We have solutions to reduce this sort of problem (at least once you get past the learning curve), but the top programming languages tend to implement very few of them. Reasoning about state is difficult, particularly when that state can be altered in unexpected ways. It is difficult to be confident that your code does what you think it does when you don't have a computer-checked method of specifying your intentions separate from what your code does.
There are no magic solutions here, at the least you will end up needing to spend more time writing in a specification language and that requires learning how it works. I would say that a gentle introduction to something like this is Elm which has an aim of stripping down typed functional programming into something that doesn't really need a C.S. degree. Here is a video which helps to explain what a better type system can do for your code. If you want to see something a bit more mind-bending check out Idris which has a much more powerful specification language which can prevent things like off-by-one errors or unbounded recursion in many cases. Moving off the scale of usability a bit, there is ATS which is a difficult language, but its specification language is able to make pointer arithmetic safe and doesn't bind you to immutable data structures. Hell, even Rust is full of good ideas that help to avoid these issues. And if fault-tolerant distributed systems are your thing, you need to check out Erlang (or its sibling Elixir) as there are so many great ideas that have been around for decades yet don't get nearly enough exposure.
This doesn't prevent us all from occasionally falling into this trap, but the themes of the languages listed is to find ways to encourage (or force) you to get the little things right the first time with computer-verified specification and to isolate the search space where problems are likely to occur.
This is a population-level study which pits total consumption in a group against various risks of death. As far as I can tell it is unable to say anything about the clinical effect on an individual. It also claims 'causality' based on purely qualitative judgments. All this seems to actually say is that there is good reason to believe that the harm caused by alcohol to populations is positively correlated with the amount of alcohol consumed and that it seems unlikely that any protective effects are strong enough across these populations to offset the harms. What it doesn't seem to say is how these harms and possible benefits are distributed within a population except for the demographic information they used to define subpopulations.
I'm not an expert in the methods used here, so I might be missing something, but my reading says that the entire framing of the conclusions of this paper are weasely and designed as academic and media click-bait. That a prestigious journal would publish a paper written to misinform like this shows that claims that the media is misinterpreting the science to create interest is only part of the story. Dietary Science is one of the most difficult areas to work in and an area that the media is most likely to sensationalize, but it doesn't help when you let your own publish articles which serve the sensationalism on a platter.
With a sample size of ~700 for each of six regions, the data collected is pretty much useless. Can anybody even find a methodology document?
Even if you want to accept the data, the narrative which emerges is not that older workers are more successful at using new technology, but that they are accustomed to using a bunch of old technology. In the break-down of device use, the following items are the ones which shift the number of devices used toward older workers: "Printer", "Scanner, "Fax Machine", "Landline Phone", "Mobile Phone (not a smart phone)". Younger people use "Smartphones" and "Projectors" more than the older cohorts ("Augmented Reality" is too small to count). Older workers are also decidedly less "excited about new technology products" than younger workers.
The biggest factor in the general economy seems to be work flexibility requirements. For reasons I won't go into here, women tend to demand a greater amount of flexibility from employers regarding things like working hours, travel, and the duration and intensity of high-demand projects. The ability and willingness to prioritize company demands over personal demands tends to pay a premium in the marketplace and is often reflected in who applies for and gets chosen for different positions. In the general marketplace, this means there is a population of people who take lower wages in exchange for flexibility either lower wages in the same field or different positions which pay less.
If we apply a similar pattern to programming jobs, we can explain quite a bit. It seems plausible that programming positions tend to have high demands in this area, selecting out a great many people from even participating. There would be a diversity, however, of positions, with some companies offering this flexibility, but with a larger applicant pool, these employers could pay less money. If women are disproportionately represented in the high-flexibility market, they would find themselves fighting for fewer positions at lower wages compared to low-flexibility workers.
I'm no opponent to wind power, but the blades aren't really the stumbling block with making wind turbines larger and better. We want to build our wind turbines larger as they will rotate slower and capture more energy. The problem is transferring that energy through the hub of the turbine. More energy and slower revolution means huge torque which has to be sped up to generate electricity. Wind turbine gear boxes are still the constraining factor for improvements. Do we have any idea how these designs plan on handling this problem?
If anybody wants to read about an actual attempt to address this, here is a thesis on a system which uses wind turbines to run gravitational pistons to directly generate compressed air.
It is a hypothesis which is supported by evidence. The existence of Jupiter is also a hypothesis which is supported by evidence, although much stronger evidence than the evidence for this planet. Epistemology is frequently at odds with our every day feelings about knowledge.
