For non-mathematicians (although some post-secondary maths is probably required), I'd also recommend Spivak's "Category Theory for the Sciences" (MIT Press, 2014) and Milewski's "Category Theory for Programmers" (available online at https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-p...). I liked it enough to buy the hardcover.
This attitude is how we ended up with Active Directory. One assumes that the author doesn't spend much time in a command-line environment. The option to set defaults for one's normal working environment is obviously of value, and environment variables are hardly exclusive of configuration files (~/.bashrc, makefiles, ...). The theory that complex syntax and statelessness are inherently good and cost-free is naïve to the point of parody.
The author is correct that "this is the way we have always done it" isn't a good argument in and of itself to persist in a practice. However, they might be rewarded by a few minutes pondering a related idea: "if generations of people---many quite capable of modifying the system to use something else---persist in using something, it's possible they have a reason for doing so other than a deficit in competence or imagination."
The crucial difference is that the mRNA virus, when finally scrutinized, was shown to be effective with effects that could be consistently replicated and there was a theoretical explanation consistent with other things we've observed about mammalian immune systems. People were absolutely correct to dismiss the claims about the mRNA virus until those demonstrations were available, and would be wrong to dismiss them afterward. Cold 'fusion' is still in the first phase and has been for decades. Science isn't about what might be right. It's about what can be demonstrated.
Exactly. The fact that reported positive results always seem to be at the limits of detectability, whatever the equipment used, is a huge red flag that the results are probably artifacts.
I get what you’re saying, but I was reporting Mahafee said about the response of scientists to the first press conference. They were not claiming that their new type of deuterium fusion didn’t have the same relationship between generated heat and neutron flux. They were claiming it was ‘fusion’ generating ‘tremendous heat’ which was completely inconsistent with them standing next to it unharmed. The (still dubious) claim that this is a different type of ‘fusion’ that has different features came much later. I’ll very happily withdraw criticism if someone (1) publishes a properly reviewed study that is replicable and (2) make a convincing case for a theory that explains the phenomenon that is consistent with other observations of fusion. After several decades, we’re still not seeing any real progress on either of those, so I remain pretty confident of my skepticism.
I don't find this argument convincing:
"This is fusion."
"It can't be fusion. We've got a pretty good understanding of how fusion works, and this is missing some key features. Notably, neutron flux consistent with the claimed heat."
"This is a special kind of fusion that doesn't have any of the features your theory describes."
"Ok. What's the theory that describes this result then?"
<Waves vaguely at beaker of warm water> "I don't need a theory, it's been experimentally proven!"
As well call start calling a campfire "forest fusion" and offer to sell me the patent.
James Mahaffey, Atomic Adventures (Pegasus:2018 Reprint): 'A couple of things about the announced phenomenon bothered me greatly. Both Pons and Fleischmann had claimed over and over that their apparatus was producing “tremendous” heat and “measurable” neutrons. On the news, they were shown hovering over their operating fusion reactor, closely examining the apparatus as the oxygen and deuterium bubbled. That didn’t make any sense. It
should have been the other way around—tremendous neutrons making measureable heat. If they were, in fact, making tremendous heat, then they would have been killed by the heavy neutron flux and secondary radiations broadcasting out of the unshielded deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction. Maybe the problem was their definition of “tremendous?” The cooling water in which the fusion cell was suspended wasn’t boiling or even misting up their glasses.'
In Atomic Adventures, James Mahaffey (who I unreservedly recommend) outlines the history, claims and problems with Cold Fusion. He was a member of one of the first teams to try to replicate the results, and points out that (from the point of view of working atomic scientists at the time) it was very clear that whatever this was, it was not fusion, as it lacked features that would have to be present if it were. Notably, the scientists pictured standing next to it weren't dead. It was also first announced in a press release, not a journal and the actual details of the experiment were initially kept secret (and not knowing the details was used as a reason that replication was failing) for commercial reasons. Whatever Pons and Fleischmann were doing, it pretty clearly wasn't science. It had none of the features of scientific enquiry, but nearly all of the features of a grift, and that hasn't changed in the intervening years.
