My guess would be a linkage with something else as you say. Look for example at the Russian domestication of silver foxes which was done very deliberately, and bred for less aggressiveness, yet it caused physical changes in appearance like dog-like ears and tails:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
Physicist here. My PhD is in an area that was spawned into existence due to inspiration coming from string theory, not string theory proper.
I've made some comments here [1] to discuss how I see the situation. It's difficult to be thorought in the world of research, and even more so in an HN comment. I'll be writing more as the subject pops up in HN.
The legit criticism with a legit recommended change is even better.
A time and technological gap always exists between theory and a plan for experimental confirmation. Some gaps are fairly short. String theory's gap is undoubtedly long, not for lack of resources.
This gap justifies tapering the allocation of attention and research resources (funding, students, etc), which got lopsided following the strong marketing campaign driven by Greene.
I tend to agree. Science funding is unfortunately a limited resource, and I would like to see different approaches explored in more detail, which unfortunately would imply less (but not zero) funding to string theory. Not zero, because we also don’t want the competence built up in string theory groups to die out completely, in case that remains our best lead.
To borrow a compsci analogy, we tried the depth-first search going in the string theory direction, maybe it’s time to switch to breadth-first for a while, to see if there are any viable and useful theories with less distance from the ones we have today. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a "theory of everything" either, we can initially settle for a "theory of more".
I'm legit interested in hearing more about this, like YouTube series, popsci books, magazines - I've been meaning to read Zwiebach's A first course, but I keep getting distracted with background reading and then never get back to it.
Yes, although the fast workers currently intentionally make their slower coworkers starve (also while compromising on quality and innovation), so how about that. They have done this for years. Payback is a part of righteousness.
If you really only care about syntax highlighting then nearly any code editor will do. Even nano supports it, it’s just disabled by default.
If you want something powerful yet easy to pick up, you might want to look at e.g. Zed (GUI IDE), Sublime Text (GUI editor), or Micro (TUI editor). If you don’t mind a learning curve, Vim/Neovim and Emacs are excellent choices. But there’s a lot of other options out there, like Gedit, Kate, BBEdit, Notepad++, etc. depending on your platform of choice.
As someone teaching in higher education, I’d say that you can certainly incentivize the students to learn "understanding", although I agree that a lot is up to the student.
Some basic examples:
- Don’t give test and exam questions that are too similar to examples and problems in the text book and homework. Then they’ll know that learning to generalize is a better pay-off than memorizing the textbook problems, and may choose to change their strategy when studying for exams.
- Reduce the amount of curriculum. By studying in depth instead of in breadth, you have time to focus on how things really work instead of just rushing through material on a surface level, and in my experience that improves understanding more. (But I know many disagree with me on this one.)
- Focus on problem solving as part of the lectures (student-active learning). I’m not an extremist, like some advocating that we shouldn’t lecture at all, but the pedagogical literature is pretty clear that small doses of lectures interspersed with problem solving enhances understanding.
- Try to teach intuition and conceptual models, not just facts. For example, as a student, I really struggled understanding eigenvalues and eigenvectors because our linear algebra textbook defined it by Αv = λv but made no attempt at explaining what it means intuitively and geometrically. Similarly, integration by parts has a simple and beautiful geometric interpretation that makes it obvious why this is correct, but we were only taught the opaque symbolic version in my calculus classes. When I teach myself, I try to lean on such visualizations and intuitive pictures as much as possible, as I think that really enhances «understanding»; not necessarily being able to cough up a solution to a problem you’ve seen before as fast as possible, but being able to generalize that knowledge to problems you haven’t seen before.
But who knows, maybe I’m just biased by how I myself perceive the world. I know there are some people who for example eschew geometric pictures entirely and still do very well. My experience is that most students seem to appreciate the things listed above though.
Students need to take responsibility for themselves and Teachers need to point them in the right direction and help/steer as needed.
A Chinese Martial Arts saying which i keep in mind goes;
To show one the right direction and the right path, oral instructions from a Master are necessary, but mastery of the subject only comes from one's own incessant self-cultivation.
A good authoritative book can be the stand-in for a Master in which case there is more discipline and effort required of the Student.
These days different types of books/videos focusing on different aspects of the same subject are so easily available/affordable that the Teacher/Student can both work together and focus on understanding. A handful of real-world problems modeled and worked through beats pages of mere symbol manipulation. We need to start stressing quality over quantity i.e. deliberate effort via deliberate practice in the right way.
The Feynman essay here is all about the teachers NOT pointing the students toward understanding.