Aren't we all qualified to see where this is going?
In the same sense that we are all qualified to have opinions about the 2007-9 financial crisis or we were all qualified to have opinions about how to respond to the recent ebola outbreak. It's not that he shouldn't have opinions on the subject, it is that he is not worthy of special attention for these opinions.
The guy is a brilliant theoretical physicist and a celebrity scientist, but this in no way makes him an authority in the social implications of scientific discovery.
The Soviets were never in the 'race to the moon'. The Apollo program had many goals:
Catch up to the Soviet rocket program.
Prepare for the possibility of wars and espionage in space.
Improve domestic opinion regarding the balance of power in the cold war.
Scientific discovery.
By the time the USA was finally putting people on the moon, their rocket program was highly competitive, the military/espionage value of humans in space was seen to be low, domestic opinion of the program was mixed (although people did see the achievement as a sign of the superiority of the USA over the Soviets), and the low-hanging scientific discoveries were completed in the first two landings. The Apollo program had achieved most of its goals and remaining goals were of dramatically decreasing value while the cost of the program remained extremely high. Humanity stopped putting people on the moon because governments couldn't justify the cost of continuing doing so.
The USA has no reason to go to the moon just because China wants to go. China has reason to go because they want to develop their rocket program in order to compete should they need more autonomy for a variety of reasons. They also need to show their domestic population that the Chinese government and people are a world power which can do crazy, inspiring things. The USA gains very little from getting into this game. Where the USA might have an interest is in something like asteroid mining, but the pressing concerns there are surveying and orbital capture of desired objects, which won't likely involve manned space flight.
So far, medical science has done essentially nothing whatsoever to stop ageing from killing us. Instead, current medicine stops us dying prematurely of other causes.
This is in no small part due to a moving of the goal-posts. Medicine has done quite a bit to address many problems with aging. People are able to live much longer lives despite the aging of the cardio-vascular system. As medicine has improved in these areas, the bits that they are good at have their own names and are removed from the 'aging' bucket. Now, with those items removed, 'aging' is only left with things that medicine hasn't yet figured out.
I see no reason at all to think we're just going 'solve' ageing overnight, as the professor seems to think.
Admittedly, the claim being made here is rather optimistic, but it isn't entirely without merit. There is an open question about how difficult the aging problem really is. Aging *could* be surprisingly simple, with just a few genes needing to be tweaked to stop chemical timers that kill cells and inhibit healing. We have many examples of creatures which effectively don't age or even reverse aging during certain events, so we may just need to find analogues in humans, turn them on, and bam, we stop aging. It could be that the only reason we haven't done this previously is we didn't have the right tools for analyzing and altering genes until the last decade or so.
Of course, we probably don't have enough information to know how difficult a problem aging is going to be. Even if this claim is accurate, it is likely that anything it creates will just uncover new problems which will, in turn, need addressing. On the other hand, we thought that gastric ulcers were a hard problem and when a researcher suggested that treatment for most could be as simple as taking a course of antibiotics, he was laughed out of the room.
People are notoriously bad at rationally assessing risk and this is a clear example of one common pattern. People are much more worried about uncommon, but catastrophic risks than they are about common, moderately costly risks. This is exacerbated by risks which reinforce an existing world-view.
It should then come as no surprise that people who believe we should be investing more in space technologies would have a distorted view of the risk posed by asteroid impacts.
Saying "The Obama Administration [sic]" makes it sound like some sort of political meddling was behind this action. While the EPA is part of the executive bureaucracy, this does not stink of Obama political officials pushing an agenda, but just normal regulatory oversight and it therefore should be attributed to the agency.
Secure protects against a whole class of man-in-the-middle attacks which allow third parties to inject malicious code into non-sensitive communications.
More importantly, however, requiring security of everyone makes secure sites more secure. The big problem is that security notifications for users don't work. It is simply too difficult and error-prone to notify users of important security problems while also ignoring unimportant ones. False negatives put users at risk and false positives train users to ignore warnings. This problem would largely disappear if security were the overwhelming expectation and the folks who can address this are the people running the servers.
I have many problems with the Scientologists and how they have conducted themselves, but there are many religious organizations from the Catholic church to televangalists to numerous unaffiliated organizations which have done horrible things to their communities and congregations at various times. Scientologists aren't even the only ones who have or currently put a price tag on better spiritual outcomes (e.g. tithing).
Scientology's religious status should not be in question. Just because it is new and it is based on a set of beliefs which you think are goofy doesn't make their spiritual or philisophical claims any less legally legitimate.
