I did just crack open Munkres to check, second edition in 2000, and my Intro to Diff Manifolds book had a new edition in 2005. The old standby Do Carmo is still hovering back in the 80s, though, and if Munkres mentions Poincaré it's only in passing (plus, what, two editions in 25 years?). You're right, of course, just a bit bitter about dropping $385 on texts today, hehe, two of which just reprinted so I have mismatched editions.
Uhhh gaming predates the internet, let alone MMOs. Regardless, Asheron's Call actually had levels called, appropriately enough, levels, that let you allocate skills but still fostered pure numerical advantages between characters. UO I am less familiar with, the skill system is a step in the same direction, but I heard it was still a big grind.
The major point is not the "level" semantics in and of itself, it's that grind (or camp)-for-mo-power is almost the solely existing paradigm. Planetside has two major differences from most MMOs -- the "grind" is PvP, and its result is not exactly more power, but more options.
Imagine this kind of system (SWG had the beginnings of this in JTL but they mucked it up): your profession in the game is as a vehicle pilot. As you gain faction with a side by killing its enemies or completing missions for it, you open up the ability to requisition different vehicles. These vehicles aren't inherently better, they're just different. For example, you might start off in the grunt blasting ship, and then unlock some sort of artillery/bomber, and then a maneuverable but low-power recon vehicle, then a stealth short-range vehicle, and maybe finally some sort of huge machine with low mobility that takes a full crew to run but packs a big punch. And then just through time on-board or killing anything, you can rack up piloting skills that let you do useful but not strictly necessary things like reroute shields or systems.
Or you could have a game where you start off with a limited array of skills and then pick up more one by one, except each skill starts fully powered up. Something like WoW or EQ where everyone was max level to begin with and all the monsters were in that range, but you have to unlock your abilities.
It could be something even more fluid -- as I kill X monster, I learn a specific sword technique that's nifty for beating them but can also be useful in other situations (i.e., a jumping attack). As I use that jump attack more I get to customize it by tweaking sliders for jump height, damage, speed, physical exertion, range, etc. And when I use that jump attack in the presence of other people that use swords, it helps to teach them as well. Crafters can make weapons with properties that actually matter, where they allocate rate of fire, spread, max ammo, ammo in clip, sword length, swing speed, etc, with sliders that balance out the weapon in the end. You could make armor with different resistance properties and weights that affect movement speed/carrying capacity. So as I spend more time in-game, I get to tweak my character into what I want them to do so that I'm more effective with them, but there's nothing that makes them inherently and overwhelmingly stronger than Joe Newb.
Some people might be skeptical about this, by the way, especially not being able to read the site, but I am able to confirm that at least one of those people was fuming about being misquoted in the article. Reading their quote from the article, it does seem like the kind of thing that can be taken out of context by an author trying to spin a story.
I dunno who you mean by "ethical us," but Perelman actually acknowledges in the story that this kind of thing does happen throughout mathematics. China is pretty central to this story, though; I can't tell you the exact reason without making some big guesses, but it seems like Chinese mathematics is dominated by this one guy who's managed to reach the top of the pecking order and has absolute say over one of their big journals. He purportedly did some pretty reprehensible things to his student, who was cowed into not responding because of the expectations of Chinese society.
Fame? Would he have gotten an article in the New Yorker by quietly accepting? Not that he's purposefully trying to build a mystique of genius, but if he were, this is the way he'd do it.
Maybe fame of a different sort. He's saying that by accepting the prize and staying in the community, he'd either have to stick up for what he views as his integrity and contribution by calling Yau out on his later proof, or he'd essentially be confirming it through inaction. He did not want to be embroiled in this kind of political mockery of mathematics, so he decided to remove himself from it. In doing so I guess he has called attention to his reasons, but he's removed from the conflict.
Honestly, this guy is not a glory hog, from all accounts I've heard. If you read the article, the New Yorker spent a week leaving him messages only to find out in the end he hadn't left to check his mail in that week. He's not holding press conferences, there aren't any photo ops, he's not going out of his way to get coverage. If he wanted the press he'd have gone to all the publications calling Yau out as a fraud and stirring up a big ruckus. That's the more interesting story.
