cdwhite

So I read this as "within 15 minutes, land up to 60 miles downwind of the generator is obscured."

I thoroughly enjoyed /The Physics of Wall Street/, but I found that it was heavier on the "physics" than on the "Wall Street". It depends on what you're looking for. If you want accessible, non-mathematical descriptions of the analytical tools that have been imported into finance from physics, or even an insightful look at the culture of physics and how how physicists tend to approach problems, Weatherall's your man---though I wonder how intelligible those descriptions really would be to someone who hasn't already seen the material in a more formal way. (I'm reminded of the description of the Feynman lectures from the introduction to that big red boxed set, IIRC: "Rereading the books, one sometimes seems to catch Feynman looking over his shoulder, not at his young audience, but directly at his colleagues, saying 'Look at that! Look how I finessed that point! Wasn’t that clever?'".)

Thing is, my background is in physics, so I'm more interested in what physicists call "sociology": how institutions are put together, what the incentive structures are, how individual personalities affect outcomes, etc., and I found Weatherall's descriptions of such things lacking. His analysis tends towards hagiography of individual scientists, with less attention for context. This intensely biographical approach to the history of science is a common-enough failing in books that focus on the science, not the history---it reminded me a bit of those boxes about the lives of prominent scientists that dot some introductory textbooks---but it's still frustrating.

I actually found Roger Lowenstein's /When Genius Failed/ much more illuminating---he gives more attention to institutions, incentives, and personalities, and how they interact.

Edit: missing word, style

Funny you should ask. I spent a while a few years ago messing around with csound, synthesizing Bach chorales in a number of tuning systems. You could tell a difference, IIRC, even with kind-of-unpleasant synthesized tones. I'd have to go back and look up what I did, but I must have done both equal temperament and (some kind of) just intonation.

Done.

Your description of "a scholarly text analysis company focused on in-depth & intricate understanding of what Judao-Christian authors meant" really piques my curiosity---I associate that sort of thing with academia (seminaries and religious studies departments, medieval studies, maybe a few classicists), not a (presumably for-profit) company.

If you don't mind my asking, what company do you work for, and what do they do?

Perhaps "you lose your job and decide that your WoW bill is a non-essential expense, and make the one-time, non-trivial-to-reverse decision to cut it, which is much easier than every fifteen minutes crushing the urge to start playing."

So I was always told that (as beambot points out) the number of credits was based on lecture time, and moreover that you should expect to spend 2-3 times as much time outside of lectures as you did inside. So your generic 3-credit course (nominally three hours of lecture, actually more like 2 1/2) would require something like 9-12 hours total: 3 in lecture, 6-9 at home.

Now in my experience, this was much more accurate for humanities than for math/science classes, where the amount of time the class took depended strongly on one's ability and preparation. I remember in particular one math professor whose problems were tricky: if you had the right insight, the proof was usually very simple, but if you didn't have that insight, you'd struggle and struggle. (And then there were the classes for which I was way under-prepared, and on which I spent way more than 25 hours.)

Add on to that the fact the time spent in lecture (on which the number of credits depends) doesn't necessarily track the difficulty of the material, and you have a recipe for wide variation in the amount of time one spends for a certain amount of credits. (Labs are notorious for taking way more time than the number of credits.)

And then you get into how some classes are more efficient than others in terms of how much learning you get for the amount of time you spend, and this doesn't match up with the number of credits either...

In a strict sense they are, I think: A[1, 2:6] could writtenas an S-expression---something like (getindex A 1 (range 2 6)), maybe, but it is not in itself an S-expression. (I think: I'm relying on Wikipedia for the precise definition of "S-expression".)

Your broader point stands, though: I can't see any reason that one couldn't have S-expressions + syntactic sugar (not that I know anything at all about designing programming languages).

My guess is that it's a sociological thing? As scott_s pointed out, people expect something Matlab-like. From http://julialang.org/ : "Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. "

To expand upon this: I love Lisp, but good array syntax is tremendously helpful when you're doing scientific programming (at least of a certain stripe). You want to be able to do things like A[1, 2:6] to get elements two through six of the first row of A. The great joy of Julia (for me, at least) it makes arrays easy to deal with, but also brings all sorts of wonderful Lisp-y features.

