that "based on current trends" inherently assumes that negative growth rate continues to spread into populations that are currently still tending towards having large families. Heck, I'm in a U.S. town where 3-4 children is still fairly common among a large percentage of the population.
Population growth, negative or otherwise, isn't distributed evenly even within a country's population, any more than it's distributed evenly globally. And the demographics that tend towards larger family sizes will inevitably become a larger proportion of the population. Empowering those demographics to make that choice intentionally kills three birds with one stone - it helps the individuals involved avoid the personal costs of their eventual demographic "victory", it delays that victory to the benefit of the "beleaguered white" crowd, and it helps sustain the trends that will let us peak at only 11B people. I consider two of those worthy goals in their own right, and if you embrace the ideals of democracy you must give at least grudging acceptance to the validity of the third.
Religion and other cultural expectations are the reason I specified "stigma-free" - that's often the most difficult challenge to overcome, but has been done effectively many times in many different countries.
Who said anything about feckless? We're absolutely fucking machines - any inclination not to fuck tends to be bred out of the population almost immediately. You can't effectively fight against human nature head-on - religion has been trying and failing to do that for millenia (or if you're more cynical, have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable failures of their flock). Responsibility lies in taking reasonable, realistic precautions. Abstinence has never been realistic, especially within a stable relationship, and unaffordable or stigmatized birth control is not reasonable.
And yeah, there are those who choose big families - and will continue to do so even when the harsh economic realities are laid bare for them (that's part of what the family planning education is about after all), but generally speaking they are a minority, and very often change their position as they see the compounding economic advantages enjoyed by their low-breeding peers. As for the rest - yeah, that's a different problem, but an 80% solution is an excellent place to start.
I'm sure you have - "undesirables" has *always* been the underlying name given to the whatever class of people someone doesn't want around (generally poor/disempowered, as they make easy targets). Everything else is just extra words trying to be more subtle, cruel, or specific. I find it a good word because it mostly eliminates specificity so that every person hears their own preferred whipping-boy, and will hear what follows in that context.
And I think what follows was important for everyone who believes there should be fewer ________'s around to think about - one of the most effective and humane ways to stop a population from growing is to give them easy access to the same reproductive education and control that is allowing the "desirables" to "underbreed"
Frankly, it's a win-win solution for everyone. And especially in such divisive times we need more such solutions. When people can ally over the same concrete steps even towards wildly different or conflicting long term goals, real progress can be made.
You want to balance the breeding rate? It's easy enough to do - give the "undesirable" women easy access to cost- and stigma-free birth control, and good family planning education. People are never going to stop humping like bunnies, so give them a reliable option to avoid reproducing because of it, of the same sort that wealthy people make regular use of. It's worked extremely well pretty much everywhere it's been tried, as is pretty much the only thing that has actually worked.
You take a huge step in the direction you want to go, and you do it without genocide, in a way that actually helps the undesirables improve their situation and themselves. But just try to get that past the "moral majority" in the US.
There is a danger #2 mitigates though - the longer a leader is in power, the more high-level connections and back-room deals they can form, and the more tightly they can consolidate their grip on power.
Perhaps I'm misinformed, it's been over a a decade since I followed things closely, but my understanding is that while purpose-built plutonium-breeding reactors certainly have an edge, so long as you're actually producing appreciable quantities of plutonium at all it's a substantial danger, especially if it's primarily the isotopes you're interested in so that simple chemical separation is possible. That becomes an even worse problem if you're already engaging in any sort of waste reprocessing - then the dangerous part is already done.
Meanwhile, any reactor that depends on choice of fuel to limit proliferation potential is already a lost cause - changing the fuel is comparatively easy, at least assuming you're talking about a flexible-fuel reactor rather than one specifically designed for your "safe" fuel.
Every war in the Middle East for the last century? We weren't there for the weather.
Every tax credit given to fossil fuel companies? Sure some will argue "tax credits aren't subsidies", but at the end of the day they give the same economic advantage to a particular business as they would get by leaving the taxes in place and adding a subsidy, so the end result is pretty much the same.
