I never understood people that questioned the practical applicability of math. Surely they must realize that these things are so elementary that there is no way there was no practical use for them. Logarithms specifically allow you to multiply values quickly by looking up their logarithm in a table, add the values and do a reverse lookup in the same table. This is the foundation of slide rules, which is the way engineers did calculations before computers were common.
The details make it a very hard problem. There is scientific consensus that a too rapidly changing climate leads to mass extinction of species (plants, animals, etc.), because suddenly species are not adapted to the climate they find themselves in and can't migrate quickly enough. This loss of biodiversity should be of great concern, because it is irrecoverable. There are tons of other non-obvious problems that are not commonly understood.
Julia always seemed great on paper and definitely is a strong candidate for replacing Matlab. But whenever I tried using it, the user experience seemed much more broken than python or c++. It just seems way easier to structure and work on a python + c++ project than it is to structure and work on a Julia project. A moderately sized sane c++ code base compiles and runs faster than whatever gymnastics Julia performs to create a single 2d plot (literally freezes my laptop for seconds). It also installs gigabytes worth of libraries into global directories by default. The compiler itself is also of questionable quality compared to clang, Swift or Ocaml.
While this is true, this work is typically done by a different person than the one designing the RTL, and it takes 1-2 month at most if there are minimal changes to the overall physical design. We are able to iterate on designs at a rate of ~6 month with a team of ~10 people.
I would try to make adding tests as easy as possible. That is for every piece of code you write think to yourself: How would I test this. If in many cases the code only makes sense in the context of the whole application running this might be a sign of danger. Basically you thinking testing might slow you down is a sign this might be the case. For some problems it is way easier to write tests than to solve them correctly.
Not necessarily, because it could give a hint. It is possible to get from various higher dimensional gauge groups like SO(10) to almost the standard model. But the left over particles often couple in unfavourable ways and lead to proton decay for example.
You basically have to listen to any lecture he gives to understand that he has at least a drastically overinflated ego.
Compare that to lectures by people like Witten or any other world-class theoretical physicist / mathematician. The vast majority of them are extremely humble. Seth Loyd and people like Mark Tegmark are the kind of guys that thrive in the current academic environment, flashy ideas with some substance pushed into prestigious journals is a winning strategy.
There is no way people would give up owning their own car outside of very dense urban centers. Everywhere else it would neither be practical nor desirable to wait for a rental car to arrive.
People also tend to store lots of personal items in their car.
There is academic effort that has been working on a similar concept for 8+ years. A recent paper that also discusses some of the challenges (routing around defects, ...) is https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.0120... . If you dig into the publications and PhD theses conducted on this system, you will also find partial answers to some of the issues raised here in the comments (how to interconnect reticles, power supply (the first prototype had really scary centimeter thick copper bars that supplied the wafer). There is a second generation system in development..
I‘be looked into clojure briefly. What made it unattractive to me was the lack of performance and complexity of the build tooling. Simplicity in go goes beyond the language itself. It is also very simple to build, depend on libraries and deploy.
The story is even worse than what is publicly reported. The test was actually not developed by this professor but by one of his postdocs. She happened to be Chinese and her contract was up for renewal, when he saw the potential for commercialization, he did not renew her contract. She only had a work visa and therefore was forced to go back to china. There was more shady stuff and nepotism going on, but I don't remember. This guy 100% deserves everything that is coming for him.
Sure this is your subjective perception, maybe fuelled by the positive reinforcement that rituals of accomplishment provide and the fact that working on physics is really fun. As long as you realise that you are playing a game that is unlikely to yield any economic or societal value (in the case of high-energy physics) at any time-scale with a group of people that have been playing the same game for >20 years with no discernible progress except for the discovery of one particle predicted >40 years ago.
> Suppose all TeV-scale colliders [..]
Well this is hypothetical, but what would most likely have happened is that the ~10000+ scientists involved with the LHC and high-energy physics had gone into different subfields of physics. Hopefully the same would have happened with funding (we don't want it to go to biologists, do we?). Since high-energy physics still attracts some of the best students, this would have actually disproportionately improved human capital in other areas of physics. Whether the Higgs was there or not was never a super pressing concern anyways. Condensed matter physics, bio-physics, environmental physics, all kinds of (mostly experimental) quantum physics still have discoveries to be made with ~1-10s of million in budget. Not only that a lot of those discoveries will have society level consequences in a time frame of decades. We are in contrast very unlikely to derive any benefit from studying the energy scales high-energy physics has reached. For those reasons I think funding high-energy physics is a huge net negative to overall societal progress.
