Nobody is seriously considering a first strike on North Korea.
Nobody serious is considering it, but there are a fair number of not-serious candidates running for President, and I wouldn't put a first strike past any of them if provoked. And NK does love to provoke.
Planck's constant itself is really just an artifact of having chosen units like meters, grams, and seconds, which are arbitrary products of a combination of numerology and the dimensions of the earth. In natural units, Planck's constant would be 1. So would the speed of light, Newton's gravitational constant, and several others.
The "real" constants of the universe are dimensionless constants that hold no matter what your units are, like the ratio of the mass of the down quark to the electron, and the coupling constants of the Standard Model (which includes the fine structure constant). Those appear to be the actual tuning knobs of the universe, at least as far as we can tell so far.
Physicists work in natural units all the time, which saves a lot of scratching on paper. Engineers, of course, don't like to work in them, so you have to convert everything back into meters and kilograms and such if you're going to build experiments. So you still need those arbitrary agreed-upon units and the constants needed to get there, with as much precision as you can muster.
Just a few months ago, actually. It's the new guy, Malcolm Turnbull. He's not quite a denialist, exactly, but the Liberal Party is the rough equivalent of Canada's Conservatives. ("Liberal" and "Conservative" mean different things in different places.) They've been kinda lukewarm on climate change (pardon the pun); his predecessor acknowledged it and even praised Obama's efforts to do something, but those efforts are heavily hamstrung by a Republican Congress and what he can do is heavily influenced by that. The new guy had made some noises in the same direction but is apparently being pushed in a Harper-like way.
Could it be useful in powering cars? Power density has been an issue for mobile power plants. It's only half the energy density of gasoline, and a bit less than ethanol, though perhaps it would be a good feedstock for making one or the other? (I'm not a chemist; I've never entirely understood why making fuel out of low-energy carbon compounds requires so much more than just the energy input.)
Those guys weren't sent for the joy of exploration. They were sent because somebody thought they could turn a profit. Magellan gave the Spanish a new route to Asia; Drake was looking for a way to circumvent Spanish (and Dutch) control of those routes. They were sent to bring back a load of stuff, as well as a route that would enable them to get more stuff cheaper. They had no plans to turn over the details to anybody except their employer.
They had very good reason to think that they had a profitable mission, and while they knew it was dangerous, they did plan to return. It was not a suicide mission.
Where does 85 come from? There are 4 positions, each with 3 legal states (back, white, empty). I get 3^4=81. Is there some rule I'm missing that creates 4 more legal states?
New Hampshire and Iowa are not really very representative of the US as a whole. The attention paid to them early on skews their perspectives on things. Sometimes that lets them pick out a dark horse, but more often it just means that they vote their local issues and then fade into obscurity. New Hampshire is right next door to Sanders' home state, and he's more popular there than in the rest of the country.
It's possible that a surprise win in either could help raise his visibility (as it did for Obama in 2008) but the national polling suggests that Sanders will be effectively over come Super Tuesday (March 1). We will, of course, just have to see. The Republican slate this year is so unusual that all of the conventional wisdom has to be treated skeptically.
What I find odd is that they've issued the chips, but as far as I can tell aren't demanding PINs. I have a couple of chipped cards, and I see no feature allowing me to establish a PIN even if I want to.
I guess that makes it harder to counterfeit the cards, which is nice, but it's still easy for the cards themselves to be stolen, and the numbers alone are still cheerfully accepted by most online merchants (along with the ultra-weak 3-digit code).
Any idea why they're not rolling out PINs at the same time as the chips? Are they planning to?
Thanks. It's odd to see hair regrowth and perpetual motion placed in the same category of unbelievability, though I imagine they get equivalent levels of humbuggery.
In an analogy to the automatic dismissal of cold fusion experimentation that Price notes, for more than a century, the US Patent Office automatically rejected patent applications directed to restoring baldness, because it was "inherently unbelievable" and "involved implausible scientific principles".
Can you give any more details on that? Googling didn't turn up anything by way of confirmation.
You do get to play the CYA card, but only a finite number of times. Eventually, people get tired of it. The threats won't end before you run out of cards, so eventually you've got to figure out how to take a risk. Having demonstrated an abundance of caution will not save you from criticism should one of those attacks finally materialize. Nor, of course, will it save you from the attack.
