I appreciate the problem. Even some of physics itself can be statistical in nature, and certainly various sensing gear used in experiments uses statistical filters to screen out noise. Yet, it seems like we only accept statistical models if we're pretty sure they're true. It would be lovely if we had rigorous methods to accept or discard statistical conclusions based on the math itself. As you quite correctly point out, all too commonly we're left wondering if the statistics are correct, misleading, or out-right lying. We've certainly seen results with 'strong' statistics turn out to be flat-wrong. Each one of those further increases the distrust.
There's a more generalized form, and I can't find it exactly at the moment but roughly, "truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is bounded by the things we know to be true."
Something that's worked pretty well for me: write your comments first.
That is, describe with comments what each step is going to do logically. When your logic is sound, fill in the code.
Now, realistically, I'm not quite smart enough to get it right all the time before I put the code down (writing the code sometimes shows my logic errors). But then, engaging in a bit of revisionist history, in the same voice as the original comments works well.
I only 'comment the [actual] code' when I'm forced to write some kind of code that is ugly for performance reasons or it appears to be non-intuitive after being written.
Modern NiMH rechargeable batteries like Sanyo Eneloop [amazon.com]
I ran down a similar link last time this discussion came around. Long-story-short: Duracell has licensed the same technology and they're easily available at WalMart or similar. 'Pre-charged' rechargables are the marketing lyric to look for. Strangely enough they're not very well marketed themselves (probably would cut into the main business too much).
If you live by principles, treat people well and avoid doing things that you'd regret seeing the light of day, saving all of your communications can make you a defense lawyer's wet dream.
Sure, if you don't have any corrupt or evil people running your government.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him" - Cardinal Richelieu
Frankly, you can't beat something like a SQL database for those requirements.
I used to have this - a Filemaker Pro database I populated with mail via AppleScript. It would break a message into pieces and store the pieces in fields. But that was mid-90's, before e-mail got hard - there was a From, a To, a Body, etc. No quoted-printable, base-64, or multi-part MIME messages.
It's great to be able to search "From:" some wildcard, Date-range foo to bar, Subject with a boolean keyword expression, but it's also important to be able to re-construct the message for forwarding, replying, etc.
So... the CRUD is pretty straightforward, but what's the best way to represent it in SQL? The easy thing to do would be to load the message into an object with a canned library and then throw that at a SQL ORB, but somewhere down the line retrieving the data manually would also be useful.
A quick search didn't turn up a well-known schema, but certainly this problem has been solved. Being able to use a fast search (tsearch2, for instance) would be so graet vs., say, Thunderbird's built-in search. Anybody have any pointers?
Right, but other groups haven't found any variation in time or in space. It's possible that they looked in exactly the wrong directions, I suppose, but that's kind of unlikely.
Indeed, but that's the suggestion of the article.
I'm not saying that this result is wrong. I'm just saying it squares badly with other measurements and it's more likely at this point that something is else confusing the result, either experimental error or some other effect.
They're saying now that they have multiple observations of a half-dozen quasars on different telescopes and have calibrated the error between them.
This isn't the first time that some team has claimed this. Around 2000, someone made the same claim. I recall it not standing up when other teams checked it.
Check out the Economist article, it's better. The difference there was that the telescopes were in different hemispheres. They thought previously that they were measuring a variation back in time (and the follow-up study in the southern hemisphere showed no such measurement back in time when they looked), but it turns out that they're measuring a variation over location in space. The new results trace a smooth gradient of alpha over something like an 18-billion-light-year arc.
oh and why the only people you manage to trick into this are on the bottom side of the intelligence bell curve.
Why would they want to compromise your computer? You're smart enough to notice and take action, it'll be out of their botnet in hours. That's just more accounting and command-and-control overhead for little benefit.
I guess I'm currently in the 'so what' camp. If a String Theory covers all of QM, Relativity, and Gravity, and it makes useful predictions that can be tested and leads to further knowledge and useful engineering - I guess I don't really care if the underlying assumptions are right or not.
By all means, keep working on something better, but if the above is true, it's a good theory to work with. We got quite a bit of useful work done with Newtonian physics, and QM/QED have gotten us much further, even if they're not quite 'right'.
If a String Theory is correct, then it will lead to insights we currently don't understand. If it's wrong it'll disagree with observation. I guess the fear is that it'll be wrong and agree with observation, which is the point where I diverge from those who worry too much.
As I recall, that's the ZIP statistic. If one home in a ZIP code is served, all are assumed to be. Some FCC commissioners were pushing for ZIP+4 statistics. The initial number I heard was 65% based on that. I think some of those commissioners got 'moved on' in the Bush->Obama changeover, not sure where that project is now.
Scientifically, philosophically and theologically "the beginning" is just something we can't figure out.
Why would you declare this knowledge impenetrable? Hawking discusses this specifically in A Brief History of Time.
