Not to mention that the molecular dynamics simulations you're describing can't actually simulate chemical reactions. (the covalent bonds can't change in the sim, unless you do a much more intensive QM calculation and even that's iffy).
447 karma · joined March 29, 2012
Java does array bounds checking in principle, but it is usually optimized out of the machine code. Isn't it then virtually just as susceptible to hardware error as C? And the JVM is written in C anyway.
If the loop variable is a int_fast16_t the loop increment step compiles to
addq $1, -16(%rbp)
movzwl -4(%rbp), %eax
addl $1, %eax
movw %ax, -4(%rbp)
Publishing questionable results quickly has many benefits (if you happen to be right) and few consequences. Just don't draw too much attention to yourself by over-hyping.
In the discussion of C strings, the author is arguing that Zed's arguments are nonsensical, maybe even objectively wrong. I write a lot of C, and the author is right in this case about C strings and undefined operations. In C you must arrange your code so that you always supply valid input to functions, there is no way around it, and it is perfectly safe once you do so.
I'd rather see discussion of the actual arguments, rather than complaints about the article's tone. :)
All scientists on the planet look at the list of authors on any papers they read. That way they know the biases of the authors, the types of assumptions they might make, and how trustworthy any data is.
"In a 2004 study, researchers estimated that people with the mutation would have produced up to 19% more fertile offspring than those who lacked it. The researchers called that degree of selection “among the strongest yet seen for any gene in the genome”."
"The inheritance of mitochondria is asymmetric: you only get them from your mother, and your father makes no mitochondrial contribution at all. Your father’s mitochondrial contribution dies with him and is not passed on. What does that mean? It means that there can be no selection to fine tune mitochondria to the male nuclear genome."
Mitochondria are extrmely important to the cell and have been linked to many effects of aging. The reasoning above suggests that mitochondria work more poorly in males. And indeed, the paper (linked below) explains that in fruit flies, mitochondrial genes in males are expressed with much higher variability than females.
Your two links depend on human biology, but early male death is a much more general phenomenon. Males die earlier in the vast majority of animals (with gender). This idea could explain it.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/02/06/mothers-curse/
In many physical (classical) systems there is a set of generalized coordinates of measure 0 which does not obey the 2nd law.
> Illegal insider trading refers generally to buying or selling a security, in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence, while in possession of material, nonpublic information about the security.
Here is an example it gives of insider trading:
> Employees of law, banking, brokerage and printing firms who were given such information to provide services to the corporation whose securities they traded;
Isn't that exactly what the parent is describing? The banks used nonpublic information given to them to provide other services.
Here's how I have come to think of it: When you create the two opposite-spin particles and send them to opposite ends of the galaxy, they exist in a superposition of states which follows QM probabilities. The spins are anti-aligned in all of these possible states , but pointing in a different direction in each state. When one person observes his/her particle, you can imagine it's like they are 'masking out' many of the possible states, leaving just one of the possible "universes". But no matter which "universe" gets masked out, in the "surviving universe" the spins are going to be anti-aligned.
This is a lot like the 'hidden variable' picture where the spins were pre-decided and put into boxes, and when person A opened her box and saw "up" she knew that the other person must have the "down" spin. The difference is that QM probabilities are not consistent with the probabilities you would get from such a boxing procedure (in particular when the observers measure the spin at different angles). But conceptually, opening the box and realizing that you have the "up" spin and therefore the other person has down is a lot like doing a spin measurement and masking out many of the superpositions, and concluding that the other person must have the opposite spin from what you measured.
http://sandwalk.blogspot.ca/2011/11/nasa-confusion-about-ori...
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2009/04/can-watery-asteroids-ex...
Two problems with the 'organic asteroid' theory are the 'racemization problem' (how to explain why life only uses L isomers rather than both the L and D isomers present in meteorites), and the fact that the amount of organic matter in meteors is tiny. Compare that to the opportunities for life to arise on earth in its diverse chemical environments.
