Not really - in this analogy grit would be the engine, intelligence would be knowing where to drive it. As Einstein put it “Science is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”. You need the 'grit' to get you through the perspiration and your 'intelligence' to provide the inspiration. So it is just like a North American road trip: you spend 99% of your time driving down a long, boring motorway getting to the city but once you get there you need some intelligence to navigate the one way system to get somewhere interesting.
Well technically none at all - absolutely no effort was put into changing the climate whatsoever it was just a byproduct of doing something else. While I would tend to agree that I think that the environment is particularly stable and will be very hard to affect I would expect that if we deliberately set out to change it we will probably find it an order of magnitude or two easier to do than changing it inadvertently.
I wasn't around then, but one of the complaints about the atom bomb was that it could "set the atmoshpere on fire" causing a chain reaction that consumed all the oxygen and killed the entire planet's biosphere
Yes, and you'll note from the fact that we still have oxygen to breathe that this did not happen. Similarly the LHC did not create a Black Hole that set off a chain reaction to swallow the Earth. Planets are bombarded by lots of high energy radiation all the time and have been for billions of years. Setting off a chain reaction is going to be incredibly hard because any reaction we can produce will already have happened many, many times over in nature. Indeed after all the CO2 we have pumped into our atmosphere over the past century or more we have only managed to create a tiny deviation in the temperature so far.
Mathematica does not sound that unique - CERN's ROOT allows you to mix compile-time and run-time constructs in a very complex, not-well documented and extremely buggy environment. I imagine that if you can survive that Mathematica will be a breeze by comparison. As for major paradigm shifts the switch from procedural to OO programming is far more major than the addition of a feature like 'yield' to Python. Indeed I'd put meta-classes (for Python) or templates (for C++) as a far more major language feature than 'yield'.
However this misses the point somewhat which is that features like 'yield', meta-classes and templates are not needed to write any program. They may make your code more elegant and easier to maintain in the right circumstances but you do not need them. The priority is to do good science not write the most efficient and beautiful code that anyone has ever seen (although that's certainly nice if you can manage it). Hence knowing all the intricacies of a language is unnecessary: you just need to know enough to do the job well.
Then, he will have very hard time getting proficient in, let's say, Mathematica.
Why do you assume that? I would agree that it is hard to imagine anyone with a strong technical background only knowing Fortran in this day and age but, should such an individual exist, I would not see it as a barrier to hiring them. During my time as a student and a postdoc I taught myself Matlab, Perl, C, C++, Python, Alpha CPU assembler, SQL, ROOT and an interesting variation of BASIC which ran on an old Caviar CAMAC crate controller from the late 1980s! Learning a new language when you already know how to program probably takes a day for basic proficiency and a bit longer to get fully up to speed. It's far more important that you have someone who understands the science and has a strong technical background: if you have that the language is easy to add, if it isn't then you do not have someone with a strong technical background.
You are absolutely correct. I laughed when I read the line in the article which said:
For example, if you master a couple math and science programming languages, you might find opportunities as a programmer working at a scientific research center.
since it shows how clueless the author is about programming languages in science. When I am hiring a postdoc I could not care less which programming language they have used: if I am looking for someone with technical skills all I care about is that they have experience programming. The delay in learning whatever specific languages and packages we use is minimal so long as they have a strong technical background.
AM and PM mean "anti-meridian" and "post-meridian", and at noon on the day of the summer solstice, the sun should sit on the celestial meridian.
This is only ever true if you happen to live precisely on the meridian for your time zone. Given that almost nobody does and that timezones often are determined more by politics than science most people on the planet are already living out of sync with the strict astronomical definition of time by many tens of minutes if not hours.
If we can handle timezones which are an hour wide then we can handle being an hour off between astronomical time and legal time and so if should be fine to buffer the changes until they make up an hour which will take ~7,200 years if the rate is one second every ~2 years (a period longer than any human calendar has ever remained in use for).
This is true for writing, but when it comes to speaking, it is far easier for an English person to pronounce German convinicngly than French.
Actually it is true for speaking as well. I agree that accent-wise it is far easier for us to pronounce German than French but that accent does not usually hinder comprehension. However not knowing the vocabulary because it is completely different can significantly hinder comprehension. There is also the issue with the very different, and very strict, word order in German which can be hard to get right for an English speaker.
You might very well be worse off than if you had believed in no god.