Every environmental impact indemnification we give to fossil fuel companies? Oil spill cleanup and recovery, especially from something like a deep-sea well failure, is outrageously expensive, and yet the cost is born almost entirely by the government rather than the companies that caused the problem. Coal is mining and waste is hideously bad as well, but has been grandfathered in so that none of the industries involved have to pay the environmental remediation costs, nor even manage their waste in a safe manner. Nuclear actually has the same problem - if a company had to pay for waste storage/reprocessing "until harmless" there would be no profit to be had in the industry.
Meanwhile your tax issue is disingenuous - mileage taxes are already being experimented with in several areas, specifically to address the fact that a gas tax promises to stop being a an indirect substitute as EVs become more common.
>What to do with spent fuel We solved that almost immediately, we just abandoned it in the face of more cost-effective options: reprocessing.
Basically you have two kinds of "leftovers" from a reactor - unspent fuel (not appreciably radioactive) and fission byproducts (very radioactive). The beauty is that the byproducts, being very radioactive, will decay quite rapidly and mostly stop being dangerously radioactive within a few centuries. The problem is that they're all mixed up with the unspent fuel, which will continue fissioning in the presence of the radiation, producing new byproducts to keep the chain reaction going for many thousands of years.
Reprocessing solves that by separating the fuel, which can be reused, from the byproducts, which can then be stored in a vault that only needs to contain things for centuries. Combine that with any of the many forms of mineralization / vitrification to dreamt up to physically stabilize the waste so that groundwater, etc. can't erode it away quickly, and you've got a recipe for realistically safe storage.
The problem is that the early reprocessing plants were extremely hazardous (you are dealing with high-level nuclear waste after all), and the entire idea was mostly scrapped with the invention of much more cost-effective uranium mining, which made "fresh" uranium considerably cheaper than reprocessed. Of course, mining fresh uranium doesn't actually address the waste problem.
There's also potential to make reactors that simply "burn" far more of their fuel in the first place - the more fuel gets consumed the less there is to prolong the radioactivity of unprocessed waste. A "traditional" reactor only consumes 5-10% of its fuel before the byproducts starve the reaction, some alternate designs can consume as much as 90% or more. The biggest problem is that the more efficient reactor designs are generally also considerably more conductive to producing and harvesting plutonium and other useful weapons-grade materials.
I agree - seems like recently especially we've gone the way of "shortcuts to make doing arithmetic easy", which strikes me as utterly ridiculous. Calculators are everywhere, and do arithmetic faster and flawlessy. Use those for applications, and focus on teaching the basic principles that work everywhere and form the basis for further learning.
My point with proofs and theories was perhaps badly expressed, it had nothing to do with errors. Math and Science are much more fundamentally different.
First, lets be clear that calculation has about as much to do with math as spelling has to do with literature. It's relevant, but not really the point.
Basically: Science is a description and depends entirely on experiment - it doesn't matter how beautiful or ugly your description, all that matters is that your experiments match the description within the margin of error of measurements and noise, even in the face of people trying to replicate your experiment to prove you wrong. If you can do that, you should get taken seriously.
Math though is a language for logical manipulation built upon "absolute truth" (declared axioms) and gains *nothing* from experiment - it doesn't matter if you've done a billion experiments (sample calculations) showing that "New Expression" equals "Old Expression" with infinite accuracy - nobody will care. All that matters is whether you have a logically sound proof that "New Expression" is an inevitable logical consequence of "Old Expression", based on nothing but the handful of fundamental axioms of mathematics.
If you've ever taken a math proof-writing class you really come to appreciate how every complex concept must be exhaustively derived from pre-validated laws and theorems - which were themselves exhaustively derived from less complicated laws and theorems, all the way down to the original axioms. It does not attempt to describe anything outside itself, except as expressed in the axioms, and can thus be proven absolutely true within the framework of those axioms.