Which is what counts in the end. I'm not sure that the CYA really saves his job, one way or the other. George W. Bush didn't lose his job despite a whole bunch of claims that he was warned. I, personally, don't consider those claims sufficiently specific to blame Bush for failing to prevent it (and I assure you, I am no fan of his). I think that a superintendent who handles things well in the aftermath (provides appropriate levels of counseling, makes sufficiently brave and consoling statements to the press, puts some kind of action plan into place but avoids accusations of security theater) would be lauded as a hero.
This is all a little vague since I don't know what the "credible" threat is. I am a bit hard pressed to imagine a threat that is specific and detailed enough to be credible but so broad that you have to shut down every school to counter it. I'm willing to extend some benefit of the doubt, at least for the moment, as part of my larger point that sooner or later one of these threats will be genuine and still not cost his job if he mis-reads it.
Climate believes in Americans less strongly than in other countries, I suspect. It's the really poor countries whose margin of error is thin, and who get wiped out entirely. The US suffers losses that aren't clearly distinguishable from ordinary disasters, except perhaps for a slight increase in frequency, and we have the money to cover it. We'll survive, literally. Other places literally won't.
Not disagreeing about the quack, but you'd be stunned at just how dimwitted people can be and still make it through medical school. For that matter, the news right now features a prominent and apparently skilled neurosurgeon who is a creationist, and disputes evolution in the most absurd terms.
So I bet it's not too hard to find a quack with an MD who will affirm your self-diagnosis of wi-fi allergy. As they say, you know what they call the person who graduated at the bottom of med school class.
Man, when your journalists are worse at grammar even than scientists, it may be time to turn out the lights. It's not just that they picked the wrong Latin abbreviation. They should never have been trying to insert editorial marks into a quote that was already grammatically complicated.
The original sentence is a bit over-long, but not out of place in a scientific journal. It is much too long for a newspaper article, and adding multiple levels of parentheses to it makes it worse.
I've come to think of science journalists as generally worthless at the science, but I thought they were at least getting grammar lessons in j-school. Apparently the author's degree is in "applied mathematics and economics", according to his bio, but he doesn't seem to have worked as an academic. But his editor should have fixed that and given him some writing homework.
As I understand it, random bets should yield about the same outcome. You just get fewer, larger payouts. Either way, the house is taking its piece, and you share the rest with the other players.
Ideally, the stats that matter are matching your knowledge of the race against everybody else's. If you know that this horse does better than people expect, or you know that some horse is a sentimental favorite but isn't likely to perform well, you can beat the other players and walk away with more than your randomly-determined share of the money.
It would be interesting to see how well the bettors actually do. The outcome I described above only works if the odds are mostly equivalent to the true odds. If a lot of bettors are betting badly, it would be easy to beat the market. It's generally hard to beat the stock market, except under narrow circumstances where you really do have better information than most (without ticking over into inside trading). Are horse tracks mostly filled with knowledgeable people, or are they just a bunch of rubes waiting for smart people to take their money? (Besides the house, of course, which always wins.)
Even without data to back it up, it does seem reasonable that a bike would be dangerous with headphones on. You're sharing the road with cars, and you've moving very fast. There's less room for error, and if you have to ditch, you hit the ground pretty hard.
It's tricky, since there's so much wind noise that it can be hard to hear cars coming anyway. Frankly, I just don't feel all that safe on a bike, and I prefer running. Worse, I find cycling duller than running, since I can't let my mind wander as much; I have to constantly pay attention for anything that might throw off my steering (glass in the road, cracks, objects, etc.). So I often put one headphone in as a compromise, though I'd like to try getting a mount that might let me listen through the external speaker.
A proof is a proof, regardless how extraordinary, extravagant or hillarious the claim is.
Well... yes and no. Even a mathematical proof isn't just a proof, because humans are involved in creating and checking it. A complex proof requires considerable work, and occasionally even a fairly sturdy result has to be withdrawn and reconsidered. Some examples.
Real-word experiments are never "proofs" in the mathematical sense. Directly, the only thing you can say about an experiment is "this thing yielded this result on this occasion". Everything else is extrapolation, and there are many different ways to extrapolate. The more you want to extrapolate, the the more work you're going to have to do to rule out the alternatives. When you want to extrapolate to something as big as "a new law of physics", you're going to have to rule out a lot of alternatives.
That's what "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs" really means. There are, at this point, a lot of far less extraordinary alternatives to "brand new physics", especially since the effect is such a tiny fraction of the input energy. The clearer you can isolate the effect, the more likely your particular extrapolation is the correct one.