Just curious but how do you actually choose whether or not to believe in something? Generally I find it is a process of listening to the evidence and then making up my mind whether or not something is true. That 'belief' can be changed by evidence, thoughts or ideas - either ones I come up with or ones others share in a discussion - but it never seems to me to be a conscious decision about whether or not I want to believe something: either something seems correct or it doesn't.
This is what I find fascinating about an argument like this. You can certainly act like you believe in $deity but can you really make yourself actually believe in something (or not believe) by making a conscious decision to do so? I'm not sure that I could in which case such arguments become utterly invalid since your belief, or lack of it, is not something you really control.
Yes the critical universe was always rather improbable but the early supernova data pushed us into eternal expansion (before it was realized that it was actually accelerating) which ultimately is the same thing: heath death.
I don't buy the religious input at all though. The reason for assuming a steady state universe was simply because the local universe appears relatively constant and unchanging i.e. in a steady state. It is only when you look at the largest possible scales that you realize that things have changed very significantly and that has only been possible in the past century. Indeed one of the strongest proponents for the 'steady state' universe was Fred Hoyle (he actually coined the term Big Bang to deride that theory) who was a lifelong atheist.
There's more French than German in the English language.
You are comparing apples with oranges. Our common, everyday words are far more like German than French: bruder=brother (vs. frere), Ich war = I was (vs. j'étais) etc. However our more complex words are largely from French e.g. economics=economiques (vs. Wirtschaft).
One of the things which makes French so much easier than German to speak for an Englishman is that if you don't know the word (which usually means rarer vocabulary) you can often get away by picking a suitable English word and saying it with a French pronunciation (it does not always work but it is worth a try). With German you cannot do that since the overlap is with the simple, everyday words that you learn when you learn the language. This makes it far harder to both speak and to understand since you have to relearn every word in German whereas with French not so much.
Not really. Before we had Dark Energy the ultimate fate of the universe was to expand up to a finite size and sit there for ever until all the stars died and the Black Holes evaporated leaving and empty, dead universe going on forever.
Now we have an unknown fate since we have no idea what will happen when the Dark Energy density causally disconnects points at the Planck-length, the so-called "Big Rip". I'll take the unknown over permanent, eternal heat death any day.
...and right up until the invention of the transistor computers would never be smaller than a large room or a small house. I would not be so sure about there being no clever idea possible unless there is a mathematical proof to support it. Until recently there was no need to go parallel now there is a growing need to be able to program in parallel and necessity is the mother of invention. While parallel does incur an overhead as CPUs become more parallel and less serial this will presumably eventually overcome the cost of the parallel algorithm.
Nothing significant will change this year or in the next 10 years in parallel computing.
You might be right but I'm far less certain of it. The problem we have is that further shrinking of silicon makes it easier to add more cores than to make a single core faster so there is a strong push towards parallelism on the hardware side. At the same time the languages we have are not at all designed to cope with parallel programming.
The result is that we are using our computing resources less and less efficiently. I'm a physicist on an LHC experiment at CERN and we are acutely aware of how inefficient our serial algorithms are at using modern hardware. What we need is a breakthrough in programming languages to be able to parallel program efficiently, just like object oriented programming allowed us to scale up the size of programs. Until this happens I agree than not much will change but if there is some clever CS researcher/student out there with a clever idea for a good parallel programming language the conditions are right for a revolution.
Making one program free while the rest remain expensive (all subjects should be free like they are in school) is not a good way to motivate students to take a STEM degree. You will end up with lots of poorly motivated students who cannot afford to take the subject they really want. The best way to ensure that students want to take STEM is to ensure that there are lots of well paid jobs waiting for them. This provides monetary incentive to people planning to make a career in STEM which is what you want.
The problem with society today is that STEM is viewed as hard by most students and leads to a job which is ok but requires real work. Compare that to the view of subjects like business studies or law where the view is that you can get a well paid job and have to do far less actual work to get the same (or even better) salary. That's not to say that there are a lot of really hard working lawyers and MBAs out there but the general perception is that you can get by doing far less work if you want to and still get a better salary than a STEM worker at least based on my interactions with prospective students.
The other reason he doesn't stand a chance is because of Hollywood accounting which ensures that even major blockbusters never make a profit so there will be no profits to capture.
The U.S. by the look of things. I think it'd be a bit heavy-handed to call it a proportional response though as Sony is a lot smaller than a country.
Physically perhaps but in terms of internet presence I would doubt it. As a non-American I'd think this was an entirely appropriate response if it were the US. It has the beauty of being non-violent, extremely humiliating and very effective at preventing them from engaging in further cyberattacks. This should send such a clear message that hopefully even their insane government can understand it. Indeed if anything it seems so well thought out and proportionate that it seems unlikely to be the US government given their previous record.