Agreed. And in the same vein, good comments that concisely capture the *intent* of the code. What exactly the code does is usually pretty self documenting*, nobody needs "assigns 5 to x" style comments, but *why* it does it, what it's trying to accomplish, is often much less clear, and discrepancies between the intent and the reality can often highlight bugs
* there are times when it's good to document *what* code is doing, usually in the case of the occasional bit of performance-boosting cleverness (magic-number based inverse square root approximations come to mind)
9. Distrust your darlings - if you've done something very clever that you're quite proud of, it's probably a good idea to give it a good hard looking over with a critical eye (or better yet, have someone else do so), and see if you haven't made a grossly over-complicated solution in search of a problem, when something much more straightforward could do the job better.
I'd disagree with (6) though - it needs more thought between "read" and "ask".
No argument that math is taught in a way that only seems to really "click" with the minority of people that already think in a way suitable to become mathematicians (aka extremely theoretical logicians) within the current framework - which is a shame, because regardless of whether you're suitable to become a mathematician in *any* framework, math is beautifully elegant, and being able to effectively use math to solve the relatively simple problems in life, engineering, etc. is immensely useful.
I think the variable thing has a very different source (and you see the same things in engineering and the other sciences) - math has traditionally be done by hand, in steps small enough to make avoiding (and spotting) errors relatively easy. Meaning you'll quite likely be writing slight variations of the previous line thousands of times when solving even relatively simple problems - and mathematicians are lazy.
There's also the fact that unlike code, where you generally want to do as little as possible on each line to improve clarity, a line of mathematics is very often a large and inseparable thing, and a moderately complex line of mathematics can easily span multiple blackboards, even when written with single-letter variable names. Having descriptive names would dramatically balloon that space, deeply obfuscating the overall patterns you're trying to find and untangle.
As for proofs and scientific theories - that completely loses touch with what mathematics fundamentally is. It's a purely theoretical construct designed to sit upon its axioms with utterly logical soundness, using formal logical proofs to construct each new building block from those that came before. Unlike Science, where proof and truth are logical impossibilities, and only successively more accurate approximations are even attempted.
The real world is irrelevant to math - it's a purely logical construct. It's broadly useful in the real world only because those fundamental axioms were chosen to be as simple and obviously true in the real world as possible - most are based in simple concepts such as basic counting and geometry. Formal logic guarantees that *if* those handful of simple axioms are true, then so is all the immense complexity built upon it. The truth of the axioms is well understood to be outside the realm of mathematics, and there are even fields of mathematics built upon adding an axiom or two known to be inconsistent with generally accepted truth (hyperbolic geometry for example), that nonetheless were later proved to be both very useful, and mappable to more generally accepted the axioms (i.e. anything that can be expressed in it can also be expressed in "normal" mathematics, though potentially much more verbosely)
That assumes a well-functioning democracy - which is pretty much still an unheard of thing at any scale larger than a few dozen people. Even the most democratic governments are a bureaucracy, mildly to thoroughly corrupt, that primarily serves the goals of it's members rather than the populace.
One of the big reasons I'm thoroughly opposed to communism despite a lot of theoretical potential: until we've mastered democracy, any attempt at centralized communism is doomed to failure before it even starts.
Maybe if you live in NYC or something - most of the country has a choice of maybe two providers, who are likely already in collusion. And that's assuming you even notice - if you notice the censorship they've already half-lost the battle.
Oh, they're certainly worth worrying about - but you've got the option of avoiding them, the rest of the internet is still out there. You don't have the option of avoiding the very short list of available ISPs. Not if you want internet access anyway.
That was the name they gave themselves, yes. Can't recall a whole lot of socialist policies though. Any more than the "communist" regimes in China and the Soviet union showed any trace of actual communism. ("Workers own the means of production" is not compatible with "Government owns the means of production, and workers have no voice" - that's Fascism, plain and simple.)