And it is all about the students being disciplined and putting in effort, but toward rote memorization rather then understanding, because that is what teachers told them to do.
I was agreeing/elaborating on "setopt's" comment (which lists specific approaches) on how to solve the problem detailed in the essay.
I had submitted the original article for discussion since the observations seem to apply to how Physics/Science has been taught/studied in most countries and not just Latin America.
I think you’re right and especially in regards to abstract concepts like linear algebra I don’t know anyone serious about learning who didn’t struggle with what turned out to be relatively simple things when viewed intuitively.
The problem as I see it
1. Professors themselves don’t understand it and are regurgitating pedagogy from books.
2. The material load is so high for your average bachelors degree you’d spend 8 years in school otherwise. I would hazard to say this is necessary and sufficient but schools wouldn’t get funding and our job oriented society would have it so then only the wealthiest could get education (like it was for centuries).
3. Tests are a benchmark and very expensive. You can consider a class’ total value to be loaded on the final exam. I recently wanted to go back to school casually. One of the cheapest universities available wanted 2600 dollars for a partial differential equations course. If I fail the course I lose 2600 dollars since I would need to retake it to proceed to higher mathematics. This alone does not allow a person time to explore - and that’s just one class!
4. Schools are simply a money laundering vehicle that takes money from students and moves it into administrator pockets. Education costs have skyrocketed yet education and pedagogy remains the same. This is money laundering by any other name.
- understanding leads intuition. There’s very little of either, anywhere.
Privacy is privacy. I ideally don’t want any of my data sold to anyone, but health data is even more vulnerable.
In my country it was even a big deal when they allowed different doctors to access your health data via a common system, as there were e.g. concerns that the information recorded by one doctor might bias another doctor, so some felt that it should be your choice what data to share between different parts of the public health system (except for explicit referrals).
Moreover, most European countries do have private doctors, private hospitals, and private health insurance – it’s just way less used than the public system. Those would have the same concerns as in the US.
Yes, I do. It is engineeringly possible, but societally a horror prescription. I maintain that even the moon landing was an engineering dead end, it resulted in no major breakthrough which we wouldn’t have reached otherwise (for much cheaper) and the humanity benefited nothing but bragging rights. It was then used to further nationalism and exceptionalism by one particular society which went on to conduct many horrible acts of atrocities in the decades that followed.
The prospect of a Mars colony would be that except a million times worse. Humanity will never migrate to Mars, we will never live on Mars, we have nothing to gain by living there, and it may even be impossible for us to live a normal human life over there (e.g. we don‘t know if we can even give birth over there). The only thing it will give us are bragging rights to the powerful individuals which achives it first, who will likely use that as political capital to enact horrible policies on Earth, for their own personal benefits, at the cost of everybody else.
Saying "working toward a martian colony" is akin to saying "working toward a way to colonize the solar system". Mars is not very interesting once you have a methodology. The Moon is a much more practical place to start the process. Then aim at the asteroid belt.
Mars costs the same as the Moon to reach and return from (delta-V) and is a much easier environment to stay in, even over as short a period as a month. Mars makes much more sense than the Moon, which has little of interest and isn’t a stepping stone to anywhere.
> Mars costs the same as the Moon to reach and return from
0/1
If you stay out of gravity wells, traveling anywhere in space is the same cost, minus the non-trivial life support issues, which only come into play on a trip to Mars and back.
> (Mars) is a much easier environment to stay in, even over as short a period as a month
0/2
> (the moon) isn’t a stepping stone to anywhere.
0/3
Humanity has gotten there before Mars for the precise reason that it is a stepping stone.
None of what you posted is factually true and, in good faith, I have to wonder why you might believe these things.
Mining asteroids is a goal that makes sense. I can picture a future where spacecrafts are regularly sent to the asteroid belt and come back to earth with some minerals. Living on the moon does not make sense. There is nothing to be gained from humans living in a future moon base. Not any more than cities built in Antarctica, or in orbit with a constellation of ISS like satellites.
We won’t build a city on the Moon, nor Mars, nor any of Jupiter’s moons, nor anywhere outside of Earth, and we won‘t do this even if engineeringly possible, for the exact same reason we won’t build a bubble city inside the Mariana Trench.
Mining asteroids makes no sense whatsoever with any currently imaginable practical tech, especially not economically. The numbers for even the most basic solutions just don't work, and anything cleverer - like adding thrusters to chunks of metal and firing them at the Earth - has one or two rather obvious issues.
The Moon is interesting because it's there, it's fairly close, it's a test bed for off-world construction, manufacturing, and life support, and there are experiments you can do on the dark side that aren't possible elsewhere.