30 years was about right for the paleolithic. Neolithic though, our best guess is around 20.
Really? Since the neolithic was later than the paleolithic what did people do that dropped the life expectancy so much? I realize that the number is heavily skewed by a large infant mortality rate and that those surviving to adulthood lived a lot longer than the average but still to drop 10 years while technology was improving seems very strange - how robust is the data supporting this huge drop?
What happened to stimulating the brain via the old fashioned method by having an exciting, provocative story populated by diverse and interesting characters? Have Hollywood fallen so far that the only way they can stimulate people's brain now is by the direct application of voltage?
So, once the order has been placed, haven't you effectively entered into a contract for sale or something?
No, not until your credit card has been charged. If they have done that then you have them under the credit card agreement but before that they can wriggle out of it as a mistake under their own terms.
Given the context - which is a post of Slashdot and not a paper - I'd stick with countless as in "too many to be counted" or "very many" given that I'm not willing to put in the large amount of effort that would be required to actually count them. Rather than the hugely overly technical considerations you are engaging in there is a very easy way to simplify this.
If I start with the glass on the table then there are is a very large range of momenta I can give the glass to arrive at the state where it is shards on the floor so long as I don't care which particular set of shards it makes. To convert from any given set of shards on the floor back to a glass I have to give each shard a precise linear and angular momentum such that they will reassemble themselves into the glass. Hence in the phase space of all possible momenta for all the shards I have to hit a single point where as for the reverse just have to hit a large area in a far lower dimensional phase space. The same applies to glasses colliding in space.
In the high energy limit the same will apply. The nuclei of the glass will collide to produce hadronic showers, each particle of which will have its own 4-momentum. However in this case it is clear that you cannot reverse the system since some of the interactions and subsequent decays will involve the weak force which we know is not symmetric under time reversal.
As such, I take a lot of taxi rides each year. But it doesn't matter if I'm in NYC, London, Paris, Berlin, Toronto, LA....
Have you actually ever taken a cab in London? The problem is the exact opposite of what you describe with only ~5% from minorities to the extent that they are trying to recruit more. As for "untrained hipster" they are required to pass The Knowledge before they get a license. They may have somewhat colourful characters but I've never had one who is not extremely competent, knowledgeable and driving a clear, well repaired cab.
Eggs turn into chickens at a different rate than chicken turns into eggs. This is proof either that A) time must go forwards, or B) my proof has a logic flaw in it.
....or C) that you forgot to account for entropy. To study time reversal violation you must have two states with identical entropy or you must account for the effects of entropy. The reason that a glass falling from a table and shatters is far more likely than all the pieces of glass coming together, leaping off the floor and forming a new glass is because of entropy. There are countless ways in which a glass on a table can be converted to broken shards on the floor but starting with the shards there is only one way that that process can be reversed.
Scale the system up, and they're just little birds that fly in boring ways, don't time travel, don't fly faster than light,...
Ummm...yes but the reason for that is because the fundamental physics governing the particles of which the starlings are made up prevent time travel and moving faster than light (which are actually one and the same). Assuming you are building a model out of simple, plastic lego bricks then regardless of what you are building we know that it will not be a conductor of electricity because the bricks you are building it from are all plastic insulators. Studying the fundamental physics of a system lets you know what is possible.
For example we know that there is a fundamental arrow of time despite the fact that at an everyday scale this is completely obscured by entropy. You could study all the flocks of starlings you like but it would be impossible to show that you have time reversal violations in it...and yet since the particles in that system are subject to the weak force we know that at some incredibly tiny, insignificant level it is there.
Because GP (and some physicist) think that if particle physics correctly describes matter/anti-matter....
Whoa there it is a LOT simpler than that. If you have a system in state A and it changes into state B then your process is A-->B. If you reverse time then the process you have is B-->A. Now if both these states have identical entropy there are no phase space arguments to favour one state over the other and so both processes (A-->B and B-->A) should be equally likely if the laws of physics are the same with regard to the direction of time.
What these experiments showed are that for some systems A-->B is more likely than B-->A and so the laws of physics define an arrow of time. If time were reversed then A-->B would become less likely than B-->A which is how you could detect it. It's the temporal equivalent of looking in a mirror. If you have a perfect left-right symmetry you cannot tell wether the image you are looking at is the real object or the reflection. However if the object is not left-right symmetric it is easy to know which image you are seeing.