Authoritarian governments will march under whatever flag will raise the rabble to put them in power - Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, doesn't matter which -ism is on the flag, it's just a flag. The truth is in the actual government policy.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that the plan is for a BFR launch to be cheaper than an F9 launch in absolute terms - as in launching a tennis ball to LEO will be cheaper in a BFR than an F9, thanks primarily to the fully recoverable second stage. Of course, that's the plan - reality might take a while to catch up.
It seems to me the Heavy accomplishes several things: nothing necessarily indispensable, but potentially worth the investment when combined:
First the non-technical strategic benefits:
It substantially boosts the maximum available launch capacity in existence, exceeding anything available in several decades. Great PR, and probably helps inspire complimentary businesses (Bigelow Aerospace, etc) to be ready to make use of the BFR.
It lets SpaceX start getting considered by the bureaucracies that currently demand heavy launch capacities, so with luck SpaceX will already be at the table ready to offer their bigger/better/cheaper rocket once it's ready to go to work.
So basically it helps create a market for BFR once it gets here. Yeah, it could go around just delivering F9 payloads cheaper, except it's probably going to need a lot of flights under its belt before the up-front costs are paid off.
And then there's the technical benefits - it gives them a test platform for coordinating large numbers of engines using comparatively cheap reused engines, as well as letting them experiment with multi-rocket linkages, which will quite possibly eventually be incorporated into the BFR design if things really take off.
The Heavy is a launch platform, and is not intended as an interplanetary rocket, certainly not with there-and-back capability, though I think it's supposed to be able to deliver a small enough payload to Pluto (orbit, I presume). Return capability will come with the the BFR. And even the BFR will need refueling facilities on the surface of the destination planet, though the plan is to be able to make it to the moon and back if fully refueled in a high Earth orbit first, which should put most other moons in range too, if transit time isn't an issue so that gravitational slingshots can be used.
And it has been proven useful - it delivered a substantial payload to a beyond-Mars transfer orbit. That the payload was useless is immaterial - the Heavy isn't a space probe, it's a launch system - the quality of its functionality begins and ends with the orbital characteristics it can impart to its payload.
As I see it, the Heavy is a stopgap solution and technology development platform.
- It gives SpaceX the greatest current launch payload available on the planet, by a substantial margin. Good for PR, inspiring complementary businesses (Bigelow Aerospace for example), and helping them get their foot in the door with bureaucracies that have occasional heavy launch needs.
- It also gives SpaceX a platform to refine their multi-core launch technology - because you know that sooner or later they're going to want to do the same thing with the BFR - why have to stop to refuel on the way to the moon? Might even be able to make it to Mars and back without any infrastructure with enough extra engines strapped on - refuel right before landing, and again once back in orbit? Might work, and would make those first few outpost construction landings a lot less do-or-die.
Or more accurately, your orbit needs to intersect its orbit, which is a far larger set of orbits that allow for collisions. Every time you pass through the intersection on your orbit, it will be at a slightly different place in its own orbit, and sooner or later you will collide.
Orbits also don't remain constant - interaction with the magnetosphere, solar wind, gravitational anomalies, trace atmosphere fluctuations, etc. all chaotically manipulate everything's path so that nothing ever stays in the orbit where you left it. You you have to actively track everything to keep track of where it really is.
Really? What is it then?
Non-minimalist adds seem pretty rare on their pages, and while the page itself and all the data they track is growing ever larger, I think the ads are still the primary way they monetize all that surveillance data.
This is mostly true - except for the fact that "based on current trends" inherently assumes that negative growth rate continues to spread into populations that are currently still tending towards having large families. Heck, I'm in a U.S. town where 3-4 children is still fairly common among a large percentage of the population.
Population growth, negative or otherwise, isn't distributed evenly even within a country's population, any more than it's distributed evenly globally. And the demographics that tend towards larger family sizes will inevitably become a larger proportion of the population. Empowering those demographics to make that choice intentionally kills three birds with one stone - it helps the individuals involved avoid the personal costs of their eventual demographic "victory", it delays that victory to the benefit of the "beleaguered white" crowd, and it helps sustain the trends that will let us peak at only 11B people. I consider two of those worthy goals in their own right, and if you embrace the ideals of democracy you must give at least grudging acceptance to the validity of the third.