Especially big telescopes.
It has many of the same life support issues as Mars, and any Moon solutions are likely to work on Mars and the asteroids, more quickly and successfully than trying to do the same R&D far, far away.
Will it pay for itself? Not for a long, long time. But frontier projects rarely do.
The benefit comes from the investment, the R&D, the new science and engineering, and the jobs created.
It's also handy if you need a remote off-site backup.
Mining asteroids wouldn’t be for Earth - it would be for satellites or LEO or possibly even Mars, which is a lot closer to the Asteroids than Earth and may need some extra raw materials we don’t want to spend the horrendous cost of lifting out of Earth’s gravity.
The Moon has nothing to offer Mars explorers as everything will be different and solutions for the unique lunar conditions (two weeks of darkness, temperature extremes, moon dust, vacuum) do not apply to Mars at all. It’like saying living under the ocean is good practice for living in the Artic, but we should start under the ocean because it’s closer.
> Mining asteroids makes no sense whatsoever with any currently imaginable practical tech, especially not economically.
With current tech, it's practical enough to extract rocks from a rock. We've already done this on a comet, which I think is much harder to do. With current economics, not practical to fund such an endeavor, even if it was to haul back an asteroid made of solid gold. Regardless, we're discussing the far future, rather than current state.
If raw materials (again, an unknown) continue to become more scarce, it's hard to say what economics might support extra-planetary resource collection. What's for sure, is mining Mars will be harder than mining asteroids for water or metals, et al.
Mining asteroids makes no sense in the current economy with our current technology. But working towards engineering solutions which makes mining asteroids make sense makes sense (if that makes sense).
However, it is much easier to see us send robots to mine these asteroids, or send robots to the moon to build a giant telescope on the dark side (if that makes sense), then it is to see us build cities on the moon to build said telescope, and to mine those asteroids.
You see the difference here is that the end goal of mining asteroids are resources being sent to earth and exploited, while the goal of space settlements are the settlements them selves, that is some hypothetical space expansion is the goal, and that makes no sense, nobodies lives will improve from space expansion (except for the grifters’ during the grift).
> nobodies lives will improve from space expansion (except for the grifters’ during the grift).
Aspiring to goals and accomplishing them makes life worth living to a lot of people. Furthermore, humanity seems to have an innate drive to explore and learn.
Even to those left at home, it's inspirational to think that there are people who are taking steps to explore the universe.
Maybe it won't help anyone live but it will give a lot of people something to live for.
As others have noted, the moon has significant limitations, in terms of resources and atmosphere. I do think it may have utility, not for anything we might consider settlements or habitats, but perhaps domed science outposts.
My organization also explicitly blocks access from other clients than Microsoft Outlook, even if the credentials are correct and the protocol is supported. They also refused providing an exception, citing that I can just use the web interface via Microsoft Edge on Linux. (Which I prefer not to do for many reasons, e.g. backing up my emails locally, working offline, and authoring using native tools.)
Currently, only Thunderbird with the proprietary "OWL" extension somehow manages to connect despite the block. My understanding is that they somehow abuse the web interface to do so, instead of actually going through the proper protocols, but not sure.
If someone has another way to access Exchange servers that intentionally blocks non-Outlook clients I’d love to hear about it.
I am surprised as davmail with the Exchange protocol has worked for me since I set it up. They made offlineimap unusable but davmail works (it even has a small web client for the login when more than a month has passed). ??
Edit: they (my Uni) made offlineimap unusable, but it works with davmail.
I actually haven’t tried DavMail (but have heard about it), so if it manages to get around this sort of shenanigans I’ll happily give that a shot.
In my previous org I could also use offlineimap and msmtp to connect to their Microsoft mail server via standard protocols. But in this org I’ve so far tried the built-in Exchange support in Thunderbird as well as in Evolution Data Server based exchange clients (Evolution and KMail). All of them manage to connect to the server, kinda, but then I get an error message saying basically that my mail client is not approved and I’ll have to contact my admin to use it.
EDIT: I might add that the IT deliberately blocked non-Outlook mail clients a year ago or so, other Linux users told me that it worked fine before that. It’s supposedly a crackdown on people using shady third-party apps that they are concerned might exfiltrate data, but somehow they don’t allow exceptions even for reputable clients like Thunderbird.
You are repeating the very same history and excuses (from the IT Dpt.) I lived and heard. Davmail works for me on Linux and MacOS even from outside the intranet. Give it a try and I would be happy to help, I have a gmail account with my nick.
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