pessimist

Hebbal lake still exists, and does see migrant birds like painted storks and pelicans every winter. You can see for yourself, and BngBirds visits Hebbal Lake on the first Sunday of every month to see birds. The migrant birds that do visit India in winter come from colder parts of Asia and Europe, not Australia btw.

Yes many lakes are destroyed in Bangalore and there are no sparrows. Its doubtful that mobile towers have anything to do with it though.

Please read chapter 3 "Probability Amplitudes".

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_03.html

"When a particle can reach a given state by two possible routes, the total amplitude for the process is the sum of the amplitudes for the two routes considered separately. In our new notation we write that ⟨x|s⟩both holes open=⟨x|s⟩through 1+⟨x|s⟩through 2. (3.4)"

Your criticism is totally incorrect. In fact the 2-slit experiment does demonstrate superposition. Wave-particle duality and superposition of states are really just complementary ways of describing the same situation. To understand this, please try to read any undergrad level treatment of quantum mechanics. For example - See Feynman's lectures volume 3.

>> As a New Zealander ... Immigrants are bad for society ... I live in Singapore now.

Perhaps if you reflect on those contradictions, you may gain a more nuanced view.

Let me address your points:

1. See the latest numbers heres: http://www.thehindu.com/data/most-of-rural-india-still-opts-...

I should have qualified "most" as "most of rural", sorry. Of course rural India is 70% of the population.

2, & 4, it is indeed true that people are choosing to poop in the fields out of choice and it "feels" more hygienic to people. But it is a misguided choice - likely a major cause of disease and childhood stunting - http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourna....

btw, I am an urban middle class Indian too. Not white by any stretch of the imagination. And where I did I say the white man is the saviour? I just said that the plight of rural Indians is completely ignored by those who complain loudly about western media views of India.

In fact I give full credit to the current government for raising awareness about toilets and trying to fix the issue.

Most Indians do in fact go out and poop in the fields every day. Most Indian commenters here are from the urban middle class and have literally never spent a minute thinking about the vast and miserable rural lower classes around them, and get incredibly offended when a westerner does in fact notice and write about them.

I have never heard of this, despite having experienced rural life both among upper and lower classes. I expect that Ellen Barry made it up, or - more likely - was conned by one of her Indian assistants/translators and swallowed it up.

Having said that, the article is correct overall that life of rural Indian women is hard and governed by patriarchal rules - they are expected to be house bound etc. The description of menstrual restrictions is also accurate.

Overall the article did ring of truth and was optimistic - surprisingly for Ellen Barry and the New York Times.

LOTR is a fine but flawed book. Reading it as a dark skinned Asian boy the characterization of all dark races as evil definitely stung and still hurts. The evil side is one dimensional and has no redeeming qualities at all.

The female characters also tend to be quite weak and uninteresting.

Still the vision and the universe was inspiring. I still prefer it to most other fantasy.

Condensed matter physics has provided important math and physical ideas for particle physics. The basic mathematical framework of particle physics - Quantum Field Theory - is also useful to describe many condensed matter phases.

Two extremely important ideas that developed first in condensed matter are symmetry breaking (invented to explain ferromagnetism and other phase transitions - ideas were borrowed for example in the Higgs) and renormalization. They are of fundamental importance in particle physics as well. Of course this was way back in the 50s and 60s.

I am aware of a couple of collaborations between condensed matter and particle/string theorists these days:

1. String theorists have discovered that their mathematical techniques are useful in solving certain Quantum Field Theories which are important in condensed matter. Google Ads/CMT, or strange metals.

2. String theorists believe that in quantum gravity entanglement and gravity are closely linked. They have used ideas from condensed matter studies of entanglement called tensor networks (MERA) to build toy-models of gravity.

> The one coincidence that Oxfordians have to explain is how Vere wound up publishing under the name of this real individual, Shakespeare.

The other "coincidence" they need to explain is why all contemporary references to Shakespeare the playwright point to the Shakespeare from Stratford - from other members of Shakespeare's troupe like Ben Jonson, Heminges, Cowell. Nobody questioned his authorship till hundreds of years later.

To keep things in perspective, in oncology the current success rate of treatments that enter trials is just 5%! See http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/02/are....

Immunotherapy is indeed the most promising approach to cancer therapy so I'm optimistic, but the odds of success here are 1-in-20 if this is an average study, or perhaps 1-in-5 at best.

Both the statements in quotes are true.

Consider the surface of a sphere. It is finite but has no centre.

Dianne Feinstein deserves enormous credit. Fox News and Republicans are bashing her and by extension her party as traitorous as we speak. The argument that this report should be kept in secret because it endangers Americans' lives is abominable. As an American living abroad, I'm happy to see this released.

Still, I wonder about some of the side-effects of this. Instead of arresting and interrogating terrorists we kill them with drones as its less messy.

Access to credit is a huge deal for people. How else to create a small business, tide over a health crisis, or make a big education investment?

Right now poor people are at the mercy of pawnbrokers, loan sharks who often charge interest rates of 100%+ per year.

Potentially access to reasonable rate credit cards is life-changing.

I think this is exaggerated on many levels.

1. There are dozens of famous and wealthy Indian classical musicians - Hariprasad Chaurasia, Zakir Hussain, Amjad Ali Khan, etc. There are hundreds if not thousands of lesser known musicians who make a living by teaching and performing in small venues.

2. Of course, many talented people are prevented by social custom or poverty from following their dream, but its simply not the case that there are hundreds of unrecognized geniuses walking around.