Isn't fast-loading minimalist advertising kind of the center of Google's revenue stream?
Of course, favoring such pages might well drive more companies into competition with them in that market niche.
Religion and other cultural expectations are the reason I specified "stigma-free" - that's often the most difficult challenge to overcome, but has been done effectively many times in many different countries.
Who said anything about feckless? We're absolutely fucking machines - any inclination not to fuck tends to be bred out of the population almost immediately. You can't effectively fight against human nature head-on - religion has been trying and failing to do that for millenia (or if you're more cynical, have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable failures of their flock). Responsibility lies in taking reasonable, realistic precautions. Abstinence has never been realistic, especially within a stable relationship, and unaffordable or stigmatized birth control is not reasonable.
And yeah, there are those who choose big families - and will continue to do so even when the harsh economic realities are laid bare for them (that's part of what the family planning education is about after all), but generally speaking they are a minority, and very often change their position as they see the compounding economic advantages enjoyed by their low-breeding peers. As for the rest - yeah, that's a different problem, but an 80% solution is an excellent place to start.
I'm sure you have - "undesirables" has *always* been the underlying name given to the whatever class of people someone doesn't want around (generally poor/disempowered, as they make easy targets). Everything else is just extra words trying to be more subtle, cruel, or specific. I find it a good word because it mostly eliminates specificity so that every person hears their own preferred whipping-boy, and will hear what follows in that context.
And I think what follows was important for everyone who believes there should be fewer ________'s around to think about - one of the most effective and humane ways to stop a population from growing is to give them easy access to the same reproductive education and control that is allowing the "desirables" to "underbreed"
Frankly, it's a win-win solution for everyone. And especially in such divisive times we need more such solutions. When people can ally over the same concrete steps even towards wildly different or conflicting long term goals, real progress can be made.
You want to balance the breeding rate? It's easy enough to do - give the "undesirable" women easy access to cost- and stigma-free birth control, and good family planning education. People are never going to stop humping like bunnies, so give them a reliable option to avoid reproducing because of it, of the same sort that wealthy people make regular use of. It's worked extremely well pretty much everywhere it's been tried, as is pretty much the only thing that has actually worked.
You take a huge step in the direction you want to go, and you do it without genocide, in a way that actually helps the undesirables improve their situation and themselves. But just try to get that past the "moral majority" in the US.
There is a danger #2 mitigates though - the longer a leader is in power, the more high-level connections and back-room deals they can form, and the more tightly they can consolidate their grip on power.
Perhaps I'm misinformed, it's been over a a decade since I followed things closely, but my understanding is that while purpose-built plutonium-breeding reactors certainly have an edge, so long as you're actually producing appreciable quantities of plutonium at all it's a substantial danger, especially if it's primarily the isotopes you're interested in so that simple chemical separation is possible. That becomes an even worse problem if you're already engaging in any sort of waste reprocessing - then the dangerous part is already done.
Meanwhile, any reactor that depends on choice of fuel to limit proliferation potential is already a lost cause - changing the fuel is comparatively easy, at least assuming you're talking about a flexible-fuel reactor rather than one specifically designed for your "safe" fuel.
>Please identify any actual gas subsidies
Every war in the Middle East for the last century? We weren't there for the weather.
Every tax credit given to fossil fuel companies? Sure some will argue "tax credits aren't subsidies", but at the end of the day they give the same economic advantage to a particular business as they would get by leaving the taxes in place and adding a subsidy, so the end result is pretty much the same.
Every environmental impact indemnification we give to fossil fuel companies? Oil spill cleanup and recovery, especially from something like a deep-sea well failure, is outrageously expensive, and yet the cost is born almost entirely by the government rather than the companies that caused the problem. Coal is mining and waste is hideously bad as well, but has been grandfathered in so that none of the industries involved have to pay the environmental remediation costs, nor even manage their waste in a safe manner. Nuclear actually has the same problem - if a company had to pay for waste storage/reprocessing "until harmless" there would be no profit to be had in the industry.