I've been finding this rather disconcerting. He wants to reform a system he doesn't even begin to understand.
That's not to say the system is great; it sucks, and it could use a lot of novel ideas. But I have a hard time believing that useful ideas are going to come from somebody who just plain misunderstands the present state of things. It just doesn't fill me with confidence that the new ideas are anything other than armchair ranting. He sounds little better than the Tea Party: his ideas are less repugnant, but he seems more incensed about the imagined flaws in the system than the real ones.
Definitely no argument from me there. While computers can do better than people in that regard, people are worse than they should be, by a lot. Paying attention, and a sense of urgency, would make traffic flow a lot more smoothly. Traffic intersections in particular are valuable commodities: get through it, and expand your following distance (if you have to) on the other side. Just getting a few more cars through on this cycle of the lights will greatly improve total throughput.
Eventually, it would also be nice to have cars that can talk to each other well enough to safely form "draft trains" to conserve energy
I'm really hoping they can use it to improve traffic flow in congested situations. Human drivers require a lot more space around their cars to move safely both in front and side-to-side. They also require a lot of slack in traffic signalling: yellow lights, slow acceleration off the line, etc. Inter-car communication would greatly improve that. Combined with reclaiming traffic lanes now used for parking (since you can send your car off to park elsewhere), cities could become far more efficient places to travel through.
Sorry; I was working on a "scientific layman" answer. It's full of errors, inconsistencies, and exaggerations. Making it more correct would have made it even longer and harder. I settled for putting "real" in quotes and hoped that people who understood the science would grasp why I did that.
It's not intractable, but it is a challenge. (Well, not "five"; I kinda hate that expression. But "scientifically interested layman" isn't beyond reach.)
Try it this way: Quantum mechanics rules are the "real" rules of the universe: objects don't have exact positions or locations. Rather, what you get is a wave that describes the object. One way to interpret that wave is that it predicts the probability that it could be at any particular place. The total behavior of the object is the sum of those probabilities. It really is in every single place, all at once, though "more" some places than others. These waves can even cancel out. That's very much at odds with what we expect.
Here's the thing with probabilities: the more of them you add up, the more they behave like the average. That is, there's a lot of uncertainty in the roll of a 20 sided die. But you know that if you roll it a thousand times, the average is going to be very close to 10.5.
Real-world objects contain far, far, far more than a thousand objects. If you work the sum of the quantum waves for that many objects, what pops out is remarkably like plain classical physics. So, everything you see looks like ordinary physics.
But if you design your experiment carefully, you can make some of the quantummy behavior show up. The most classic one is the two-slit experiment: you restrict the particle's path to one of two places, and you get interference waves. But if you modify the experiment so that it is interacting with large-scale objects like a detector somewhere in the process, the waves vanish. (A detector is something that has large-scale changes between the particle's presence and the particle's absence.) The confusing part is that you can put the detector in places where you wouldn't expect it to have an effect, but since the particle is "everywhere", it affects it in counterintuitive waves.
Proving that for certain turns out to be tricky. The difference between "the particle really is (partly) everywhere at once" and "the particle is actually in only one place, but you can't tell" is pretty subtle. You can show it by carefully counting up "entangled particles", where the two probability waves are linked. It would be natural to think that particles were exchanging information to maintain the linkage, faster than the speed of light, but the quantum rules actually rule that out. Proving it for certain is hard, since you're talking about very tiny things and very fast speeds. We actually have been doing it for decades, but since it's so hard, there were usually loopholes. This experiment finally nails the last of them shut.
The solution to the chicken-egg problem lies in the behavior of the sums: big objects behave like you expect them to because the probability of them not doing so becomes vanishingly small. There's still some fiddly bits: that "vanishingly small" isn't quite zero and nobody exactly knows where it goes. Some say "another universe"; others (like me) just put our fingers in our ears and say "I don't know but shut up and calculate la la la".
I was really excited by the long-tail idea. I got less excited soon after because I happened to be dating a rock musician (seriously). Her band worked insanely hard, were incredibly talented, and put on great shows, but they were just never in the right place at the right time to make it big. Of course you have only my word for their ability, which is subjective (and biased) and anecdotal, but I'm just saying it shifted my perspective on what could be accomplished in the long tail. As abominable as the record labels are, they do one thing very well: make people famous by spending lots of money.