> Every statement in your diatribe would seem to be predicate...
I would be happy if they found any experimental evidence for their predictions. If you have followed the field basically the majority opinion was that supersymmetry at the LHC would be inevitably found, as long as the Higgs mass was in a certain range (naturalness argument). Turns out it (narrowly) was in that range but supersymmetry was not found anyways. Arguably a lot of particle phenomenology in the last 20+ years was bad science in that way, because no new phenomena had actually been observed/measured and needed model building. Of course there is nothing inherently bad with conjecture or theory, but given the fact that there are lots of unsolved problems in physics on which progress was made in that time, a lot of what they were doing seems like a huge waste of time.
I'm pretty positive that people made firm predictions and bets that the LHC will see super partners (because otherwise the "naturalness" argument would go away). Whether it would be the MSSM or something else was up for debate, but people thought it would be more likely than not that they would see them if the Higgs was found in the predicted energy range. In any case physics departments at top universities all over the world are stacked with phenomenologists that made their careers on working out these predictions.
Anderson made an argument against the SSC https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion-old/the-case-against-t..., which I pretty much agree with. Science funding is finite and physics talent in a country as well. Many really good students are funnelled into dead end careers in high-energy physics (whether theoretical or experimental). It's just a huge waste of human potential, especially given the fact of how ruthlessly they are exploited. I know people in the field, a hiring decision between three people was recently described to me as a choice between a 'social case' and two competent workers, one of which happens to be a friend of mine.
Funnily enough lot's of institutions doing fundamental research in high energy physics either also do military research or receive military funding. Most of Witten's work for example has been funded by the Department of Energy. The whole reason CERN was build in a neutral country was because people worried that a post nuclear arms race would break out otherwise. In France one of the major institutes contributing to particle physics (Saclay Nuclear Research Centre) also developed their nuclear arsenal and is located next to a major arms manufacturers research center (Thalys).
CERN and the LHC are to me prime examples of bad science. You build huge machines at incredible cost, wasting hundreds of thousands of man hours of brilliant young people’s time. They are paid almost nothing (a checkout clerk at a Swiss supermarket makes more than a PhD student at CERN). Then you string along a subset of those for years, exploiting them for further cheap labor, somehow making them believe they are “lucky” to get that opportunity (a postdoc at CERN pays a fraction of what you can make at Google Zurich). In the time between experiments people only ever see simulated data, leading to a rude awakening when actual experimental data comes in (c.f. ALICE’s desaster of a analysis Pipeline). Then there is literally decades of over promising on ground breaking discoveries right around the corner (super symmetry, extra dimensions, dark matter). Defunding the super collider in the 90s in the US was probably one of the best science policy decisions they made.
I agree, basically it should either not be allowed or strictly controlled how to advertise politics online. Targeted political advertisement should be banned completely. Then there is twitter, which also basically serves as a direct marketing channel for political parties. In Germany this is a huge problem especially with the AFD, they can publish lots of nonsense there, more or less unchallenged by facts or reason.
In Germany every political party gets a fixed number of slots for TV-Spots basically free of charge ahead of an election. There is no other political advertisement allowed (only the parties themselves are allowed to advertise). Unfortunately neither newspapers nor internet advertisement is as strictly regulated, but I feel like it should be eventually as well.
I think even a PhD is more about execution than good ideas. There is generally speaking no shortage of good ideas, but many turn out to be too labour intensive or have other subtle problems. In any case I’ve also gotten discouraged by this, but what eventually matters is really execution on one or two good ideas during your PhD
While Yang seems nice on the surface, his policy idea to finance 1000€ in cash per month for everyone by a VAT is a prime example of a regressive tax policy. If you spend ~2000€ a month at ~10% that is 200€ already gone. So you end up paying out something like Hartz IV Level (German Social Security) to everyone. I can’t imagine that it would be particularly fun to support yourself based on that.
The quantum circuit based simulation actually has much worse accuracy. A classical computer can simulate the class of circuits they are proposing with linear increasing runtime (as opposed to exponential as Google claims) and _much_ higher accuracy according to IBM.
As far as I'm aware there actually is no proof that there is no polynomial time factoring algorithm. Complexity theory contains a lot of cargo cult belief with little solid proofs unfortunately. One reason is of course that it is a very hard field of mathematics. See https://www.math.ias.edu/avi/book for a recent survey.
That is not true: Verilator is an excellent tool that compiles a large subset of synthesizable System Verilog to C++. Companies like Tesla use it and report speed ups of up to 40 compared to commercial tools. Similarly for vhdl there exists ghdl, which seems pretty feature complete and has an LLVM backend