Levels are lame. They've been around forever, but they're still lame. They're a barrier to playing with your friends, even in progressive games like CoX where you have sidekicking and exemplaring, since someone's character advancement gets killed if the gap widens. In games like the Everquest series and others they're the collecting point -- everyone moves towards the level cap, so everyone tends to collect there, and that's where all the groups, raids, and new content ends up.
They suck the life out of PvP by making it highly level-oriented. They ruin the game world by sucking the challenge out of "lower level" zones and trivializing big things that you did earlier. Wouldn't it be neat to have a game world where monsters didn't just spiral out of the newb cities in progressive circles of difficulty?
I think the future is games with levelling systems like Planetside or even old-school SWG. In Planetside your levels give you access to more diverse equipment loadouts, but doesn't make it more potent. A level 10 facing a level 20 still has a pretty good chance. In old-school SWG levels were pretty trivial to come by, and you could become an expert at a particular skill (i.e., shooting a carbine) without hitting the skill cap. Even in that game, people asked for "blue frog" servers, where you'd have a mechanism that autolevels you, because the gameplay really got interesting when you maxed out your template.
A temporary fix would be something like the option to bump up your EXP by 2x for every character you have at cap. If I've levelled three characters up, chances are I've seen enough of the game world that I don't want to crawl through it at a snail's pace again.
But eventually a clever developer will figure out a way to keep gamers interested without running the traditional treadmill, and that will be a great day for MMOs.
Seriously. I'm getting a little sick of the uninformed intellectuals springing onto the attack every time someone feeds them a controversial line.
A lot of our current problems stem from the belief that people are stupid. We get a certain satisfaction from seeing people put down below us. The news media and the government feed on that and deliver one-line characterizations of people, factions, countries, whatever. "The terrorists" are, to a man, religious fanatics that want to see our way of life destroyed. They wake up every morning with nothing but killing America on their minds. Christian fundies are stupid sheeple. Frenchmen are arrogant bastards. Americans as a whole are fat, lazy, imperialist cowboys. The president is a completely evil ignoramus. We should point and laugh at every lawsuit you can spin into something ludicrous, like the McDonald's coffee case. Ann Coulter and Michael Moore are 100% politically honest and represent the majority of conservatives and liberals.
So PhDs are stupid ivory tower academics -- especially the women, who probably slept their way to the top. If you see the words "study," and god forbid it's from a PhD, you don't have to go beyond the short mischaracterization of their research provided by all the popular media outlets. Next thing you know, everyone's walking around laughing about the same mischaracterization, and spin becomes reality. We instantly assume the stupidest motives of everyone, except when we've decided they're evil, when we assume the most insidious motive.
"Think for yourself" doesn't mean to root against authority, it means to understand the facts fully before you start spewing out verbal diharreha. How many of you believe that anti-evolutionists deserve nothing but contempt, yet don't actually know the scientific studies and principles that led to the adoption of evolution? How many people that constantly bring up the example of the heliocentric theory will tell me what makes it physically superior to choosing any other fixed point vis-a-vis relativity? And speaking of relativity, who among you can tell me what Einstein actually did?
Haha, as opposed to all the people responding with their deep concerns about a study on video game violence, who spend their entire god-forsaken lives bathed in the electric glow of monitors and televisions.
Meh, I know as many burnout nerds as I do jocks. The smart, reclusive one who used to toke up all the time is a minor drug dealer now, the lazy one walked out of his business bachelor's and into mom's basement, the punk-rocker D&D guy graduated high school a year and a half late and shelves videos. Meanwhile, the captain of our high school football team (who actually wasn't a bad guy) just graduated with honors from U. Penn with a degree in... I think civil engineering. Captain of the wrestling team is finishing up a computer engineering degree at U. Florida.
The biggest problem with the way a lot of people try to merge onto a highway is their speed. If they get up to at least 90 before attempting to move over onto the highway, most wouldn't have a problem at that point.
I gotta think some of the merges in America have to be leading causes of accidents. Once you're on the highway, unless you run into some sort of slick on the ground or fall asleep, it's pretty easy to avoid trouble. Some of the merges, though...
