zbyszek

The answer is "God knows!"

Monty Python imitated Britain first.

"In 1944, while at a railway station he started chatting with a stranger who turned out to be an engineer who worked on ENIAC." I thought this was precisely the kind of careless talk people were told to avoid during wartime.

That doesn't sound quite like the Balboa I was taught, where the contact is at the top of the chest (and along the arms and hands of course) and the partners are slightly offset to the side to avoid shin kicking and toe trampling. As you say, the footwork is very rapid and the hold is close - perfect for fast tunes and crowded dancefloors - but no hip mashing that I recall.

I thought the catch was going to be people who cannot stand upright.

As far as I recall, QCD gives you a nice simple formula - a path integral over quantum operators - for any quantity you want. Lattice QCD works out the answer with great big Monte-Carlo integration. The tricky bit is defining a field theory on a finite discrete space-time lattice that is provably equivalent to the continuum theory after controlled extrapolations to the continuum. And you have to show that you can define the correct operators in the lattice theory that really do give the quantities you want. Then you need to implement this in code that runs blazingly fast over huge data sets. These considerations, and the fact that there are all sorts of solutions to these problems which might supported by a code base, tend to make code implementations complicated.

Goodness me, that's a blast from my very distant past! The venerable MILC code is still available: https://web.physics.utah.edu/~detar/milc/milc_qcd.html

And since you had asked for the difference and not the ratio, the candidate immediately failed, right?

A London taxi driver explained to me back in the 1980's how he liked fares from clubs where boys wore make-up because anyone who has spent three hours crimping and back-combing and spraying their hair is unlikely to want to risk damaging it by having a fight.

Being at the front and facing the orchestra, a conductor can also balance the volume of the various sections. An orchestra is usually large enough that when you are sitting in one bit you cannot judge your volume relative to others.

There is. A field theory in Minkowski space can be formulated in Euclidean space (and vice versa) with a technique called Wick rotation.

The photographer, Harry Diamond, (himself the subject of a Freud painting -- http://pictify.saatchigallery.com/462766/interior-in-padding...) was still a Soho habitué many years later when I had the pleasure of meeting him. I recommend his work, too.

The author says "the least likely element of this scenario is that Kellogg's will bring back free gifts". I have at home a bunch of squashy balls, eagerly sought by my son, from Kellog's Frosties from the time of Six Nations Rugby tournament this year. Does she know something I don't?

There is; the equation on the CERN mug in the photo is an example. For example, the gluon Lagrangian (Section 1) may be more compactly written

-1/2 Tr F_{\mu\nu} F^{\mu\nu}

for a suitably defined F. Or further abbreviated to something like L_g.

It just depends on how much detail you need to expose.

I imagine that the conclusion Mr Karpov would have you reach is that you should buy PVS Studio instead.

Having worked in a university mathematics department I noticed that the pure mathematicians tended to keep themselves to themselves, for instance not attending talks by visiting mathematicians unless it was of direct relevance to their research. In contrast, we theoretical physicists would listen to any visiting speaker just for fun - even on occasion experimental particle physicists, applied mathematicians or computing specialists. Perhaps pure maths is just more deeply specialised and leaves no possibility of such dilettanteism.

I am suprised that there was only one. I knew someone who kept ferrets (to catch rabbits for her hawk) and was told that, as social animals, being kept in isolation would send them crazy, while all-female groups didn't get along well. Was spaying Felicia not an option in 1971?

They do, but they also want things simpler. Reconciling these conflicting demands is the trick.

Presumably after the Crimean War, otherwise Dr James Barry (http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-A-Bu-and-O...) could never have succeeded in her subterfuge.

The famous jibe is along the lines of "An empty taxi drew up outside 10 Downing Street and Clement Attlee got out", attributed to Winston Churchill, but I think he denied it.

"Sculpting in time" is also the title of Tarkovsky's book which I haven't read, but I now have a new impetus to do so.

Interesting about colour - perhaps a "less is more" thing. The end of Andrei Rublev is breathtaking, for instance.

I saw Mirror three times at the cinema, and there are not many flicks I can say that about.

That would have to be a different URL, like www.howmanypeoplewereinspaceatanygiventimeinthepast.com (sorry, coldcode).

Das ist aber Mist. Nicht bloß wissenschaflicher Mist, nur der reine Scheiß.

I wonder how this compares with previous 'pseudolite' ideas? The University of New South Wales (et al.) were active here but I think the point was more an augemtation to provide better positioning at GPS-unfriendly latitudes or topographies.

These ran into all sorts of problems, largely to do with the proximity of the pseudolites to the receivers such as synchronisation and signal strength issues. Locatanets (http://locata.com/) are the in thing nowadays.

Such temerity! They'll want their own flag next.

I presume because the relative permanence of the printed word relative to the spoken, leading to its potentially greater exposure.

Repetition isn't necessarily a bad thing. Whether compatible results can be obtained with independent analyses of the same data is surely an important indicator of success.

Of course that should not preclude the possibility of replication as described here.

I find the idea of threats to job security misguided. In the particle physics world some significant code (not everything, granted) has been made available for some time; e.g. Monte-Carlo simulators like Geant or lattice gauge theory codes like those from MILC, SciDAC or FermiQCD. Even highly optimised code has been available. Users are requested to cite the authors. No careers have been harmed, as far as I can tell.

Also, the code itself is not much use for replicating results without making the data available too. This can be more problematic politically and technically, but even here there are good precedents in the particle physics world.

I met him on a couple of occasions many years ago and he really is great company. And he got a round in.

Different personalities all right. Recall the Ig Nobel Prize-winning observations of mallard necrophilia; https://moeliker.wordpress.com/the-duck/