If the leadership of Scientology are involved in things which we generally find morally reprehensible we should certainly question why this state of affairs has been allowed to continue and seek reforms to address it. If they are in violation of our definitions of being a religious non-profit organization, that should also be pursued. To simply ask that an unpopular religious movement be stripped of legal recognition due to the misconduct of some of its leadership, however, is a political discrimination which we should be wary of. Americans' right to organize based on their shared belief regardless of what other people think of that belief is a protection we have traditionally valued and to erode it by selectively favouring some beliefs over others without clear, fair reasons is a dangerous precedent to adopt.
English dictionaries are not prescriptive, but descriptive of the useage of words. All this is saying is that this is how people are using this word so if you hear someone use it you should consider this definition in trying to understand what has been said.
Also, while I agree on a technical level that words have no intrinsic meaning and are simply tools of communication, I don't think this conflicts with the idea that we should care about language in order to improve its utility and accessibility. It is completely legitimate to prefer that people use nauseated over nauseous as the expanded definition of the latter to include the former can hinder communication and cause confusion.
We certainly should care about our language and quoting dictionaries at people who do so is a high form of anti-thinking which just discourages people from caring.
The ignorance in your statement is mind-boggling and shows a deep bias toward the physical sciences and the number of mod points that it has received just shows how well it panders to this particular audience. The success of physical sciences does not come from their "solid foundation", but from how much simpler their fields of study are. As one moves up the ladder of complexity or murkier sources of evidence, the less predictive they become, not because they are any 'less scientific', but because the science is more difficult. Ecology, behavioral biology, medicine, and archaeologically-based fields all live in the middle of this spectrum and it is evident from the lack of consensus and frequent regressions in those fields.
The biggest problem in the social sciences isn't their practices, it is that their findings are inherently political, so it is very common for them to be used by people with an agenda or even promoted in order to create those tools to do so. While ideologues certainly exist in all academic fields, the murkiness of social science makes it more difficult to discredit their ideas conclusively. Even so, there are large bodies of actionable evidence which must be contended with. Unfortunately, journalists and the lay public rarely have the familiarity with the field or the sophistication to interpret social science research.
The first movie in the reboot series was passable.
I hear this so much and I am convinced that people are deluding themselves. Both films are filled with action schlock and related tropes with anemic stories. I don't see how the cold fusion bomb is any better than red matter. Why does the first garbage film get a pass when the second one is an awful betrayal?
Currency in general is just common agreement to scale work for goods and services
This is a key misunderstanding which has helped to pump up these virtual 'currencies'. Modern currencies are not value because of 'scarcity'. People don't want it because it is rare. People want it because they are motivated to pay their debts, either the ones they have chosen to take on or those imposed upon them by a government (e.g. property taxes). As long as one trusts that people will be motivated to pay off their debts in the future and that the money supply will only grow as legitimate promises to pay that debt grows, then the currency has real value separate from some vague notion of scarcity or 'common agreement'.
We want to transfer load to weaker faults as they break under less load creating more small earthquakes instead of a few large ones. Bad loading scenarios certainly can occur, but they seem to be less probable than scenarios where fracking is reducing system load and thus reducing risk to lives and structures.
The pro-space camp is a group, I presume, supports evidence-based policy making... except when it comes to their favorite pet projects, then they will concoct any argument they can to convince themselves that their programs have merit.
Unfortunately there are still no signs of a comparably efficient DC voltage transformer on the horizon.
I sometimes wonder where ideas like the one from the OP AC come from; do many people think that AC is an accident of history which is now horribly outdated?
even if it makes some things easier to understand it's not generally the most useful way to think about QM
Engineers use Newtonian gravity as the basis for their equations because they are more practical than using relativity. Even if this theory were to turn out to better describe the universe, actual work would get done using simpler, good-enough probabilistic equations instead of the deterministic ones, but that wouldn't change the fact that the new theory better explains the total body of observations we have.
and arguably in some sense can't be the way Nature does what it does.
Why would this be the case? Chaotic systems as a class are extremely difficult to calculate, but we have plenty of examples of them in nature.
"Philosophical" exemptions are, in effect, no different from religious exemptions, it simply words things to be more understanding of non-"religious" beliefs. To target philosophical exemptions is to hold supernatural philosophies higher than naturalistic philosophies, a road we should probably avoid.