Near where I used to live there's a highway that's jam packed with people going 65 or 75 mph. There's one on-ramp where you go up a curvy hill, get to the top, and boom, you're at the highway. Not 100 feet in front of you is an off-ramp. I can't even count all the times I've been merging there only to have the guy in front of me slam on the brakes because he couldn't get a merge. So you also have to deal with the guy in front of you jamming on the brakes while you're trying to find the elusive opening for yourself in your five second window, and meanwhile other people could be exiting the highway in front of you, too. I honestly stopped using that on-ramp because I'm convinced if I kept doing it, my luck would run out eventually.
I'm not going to link up everything, especially since the page seems to be well and down just recently, but here's the plot thus far: company formerly specializing in tech promotions and stuff (not any actual development from what I've read) goes underground for a couple years and resurfaces on April 1 for a Guardian article as per their website. This article does not exist in the online archives of the Guardian. Other press releases are all listed as being announced today, even though they ostensibly happened since last Christmas -- this is one ramshackle website for a long-established tech company to be announcing a major technology on.
There is a website SteornWatch.com that came up seemingly hours after the initial press, was linked to in the forums available on the steorn website (why do they have forums again?), and contains absolutely no useful information or any popular theories about steorn.com. Steornwatch has a disclaimer saying they are not affiliated with steorn, Citigate D.R., or any of their subsidiaries. Who is Citigate D.R.? You'd have no idea from the steorn.com website, but "Citigate Dewe Rogerson is the leading international consultancy specialising exclusively in financial and corporate communications. Its work for clients, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups, focuses on developing and building corporate brands and actively managing corporate reputations, with all stakeholder groups from capital markets to consumers." How does steornwatch.com know about this firm, and why would they put it in the disclaimer and not mention what it has to do with steorn on their steorn exposé page?
Where are the actual people who came up with this? Did a group of marketing agents and publicists put their heads together and decide to create a free energy device someday? None of their "key players" is touted as being any kind of scientist or having come up with the machine itself.
All of this smells fishy even if they had something that wasn't an incredibly controversial scientific breakthrough up for grabs. And with people probing the viral marketing a lot now, this kind of thing is bound to come up. Burden of proof is on them, and so far I'm not impressed.
Re:Unfounded Criticism
on
iPods at War
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· Score: 1
Parent brings up many good points. I don't think someone has a right to criticize the military unless they've been a part of it, even for a little bit. The only way to really know something is to experience it first hand. Otherwise you run the risk of the straw-man fallacy.
You ever been a mathematician? Okay, good, I need a billion dollar grant to research my new theory. You ever been a Nazi dictator? President of the U.S.? A crack addict?
I've got a much higher tolerance for crap coming out of the military because they're out there putting their lives on the line for what are theoretically my interests, but they (the organization, the people on the top) can't have a free pass or else we're all going to have first-hand experience with living in a police state.
Umm, perhaps you could articulate why they could never have any bearing on physical reality. Sure, go back to the current model, but the entire point of my post (whooooosh) is that there are times, historically, when we thought we had the universe nailed and some mathematical concept could never fit into it. Then we were proven wrong, and the good ol' useless, abstract mathematics in these areas suddenly became interesting to scientists.
As to its necessity in the basis of mathematics, there're plenty of axioms that aren't necessary. The law of the excluded middle, for one. In fact, no axiom is "necessary" by definition.
Eliminating infinite sets might well represent our current knowledge of physics better; if it's easier, or it fits your research, or it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling to throw out that axiom, by all means, go ahead and do it. Claiming that anything dependent on that axiom can never be applicable to reality is just short-sighted arrogance verging on stupidity. In either case, working in a certain axiomatic system is nowhere close to an admission that "math has no connection to reality."
Please, for the love of god, only publish articles that you understand.
Re:A very odd mathematician
on
Divine Proportions
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Physical reality? Is that the one where zero and sqrt(-1) can have no interpretation in any sort of physical meaning or even in interim calculation, the one where Newton's laws are the end-all be-all, or the one where spacetime is completely Euclidean?
I try to keep abreast of the current absolutely correct, final theories of everything.
