Also "I've tortured the meaning of this to make Ray look like less of an idiot." I'm pretty sure gunshot detectors, which arguably date from WW-1, don't qualify as "Public and private spaces are routinely monitored by machine intelligence to prevent interpersonal violence.”
I’m not sure how you think they work or how they are currently being used if you’re under the impression that statement is an inaccurate description of reality.
It's a regression as far as code readability goes for fairly straightforward reasons: almost everything in Matlab is a matrix. Matrices are not first class citizens in Python, and it matters. I use Python a hell of a lot more than Matlab, but for examining how an algorithm works (say, for implementing in another language or modifying it to do tricks), Matlab wins. Go look at these PRML collections in Python and Matlab and see if you disagree:
I used to feel the same, but three years after making the switch, I've changed my mind. Matlab code has brevity, but sometimes at the expense of clarity. For example, sum(x,axis=1) is more clear than sum(x,1). Especially when matlab has functions like diff() where the second argument is not axis.
Broadcasting in python is a lot more clean than the "bsxfun(@plus, ...)" abomination in matlab. If you think all the "np." is too wordy then just do "from numpy import *". For matrix multiplication you can use "@". Numpy code can be dense but most people choose clarity over brevity.
I'd rather write python than matlab any day (I made this choice, literally in '98): it's a statement about reading. Matlab is closer to a a math notation and python is a clunky programming language. I'd never in a million years write new code in Matlab, but I prefer it for didactics.
I'm happy to pay more for, say, beans which aren't soaked in glyphosate. It's really bonkers how Monsanto has succeeded in putting this shit everywhere.
I didn't downvote, but maybe because it is an insipid and disgusting question?
FWIIW in high altitude aviation where digestive gas could cause debilitating pain or even life threatening injury, the solution is to eat food that doesn't make you fart; usually steak and eggs. I'm sure the astronaut nutritionist types have this issue under control. People forget how many zillions of dollars went into the early space program to figure stuff like this out.
Even though it is a disgusting issue, it is a real issue, pretty much on topic.
And despite zillions of dollars wenting into it, if it would be just the smell, I believe it is possible someone just would have said, deal with it, there are bigger concerns in space, like keeping people alive.
(but charcoal filters work, like someone else pointed out)
And since you cannot really shower in space, I doubt the smell is the nicest up there.
A little gross, yes, but definitely not insipid. And yes, we assume that there's some solution (or that it's not a problem) somehow, but it's reasonable to be curious what the solution is.
I usually like Collision articles, and agree with the title, but this is a terrible measure for physics.
Horgan's book is a better resource for this sort of thing[0]. Obviously there are many problems with the sociology and incentive systems for physics departments; affirmative action, papers with 1000 "coauthors," infrastructure fees for grants involving giving a grad student a pencil, political witch hunts, difficulties in family formation, herding behavior in subjects, byzantine political games, overcrowded winner take all credit. Frankly you'd have to be kind of a combination masochist moron to want to do it these days outside of the rare person whose career is assured post PhD; masochistic morons probably don't make good scientists.
But nobody talks about the fact that an awful lot of "physics" these days is unfalsifiable piffle. Phenomenology, network theory, cosmology, noodle theory, "quantum computing," black hole physics, neural net fiddlers, nanotechnologists, cosmologists, numskulls babbling about "muh multiverse" and "muh simulation hypothesis" -the world let alone the average physics department has entirely too many of these. Nobody in the physics department can make fun of these cranks for entirely political reasons. And at this point the lunatics outnumber the actual scientists, who, you know, can make predictions that can be checked, rather than generating piffle suited for press releases and late night bong sessions.
I don't understand why affirmative action would be a problem for physics departments. What's the basis of that? As an outsider, I'll say that I see the jobs of a physics department as a) making physics b) making physicists c) teaching physics d) funding making physics. How is affirmative action an "obvious" issue?
This isn't obvious to me either. While I can see that hiring to match predetermined racial quota can result in subpar performance, most of the world does not play the diversity/inclusion game in the way that USA does, and does not seem to have better results.