So it does prove that there is an arrow of time. Perhaps you ought to spend a little time understanding the physics before you start applying simple logic: it tends to lead to more accurate conclusions.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really - in this analogy grit would be the engine, intelligence would be knowing where to drive it. As Einstein put it “Science is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”. You need the 'grit' to get you through the perspiration and your 'intelligence' to provide the inspiration. So it is just like a North American road trip: you spend 99% of your time driving down a long, boring motorway getting to the city but once you get there you need some intelligence to navigate the one way system to get somewhere interesting.
I thought grit was what you put under the tyres to stop them slipping when it's -30C and icy.
How much effort does that require?
Well technically none at all - absolutely no effort was put into changing the climate whatsoever it was just a byproduct of doing something else. While I would tend to agree that I think that the environment is particularly stable and will be very hard to affect I would expect that if we deliberately set out to change it we will probably find it an order of magnitude or two easier to do than changing it inadvertently.
I wasn't around then, but one of the complaints about the atom bomb was that it could "set the atmoshpere on fire" causing a chain reaction that consumed all the oxygen and killed the entire planet's biosphere
Yes, and you'll note from the fact that we still have oxygen to breathe that this did not happen. Similarly the LHC did not create a Black Hole that set off a chain reaction to swallow the Earth. Planets are bombarded by lots of high energy radiation all the time and have been for billions of years. Setting off a chain reaction is going to be incredibly hard because any reaction we can produce will already have happened many, many times over in nature. Indeed after all the CO2 we have pumped into our atmosphere over the past century or more we have only managed to create a tiny deviation in the temperature so far.
Mathematica does not sound that unique - CERN's ROOT allows you to mix compile-time and run-time constructs in a very complex, not-well documented and extremely buggy environment. I imagine that if you can survive that Mathematica will be a breeze by comparison. As for major paradigm shifts the switch from procedural to OO programming is far more major than the addition of a feature like 'yield' to Python. Indeed I'd put meta-classes (for Python) or templates (for C++) as a far more major language feature than 'yield'.
However this misses the point somewhat which is that features like 'yield', meta-classes and templates are not needed to write any program. They may make your code more elegant and easier to maintain in the right circumstances but you do not need them. The priority is to do good science not write the most efficient and beautiful code that anyone has ever seen (although that's certainly nice if you can manage it). Hence knowing all the intricacies of a language is unnecessary: you just need to know enough to do the job well.
Then, he will have very hard time getting proficient in, let's say, Mathematica.
Why do you assume that? I would agree that it is hard to imagine anyone with a strong technical background only knowing Fortran in this day and age but, should such an individual exist, I would not see it as a barrier to hiring them. During my time as a student and a postdoc I taught myself Matlab, Perl, C, C++, Python, Alpha CPU assembler, SQL, ROOT and an interesting variation of BASIC which ran on an old Caviar CAMAC crate controller from the late 1980s! Learning a new language when you already know how to program probably takes a day for basic proficiency and a bit longer to get fully up to speed. It's far more important that you have someone who understands the science and has a strong technical background: if you have that the language is easy to add, if it isn't then you do not have someone with a strong technical background.
For example, if you master a couple math and science programming languages, you might find opportunities as a programmer working at a scientific research center.
since it shows how clueless the author is about programming languages in science. When I am hiring a postdoc I could not care less which programming language they have used: if I am looking for someone with technical skills all I care about is that they have experience programming. The delay in learning whatever specific languages and packages we use is minimal so long as they have a strong technical background.
AM and PM mean "anti-meridian" and "post-meridian", and at noon on the day of the summer solstice, the sun should sit on the celestial meridian.
This is only ever true if you happen to live precisely on the meridian for your time zone. Given that almost nobody does and that timezones often are determined more by politics than science most people on the planet are already living out of sync with the strict astronomical definition of time by many tens of minutes if not hours.
If we can handle timezones which are an hour wide then we can handle being an hour off between astronomical time and legal time and so if should be fine to buffer the changes until they make up an hour which will take ~7,200 years if the rate is one second every ~2 years (a period longer than any human calendar has ever remained in use for).
This is true for writing, but when it comes to speaking, it is far easier for an English person to pronounce German convinicngly than French.
Actually it is true for speaking as well. I agree that accent-wise it is far easier for us to pronounce German than French but that accent does not usually hinder comprehension. However not knowing the vocabulary because it is completely different can significantly hinder comprehension. There is also the issue with the very different, and very strict, word order in German which can be hard to get right for an English speaker.
You might very well be worse off than if you had believed in no god.