Meanwhile your tax issue is disingenuous - mileage taxes are already being experimented with in several areas, specifically to address the fact that a gas tax promises to stop being a an indirect substitute as EVs become more common.
>What to do with spent fuel
We solved that almost immediately, we just abandoned it in the face of more cost-effective options: reprocessing.
Basically you have two kinds of "leftovers" from a reactor - unspent fuel (not appreciably radioactive) and fission byproducts (very radioactive). The beauty is that the byproducts, being very radioactive, will decay quite rapidly and mostly stop being dangerously radioactive within a few centuries. The problem is that they're all mixed up with the unspent fuel, which will continue fissioning in the presence of the radiation, producing new byproducts to keep the chain reaction going for many thousands of years.
Reprocessing solves that by separating the fuel, which can be reused, from the byproducts, which can then be stored in a vault that only needs to contain things for centuries. Combine that with any of the many forms of mineralization / vitrification to dreamt up to physically stabilize the waste so that groundwater, etc. can't erode it away quickly, and you've got a recipe for realistically safe storage.
The problem is that the early reprocessing plants were extremely hazardous (you are dealing with high-level nuclear waste after all), and the entire idea was mostly scrapped with the invention of much more cost-effective uranium mining, which made "fresh" uranium considerably cheaper than reprocessed. Of course, mining fresh uranium doesn't actually address the waste problem.
There's also potential to make reactors that simply "burn" far more of their fuel in the first place - the more fuel gets consumed the less there is to prolong the radioactivity of unprocessed waste. A "traditional" reactor only consumes 5-10% of its fuel before the byproducts starve the reaction, some alternate designs can consume as much as 90% or more. The biggest problem is that the more efficient reactor designs are generally also considerably more conductive to producing and harvesting plutonium and other useful weapons-grade materials.
I agree - seems like recently especially we've gone the way of "shortcuts to make doing arithmetic easy", which strikes me as utterly ridiculous. Calculators are everywhere, and do arithmetic faster and flawlessy. Use those for applications, and focus on teaching the basic principles that work everywhere and form the basis for further learning.
My point with proofs and theories was perhaps badly expressed, it had nothing to do with errors. Math and Science are much more fundamentally different.
First, lets be clear that calculation has about as much to do with math as spelling has to do with literature. It's relevant, but not really the point.
Basically:
Science is a description and depends entirely on experiment - it doesn't matter how beautiful or ugly your description, all that matters is that your experiments match the description within the margin of error of measurements and noise, even in the face of people trying to replicate your experiment to prove you wrong. If you can do that, you should get taken seriously.
Math though is a language for logical manipulation built upon "absolute truth" (declared axioms) and gains *nothing* from experiment - it doesn't matter if you've done a billion experiments (sample calculations) showing that "New Expression" equals "Old Expression" with infinite accuracy - nobody will care. All that matters is whether you have a logically sound proof that "New Expression" is an inevitable logical consequence of "Old Expression", based on nothing but the handful of fundamental axioms of mathematics.
If you've ever taken a math proof-writing class you really come to appreciate how every complex concept must be exhaustively derived from pre-validated laws and theorems - which were themselves exhaustively derived from less complicated laws and theorems, all the way down to the original axioms. It does not attempt to describe anything outside itself, except as expressed in the axioms, and can thus be proven absolutely true within the framework of those axioms.
Agreed. And in the same vein, good comments that concisely capture the *intent* of the code. What exactly the code does is usually pretty self documenting*, nobody needs "assigns 5 to x" style comments, but *why* it does it, what it's trying to accomplish, is often much less clear, and discrepancies between the intent and the reality can often highlight bugs
* there are times when it's good to document *what* code is doing, usually in the case of the occasional bit of performance-boosting cleverness (magic-number based inverse square root approximations come to mind)
9. Distrust your darlings - if you've done something very clever that you're quite proud of, it's probably a good idea to give it a good hard looking over with a critical eye (or better yet, have someone else do so), and see if you haven't made a grossly over-complicated solution in search of a problem, when something much more straightforward could do the job better.