My father believed strongly in this. I first learned to program in my early teens (at the time there were precisely two computers in a 300 km range of where we lived, my father was an operator on one of them). The ‘computer’ I learned on was made of cardboard, and I was the CPU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_...
At my institution, our students take a series of courses on programming a simple microcontroller (and were doing so long before IoT/Arduino made that fashionable again). We worked with the HC11 until a few years ago when we moved to the 9s12. They even worked for a while in Assembly Language until quite recently (we now use C exclusively). In this case it wasn’t nostalgia or joy or anything subtle: modern computers are too complex to permit a useful mental model of how they operate. These ‘older’ systems (and their modern simple cousins) are a fantastic way to learn how a computer actually works with sufficient insight that it gives you a much deeper feel for how more complex descendants work. As one example, pointers and indirection are always a topic that students learning programming struggle with. Explaining that topic is much, much easier to a roomful of people who’ve worked directly with address registers and offsets.
I’ve always disliked the tendency to describe this otherwise amusing anecdote as a ‘strike’ or ‘mutiny.’ By definition, the captain of a ship—-or commander of a mission—-can’t ‘mutiny.’ They may be held responsible for their actions, court martialed, grounded, etc. but decisions made by the commander during the mission, whatever they are^1, are legitimate. That the mission commander aboard the ship would function as a military commander was established very early in NASA’s history—-going back to Mercury, where the commander was also the crew. Carr decided or agreed that his crew needed a break, and he had been very carefully selected to be the person who had the authority to make that decision. (^1 There is a modern exception to this rule in the case of illegal orders and war crimes, but that somewhat fraught question doesn’t apply here.)
"[I]t already broke backwards compatibility several times". There's your answer. I've got three decades worth of style files, personal macros, and workflow invested in the way I use LaTeX, numbering in the thousands of lines. In some communities, especially academia and most especially amongst mathematicians and engineers, that is a typical investment. Nothing that might require me to start overhauling that is going to get a moment's consideration until LaTeX stops working for me, and even then I'm probably going to try and maintain a bespoke TeX distro before I'd try to replace it.
New and casual users of LaTeX should probably consider these alternatives (I've even considered moving over to LuaTeX because it would allow more automation, but I'd need a pretty longish period of reimplementation that I don't see becoming available soon.) But anyone who wants to move that community of long-time users, organizations and publications is going to need to address the problem of a significant user base that have been using effectively the same software for literally (and according to my students, unbelievably) decades.
There's an analogous situation (or a continuation of this same situation, given the overlap in user
base) for those who've invested decades in building a personal set of Emacs configuration files. Again, I've got thousands of lines of *.el files (many of them devoted to my idiosyncratic use of LaTeX) in my Emacs configuration. Of projects looking to replace the aged Elisp engine and create a modern implementation aren't going to get much consideration if it would mean replacing that (literally decades of) work in a different language. That's why I continue to be interested in Guile Emacs---less because of Guile (although I have no issues replacing Elisp with a modern Scheme), but because they've always made it clear that an ability to re-use Elisp configuration files was a primary design goal.
Glenn's thesis in the referenced interview is that conservatives are the true liberals, not the ones who now call themselves liberals. This respondent has been encouraged to find ways to work together with other conservatives and colonize the words "liberal" and "socialist". I'm not sure that encouraging conservatives to find a way to work with real socialists like Tucker and Steve Bannon is the progress that you think it is.
Conspiracy theories are a well-documented psychological and social phenomena that generate self-validating beliefs that are remarkably resilient in the face of contradictory evidence and experience. Or at least that's what the secret cabal of globalists is paying me to tell you.