Just curious but how do you actually choose whether or not to believe in something? Generally I find it is a process of listening to the evidence and then making up my mind whether or not something is true. That 'belief' can be changed by evidence, thoughts or ideas - either ones I come up with or ones others share in a discussion - but it never seems to me to be a conscious decision about whether or not I want to believe something: either something seems correct or it doesn't.
This is what I find fascinating about an argument like this. You can certainly act like you believe in $deity but can you really make yourself actually believe in something (or not believe) by making a conscious decision to do so? I'm not sure that I could in which case such arguments become utterly invalid since your belief, or lack of it, is not something you really control.
Yes the critical universe was always rather improbable but the early supernova data pushed us into eternal expansion (before it was realized that it was actually accelerating) which ultimately is the same thing: heath death.
I don't buy the religious input at all though. The reason for assuming a steady state universe was simply because the local universe appears relatively constant and unchanging i.e. in a steady state. It is only when you look at the largest possible scales that you realize that things have changed very significantly and that has only been possible in the past century. Indeed one of the strongest proponents for the 'steady state' universe was Fred Hoyle (he actually coined the term Big Bang to deride that theory) who was a lifelong atheist.
There's more French than German in the English language.
You are comparing apples with oranges. Our common, everyday words are far more like German than French: bruder=brother (vs. frere), Ich war = I was (vs. j'étais) etc. However our more complex words are largely from French e.g. economics=economiques (vs. Wirtschaft).
One of the things which makes French so much easier than German to speak for an Englishman is that if you don't know the word (which usually means rarer vocabulary) you can often get away by picking a suitable English word and saying it with a French pronunciation (it does not always work but it is worth a try). With German you cannot do that since the overlap is with the simple, everyday words that you learn when you learn the language. This makes it far harder to both speak and to understand since you have to relearn every word in German whereas with French not so much.
Sorry, bit of a downer to end on.
Not really. Before we had Dark Energy the ultimate fate of the universe was to expand up to a finite size and sit there for ever until all the stars died and the Black Holes evaporated leaving and empty, dead universe going on forever.
Now we have an unknown fate since we have no idea what will happen when the Dark Energy density causally disconnects points at the Planck-length, the so-called "Big Rip". I'll take the unknown over permanent, eternal heat death any day.
...and right up until the invention of the transistor computers would never be smaller than a large room or a small house. I would not be so sure about there being no clever idea possible unless there is a mathematical proof to support it. Until recently there was no need to go parallel now there is a growing need to be able to program in parallel and necessity is the mother of invention. While parallel does incur an overhead as CPUs become more parallel and less serial this will presumably eventually overcome the cost of the parallel algorithm.
Nothing significant will change this year or in the next 10 years in parallel computing.
You might be right but I'm far less certain of it. The problem we have is that further shrinking of silicon makes it easier to add more cores than to make a single core faster so there is a strong push towards parallelism on the hardware side. At the same time the languages we have are not at all designed to cope with parallel programming.
The result is that we are using our computing resources less and less efficiently. I'm a physicist on an LHC experiment at CERN and we are acutely aware of how inefficient our serial algorithms are at using modern hardware. What we need is a breakthrough in programming languages to be able to parallel program efficiently, just like object oriented programming allowed us to scale up the size of programs. Until this happens I agree than not much will change but if there is some clever CS researcher/student out there with a clever idea for a good parallel programming language the conditions are right for a revolution.
Just make all the STEM programs FREE.
Making one program free while the rest remain expensive (all subjects should be free like they are in school) is not a good way to motivate students to take a STEM degree. You will end up with lots of poorly motivated students who cannot afford to take the subject they really want. The best way to ensure that students want to take STEM is to ensure that there are lots of well paid jobs waiting for them. This provides monetary incentive to people planning to make a career in STEM which is what you want.
The problem with society today is that STEM is viewed as hard by most students and leads to a job which is ok but requires real work. Compare that to the view of subjects like business studies or law where the view is that you can get a well paid job and have to do far less actual work to get the same (or even better) salary. That's not to say that there are a lot of really hard working lawyers and MBAs out there but the general perception is that you can get by doing far less work if you want to and still get a better salary than a STEM worker at least based on my interactions with prospective students.
The other reason he doesn't stand a chance is because of Hollywood accounting which ensures that even major blockbusters never make a profit so there will be no profits to capture.
The U.S. by the look of things. I think it'd be a bit heavy-handed to call it a proportional response though as Sony is a lot smaller than a country.