Mathematician? Well, the reviewer doesn't have a single article on MathSciNet and a quick Google search turns up some submissions to online vanity "general science" journals that have no criteria for acceptance. I tend to think it is a troll. It's certainly not coherent, in either case.
As to your prior experiences, articles like these are part of the reason why mathematicians are distrustful of people that don't find a way to prove themselves. It's an easy field to claim that you've come up with a result, and sometimes it can be a very technical logical fallacy that defeats your efforts. I just wasted a half hour of my time looking up this guy's name for any signs of credibility and reading through the comments.
In experimental fields, even if someone isn't very good, at least they can be used as a technician or research goon. In math, if you're not bright enough to come up with results, you're a non-starter. I know an undergrad who spent four years struggling through basic undergrad classes with the goal of grad school, and then got to his senior year and none of them would take him. It would almost have been a service if someone had been more blunt earlier on.
Of course, I'm not really talking about the calculus sequence, linear algebra I, that kind of thing. Those are more for engineers and scientists. But there you have to bear in mind that to math majors it's the equivalent of Humanities_Course 101, and I dunno about you, but I've taken my share of shitty-ass 101 courses. It's usually because it's foisted off on the newest professor that can't get out of it, they in turn foist off a lot of the work on the TAs, and it's not interesting for anyone's research. It's not a great situation, but then again there are exceptions. I went to a small, teaching-focused school, and my math professors were very personable and great teachers. They loved student research because they got so few who were motivated. I spent some time at a research school, and had a lot more opportunities, but the professors were a lot less accessible and not as good at teaching. It's a trade-off and something worth thinking about before you settle on a school.
Sure, playing MMOGs can help you meet all kinds of strange people, as long as they are male.
Actually, no, not so much. It depends pretty heavily on what game you play and how you conduct yourself in the game ("ROFL there are no women on teh internets" is a great self-fulfilling statement, for example), but you run into a surprising amount of people of all types. My last guild had maybe a 60/40 split of real life guys and girls, with a fairly even distribution of people from ages 20 to 50 of both genders, including ex-military, tech people, students, engineers, a physician, an artist or two, etc. As always, people can lie on the internet, but there was very little motivation, as no one was exactly impressing anyone else.
And anyway, this doesn't so much change anything, as anyone living anywhere is likely to run into women pretty often:P
They said it promoted broadening social horizons. The internet is filled with diverse people from all over the world with all sorts of opinions, but it's even more potent in MMOs, where you can spend hours every week playing with the same friends, who have personalized avatars and such. It's a deeper contact than in your typical forum or chatroom. And while the internet can be great for shut-ins that like to lock out the rest of the world, let's be honest here for a minute, reality can be even more insular.
Look at high school -- a group of confused adolescents form a weird little shared reality that reinforces homogeneity as normalcy, raising a predictable counterculture that conforms to all the stereotypes you'd expect. Or living out in the country, where asshole parents can raise their kids to say things like, "I don't hate black people, I mean I'd save one if they were dying, but man are they dirty sons of bitches," and the kid doesn't really have any black friends to defeat the stereotype. And this is largely possible because our little social circles don't tend to include an incredible amount of diversity, either by choice or chance. Teh Internets and MMOs help defeat that somewhat.
Just out of curiosity, was this mathematics? I'm entering on a PhD track right now and the vast majority of professors I've met across three schools so far have all been pretty enthusiastic. I'm sure it might change once I officially become committed to an advisor, but I dunno, seems like a decent deal. The horror stories really aren't much different from the rest of humanity: lying on taxes, embellishing resumes, taking credit for the work of their underlings, inappropriate sexual conduct...
If you think Occam's Razor applies here, you have a serious misunderstanding of mathematics or Occam's Razor. In either case, it's simply a common sense suggestion written down hundreds of years ago. It's not an axiom of the universe, nor is it even necessarily an axiom of science.
Slashdot Mirror
I did just crack open Munkres to check, second edition in 2000, and my Intro to Diff Manifolds book had a new edition in 2005. The old standby Do Carmo is still hovering back in the 80s, though, and if Munkres mentions Poincaré it's only in passing (plus, what, two editions in 25 years?). You're right, of course, just a bit bitter about dropping $385 on texts today, hehe, two of which just reprinted so I have mismatched editions.