Actually, people are all the time now going the other direction (or proposing to): they use cold atoms to simulate setups from condensed matter. The general idea is that you can use lasers to site the atoms on a lattice, and then tune the interactions between the atoms to get all sorts of physics. A quick Google Scholar search turns up http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v415/n6867/abs/415039a.... , wherein Greiner et al. simulate the Hubbard model (it would appear---I don't have access to the paper at the moment.

This is cool, because the Hubbard model is a simple and displays interesting phenomena, but understanding it is a hard problem. The Hamiltonian (that is to say, the energy) consists only of a kinetic energy plus an interaction between the spin up and spin down particles on the same site (e.g. if I have two spin up bosons and four spin down bosons, the interaction contribution to the energy is 8 U, where U is a constant parameter---the strength of the interaction.) Depending on this interaction strength U, the system might behave either like a conductor or an insulator.

The problem is hard to deal with analytically (for reasons I can't say I understand) and, as I understand it, the space of possible states is so huge that the numerics become computationally intractible at about a lattice 5 sites x 5 sites x 5 sites. So being able to see the phase transition happen is very neat, and exactly what you expect from an "analog quantum computer": simulating with cold atoms a system that we can't really simulate with ordinary computers.

This sort of stuff doesn't require the politicians in question to change their minds. Think of it as a two-fold selection effect. First, the candidate who already holds views of which the defense industry approves, receives campaign contributions therefrom and is therefore more likely to win. Second, I would think that defense companies are hardly likely to donate to a politician of the Ron Paul stripe when they are in a race against someone more ... conventional. As rayiner pointed out elswhere in the thread, correlation does not imply causation.

This mechanism may have deleterious effects on our political discourse and decision-making, but it's hard to call something that doesn't involve a politician changing his mind as a result of money "bribery". This mechanism is a systems problem, it seems to me, not a problem with individuals.

Now I'm sure this is far from the only thing that's going on. (In particular, I think I remember Lawrence Lessig talking about how money may or may not buy a change of views, but it surely buys access. You pick up the phone for the guy that contributed $LEGAL_LIMIT to your campaign.) Moreover, I haven't ruled out that the money changed their minds---just provided an alternate hypothesis. Nonetheless, this toy model provides a not-totally-implausible explanation for things we observed, without invoking bribery.

Edited for style.

A standard intro materials science textbook wouldn't tell you exactly what you're looking for, but it would give you an idea of what the state of the art is and where different materials are used and also a little bit of potted history. I read Askeland, Fulay, and Wright's /The Science and Engineering of Materials/ a couple of months ago; it seemed like a mediocre book, but the material covered was fascinating (and reasonably clearly presented.)

Kemal. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/perry-anderson/kemalism. I feel that "dictator", while technically accurate, doesn't have quite the right connotation---his rule didn't have the same totalitarian nature that those of Stalin, Hitler, Hussein, Castro, the Kims, etc. do/did to varying extents. (Or maybe I'm being oversensitive to questions of connotation.)

Hürriyet, a left-leaning English-language daily, is covering the protests (and Erdoğan's response, the resulting politicking, and so on): http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/

I should note that Hürriyet is historically quite unfriendly to Erdoğan; in particular (IIRC) it raised quite a bit of noise when Doğan Holdings, which owns Hürriyet, underwent tax fraud investigations that may have been politically motivated.

I would be surprised to find that the NSA has a quantum computer that can quickly factor large numbers.

There are very hard fundamental physics problems with quantum computing. IANAexpert, but as I understand it, the difficulty lies in closing off the system (cold atoms, what have you) you're using to do the computation from the outside world, while you're doing the computation. Any contact (up to a very, very low limit), and you smear ("decohere") the computation so that the output will be in essence noise---not what we want at all. One can approach this as (in some sense) an engineering/experiment problem and try to limit contact with the outside world, or as a theory problem and try to come up with a system that inherently resists problematic contact with the outside world (topological quantum computation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_quantum_computer), comes to my mind).

So we're dealing with a physics problem: either the gloriously messy, difficult work of experiment, trying to track down and eliminate sources of decoherence, or the theoretical work of finding an appropriate system (and then figuring out how to implement it).

Both of these are far from the core competencies of the NSA, as I understand them (not that I have any real information---just an impression based on way to much time spent reading Hacker News :-) ). As you say, NSA is (perceived as) very, very good and far ahead of the community at computing, cryptography, and cryptanalysis. The problem is, this is not a computing problem, it's a physics problem.