Physically perhaps but in terms of internet presence I would doubt it. As a non-American I'd think this was an entirely appropriate response if it were the US. It has the beauty of being non-violent, extremely humiliating and very effective at preventing them from engaging in further cyberattacks. This should send such a clear message that hopefully even their insane government can understand it. Indeed if anything it seems so well thought out and proportionate that it seems unlikely to be the US government given their previous record.
30 years was about right for the paleolithic. Neolithic though, our best guess is around 20.
Really? Since the neolithic was later than the paleolithic what did people do that dropped the life expectancy so much? I realize that the number is heavily skewed by a large infant mortality rate and that those surviving to adulthood lived a lot longer than the average but still to drop 10 years while technology was improving seems very strange - how robust is the data supporting this huge drop?
What happened to stimulating the brain via the old fashioned method by having an exciting, provocative story populated by diverse and interesting characters? Have Hollywood fallen so far that the only way they can stimulate people's brain now is by the direct application of voltage?
So, once the order has been placed, haven't you effectively entered into a contract for sale or something?
No, not until your credit card has been charged. If they have done that then you have them under the credit card agreement but before that they can wriggle out of it as a mistake under their own terms.
Given the context - which is a post of Slashdot and not a paper - I'd stick with countless as in "too many to be counted" or "very many" given that I'm not willing to put in the large amount of effort that would be required to actually count them. Rather than the hugely overly technical considerations you are engaging in there is a very easy way to simplify this.
If I start with the glass on the table then there are is a very large range of momenta I can give the glass to arrive at the state where it is shards on the floor so long as I don't care which particular set of shards it makes. To convert from any given set of shards on the floor back to a glass I have to give each shard a precise linear and angular momentum such that they will reassemble themselves into the glass. Hence in the phase space of all possible momenta for all the shards I have to hit a single point where as for the reverse just have to hit a large area in a far lower dimensional phase space. The same applies to glasses colliding in space.
In the high energy limit the same will apply. The nuclei of the glass will collide to produce hadronic showers, each particle of which will have its own 4-momentum. However in this case it is clear that you cannot reverse the system since some of the interactions and subsequent decays will involve the weak force which we know is not symmetric under time reversal.
As such, I take a lot of taxi rides each year. But it doesn't matter if I'm in NYC, London, Paris, Berlin, Toronto, LA....
Have you actually ever taken a cab in London? The problem is the exact opposite of what you describe with only ~5% from minorities to the extent that they are trying to recruit more. As for "untrained hipster" they are required to pass The Knowledge before they get a license. They may have somewhat colourful characters but I've never had one who is not extremely competent, knowledgeable and driving a clear, well repaired cab.
Eggs turn into chickens at a different rate than chicken turns into eggs. This is proof either that A) time must go forwards, or B) my proof has a logic flaw in it.
Scale the system up, and they're just little birds that fly in boring ways, don't time travel, don't fly faster than light,...
Ummm...yes but the reason for that is because the fundamental physics governing the particles of which the starlings are made up prevent time travel and moving faster than light (which are actually one and the same). Assuming you are building a model out of simple, plastic lego bricks then regardless of what you are building we know that it will not be a conductor of electricity because the bricks you are building it from are all plastic insulators. Studying the fundamental physics of a system lets you know what is possible.
For example we know that there is a fundamental arrow of time despite the fact that at an everyday scale this is completely obscured by entropy. You could study all the flocks of starlings you like but it would be impossible to show that you have time reversal violations in it...and yet since the particles in that system are subject to the weak force we know that at some incredibly tiny, insignificant level it is there.
Because GP (and some physicist) think that if particle physics correctly describes matter/anti-matter....
Whoa there it is a LOT simpler than that. If you have a system in state A and it changes into state B then your process is A-->B. If you reverse time then the process you have is B-->A. Now if both these states have identical entropy there are no phase space arguments to favour one state over the other and so both processes (A-->B and B-->A) should be equally likely if the laws of physics are the same with regard to the direction of time.
What these experiments showed are that for some systems A-->B is more likely than B-->A and so the laws of physics define an arrow of time. If time were reversed then A-->B would become less likely than B-->A which is how you could detect it. It's the temporal equivalent of looking in a mirror. If you have a perfect left-right symmetry you cannot tell wether the image you are looking at is the real object or the reflection. However if the object is not left-right symmetric it is easy to know which image you are seeing.
So it does prove that there is an arrow of time. Perhaps you ought to spend a little time understanding the physics before you start applying simple logic: it tends to lead to more accurate conclusions.