Uhhh gaming predates the internet, let alone MMOs. Regardless, Asheron's Call actually had levels called, appropriately enough, levels, that let you allocate skills but still fostered pure numerical advantages between characters. UO I am less familiar with, the skill system is a step in the same direction, but I heard it was still a big grind.
The major point is not the "level" semantics in and of itself, it's that grind (or camp)-for-mo-power is almost the solely existing paradigm. Planetside has two major differences from most MMOs -- the "grind" is PvP, and its result is not exactly more power, but more options.
Imagine this kind of system (SWG had the beginnings of this in JTL but they mucked it up): your profession in the game is as a vehicle pilot. As you gain faction with a side by killing its enemies or completing missions for it, you open up the ability to requisition different vehicles. These vehicles aren't inherently better, they're just different. For example, you might start off in the grunt blasting ship, and then unlock some sort of artillery/bomber, and then a maneuverable but low-power recon vehicle, then a stealth short-range vehicle, and maybe finally some sort of huge machine with low mobility that takes a full crew to run but packs a big punch. And then just through time on-board or killing anything, you can rack up piloting skills that let you do useful but not strictly necessary things like reroute shields or systems.
Or you could have a game where you start off with a limited array of skills and then pick up more one by one, except each skill starts fully powered up. Something like WoW or EQ where everyone was max level to begin with and all the monsters were in that range, but you have to unlock your abilities.
It could be something even more fluid -- as I kill X monster, I learn a specific sword technique that's nifty for beating them but can also be useful in other situations (i.e., a jumping attack). As I use that jump attack more I get to customize it by tweaking sliders for jump height, damage, speed, physical exertion, range, etc. And when I use that jump attack in the presence of other people that use swords, it helps to teach them as well. Crafters can make weapons with properties that actually matter, where they allocate rate of fire, spread, max ammo, ammo in clip, sword length, swing speed, etc, with sliders that balance out the weapon in the end. You could make armor with different resistance properties and weights that affect movement speed/carrying capacity. So as I spend more time in-game, I get to tweak my character into what I want them to do so that I'm more effective with them, but there's nothing that makes them inherently and overwhelmingly stronger than Joe Newb.
Some people might be skeptical about this, by the way, especially not being able to read the site, but I am able to confirm that at least one of those people was fuming about being misquoted in the article. Reading their quote from the article, it does seem like the kind of thing that can be taken out of context by an author trying to spin a story.
I dunno who you mean by "ethical us," but Perelman actually acknowledges in the story that this kind of thing does happen throughout mathematics. China is pretty central to this story, though; I can't tell you the exact reason without making some big guesses, but it seems like Chinese mathematics is dominated by this one guy who's managed to reach the top of the pecking order and has absolute say over one of their big journals. He purportedly did some pretty reprehensible things to his student, who was cowed into not responding because of the expectations of Chinese society.
Fame? Would he have gotten an article in the New Yorker by quietly accepting? Not that he's purposefully trying to build a mystique of genius, but if he were, this is the way he'd do it.
Maybe fame of a different sort. He's saying that by accepting the prize and staying in the community, he'd either have to stick up for what he views as his integrity and contribution by calling Yau out on his later proof, or he'd essentially be confirming it through inaction. He did not want to be embroiled in this kind of political mockery of mathematics, so he decided to remove himself from it. In doing so I guess he has called attention to his reasons, but he's removed from the conflict.
Honestly, this guy is not a glory hog, from all accounts I've heard. If you read the article, the New Yorker spent a week leaving him messages only to find out in the end he hadn't left to check his mail in that week. He's not holding press conferences, there aren't any photo ops, he's not going out of his way to get coverage. If he wanted the press he'd have gone to all the publications calling Yau out as a fraud and stirring up a big ruckus. That's the more interesting story.