I still have high hopes for the long tail. It's now present-seeking season and I do it as much as I can on sites like etsy, the long tail of craft stuff. I occasionally find cool things, which I buy and evangelize by giving as gifts. But I doubt any are eking out even as much as the minimum wage by doing it. That's partly Etsy's fault, and I am gonna try out Amazon's new version of it. Amazon is good at building buzz.
Oh, one other thing that advertising has worked well for, to me. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I've bought at least two things because they supported things I like. I would not have encountered NatureBox; I'm not going to evangelize it (it's good, not amazing), but I do kinda like having prepackaged snacks on hand for grab-and-go things. I did so at least partly because I wanted to support the podcasts. (In the case of one podcast, they have an adless, longer paid version, but I actually like the free version because the longer version can be tedious.)
I feel like I'm spreading word of mouth for advertising;-) (The Onion, of course, did that joke better: http://www.theonion.com/articl...)
Yep... when you can get amazing buzz, it's awesome. It helps when your CEO is a gazillionaire who gets free press for building freaking *rockets*. And when your competition gives you this massive opening to build something that's just so much better than what they're putting out. (Cf Uber, who is competing against cab companies who put out a genuinely abysmal but widely-used product.)
I don't expect anybody to get similarly excited by my new OXO spatula. But it got the first brownies out of pan whole because it's somehow flexible enough in one direction to curve under the corner of the pan, while being strong enough in the other direction to support the brownie as I lift it. Kinda spooky, actually. It's definitely better than my previous spatulas, which cost about half as much (though I can spring for eight bucks on a kitchen tool), but I don't expect there to be a waiting list;-)
Few things are so Insanely Great that people are going to rush out and tell their friends about it. I got a really nice new spatula the other day, but I'm not evangelizing for the spatula company. Even if they'd given me a free spatula to encourage me to proselytize, and I managed to encourage a couple of friends to buy one, it's unlikely that they're going to rave about a spatula they bought so much that it's going to push out to six degrees of separation.
This kind of marketing works great when it works, for really exciting consumer gadgets and apps and political candidates. But a lot of the stuff you need to buy is just, ya know, stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody is seriously considering a first strike on North Korea.
Nobody serious is considering it, but there are a fair number of not-serious candidates running for President, and I wouldn't put a first strike past any of them if provoked. And NK does love to provoke.
Planck's constant itself is really just an artifact of having chosen units like meters, grams, and seconds, which are arbitrary products of a combination of numerology and the dimensions of the earth. In natural units, Planck's constant would be 1. So would the speed of light, Newton's gravitational constant, and several others.
The "real" constants of the universe are dimensionless constants that hold no matter what your units are, like the ratio of the mass of the down quark to the electron, and the coupling constants of the Standard Model (which includes the fine structure constant). Those appear to be the actual tuning knobs of the universe, at least as far as we can tell so far.
Physicists work in natural units all the time, which saves a lot of scratching on paper. Engineers, of course, don't like to work in them, so you have to convert everything back into meters and kilograms and such if you're going to build experiments. So you still need those arbitrary agreed-upon units and the constants needed to get there, with as much precision as you can muster.
Just a few months ago, actually. It's the new guy, Malcolm Turnbull. He's not quite a denialist, exactly, but the Liberal Party is the rough equivalent of Canada's Conservatives. ("Liberal" and "Conservative" mean different things in different places.) They've been kinda lukewarm on climate change (pardon the pun); his predecessor acknowledged it and even praised Obama's efforts to do something, but those efforts are heavily hamstrung by a Republican Congress and what he can do is heavily influenced by that. The new guy had made some noises in the same direction but is apparently being pushed in a Harper-like way.
Could it be useful in powering cars? Power density has been an issue for mobile power plants. It's only half the energy density of gasoline, and a bit less than ethanol, though perhaps it would be a good feedstock for making one or the other? (I'm not a chemist; I've never entirely understood why making fuel out of low-energy carbon compounds requires so much more than just the energy input.)
Those guys weren't sent for the joy of exploration. They were sent because somebody thought they could turn a profit. Magellan gave the Spanish a new route to Asia; Drake was looking for a way to circumvent Spanish (and Dutch) control of those routes. They were sent to bring back a load of stuff, as well as a route that would enable them to get more stuff cheaper. They had no plans to turn over the details to anybody except their employer.