See the calculations by Jeffrey Bada discussed in the second link.
bind '"^[[1;5A": history-search-backward'
bind '"^[[1;5B": history-search-forward'
Google "Latex implementation" and you will see a lot of hits. I see a Java implementation, Windows implementations, LaTeX3 and LuaTeX are referred to as reimplemetations 'nearly from scratch', etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format
Even today you will need to buy Microsoft Word to "properly" read .doc files. There are other readers (libreoffice) but they only do the basics, and in my experience they usually mangle the file.
LaTeX has never been proprietary because it has always been publicly documented.
Here are the NPR story and related Atlantic article by the author of the book:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-...
http://download.npr.org/real.npr.na-central/npr/wesat/2000/0...
Kind of like how minstrel shows are racist, in contrast to films like "12 Years A Slave".
When painting, you might 'see' the 520nm green in your scene, but choose paint that is a mixture of yellow and blue to recreate it since the net color looks the same to you. However, the paint will look different from the scene to someone missing (eg) red cones.: Your red cones contributed to the blue+yellow looking green to you, since the yellow paritally activates the red cones.
Wikipedia gives a citation for backpropagation going back to 1963 by the way, but looking more carefully you are right that the 1986 paper is important.
These have traditionally been domains requiring a huge research apparatus with tremendous manpower, for only very long term gains. Not good for startups. In AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve' the problem).
In addition, the people with the skills necessary to make progress are going to be advanced researchers with PhDs, who are good enough to remain in academia if they wish or who have already developed a proven-enough idea through their research career that they don't need Y-combinator-style money.
I am not trying to be a downer on the idea, contrarily I hope there can be success. Really I am fishing for anyone with a good perspective (or an answer) to these points.
A quick google search for studies of the correlation between wealth and suicide seem to confirm my view, eg "a 2009 Gallup survey [shows] the rate of depression is nearly twice as high for Americans making less than $24,000 a year than it is for those with annual incomes above $60,000." Of course, the real story is more complicated: It seems the correlation is much less clear for poor regions than for poor individuals, and I saw some suggestions that poor people living next to wealthy people were more likely to commit suicide.
A major theme of the book is how many of the fruits we see today (especially avocados, osange oranges, honey locust pods, possibly mangoes and many other large fruits) originally evolved to be eaten by megafauna. The idea is they would eat the fruit whole and swallow the pit, and poop it out somewhere. Evidence for this is that many of the trees have defenses against non-megafauna eating the fruits, or others have out-of-proportion defenses against any living animal today, the fact that many pits will only grow if they have been scoured (for example by the digestive system of an animal), and that the pits often seem over-defended, and the fact that many of these fruits are not eaten by any living animals and often fall from the tree and rot in place.
His main complaint is against rich people who "squandered in luxury and carelessness", the various ways in which "riches [are] a burden", how men care too much about the "limit of their lands". Almost every sentence seems spoken to someone too rich for his own good, with too many slaves, mistresses, clients, and land.
It fits in with my picture of Rome as having a strong class hierarchy (and up to 30% slaves!). This are the words from the "optimo iure" to themselves.
Statistical Mechanics and thermodynamics are the basis for a huge amount of technology and scientific models of the world, yet they rely on a fundamental assumption which is in some sense unjustified, known as the 'Ergodic hypothesis': Even though (classically) we know that the current position of gas particles in a box can be determined from their positions in the past, in thermodynamics we make the (unjustified) assumption that their positions are actually random and independent of their previous positions. In other words, these models for the world are probabilistic, which contradicts our more fundamental models of the world which say it is deterministic (and even QM is deterministic, with the single exception of the born rule). What he's doing here helps justify the probabilistic treatment, and understand when it does or does not apply.
I have always though this to be one of the great 'foundations' questions in physics (The others being QM foundations/origin of the born rule, and foundations of Field Theory). These are 'hard' and borderline philosophical questions, which most scientists (with good reason) simply assume to be true, to the point they often find them uninteresting. Lately though there seems to be renewed interest in them.
King Louis XVI kept his sugar in a locked container and kept the key with him. He would open it up for special guests and personally delivered small amounts of sugar to each person. Similarly, in French noble households it was common for the man of the house to control the sugar-key, and to distribute small amounts of sugar to the family as he saw fit.