No kidding. The real losers here are the students who are going to get shafted when all the topology texts release new editions for a footnote :P
Levels are lame. They've been around forever, but they're still lame. They're a barrier to playing with your friends, even in progressive games like CoX where you have sidekicking and exemplaring, since someone's character advancement gets killed if the gap widens. In games like the Everquest series and others they're the collecting point -- everyone moves towards the level cap, so everyone tends to collect there, and that's where all the groups, raids, and new content ends up.
They suck the life out of PvP by making it highly level-oriented. They ruin the game world by sucking the challenge out of "lower level" zones and trivializing big things that you did earlier. Wouldn't it be neat to have a game world where monsters didn't just spiral out of the newb cities in progressive circles of difficulty?
I think the future is games with levelling systems like Planetside or even old-school SWG. In Planetside your levels give you access to more diverse equipment loadouts, but doesn't make it more potent. A level 10 facing a level 20 still has a pretty good chance. In old-school SWG levels were pretty trivial to come by, and you could become an expert at a particular skill (i.e., shooting a carbine) without hitting the skill cap. Even in that game, people asked for "blue frog" servers, where you'd have a mechanism that autolevels you, because the gameplay really got interesting when you maxed out your template.
A temporary fix would be something like the option to bump up your EXP by 2x for every character you have at cap. If I've levelled three characters up, chances are I've seen enough of the game world that I don't want to crawl through it at a snail's pace again.
But eventually a clever developer will figure out a way to keep gamers interested without running the traditional treadmill, and that will be a great day for MMOs.
Seriously. I'm getting a little sick of the uninformed intellectuals springing onto the attack every time someone feeds them a controversial line.
A lot of our current problems stem from the belief that people are stupid. We get a certain satisfaction from seeing people put down below us. The news media and the government feed on that and deliver one-line characterizations of people, factions, countries, whatever. "The terrorists" are, to a man, religious fanatics that want to see our way of life destroyed. They wake up every morning with nothing but killing America on their minds. Christian fundies are stupid sheeple. Frenchmen are arrogant bastards. Americans as a whole are fat, lazy, imperialist cowboys. The president is a completely evil ignoramus. We should point and laugh at every lawsuit you can spin into something ludicrous, like the McDonald's coffee case. Ann Coulter and Michael Moore are 100% politically honest and represent the majority of conservatives and liberals.
So PhDs are stupid ivory tower academics -- especially the women, who probably slept their way to the top. If you see the words "study," and god forbid it's from a PhD, you don't have to go beyond the short mischaracterization of their research provided by all the popular media outlets. Next thing you know, everyone's walking around laughing about the same mischaracterization, and spin becomes reality. We instantly assume the stupidest motives of everyone, except when we've decided they're evil, when we assume the most insidious motive.
"Think for yourself" doesn't mean to root against authority, it means to understand the facts fully before you start spewing out verbal diharreha. How many of you believe that anti-evolutionists deserve nothing but contempt, yet don't actually know the scientific studies and principles that led to the adoption of evolution? How many people that constantly bring up the example of the heliocentric theory will tell me what makes it physically superior to choosing any other fixed point vis-a-vis relativity? And speaking of relativity, who among you can tell me what Einstein actually did?
Haha, as opposed to all the people responding with their deep concerns about a study on video game violence, who spend their entire god-forsaken lives bathed in the electric glow of monitors and televisions.
Meh, I know as many burnout nerds as I do jocks. The smart, reclusive one who used to toke up all the time is a minor drug dealer now, the lazy one walked out of his business bachelor's and into mom's basement, the punk-rocker D&D guy graduated high school a year and a half late and shelves videos. Meanwhile, the captain of our high school football team (who actually wasn't a bad guy) just graduated with honors from U. Penn with a degree in ... I think civil engineering. Captain of the wrestling team is finishing up a computer engineering degree at U. Florida.
So they'll just have to take away his pants. That'll teach him.
The biggest problem with the way a lot of people try to merge onto a highway is their speed. If they get up to at least 90 before attempting to move over onto the highway, most wouldn't have a problem at that point.
I gotta think some of the merges in America have to be leading causes of accidents. Once you're on the highway, unless you run into some sort of slick on the ground or fall asleep, it's pretty easy to avoid trouble. Some of the merges, though...