They had very good reason to think that they had a profitable mission, and while they knew it was dangerous, they did plan to return. It was not a suicide mission.
Where does 85 come from? There are 4 positions, each with 3 legal states (back, white, empty). I get 3^4=81. Is there some rule I'm missing that creates 4 more legal states?
New Hampshire and Iowa are not really very representative of the US as a whole. The attention paid to them early on skews their perspectives on things. Sometimes that lets them pick out a dark horse, but more often it just means that they vote their local issues and then fade into obscurity. New Hampshire is right next door to Sanders' home state, and he's more popular there than in the rest of the country.
It's possible that a surprise win in either could help raise his visibility (as it did for Obama in 2008) but the national polling suggests that Sanders will be effectively over come Super Tuesday (March 1). We will, of course, just have to see. The Republican slate this year is so unusual that all of the conventional wisdom has to be treated skeptically.
What I find odd is that they've issued the chips, but as far as I can tell aren't demanding PINs. I have a couple of chipped cards, and I see no feature allowing me to establish a PIN even if I want to.
I guess that makes it harder to counterfeit the cards, which is nice, but it's still easy for the cards themselves to be stolen, and the numbers alone are still cheerfully accepted by most online merchants (along with the ultra-weak 3-digit code).
Any idea why they're not rolling out PINs at the same time as the chips? Are they planning to?
Thanks. It's odd to see hair regrowth and perpetual motion placed in the same category of unbelievability, though I imagine they get equivalent levels of humbuggery.
In an analogy to the automatic dismissal of cold fusion experimentation that Price notes, for more than a century, the US Patent Office automatically rejected patent applications directed to restoring baldness, because it was "inherently unbelievable" and "involved implausible scientific principles".
Can you give any more details on that? Googling didn't turn up anything by way of confirmation.
You do get to play the CYA card, but only a finite number of times. Eventually, people get tired of it. The threats won't end before you run out of cards, so eventually you've got to figure out how to take a risk. Having demonstrated an abundance of caution will not save you from criticism should one of those attacks finally materialize. Nor, of course, will it save you from the attack.
Which is what counts in the end. I'm not sure that the CYA really saves his job, one way or the other. George W. Bush didn't lose his job despite a whole bunch of claims that he was warned. I, personally, don't consider those claims sufficiently specific to blame Bush for failing to prevent it (and I assure you, I am no fan of his). I think that a superintendent who handles things well in the aftermath (provides appropriate levels of counseling, makes sufficiently brave and consoling statements to the press, puts some kind of action plan into place but avoids accusations of security theater) would be lauded as a hero.
This is all a little vague since I don't know what the "credible" threat is. I am a bit hard pressed to imagine a threat that is specific and detailed enough to be credible but so broad that you have to shut down every school to counter it. I'm willing to extend some benefit of the doubt, at least for the moment, as part of my larger point that sooner or later one of these threats will be genuine and still not cost his job if he mis-reads it.
Climate believes in Americans less strongly than in other countries, I suspect. It's the really poor countries whose margin of error is thin, and who get wiped out entirely. The US suffers losses that aren't clearly distinguishable from ordinary disasters, except perhaps for a slight increase in frequency, and we have the money to cover it. We'll survive, literally. Other places literally won't.
Not disagreeing about the quack, but you'd be stunned at just how dimwitted people can be and still make it through medical school. For that matter, the news right now features a prominent and apparently skilled neurosurgeon who is a creationist, and disputes evolution in the most absurd terms.
So I bet it's not too hard to find a quack with an MD who will affirm your self-diagnosis of wi-fi allergy. As they say, you know what they call the person who graduated at the bottom of med school class.
Man, when your journalists are worse at grammar even than scientists, it may be time to turn out the lights. It's not just that they picked the wrong Latin abbreviation. They should never have been trying to insert editorial marks into a quote that was already grammatically complicated.
The original sentence is a bit over-long, but not out of place in a scientific journal. It is much too long for a newspaper article, and adding multiple levels of parentheses to it makes it worse.
I've come to think of science journalists as generally worthless at the science, but I thought they were at least getting grammar lessons in j-school. Apparently the author's degree is in "applied mathematics and economics", according to his bio, but he doesn't seem to have worked as an academic. But his editor should have fixed that and given him some writing homework.
As I understand it, random bets should yield about the same outcome. You just get fewer, larger payouts. Either way, the house is taking its piece, and you share the rest with the other players.