Slashdot Mirror
We have solutions to reduce this sort of problem (at least once you get past the learning curve), but the top programming languages tend to implement very few of them. Reasoning about state is difficult, particularly when that state can be altered in unexpected ways. It is difficult to be confident that your code does what you think it does when you don't have a computer-checked method of specifying your intentions separate from what your code does.
There are no magic solutions here, at the least you will end up needing to spend more time writing in a specification language and that requires learning how it works. I would say that a gentle introduction to something like this is Elm which has an aim of stripping down typed functional programming into something that doesn't really need a C.S. degree. Here is a video which helps to explain what a better type system can do for your code. If you want to see something a bit more mind-bending check out Idris which has a much more powerful specification language which can prevent things like off-by-one errors or unbounded recursion in many cases. Moving off the scale of usability a bit, there is ATS which is a difficult language, but its specification language is able to make pointer arithmetic safe and doesn't bind you to immutable data structures. Hell, even Rust is full of good ideas that help to avoid these issues. And if fault-tolerant distributed systems are your thing, you need to check out Erlang (or its sibling Elixir) as there are so many great ideas that have been around for decades yet don't get nearly enough exposure.
This doesn't prevent us all from occasionally falling into this trap, but the themes of the languages listed is to find ways to encourage (or force) you to get the little things right the first time with computer-verified specification and to isolate the search space where problems are likely to occur.
This is a population-level study which pits total consumption in a group against various risks of death. As far as I can tell it is unable to say anything about the clinical effect on an individual. It also claims 'causality' based on purely qualitative judgments. All this seems to actually say is that there is good reason to believe that the harm caused by alcohol to populations is positively correlated with the amount of alcohol consumed and that it seems unlikely that any protective effects are strong enough across these populations to offset the harms. What it doesn't seem to say is how these harms and possible benefits are distributed within a population except for the demographic information they used to define subpopulations.
I'm not an expert in the methods used here, so I might be missing something, but my reading says that the entire framing of the conclusions of this paper are weasely and designed as academic and media click-bait. That a prestigious journal would publish a paper written to misinform like this shows that claims that the media is misinterpreting the science to create interest is only part of the story. Dietary Science is one of the most difficult areas to work in and an area that the media is most likely to sensationalize, but it doesn't help when you let your own publish articles which serve the sensationalism on a platter.
With a sample size of ~700 for each of six regions, the data collected is pretty much useless. Can anybody even find a methodology document?
Even if you want to accept the data, the narrative which emerges is not that older workers are more successful at using new technology, but that they are accustomed to using a bunch of old technology. In the break-down of device use, the following items are the ones which shift the number of devices used toward older workers: "Printer", "Scanner, "Fax Machine", "Landline Phone", "Mobile Phone (not a smart phone)". Younger people use "Smartphones" and "Projectors" more than the older cohorts ("Augmented Reality" is too small to count). Older workers are also decidedly less "excited about new technology products" than younger workers.
The biggest factor in the general economy seems to be work flexibility requirements. For reasons I won't go into here, women tend to demand a greater amount of flexibility from employers regarding things like working hours, travel, and the duration and intensity of high-demand projects. The ability and willingness to prioritize company demands over personal demands tends to pay a premium in the marketplace and is often reflected in who applies for and gets chosen for different positions. In the general marketplace, this means there is a population of people who take lower wages in exchange for flexibility either lower wages in the same field or different positions which pay less.
If we apply a similar pattern to programming jobs, we can explain quite a bit. It seems plausible that programming positions tend to have high demands in this area, selecting out a great many people from even participating. There would be a diversity, however, of positions, with some companies offering this flexibility, but with a larger applicant pool, these employers could pay less money. If women are disproportionately represented in the high-flexibility market, they would find themselves fighting for fewer positions at lower wages compared to low-flexibility workers.
I am not finding their question sheet after two minutes of scanning, but the pictures offer what seems to be a slightly abbreviated version.
"In response to court order tied to ongoing FBI investigation of San Bernadino attacks, Apple..."
This question is entirely biased toward the FBI's position and should have been rejected by whomever was managing the survey.
I'm no opponent to wind power, but the blades aren't really the stumbling block with making wind turbines larger and better. We want to build our wind turbines larger as they will rotate slower and capture more energy. The problem is transferring that energy through the hub of the turbine. More energy and slower revolution means huge torque which has to be sped up to generate electricity. Wind turbine gear boxes are still the constraining factor for improvements. Do we have any idea how these designs plan on handling this problem?
If anybody wants to read about an actual attempt to address this, here is a thesis on a system which uses wind turbines to run gravitational pistons to directly generate compressed air.