I'd disagree with (6) though - it needs more thought between "read" and "ask".
No argument that math is taught in a way that only seems to really "click" with the minority of people that already think in a way suitable to become mathematicians (aka extremely theoretical logicians) within the current framework - which is a shame, because regardless of whether you're suitable to become a mathematician in *any* framework, math is beautifully elegant, and being able to effectively use math to solve the relatively simple problems in life, engineering, etc. is immensely useful.
I think the variable thing has a very different source (and you see the same things in engineering and the other sciences) - math has traditionally be done by hand, in steps small enough to make avoiding (and spotting) errors relatively easy. Meaning you'll quite likely be writing slight variations of the previous line thousands of times when solving even relatively simple problems - and mathematicians are lazy.
There's also the fact that unlike code, where you generally want to do as little as possible on each line to improve clarity, a line of mathematics is very often a large and inseparable thing, and a moderately complex line of mathematics can easily span multiple blackboards, even when written with single-letter variable names. Having descriptive names would dramatically balloon that space, deeply obfuscating the overall patterns you're trying to find and untangle.
As for proofs and scientific theories - that completely loses touch with what mathematics fundamentally is. It's a purely theoretical construct designed to sit upon its axioms with utterly logical soundness, using formal logical proofs to construct each new building block from those that came before. Unlike Science, where proof and truth are logical impossibilities, and only successively more accurate approximations are even attempted.
The real world is irrelevant to math - it's a purely logical construct. It's broadly useful in the real world only because those fundamental axioms were chosen to be as simple and obviously true in the real world as possible - most are based in simple concepts such as basic counting and geometry. Formal logic guarantees that *if* those handful of simple axioms are true, then so is all the immense complexity built upon it. The truth of the axioms is well understood to be outside the realm of mathematics, and there are even fields of mathematics built upon adding an axiom or two known to be inconsistent with generally accepted truth (hyperbolic geometry for example), that nonetheless were later proved to be both very useful, and mappable to more generally accepted the axioms (i.e. anything that can be expressed in it can also be expressed in "normal" mathematics, though potentially much more verbosely)
Other way around - mathematics is a strict subset of logic, which also applies to realms well outside mathematics.
That assumes a well-functioning democracy - which is pretty much still an unheard of thing at any scale larger than a few dozen people. Even the most democratic governments are a bureaucracy, mildly to thoroughly corrupt, that primarily serves the goals of it's members rather than the populace.
One of the big reasons I'm thoroughly opposed to communism despite a lot of theoretical potential: until we've mastered democracy, any attempt at centralized communism is doomed to failure before it even starts.
Maybe if you live in NYC or something - most of the country has a choice of maybe two providers, who are likely already in collusion. And that's assuming you even notice - if you notice the censorship they've already half-lost the battle.
Oh, they're certainly worth worrying about - but you've got the option of avoiding them, the rest of the internet is still out there. You don't have the option of avoiding the very short list of available ISPs. Not if you want internet access anyway.
Yes, what horrible control, denying your ISP the right to block or censor the internet as they see fit.
That was the name they gave themselves, yes. Can't recall a whole lot of socialist policies though. Any more than the "communist" regimes in China and the Soviet union showed any trace of actual communism. ("Workers own the means of production" is not compatible with "Government owns the means of production, and workers have no voice" - that's Fascism, plain and simple.)
Authoritarian governments will march under whatever flag will raise the rabble to put them in power - Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, doesn't matter which -ism is on the flag, it's just a flag. The truth is in the actual government policy.
Something about its low-slung gait really reminds of a slinking wolf. And the completely unnatural movement of the arm doesn't help anything.