Near where I used to live there's a highway that's jam packed with people going 65 or 75 mph. There's one on-ramp where you go up a curvy hill, get to the top, and boom, you're at the highway. Not 100 feet in front of you is an off-ramp. I can't even count all the times I've been merging there only to have the guy in front of me slam on the brakes because he couldn't get a merge. So you also have to deal with the guy in front of you jamming on the brakes while you're trying to find the elusive opening for yourself in your five second window, and meanwhile other people could be exiting the highway in front of you, too. I honestly stopped using that on-ramp because I'm convinced if I kept doing it, my luck would run out eventually.
I'm not going to link up everything, especially since the page seems to be well and down just recently, but here's the plot thus far: company formerly specializing in tech promotions and stuff (not any actual development from what I've read) goes underground for a couple years and resurfaces on April 1 for a Guardian article as per their website. This article does not exist in the online archives of the Guardian. Other press releases are all listed as being announced today, even though they ostensibly happened since last Christmas -- this is one ramshackle website for a long-established tech company to be announcing a major technology on.
There is a website SteornWatch.com that came up seemingly hours after the initial press, was linked to in the forums available on the steorn website (why do they have forums again?), and contains absolutely no useful information or any popular theories about steorn.com. Steornwatch has a disclaimer saying they are not affiliated with steorn, Citigate D.R., or any of their subsidiaries. Who is Citigate D.R.? You'd have no idea from the steorn.com website, but "Citigate Dewe Rogerson is the leading international consultancy specialising exclusively in financial and corporate communications. Its work for clients, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups, focuses on developing and building corporate brands and actively managing corporate reputations, with all stakeholder groups from capital markets to consumers." How does steornwatch.com know about this firm, and why would they put it in the disclaimer and not mention what it has to do with steorn on their steorn exposé page?
Where are the actual people who came up with this? Did a group of marketing agents and publicists put their heads together and decide to create a free energy device someday? None of their "key players" is touted as being any kind of scientist or having come up with the machine itself.
All of this smells fishy even if they had something that wasn't an incredibly controversial scientific breakthrough up for grabs. And with people probing the viral marketing a lot now, this kind of thing is bound to come up. Burden of proof is on them, and so far I'm not impressed.
Parent brings up many good points. I don't think someone has a right to criticize the military unless they've been a part of it, even for a little bit. The only way to really know something is to experience it first hand. Otherwise you run the risk of the straw-man fallacy.
You ever been a mathematician? Okay, good, I need a billion dollar grant to research my new theory. You ever been a Nazi dictator? President of the U.S.? A crack addict?
I've got a much higher tolerance for crap coming out of the military because they're out there putting their lives on the line for what are theoretically my interests, but they (the organization, the people on the top) can't have a free pass or else we're all going to have first-hand experience with living in a police state.
I just wonder what kind of kinky stuff theoretical physicists are into then.
Umm, perhaps you could articulate why they could never have any bearing on physical reality. Sure, go back to the current model, but the entire point of my post (whooooosh) is that there are times, historically, when we thought we had the universe nailed and some mathematical concept could never fit into it. Then we were proven wrong, and the good ol' useless, abstract mathematics in these areas suddenly became interesting to scientists.
As to its necessity in the basis of mathematics, there're plenty of axioms that aren't necessary. The law of the excluded middle, for one. In fact, no axiom is "necessary" by definition.
Eliminating infinite sets might well represent our current knowledge of physics better; if it's easier, or it fits your research, or it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling to throw out that axiom, by all means, go ahead and do it. Claiming that anything dependent on that axiom can never be applicable to reality is just short-sighted arrogance verging on stupidity. In either case, working in a certain axiomatic system is nowhere close to an admission that "math has no connection to reality."
Please, for the love of god, only publish articles that you understand.
Physical reality? Is that the one where zero and sqrt(-1) can have no interpretation in any sort of physical meaning or even in interim calculation, the one where Newton's laws are the end-all be-all, or the one where spacetime is completely Euclidean?
I try to keep abreast of the current absolutely correct, final theories of everything.