Ideally, the stats that matter are matching your knowledge of the race against everybody else's. If you know that this horse does better than people expect, or you know that some horse is a sentimental favorite but isn't likely to perform well, you can beat the other players and walk away with more than your randomly-determined share of the money.
It would be interesting to see how well the bettors actually do. The outcome I described above only works if the odds are mostly equivalent to the true odds. If a lot of bettors are betting badly, it would be easy to beat the market. It's generally hard to beat the stock market, except under narrow circumstances where you really do have better information than most (without ticking over into inside trading). Are horse tracks mostly filled with knowledgeable people, or are they just a bunch of rubes waiting for smart people to take their money? (Besides the house, of course, which always wins.)
Even without data to back it up, it does seem reasonable that a bike would be dangerous with headphones on. You're sharing the road with cars, and you've moving very fast. There's less room for error, and if you have to ditch, you hit the ground pretty hard.
It's tricky, since there's so much wind noise that it can be hard to hear cars coming anyway. Frankly, I just don't feel all that safe on a bike, and I prefer running. Worse, I find cycling duller than running, since I can't let my mind wander as much; I have to constantly pay attention for anything that might throw off my steering (glass in the road, cracks, objects, etc.). So I often put one headphone in as a compromise, though I'd like to try getting a mount that might let me listen through the external speaker.
A proof is a proof, regardless how extraordinary, extravagant or hillarious the claim is.
Well... yes and no. Even a mathematical proof isn't just a proof, because humans are involved in creating and checking it. A complex proof requires considerable work, and occasionally even a fairly sturdy result has to be withdrawn and reconsidered. Some examples.
Real-word experiments are never "proofs" in the mathematical sense. Directly, the only thing you can say about an experiment is "this thing yielded this result on this occasion". Everything else is extrapolation, and there are many different ways to extrapolate. The more you want to extrapolate, the the more work you're going to have to do to rule out the alternatives. When you want to extrapolate to something as big as "a new law of physics", you're going to have to rule out a lot of alternatives.
That's what "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs" really means. There are, at this point, a lot of far less extraordinary alternatives to "brand new physics", especially since the effect is such a tiny fraction of the input energy. The clearer you can isolate the effect, the more likely your particular extrapolation is the correct one.
I've been finding this rather disconcerting. He wants to reform a system he doesn't even begin to understand.
That's not to say the system is great; it sucks, and it could use a lot of novel ideas. But I have a hard time believing that useful ideas are going to come from somebody who just plain misunderstands the present state of things. It just doesn't fill me with confidence that the new ideas are anything other than armchair ranting. He sounds little better than the Tea Party: his ideas are less repugnant, but he seems more incensed about the imagined flaws in the system than the real ones.
Definitely no argument from me there. While computers can do better than people in that regard, people are worse than they should be, by a lot. Paying attention, and a sense of urgency, would make traffic flow a lot more smoothly. Traffic intersections in particular are valuable commodities: get through it, and expand your following distance (if you have to) on the other side. Just getting a few more cars through on this cycle of the lights will greatly improve total throughput.
Eventually, it would also be nice to have cars that can talk to each other well enough to safely form "draft trains" to conserve energy
I'm really hoping they can use it to improve traffic flow in congested situations. Human drivers require a lot more space around their cars to move safely both in front and side-to-side. They also require a lot of slack in traffic signalling: yellow lights, slow acceleration off the line, etc. Inter-car communication would greatly improve that. Combined with reclaiming traffic lanes now used for parking (since you can send your car off to park elsewhere), cities could become far more efficient places to travel through.
Just my $.02. But that will take some time.
Sorry; I was working on a "scientific layman" answer. It's full of errors, inconsistencies, and exaggerations. Making it more correct would have made it even longer and harder. I settled for putting "real" in quotes and hoped that people who understood the science would grasp why I did that.
It's not intractable, but it is a challenge. (Well, not "five"; I kinda hate that expression. But "scientifically interested layman" isn't beyond reach.)
Try it this way: Quantum mechanics rules are the "real" rules of the universe: objects don't have exact positions or locations. Rather, what you get is a wave that describes the object. One way to interpret that wave is that it predicts the probability that it could be at any particular place. The total behavior of the object is the sum of those probabilities. It really is in every single place, all at once, though "more" some places than others. These waves can even cancel out. That's very much at odds with what we expect.