Here's Glen on the Daily Caller praising Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon as exemplary socialists. The accompanying article covers a lot of the main concerns about Greenwald's behaviour in the last few months. A few minutes on his Twitter feed is also instructive. I wish him well, but I think his loved ones need to intervene.https://www.mediaite.com/politics/glenn-greenwald-describes-...
Mycle Schneider isn’t a trustworthy source. He’s an anti-nuclear activist with a clear agenda and a history of misrepresenting or obfuscating facts about the industry and its inherent danger.
The decision to disable comments is not one that requires an explanation to anyone who has used the internet in the last decade. I’m still amazed that this site hasn’t yet turned into a garbage fire.
Whether or not Ivermectin turns out to be an effective treatment is irrelevant to the assessment of whether this particular study is good evidence for that or even a good example of a metastudy. Nor, of course, does the existnce of good-quality evidence redeem bad-quality. (I'll take a moment here to point out that none of the major public health authorities (who are basing their opinion on those very studies) think there is yet sufficient evidence to recommend Ivermectin for this use.
The juxtaposition of "meta analysis" and "real-time" is problematic. The point of a meta analysis isn't merely to rapidly aggregate lots of data from multiple studies. It's also an analysis of the quality and applicability of the studies. The consensus of most (all?) regulatory bodies is that the clinical effectiveness of off-label Ivermectin for CoViD-19 has not been well established. A useful survey of many of the relevant studies can be found at https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/tables/table-.... "Real time" is not particularly compatible with things like peer-review and replication, and that's a big problem.
They also seem to be aggregating a large amount of unpublished data that was not part of a relevant study. That needs to be accompanied with a detailed discussion about why the data (and population) in question provides good evidence. That's also not meta-analysis but original research, requiring independant review and assessment before it could be part of a meta study.
An attempt to rapidly correlate the results of all available studies runs the risk of simply representing an automated version of p-hacking. Aggregating a bunch of low quality studies does not generate a good quality study, especially if (as in this case) many of them generate concerns about the study population selection, lack of controls, and comorbidities.
Funny aside: for my sins, I own a complete more-than-a-ventury old set of leather-bound Jane Austen works, because I was the family member who was ‘into books’. I’ve promised myself to make sure they go to someone who will enjoy them when they pass from my custody.
I agree on all of that, but advancing age has forced me to qualify it. I now own more books that I want to read than my expected life span and average reading speed can support. I don’t regret a single moment spent reading crap genre mind-candy. I regret every single moment spent forcing myself through a book that I wasn’t enjoying, because it was something I ‘should read’. I don’t regret starting any of them, and I’ve enjoyed the hell out of some Dickens and Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and Tennyson. I studied Latin and Hebrew at school. I’ve read half of what Kipling wrote and everything Keri Hulme did. Hell, I used to teach the publication history of the Bible.
But I’ve read four Jane Austen novels (three for credit, one for a failed shot at a Women’s Studies major) and not enjoyed a moment of the experience. Intellectually, I get the quality of the work, but it wasn’t entertaining. It wasn’t pleasant, and life is just way too short for that. Books, even technical ones, get about three chapters to make their case now, if I’m not voluntarily choosing to read it after that, I’m moving on.
My daughter is at the learning algebra stage. I note that the way they teach kids to parse algebraic notation is by building an infix operation tree. If they’d just take the natural next step of discussing postfix (and prefix) traversal, everyone would think rpn natural.
Well, it’s easier to build because it has a terse syntax that requires fewer symbols, doesn’t need precedence and associativity rules, and has no ambiguous instructions. It’s easier to use for the same reasons.
I was exaggerating for effect, but yeah. The existence of a polynomial time prime factoring suggests the existence of a useful predictive pattern in the distribution of primes. That would break the Twin Prime Conjecture and possibly refute Riemann. Undermining those starts tearing the foundations apart. I’m almost certain that won’t have just happened.
Good points. Thanks. This isn’t really my area (I start to glaze over around when ‘fiat’ is the main topic), so I’m sure I’m ignorant of some subtleties.