The basic idea is that time is a dimension. Do you say that before the Big Bang that length always existed? Width or depth? If not, then why time? There is no 'before the Big Bang' because you need time to explain that concept, and there was no time.
So, then you can play Zeno's Paradox with time, and try to get asymptotically close to it, but Hawking's insight is that time is closed near the beginning. Try to get to zero and you come back out into the positive again, as if it loops back on itself. I'm sure I have the details wrong, I seem to recall irrational numbers are required to do the math, but the basic point is that there is no time zero in our universe, so there's no possible way to get to zero much less -1.
You're thinking like an engineer. Space programs are currently controlled by scientists who go to freakish lengths to ensure no Earth life contaminates Mars.
They can play until we figure out how to sustain people up there, but once that's a GO, game over, the dirty apes and their microscopic pals are taking over.
No kidding - the gravity argument doesn't even make sense. I'll admit, there's a good chance this is popular-press error, but there was some pretty shoddy logic behind his 'ET' press release a few months ago as well.
It's worth noting he retired a year ago. Perhaps he just isn't well (relatively speaking, of course, he's proven himself heroic figure already).
(yes, I realize that could be a complete if unlikely coincidence).
Assange is on record saying that he didn't do what they said he did. If he's caught lying, Wikileaks is devastated. My suspicion is that Wikileaks is important enough to him that if he did it he'd take the lumps so that Wikileaks could stand.
This will work out well in the end. Either I've misjudged him and he's a scumbag and Wikileaks will recover with a non-scumbag leader, or it will be shown just how dangerous/important Wikileaks is that they'd set him up like that.
If it's the latter, Assange is going to be molested himself for several months by the Swedish government, but I don't think he expected this would be an easy burden.
Slashdot Mirror
I appreciate the problem. Even some of physics itself can be statistical in nature, and certainly various sensing gear used in experiments uses statistical filters to screen out noise. Yet, it seems like we only accept statistical models if we're pretty sure they're true. It would be lovely if we had rigorous methods to accept or discard statistical conclusions based on the math itself. As you quite correctly point out, all too commonly we're left wondering if the statistics are correct, misleading, or out-right lying. We've certainly seen results with 'strong' statistics turn out to be flat-wrong. Each one of those further increases the distrust.
By "securing the Internet" they really mean, "stop filesharing and wikileaks".
This is why neutrality regarding the infrastructure of the Internet has to be codified now.
You really think they're going to stop at enforcing neutrality? How does Wikileaks and filesharing get stopped? Three words:
Internet Drivers License
Duracell "Pre-charged" made in japan are the same, Duracell "Pre-charged" made in China are not.
Ah, good to know! Thanks.
then they can run around stealing gold instead of whatever it is they do now to fleece the public
They hate gold, it can't be magically multiplied on a computer*.
* excepting people who think it's a good idea to buy unaudited paper gold, sigh.
There's a more generalized form, and I can't find it exactly at the moment but roughly, "truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is bounded by the things we know to be true."
I'm surprised this hasn't been posted yet... you guys are slacking.
Something that's worked pretty well for me: write your comments first.
That is, describe with comments what each step is going to do logically. When your logic is sound, fill in the code.
Now, realistically, I'm not quite smart enough to get it right all the time before I put the code down (writing the code sometimes shows my logic errors). But then, engaging in a bit of revisionist history, in the same voice as the original comments works well.
I only 'comment the [actual] code' when I'm forced to write some kind of code that is ugly for performance reasons or it appears to be non-intuitive after being written.
Modern NiMH rechargeable batteries like Sanyo Eneloop [amazon.com]
I ran down a similar link last time this discussion came around. Long-story-short: Duracell has licensed the same technology and they're easily available at WalMart or similar. 'Pre-charged' rechargables are the marketing lyric to look for. Strangely enough they're not very well marketed themselves (probably would cut into the main business too much).
If you live by principles, treat people well and avoid doing things that you'd regret seeing the light of day, saving all of your communications can make you a defense lawyer's wet dream.
Sure, if you don't have any corrupt or evil people running your government.
Frankly, you can't beat something like a SQL database for those requirements.
I used to have this - a Filemaker Pro database I populated with mail via AppleScript. It would break a message into pieces and store the pieces in fields. But that was mid-90's, before e-mail got hard - there was a From, a To, a Body, etc. No quoted-printable, base-64, or multi-part MIME messages.
It's great to be able to search "From:" some wildcard, Date-range foo to bar, Subject with a boolean keyword expression, but it's also important to be able to re-construct the message for forwarding, replying, etc.
So... the CRUD is pretty straightforward, but what's the best way to represent it in SQL? The easy thing to do would be to load the message into an object with a canned library and then throw that at a SQL ORB, but somewhere down the line retrieving the data manually would also be useful.
A quick search didn't turn up a well-known schema, but certainly this problem has been solved. Being able to use a fast search (tsearch2, for instance) would be so graet vs., say, Thunderbird's built-in search. Anybody have any pointers?