It is a hypothesis which is supported by evidence. The existence of Jupiter is also a hypothesis which is supported by evidence, although much stronger evidence than the evidence for this planet. Epistemology is frequently at odds with our every day feelings about knowledge.
Aren't we all qualified to see where this is going?
In the same sense that we are all qualified to have opinions about the 2007-9 financial crisis or we were all qualified to have opinions about how to respond to the recent ebola outbreak. It's not that he shouldn't have opinions on the subject, it is that he is not worthy of special attention for these opinions.
The guy is a brilliant theoretical physicist and a celebrity scientist, but this in no way makes him an authority in the social implications of scientific discovery.
The Soviets were never in the 'race to the moon'. The Apollo program had many goals:
By the time the USA was finally putting people on the moon, their rocket program was highly competitive, the military/espionage value of humans in space was seen to be low, domestic opinion of the program was mixed (although people did see the achievement as a sign of the superiority of the USA over the Soviets), and the low-hanging scientific discoveries were completed in the first two landings. The Apollo program had achieved most of its goals and remaining goals were of dramatically decreasing value while the cost of the program remained extremely high. Humanity stopped putting people on the moon because governments couldn't justify the cost of continuing doing so.
The USA has no reason to go to the moon just because China wants to go. China has reason to go because they want to develop their rocket program in order to compete should they need more autonomy for a variety of reasons. They also need to show their domestic population that the Chinese government and people are a world power which can do crazy, inspiring things. The USA gains very little from getting into this game. Where the USA might have an interest is in something like asteroid mining, but the pressing concerns there are surveying and orbital capture of desired objects, which won't likely involve manned space flight.
So far, medical science has done essentially nothing whatsoever to stop ageing from killing us. Instead, current medicine stops us dying prematurely of other causes.
This is in no small part due to a moving of the goal-posts. Medicine has done quite a bit to address many problems with aging. People are able to live much longer lives despite the aging of the cardio-vascular system. As medicine has improved in these areas, the bits that they are good at have their own names and are removed from the 'aging' bucket. Now, with those items removed, 'aging' is only left with things that medicine hasn't yet figured out.
I see no reason at all to think we're just going 'solve' ageing overnight, as the professor seems to think.
Admittedly, the claim being made here is rather optimistic, but it isn't entirely without merit. There is an open question about how difficult the aging problem really is. Aging *could* be surprisingly simple, with just a few genes needing to be tweaked to stop chemical timers that kill cells and inhibit healing. We have many examples of creatures which effectively don't age or even reverse aging during certain events, so we may just need to find analogues in humans, turn them on, and bam, we stop aging. It could be that the only reason we haven't done this previously is we didn't have the right tools for analyzing and altering genes until the last decade or so.
Of course, we probably don't have enough information to know how difficult a problem aging is going to be. Even if this claim is accurate, it is likely that anything it creates will just uncover new problems which will, in turn, need addressing. On the other hand, we thought that gastric ulcers were a hard problem and when a researcher suggested that treatment for most could be as simple as taking a course of antibiotics, he was laughed out of the room.
People are notoriously bad at rationally assessing risk and this is a clear example of one common pattern. People are much more worried about uncommon, but catastrophic risks than they are about common, moderately costly risks. This is exacerbated by risks which reinforce an existing world-view.
It should then come as no surprise that people who believe we should be investing more in space technologies would have a distorted view of the risk posed by asteroid impacts.
Saying "The Obama Administration [sic]" makes it sound like some sort of political meddling was behind this action. While the EPA is part of the executive bureaucracy, this does not stink of Obama political officials pushing an agenda, but just normal regulatory oversight and it therefore should be attributed to the agency.
Secure protects against a whole class of man-in-the-middle attacks which allow third parties to inject malicious code into non-sensitive communications.
More importantly, however, requiring security of everyone makes secure sites more secure. The big problem is that security notifications for users don't work. It is simply too difficult and error-prone to notify users of important security problems while also ignoring unimportant ones. False negatives put users at risk and false positives train users to ignore warnings. This problem would largely disappear if security were the overwhelming expectation and the folks who can address this are the people running the servers.
I have many problems with the Scientologists and how they have conducted themselves, but there are many religious organizations from the Catholic church to televangalists to numerous unaffiliated organizations which have done horrible things to their communities and congregations at various times. Scientologists aren't even the only ones who have or currently put a price tag on better spiritual outcomes (e.g. tithing).