One possibilty, though, is that the NSA has figured out some way to use something like the D-Wave quantum computer (which I am ridiculously far from understanding, but you might recall Scott Aaronson's blog post on the subject not too long ago) to factor large primes---that is to say, to transform prime factorization into the D-Wave problem. At a gut level, I find this much more plausible than that the NSA has independently built a quantum computer: that sort of problem-transformation is much more the kind of math that I feel the NSA would be good at, or be able to become good at very quickly.

That's interesting. In my undergraduate degree (which I believe to be fairly standard for the US), Lagrangian and Hamiltonian dynamics were both part of a one-semester classical mechanics course, along with much else. I'm quite envious, though---both Lagrangian and Hamiltonian dynamics are beautiful, and I need a better background.

If you don't mind my asking, where did you do undergrad?

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cac... (Page is taking some time to load.)

Eugene Volokh's take: http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/25/man-who-took-off-his-shirt-...

Getting started with vanilla LaTeX isn't actually that bad. The very bare minimum is easy (take the hello world document, https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Basics#Our_first_documen... , as a template and start typing); after that, as you need to do more and more things you can look in the (very good) wikibook or google. One gradually works one's way up the learning curve.

One can imagine them dictating, if speech recognition software is sufficiently good. This doesn't work for code (or, perhaps, it doesn't work for the programming languages we have now---a programming language with syntax designed to be spoken, not typed, would be very interesting) and it seems it doesn't work for writing fiction, as I think I recall Charlie Stross discovering (can't find the blog posts now, though http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/03/a-writin... discusses the problem). For day-to-day communication, though, the stylistic differences between dictated and typed prose are probably not important.

Moreover, this might yield a small efficiency win over both text communication as is (email, IM) and the telephone: dictated text would be as fast to produce as spoken communication (I can talk much faster than I can type, and I get the feeling that's true in general), while remaining as fast to read and as easy to edit as text.

I'm not sure this win would be very big, though; for me, at least, the bulk of the time I spend on writing is spent figuring out how to phrase things. Jackalope's comment, though, indicates that people are starting to see noticeable improvements in efficiency---the "how did I ever live without this" feeling. Perhaps they find speech more natural than typing, and spend less time agonizing over how to express themselves?

This scenario depresses me somewhat, as I have an inordinate and perhaps irrational fondness for slower, more considered forms of expression. I find my prose is more dense and pointed when I hand-write than when I type, which I prefer (though my superabundant laziness combined with the ease of editing on a computer mean that I almost always type).

About representation theory of Lie algebras: physicists actually care about that quite a bit, as the the theory of spin is intimately tied up with the subject. Your point stands, though. I don't know of any major applications outside quantum mechanics, and other parts of mathematics have even fewer applications. (I have always found integration theory kind of tedious for exactly that reason---some results turn out to be handy, but it's more like you're laying the groundwork for background material for stuff that'll be useful to physicists.) Also, the way in which physicists care about the math is very different from the way mathematicians do: we want the moral reasoning---we want to have some intuition for why the result is true---but (to grossly stereotype) we don't really care about the detailed proof.

(I must add that I heartily second your recommendation of /Q.E.D./)

Not true. I spent a summer not too long ago doing quantum Monte Carlo calculations for condensed-matter physics, and IIRC Valgrind showed that the whole thing was under 5 MB. Not only did it not require 1GB of RAM, but code + data fit in the L2 cache of each node. (We were seriously CPU bound, not memory bound.) I can't speak to how much of a market there is for something with 1GB RAM, but you certainly can do "serious computation" with far less than that.

Note, though that the Houston light rail line connects two of the three big parts of Houston: Downtown and the Medical Center (+ the Museum district). I don't disagree that airport service is sorely needed, and the Galleria would be nice too, but it could be worse.

Maybe it's just me, but there are circumstances when I prefer a good index to a text search. If a term is informally introduced and used a couple of times in the few pages before it's defined, for example, I usually want the formal definition, and I can just remember that that's the second index entry rather than the first rather than Ctrl-G-ing my way through a bunch of uses.

(I do passionately hate bad indexes, though.)

Yes. For Jobs to treat Obama otherwise seems somehow anti-republican: the fact that Obama is Jobs' peer---and indeed yours and mine---is, I think, a notion deeply rooted in American political culture. Considering the possibility of Jobs showing deference certainly raises my hackles. At the same time, it's natural to be overawed by a man like Obama, with so much political authority (and however much remains of the tremendous moral authority he had when elected).