3. Ravi Shankar's success was not totally accidental - he didn't just "happen" to become popular. He was a great communicator, and he appropriately structured his music to be not too complex for beginners and westerners to understand. If you listed to his rivals like Ustad Vilayat Khan for example, they went the opposite way and added layers of complexity and did not achieve popularity among the masses.

The best Indian research institutions like IISc and TIFR don't teach undergraduates, and the best Indian undergraduate institutions (IITs) don't do much research.

Both research and undergrad teaching are required in the ranking. Honestly though, IISc is the best indian institution and will barely crack the top 100 research institutes in the world.

I'm not aware of the move in question, but you are overinterpreting wildly. Of course top chess players recognize obviously bad moves.

In this case though Kasparov was trying to defeat Deep Blue with an anti-computer style, he had a particular model in mind for how the computer would play and when it didnt, he thought it meant that the computer was more far-sighted than it actually was.

In General Relativity, Faster-Than-Light travel is only prohibited locally. Its possible for space-time itself to expand and shrink faster than light. This is why distant-enough galaxies are receding from us at faster than the speed of light.

Mathematically, the structure of the proposed warp-drive is such that the spaceship is moving at << c locally, so no causality is violated. See the author's answer here:

http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/daydreaming-beyond-the-sol...

This problem is as old as the Industrial Revolution, not exactly news.

I moved to India and here I can afford tons of household help. For example, I have a chauffeur, who comes from a community of highly skilled weavers who make traditional fabrics like this: http://bannacreations.blogspot.in/2012/02/ilkal-story.html.

Basically, there is simply not enough demand for those skills. So he chucks his skill - handed down from father to son for generations - learns English and driving, and moves to the city. He now hopes to soon move out from his slum to a real house. I wish him luck - he is ambitious and hard-working, and is making a niche for himself in a challenging world.

I presume you live or have lived in India? In that case, consider yourself that the people targeted for this earn less than Rs. 25 per day - that is the official poverty line in India. Please consider yourself what you would be able to afford to buy and eat and that price. For yourself and 2 children. If you live in India please attempt to go to a store and buy food for the same price and see what you get.

Thanks!

Perhaps, but I should note that India has historically suffered from highly inconsistent monsoons which have lead to famines, as recently as the 1960s. The failure of those monsoons lead to the creation of a PDS system.

Incidentally, the problematic public distribution system is solved in parts of India, most notably the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu - http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article2475948.ece. The estimated loss in Tamil Nadu is 4%, as opposed to over 90% in some states.

Tamil Nadu politicians are not any less corrupt than other states. However the PDS has some notable features:

1. It is universal - not restricted to only people below the "poverty line". Thus many people are incentivized to have it work.

2. The PDS "ration" shops are run cooperatively by localities and villages, not private dealers.

3. Simple schemes make it transparent like an SMS that will reply telling you the current stock of a given shop, when new stocks will arrive and so on so that the shop keeper cannot simply cheat you out of your ration.

You are right that India is something like 2 orders of magnitude behind China, and that their Olympic performance was horrendous.

However, 4 medals is actually an all-time record for India, a 33% improvement from last time and I believe only the 2nd time India has had more than one medal!

2 of the medals came from middle-class athletes, but the other 2 came from people born in remote villages. Things are improving, albeit extremely slowly.

> Well, they are not trying to convince anyone here. They are trying to prove something.

A nobel prize is at stake! If ATLAS only had the results and not CMS, they would have lost the nobel. For them to put aside personal glory for science is impressive.

Bullshit. She has plenty of informative graphs and useful numbers.

The worst powerpoint presentations are ones that are content-free - this one could be accused of too much content.

I think this 100x rule is not unique to software. Consider athletes for example. The best athletes are much much better than the merely very good. For example, the top tennis player would defeat the 500th best every single time barely losing a single game. And the world no. 500 would defeat a good amateur 6-0 6-0 (as David Foster Wallace found out).

What stood out to me from watching the presentation was the incredible integrity of the physicists involved. The CMS group had 2 sets of data with > 5 sigma significance, but chose to also show weaker data that actually reduced the significance slightly. Consider the enormous effort spent to show that the result was not some background fluke - two separate detectors, running 2 completely different means of detection, each with their own sets of computer programs verifying the results. Finally both show almost exactly the same result (although the masses are slightly different at this point)!

Given that tevatron also sees similar (although weaker) results, the confirmation is beyond doubt. And what an achievement - the first fundamental particle observed since the quarks in the 1980's! An incredible victory for theoretical models developed almost 50 years ago (no wonder Peter Higgs had tears in this eyes)!

Combining the brilliance of the theoreticians with the integrity of experimentalists is what makes science the pinnacle of human achievement (IMO), and makes me proud to be human today.

They have certainly found something that is very close to the Higgs Boson predicted by the standard model of particle physics. How do they know its the Higgs?

http://blog.vixra.org/2012/06/24/higgs-discovery-on-the-brin...

There are some intriguing unexpected signals in the data that is public so far:

http://blog.vixra.org/2012/06/29/whats-the-deal-with-h-%E2%8...

> So the situation is perhaps a little cumbersome, but no worse than C.

Actually, this is not totally true. C has pre-processor and void * which allows for simple generic data structures with no performance impact. go ties your hands here since you have to use type-assertions which are not free, unlike C casts.

> 4. I think you're wrong. Think of any time you've written an event loop or had to rally multiple threads. I'm confident that in most of those cases you could have done it more cleanly with goroutines and channels.

Goroutines are great, but synchronous channels are not at all easy to use beyond simple producer/consumer models.

I'll also note that for both complaints 1 and 2, you think its trivial for programmers to just do the work, but I though go was all about saving programmer time?