I've come to see affirmative action's value for the future. Hiring was not free from bias in the past. Even if that's no longer true, the existing lack of physicists in a community means less people from that community will have physics as a goal. Kids rarely dream of attaining roles they don't see. And if kids don't see roles on television or in daily life, that leaves their community. Underrepresentation causes an artificial self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's hard to come up with an unbiased way to correct current problems caused by past bias.
Still, there is a natural experiment. There is no affirmative action in Taiwan or Japan (or Czechia, where I live). In that case, shouldn't teams from those countries exhibit some advantages against American ones?
Or is the effect so small that it gets erased by, say, better facilities or funding?
Assuming that capacity to produce valuable scientific results is uncorrelated with society’s historical prejudice (ie people from historically disadvantaged backgrounds are as likely as any other to produce such results, given they aren’t hampered by historical prejudice), seems more reasonable than assuming that “talent” is reducable to a single normally distributed variable that we have consistently been able to measure in practice.
Because even a reasonable set of first steps towards creating artificial mechanical life forms made out of arbitrary atoms do not exist and probably never will. Drexler wrote a stupid science fiction book. Good marketing for chemists for a while I guess. Remember the congressional hearings back in 2005 on how nanotech was going to be 15% of US GDP by 2015? I do!
Of course the capital costs of this are absurd (that's basically what you're saying here), but if it results in tomatoes and strawberries which don't taste like paste, it's worth it to me. Dutch greenhouse farms are considerably more realistic [0], but who knows, this may have some niches in extremely urban areas.
> The total area of the Netherlands is just 41.6 square kilometers, but the country is ranked first in the world by the area of greenhouse farms.
Well, that would be quite something.. but the number is a typo. From Wikipedia:
> With a population of 17.4 million people, all living within a total area of roughly 41,800 square kilometres (16,100 sq mi)—of which the land area is 33,500 square kilometres (12,900 sq mi)—the Netherlands is the 12th most densely populated country in the world.
The total amount of greenhouse area is about 10,000 hectares (24710 acres).
Well my time is definitely not free; people pay lots of money for access to it.
The problem with "muh welcome to upper middle class prosperity" lists like this is it doesn't account for the management time and mental load involved in something like "Hire a researcher or expert consultant." For that matter "Cleaning services" or "Hire a graphic designer to turn your appalling sketches into ..." require significant cognitive overhead and time to hire and manage unless you or your spouse or close friends are already doing such things for your day job. If you're already doing such things for your day job you probably already thought of these things.
Some of them are pretty insane: people who need a maid to chuck their clothes into the washer and dryer, then put them away: if it takes you longer than 15 minutes a week to do this ... I have to wonder at your wardrobe. I mean, I understand some people deeply resent performing such menial tasks, or maybe they have large families, but it's not that big a job compared to feeding yourself and getting some exercise.
For myself, hiring experts to assist with my day to day life has been a fairly mixed bag, and my education, hobbies and lifestyle is such that DiY is usually the win.
> Well my time is definitely not free; people pay lots of money for access to it.
Your working time is worth money, but your free time is free. Your time is only worth money (opportunity cost) if you'd otherwise be working on some money-making opportunity.
If it's 1. Hiring someone for $25/hr to mow the lawn while I work on a contract that's making me $200/hr, I'd choose to hire the gardener. If it's 2. Hiring someone to mow the lawn while I play video games, I'm better off if I mow it myself.
I charge by the hour, so my "free time" is billable too. Focuses the mind knowing whatever you're doing when you're not working is billable hours (hence no vidya). I still mostly make my own food, coffee and wash my own clothes. Hell Paul Krugman washes his own clothes in his sink, while he's travelling, and I'm pretty sure he bills more than I do (I actually do use laundry service when I travel for work).
Anyway, maybe that's why I don't see a lot of those things on the list as desirable; if I have to spend two hours managing the graphic designer to make a chart/plot/figure, I may as well fiddle around in xfig or whatever to get it done myself.
> if it takes you longer than 15 minutes a week to do this ... I have to wonder at your wardrobe
Consider a large family with multiple children, a humid environment where towels have to be washed often or they smell, plus the safety precaution of washing outside clothes more often to eliminate any possible coronavirus, then you have the recipe for a full load of laundry almost every day. It easily adds up to way more than 15 minutes a week.
