> You would rather be manipulated better?

There is another way to look at it. "Manipulation" is sometimes necessitated by poor targeting.

That seemed like a well-intentioned article, but his story strikes me as paradigmatic though:

* Year 1969. Writes the Anarchist Cookbook.

* Years 1973-75. Becomes a teacher.

Interpret at will.

Typing with this keyboard right now: http://matias.ca/laptoppro/mac/ Much better keyboard than Apple's own wireless thingy.

Looks good but it weighs around 2 pounds! There are lighter laptops ;-)

I have been pondering about this for a while and have developed a hypothesis as to why Indian parents (and those from similar nations) tend to overvalue college degrees.

It is mostly due to the parents having low self-esteem. It comes down to the following two facts:

(1) While there are plenty of exceptionally capable young individuals like OP who have been proving everyone wrong, it usually takes a lot of parental skill and know-how to produce a wunderkind with social skills necessary to navigate the adult world in a foreign country.

(2) Parents who are recent immigrants (especially from poorer nations or from nations with significant cultural differences from the host nation) do not see themselves as capable of providing that know-how. Note that I did not say they can't provide it -- just that they do not see themselves as capable to (it turns out that more often than not they underestimate themselves).

Therefore, if you are a parent in a similar situation, it (often wrongly) appears to you that the only way your children stand a fighting chance is if you they spend as much time in school as possible. Then, of course, is the social pressure from family friends.

Don't read prose written for the sake of sounding meaningful.

I'm not an expert on Comp Chem, but you might want to rephrase your question. If the simulation is "chemically accurate", of course it will match the real-world, by definition of "accurate"...

My understanding of these things is that the dynamics of the real world are not easily measurable at this scale. An alternative is to simulate using using packages such as Gromacs:

  http://www.gromacs.org/About_Gromacs

These packages are truly incredible but use relatively crude approximations and are in wide use. It is possible to get a decent paper out that uses a simulation as evidence to support an idea.

The aim of my question was to see if chemically accurate simulations come up with significantly different answers or to see if the current way of doing things is a good enough approximation.

You bring up an excellent point, papaf. The accuracy of the empirical force fields used in molecular dynamics simulation engines (such as Gromacs) is a hotly debated topic. Even without quantum computing the issue can be addressed with conventional computers that perform quantum mechanical calculations on interacting molecular fragments. The forces calculated from quantum mechanics can then be compared with those calculated from molecular dynamics force fields (as an example see Sherrill et al. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcc.21226/full ). Such studied have shown that current force fields fail to model certain chemical interactions and need improved. Specifically, the underlying functional forms used to model molecular forces need revised.

Currently such investigations are limited in scope by the large computational resources required to perform a single quantum mechanical calculation on a molecular fragment. With quantum computers, tens of thousands of such calculations could be performed and the results could be used to optimize new molecular force fields through multivariate regression.

Nice to see another GT person on HN! (Did my undergrad there.) Have you worked with Dr. Sherrill? It's funny you mention him; I was actually reading one of his presentations on electron-electron correlation last night.

Cool. I'm a grad student in another chemistry theory group. Dr. Sherrill definitely has the best notes on electronic structure calculations.

Haha, sounds like you've met a Lacanian (Lacan was famous for saying, among other things, that "the unconscious is structured like a language"). Such reductionist intellectualizations (aka "man, everything is a pineapple!") are neat to meditate on, but they alone won't give you tangible results or something you can use to forecast events and test hypotheses.

The point pg is trying to make is that seeking relative material wealth with respect to others is akin to seeking pure status/power without having to do the work required to get it. It is all too easy to move to Costa Rica or wherever and live like a king for $10 a day.

Costa Rica isn't so cheap anymore, BTW.

Looks like the park of the Permian period will be robotic.

What surprises me is that the same people who complain about patents and intellectual property are often the first to bring up the discussion of how market tends to undervalue fundamental research. You can't have your cake and eat it too.