Measurements in the same part of the sky given very different results. It looks like they've teased out trends statistically
Ah, interesting. I hate to disbelieve well-done statistics, but perhaps they can work on getting the noise out of their sensing. Thanks.
blatantly state that she's not really advocating armed revolution
The sibling post noted that you may be taking her out of context, but supposing you're not - is your position that armed revolution is always wrong?
Right, but other groups haven't found any variation in time or in space. It's possible that they looked in exactly the wrong directions, I suppose, but that's kind of unlikely.
Indeed, but that's the suggestion of the article.
I'm not saying that this result is wrong. I'm just saying it squares badly with other measurements and it's more likely at this point that something is else confusing the result, either experimental error or some other effect.
They're saying now that they have multiple observations of a half-dozen quasars on different telescopes and have calibrated the error between them.
This isn't the first time that some team has claimed this. Around 2000, someone made the same claim. I recall it not standing up when other teams checked it.
Check out the Economist article, it's better. The difference there was that the telescopes were in different hemispheres. They thought previously that they were measuring a variation back in time (and the follow-up study in the southern hemisphere showed no such measurement back in time when they looked), but it turns out that they're measuring a variation over location in space. The new results trace a smooth gradient of alpha over something like an 18-billion-light-year arc.
oh and why the only people you manage to trick into this are on the bottom side of the intelligence bell curve.
Why would they want to compromise your computer? You're smart enough to notice and take action, it'll be out of their botnet in hours. That's just more accounting and command-and-control overhead for little benefit.
I don't understand; how does theming your window manager help against this?
Theming probably doesn't, but assuming Google checks its dialogs for proper grammar probably does.
I guess the punchline has lost its punch.
Maybe they figure people will start launching their barristers if they have no access to water bottles. Barrister over the banister!
I guess I'm currently in the 'so what' camp. If a String Theory covers all of QM, Relativity, and Gravity, and it makes useful predictions that can be tested and leads to further knowledge and useful engineering - I guess I don't really care if the underlying assumptions are right or not.
By all means, keep working on something better, but if the above is true, it's a good theory to work with. We got quite a bit of useful work done with Newtonian physics, and QM/QED have gotten us much further, even if they're not quite 'right'.
If a String Theory is correct, then it will lead to insights we currently don't understand. If it's wrong it'll disagree with observation. I guess the fear is that it'll be wrong and agree with observation, which is the point where I diverge from those who worry too much.
and internet penetration into homes is above 90%
As I recall, that's the ZIP statistic. If one home in a ZIP code is served, all are assumed to be. Some FCC commissioners were pushing for ZIP+4 statistics. The initial number I heard was 65% based on that. I think some of those commissioners got 'moved on' in the Bush->Obama changeover, not sure where that project is now.
Scientifically, philosophically and theologically "the beginning" is just something we can't figure out.
Why would you declare this knowledge impenetrable? Hawking discusses this specifically in A Brief History of Time.
The basic idea is that time is a dimension. Do you say that before the Big Bang that length always existed? Width or depth? If not, then why time? There is no 'before the Big Bang' because you need time to explain that concept, and there was no time.
So, then you can play Zeno's Paradox with time, and try to get asymptotically close to it, but Hawking's insight is that time is closed near the beginning. Try to get to zero and you come back out into the positive again, as if it loops back on itself. I'm sure I have the details wrong, I seem to recall irrational numbers are required to do the math, but the basic point is that there is no time zero in our universe, so there's no possible way to get to zero much less -1.
It's been a while, but isn't high school trigonometry using radians effectively using base-pi?
Well, he is making a ring around the entire planet. That's some significant surface area.
Now, to make solar panels out of CO2 and rust...
You're thinking like an engineer. Space programs are currently controlled by scientists who go to freakish lengths to ensure no Earth life contaminates Mars.
They can play until we figure out how to sustain people up there, but once that's a GO, game over, the dirty apes and their microscopic pals are taking over.
No kidding - the gravity argument doesn't even make sense. I'll admit, there's a good chance this is popular-press error, but there was some pretty shoddy logic behind his 'ET' press release a few months ago as well.
It's worth noting he retired a year ago. Perhaps he just isn't well (relatively speaking, of course, he's proven himself heroic figure already).
Is she the foreign service agent or is that the other one?
(yes, I realize that could be a complete if unlikely coincidence).
Assange is on record saying that he didn't do what they said he did. If he's caught lying, Wikileaks is devastated. My suspicion is that Wikileaks is important enough to him that if he did it he'd take the lumps so that Wikileaks could stand.
This will work out well in the end. Either I've misjudged him and he's a scumbag and Wikileaks will recover with a non-scumbag leader, or it will be shown just how dangerous/important Wikileaks is that they'd set him up like that.
If it's the latter, Assange is going to be molested himself for several months by the Swedish government, but I don't think he expected this would be an easy burden.