Here's the thing with probabilities: the more of them you add up, the more they behave like the average. That is, there's a lot of uncertainty in the roll of a 20 sided die. But you know that if you roll it a thousand times, the average is going to be very close to 10.5.
Real-world objects contain far, far, far more than a thousand objects. If you work the sum of the quantum waves for that many objects, what pops out is remarkably like plain classical physics. So, everything you see looks like ordinary physics.
But if you design your experiment carefully, you can make some of the quantummy behavior show up. The most classic one is the two-slit experiment: you restrict the particle's path to one of two places, and you get interference waves. But if you modify the experiment so that it is interacting with large-scale objects like a detector somewhere in the process, the waves vanish. (A detector is something that has large-scale changes between the particle's presence and the particle's absence.) The confusing part is that you can put the detector in places where you wouldn't expect it to have an effect, but since the particle is "everywhere", it affects it in counterintuitive waves.
Proving that for certain turns out to be tricky. The difference between "the particle really is (partly) everywhere at once" and "the particle is actually in only one place, but you can't tell" is pretty subtle. You can show it by carefully counting up "entangled particles", where the two probability waves are linked. It would be natural to think that particles were exchanging information to maintain the linkage, faster than the speed of light, but the quantum rules actually rule that out. Proving it for certain is hard, since you're talking about very tiny things and very fast speeds. We actually have been doing it for decades, but since it's so hard, there were usually loopholes. This experiment finally nails the last of them shut.
The solution to the chicken-egg problem lies in the behavior of the sums: big objects behave like you expect them to because the probability of them not doing so becomes vanishingly small. There's still some fiddly bits: that "vanishingly small" isn't quite zero and nobody exactly knows where it goes. Some say "another universe"; others (like me) just put our fingers in our ears and say "I don't know but shut up and calculate la la la".
I was really excited by the long-tail idea. I got less excited soon after because I happened to be dating a rock musician (seriously). Her band worked insanely hard, were incredibly talented, and put on great shows, but they were just never in the right place at the right time to make it big. Of course you have only my word for their ability, which is subjective (and biased) and anecdotal, but I'm just saying it shifted my perspective on what could be accomplished in the long tail. As abominable as the record labels are, they do one thing very well: make people famous by spending lots of money.
I still have high hopes for the long tail. It's now present-seeking season and I do it as much as I can on sites like etsy, the long tail of craft stuff. I occasionally find cool things, which I buy and evangelize by giving as gifts. But I doubt any are eking out even as much as the minimum wage by doing it. That's partly Etsy's fault, and I am gonna try out Amazon's new version of it. Amazon is good at building buzz.
Oh, one other thing that advertising has worked well for, to me. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I've bought at least two things because they supported things I like. I would not have encountered NatureBox; I'm not going to evangelize it (it's good, not amazing), but I do kinda like having prepackaged snacks on hand for grab-and-go things. I did so at least partly because I wanted to support the podcasts. (In the case of one podcast, they have an adless, longer paid version, but I actually like the free version because the longer version can be tedious.)
I feel like I'm spreading word of mouth for advertising ;-) (The Onion, of course, did that joke better: http://www.theonion.com/articl...)
Yep... when you can get amazing buzz, it's awesome. It helps when your CEO is a gazillionaire who gets free press for building freaking *rockets*. And when your competition gives you this massive opening to build something that's just so much better than what they're putting out. (Cf Uber, who is competing against cab companies who put out a genuinely abysmal but widely-used product.)
I don't expect anybody to get similarly excited by my new OXO spatula. But it got the first brownies out of pan whole because it's somehow flexible enough in one direction to curve under the corner of the pan, while being strong enough in the other direction to support the brownie as I lift it. Kinda spooky, actually. It's definitely better than my previous spatulas, which cost about half as much (though I can spring for eight bucks on a kitchen tool), but I don't expect there to be a waiting list ;-)
Few things are so Insanely Great that people are going to rush out and tell their friends about it. I got a really nice new spatula the other day, but I'm not evangelizing for the spatula company. Even if they'd given me a free spatula to encourage me to proselytize, and I managed to encourage a couple of friends to buy one, it's unlikely that they're going to rave about a spatula they bought so much that it's going to push out to six degrees of separation.
This kind of marketing works great when it works, for really exciting consumer gadgets and apps and political candidates. But a lot of the stuff you need to buy is just, ya know, stuff.