Mathematician? Well, the reviewer doesn't have a single article on MathSciNet and a quick Google search turns up some submissions to online vanity "general science" journals that have no criteria for acceptance. I tend to think it is a troll. It's certainly not coherent, in either case.
As to your prior experiences, articles like these are part of the reason why mathematicians are distrustful of people that don't find a way to prove themselves. It's an easy field to claim that you've come up with a result, and sometimes it can be a very technical logical fallacy that defeats your efforts. I just wasted a half hour of my time looking up this guy's name for any signs of credibility and reading through the comments.
In experimental fields, even if someone isn't very good, at least they can be used as a technician or research goon. In math, if you're not bright enough to come up with results, you're a non-starter. I know an undergrad who spent four years struggling through basic undergrad classes with the goal of grad school, and then got to his senior year and none of them would take him. It would almost have been a service if someone had been more blunt earlier on.
Of course, I'm not really talking about the calculus sequence, linear algebra I, that kind of thing. Those are more for engineers and scientists. But there you have to bear in mind that to math majors it's the equivalent of Humanities_Course 101, and I dunno about you, but I've taken my share of shitty-ass 101 courses. It's usually because it's foisted off on the newest professor that can't get out of it, they in turn foist off a lot of the work on the TAs, and it's not interesting for anyone's research. It's not a great situation, but then again there are exceptions. I went to a small, teaching-focused school, and my math professors were very personable and great teachers. They loved student research because they got so few who were motivated. I spent some time at a research school, and had a lot more opportunities, but the professors were a lot less accessible and not as good at teaching. It's a trade-off and something worth thinking about before you settle on a school.
Sure, playing MMOGs can help you meet all kinds of strange people, as long as they are male.
:P
Actually, no, not so much. It depends pretty heavily on what game you play and how you conduct yourself in the game ("ROFL there are no women on teh internets" is a great self-fulfilling statement, for example), but you run into a surprising amount of people of all types. My last guild had maybe a 60/40 split of real life guys and girls, with a fairly even distribution of people from ages 20 to 50 of both genders, including ex-military, tech people, students, engineers, a physician, an artist or two, etc. As always, people can lie on the internet, but there was very little motivation, as no one was exactly impressing anyone else.
And anyway, this doesn't so much change anything, as anyone living anywhere is likely to run into women pretty often
Occam's Razor alone means jack diddly shit. What's the current fascination with everyone misinterpreting 13th century common sense philosophy?
In either case, wouldn't you rather probe for truth than stop at step one with the simplest answer?
They said it promoted broadening social horizons. The internet is filled with diverse people from all over the world with all sorts of opinions, but it's even more potent in MMOs, where you can spend hours every week playing with the same friends, who have personalized avatars and such. It's a deeper contact than in your typical forum or chatroom. And while the internet can be great for shut-ins that like to lock out the rest of the world, let's be honest here for a minute, reality can be even more insular.
Look at high school -- a group of confused adolescents form a weird little shared reality that reinforces homogeneity as normalcy, raising a predictable counterculture that conforms to all the stereotypes you'd expect. Or living out in the country, where asshole parents can raise their kids to say things like, "I don't hate black people, I mean I'd save one if they were dying, but man are they dirty sons of bitches," and the kid doesn't really have any black friends to defeat the stereotype. And this is largely possible because our little social circles don't tend to include an incredible amount of diversity, either by choice or chance. Teh Internets and MMOs help defeat that somewhat.
I don't hate the academic system - I think it generally works very well.
:P
Not you, I meant the one actually in a position to turn down the money, hehe
I realized it was a little unclear after I typed it.
Just out of curiosity, was this mathematics? I'm entering on a PhD track right now and the vast majority of professors I've met across three schools so far have all been pretty enthusiastic. I'm sure it might change once I officially become committed to an advisor, but I dunno, seems like a decent deal. The horror stories really aren't much different from the rest of humanity: lying on taxes, embellishing resumes, taking credit for the work of their underlings, inappropriate sexual conduct...
If you think Occam's Razor applies here, you have a serious misunderstanding of mathematics or Occam's Razor. In either case, it's simply a common sense suggestion written down hundreds of years ago. It's not an axiom of the universe, nor is it even necessarily an axiom of science.