Scientology's religious status should not be in question. Just because it is new and it is based on a set of beliefs which you think are goofy doesn't make their spiritual or philisophical claims any less legally legitimate.
If the leadership of Scientology are involved in things which we generally find morally reprehensible we should certainly question why this state of affairs has been allowed to continue and seek reforms to address it. If they are in violation of our definitions of being a religious non-profit organization, that should also be pursued. To simply ask that an unpopular religious movement be stripped of legal recognition due to the misconduct of some of its leadership, however, is a political discrimination which we should be wary of. Americans' right to organize based on their shared belief regardless of what other people think of that belief is a protection we have traditionally valued and to erode it by selectively favouring some beliefs over others without clear, fair reasons is a dangerous precedent to adopt.
English dictionaries are not prescriptive, but descriptive of the useage of words. All this is saying is that this is how people are using this word so if you hear someone use it you should consider this definition in trying to understand what has been said.
Also, while I agree on a technical level that words have no intrinsic meaning and are simply tools of communication, I don't think this conflicts with the idea that we should care about language in order to improve its utility and accessibility. It is completely legitimate to prefer that people use nauseated over nauseous as the expanded definition of the latter to include the former can hinder communication and cause confusion.
We certainly should care about our language and quoting dictionaries at people who do so is a high form of anti-thinking which just discourages people from caring.
The ignorance in your statement is mind-boggling and shows a deep bias toward the physical sciences and the number of mod points that it has received just shows how well it panders to this particular audience. The success of physical sciences does not come from their "solid foundation", but from how much simpler their fields of study are. As one moves up the ladder of complexity or murkier sources of evidence, the less predictive they become, not because they are any 'less scientific', but because the science is more difficult. Ecology, behavioral biology, medicine, and archaeologically-based fields all live in the middle of this spectrum and it is evident from the lack of consensus and frequent regressions in those fields.
The biggest problem in the social sciences isn't their practices, it is that their findings are inherently political, so it is very common for them to be used by people with an agenda or even promoted in order to create those tools to do so. While ideologues certainly exist in all academic fields, the murkiness of social science makes it more difficult to discredit their ideas conclusively. Even so, there are large bodies of actionable evidence which must be contended with. Unfortunately, journalists and the lay public rarely have the familiarity with the field or the sophistication to interpret social science research.
The first movie in the reboot series was passable.
I hear this so much and I am convinced that people are deluding themselves. Both films are filled with action schlock and related tropes with anemic stories. I don't see how the cold fusion bomb is any better than red matter. Why does the first garbage film get a pass when the second one is an awful betrayal?
Currency in general is just common agreement to scale work for goods and services
This is a key misunderstanding which has helped to pump up these virtual 'currencies'. Modern currencies are not value because of 'scarcity'. People don't want it because it is rare. People want it because they are motivated to pay their debts, either the ones they have chosen to take on or those imposed upon them by a government (e.g. property taxes). As long as one trusts that people will be motivated to pay off their debts in the future and that the money supply will only grow as legitimate promises to pay that debt grows, then the currency has real value separate from some vague notion of scarcity or 'common agreement'.
We want to transfer load to weaker faults as they break under less load creating more small earthquakes instead of a few large ones. Bad loading scenarios certainly can occur, but they seem to be less probable than scenarios where fracking is reducing system load and thus reducing risk to lives and structures.
The pro-space camp is a group, I presume, supports evidence-based policy making... except when it comes to their favorite pet projects, then they will concoct any argument they can to convince themselves that their programs have merit.
Unfortunately there are still no signs of a comparably efficient DC voltage transformer on the horizon.
I sometimes wonder where ideas like the one from the OP AC come from; do many people think that AC is an accident of history which is now horribly outdated?
This bubble still has life in it if we can keep finding fresh meat to keep it going.
even if it makes some things easier to understand it's not generally the most useful way to think about QM
Engineers use Newtonian gravity as the basis for their equations because they are more practical than using relativity. Even if this theory were to turn out to better describe the universe, actual work would get done using simpler, good-enough probabilistic equations instead of the deterministic ones, but that wouldn't change the fact that the new theory better explains the total body of observations we have.
and arguably in some sense can't be the way Nature does what it does.
Why would this be the case? Chaotic systems as a class are extremely difficult to calculate, but we have plenty of examples of them in nature.
"Philosophical" exemptions are, in effect, no different from religious exemptions, it simply words things to be more understanding of non-"religious" beliefs. To target philosophical exemptions is to hold supernatural philosophies higher than naturalistic philosophies, a road we should probably avoid.