korch

I too have wanted a search-engine/feed-reader, no-holds-barred web-experiment that does exactly what you describe. I'm not an academic, but I have fairly deep & broad reading interests across mathematics, physics, economics, history, etc. Ok, make that broad interests in basically every subject that is truly interesting. I'm the guy who pretty much reads journal articles for fun because newspapers, magazines, blogs, and most books suck and just aren't smart enough.

But it's more work for me to find reading material I like and want to learn from than it is for me to read it.

I could certainly hack around on something like this, as I too have been wanting to scratch this itch for a many years. I've got the time, since I'm currently un(der)-employed(ahh, gotta love contracting) and bored, but my first two roadblocks would be:

1) instant non-starter: I no longer have any university library proxy account to use to login and scrape the journals, abstracts, authors, citations, etc. I personally could care less about copyrights on academic papers. I justify my position via jury nullification using a jury of one—me. And I don't give a second thought to doing whatever dirty work it takes for building a system of scraping scripts to pull all info about every paper from every journal out there.

2) If the beta site gets even the smallest amount of traffic, I will be crushed by EC2 server and bandwidth bills.

I realize a bajillion other folks probably want to build the exact same thing, and I realize it's stupid to build your own when someone else might already be well along the way and just needs some help.

Anyone need a Linux/Ruby/SQL/Sysadmin/Wear-All-Hats-Get-Shit-Done developer? I'm in LA and on #freenode. Just say the word!

How can a bubble like this even pop? Kids aren't just going to stop going to college en mass. Universities are not going to drop their tuition rates back to 1975 levels, and instead live off their massive endowment funds for a period of austerity.

The bubble that will pop is the sea of minority, non-traditional, vocational, low-income college dropouts who can't pay back their loans. Granted, the for-profit colleges got a bit too greedy in signing kids up(thanks US gov't for providing subsidies to encourage them!), while the banks, as is typical of their particular species of shark, were only too happy to over-extend cheap credit to kids. I would be interested in knowing the total amount of outstanding private loans at for-profit colleges. Because whatever that amount is, Wall St. better prepare for all of it to be written off as losses without the need for Federal bailouts and financial shennanigans.

Let's forecast: America has the weakest labor market since the Great Depression, record unemployment, with no end in sight. Like an article I saw just yesterday, right now, today, America would need to add 270,000 new jobs per month, every month, until the end of Obama's 2nd term in office for the employment levels to return to what was normal pre-2008. And that just ain't going to happen, no matter how much Hopium you're smoking, and no matter what fairy-tale of cognitive-dissonance that you've chosen to believe in.

Unemployment for those under-25 is at a historic high. Wages are probably not rising. The entire business market is now stuck moving sideways, and it's going to be that way for at least a decade(the US is the new Japan). At least 50% of all college kids never even graduate, and the rate is higher for kids attending for-profit colleges.

So where are all these kids going to be working when they either graduate or drop out? They won't be able to pay back the loans. And that is going to trigger the popping of the bubble. And much like the way the housing market explosion threw off a ton of shrapnel and hit targets nobody even thought were in the line-of-fire, a similar thing will happen here. Most of these college loans have co-signers, who are mostly the parents. So it's not going to be a bunch of bankrupt kids—it's going to take down the lower-middle-class with it.

The true tragedy becomes apparent when you compare America to Europe and Latin American nations where the idea of paying for college is as foreign as the idea of paying for health care. Education costs are simply built into the society through taxes, instead of being externalized into a sociopathic, inhumane, capitalist tragedy of the commons extraction of profits like we have in the US. Instead, the US chooses to piss away its wealth on military spending and Wall St. gambling.

tl;dr version: The banks are continuing to wage a covert war against the middle and lower class, exploiting them into permanent poverty through loans that simply can't ever be paid back. The banks have the law, the gov't, and armies of finely suited lawyers and scary storm troopers packing guns on their side, the poor have well, nothing. The class divide in America is about to widen even more starkly. If you're already rich, or your parents are rich alumni, or you're in the top 85% percentile of income, or in a white collar profession, you won't even see this bubble nor its popping. If you are on the other end of the economic spectrum, it's going to wipe out you and a lot of families like you. And it sure is a great thing that these poor families are likely already underwater on a home mortgage loan.

Then CL could just offer a bare-bones, REST, read-only firehose API to access those posts. Just like how Twitter does it. This entire project would probably take the developers at CL a month to roll out into prod. Hell, knowing how software shops work, they probably already have 3 private internal versions of it that were shelved by the ignorant, risk-averse management who only fear change and don't know how to tread water in the meandering river of technology and Internet society.

Wild idea for the Techcrunch rumor mill in 2011: it's too bad Twitter doesn't buy or merge with CL, and in absorbing CL, make them be more open and community-centric.

Perhaps CL will see the light and open up an API, as the newspapers get more desperate and turn up the dial on the hate. CL is going to need to show off something, anything to take the spot light off themselves before the wolves rush in now that they're injured & bleeding.

Rather than viewing a modest annual expense of $20 million on lobbyists and branding, look at it as protection money that enables the revenue stream to continue and to grow. If the choice comes down to either shutting down all of Craigslist because they can't possibly moderate every post after hookers are using their freedom of speech to posti ads in every category, or paying lobbyists to keep a lid on things from DC and thereby continue the operations, then the arithmetic shows CL loses more if they don't pay the lobbyists.

I loathe the entire DC lobbyist racket as much as the next guy, and it truly is the scourge of our democracy, but it works! Otherwise why else would all of corporate America spend such lavish amounts on lobbying?

You exist in the physical world. You body is in meatspace, and your mind is in the ever fluctuating electrodynamic field. Both of these can be modeled by physics equations to a very high precision.

Therefore when you say you believe you do not know something, even in reference to your own perception of your self-knowledge, you are nonetheless making a statement about the physical world.

Sorry if this sounds pedantic. :P

— Wernher von Braun

Because having a worst case algorithm of n^2 is tractable, while solving for n^1000000 or bigger is not so much. The numbers are as shockingly big as in thermodynamics. And for real problems, it's not just one matrix, but thousands, all interlocked. And for some reason, the most common cases involve extremely sparse matrices. Numerical methods can only scratch the surface. On the bright side, we can't even imagine the true difficultly level. Sure computers can model the easy text book examples, but when it comes to modeling the real world, our current best mathematical capabilities don't even get off the paper.

But like bank robbers who foolishly think they wouldn't get caught on the 10th robbery, or a gambler playing martingale double or nothing all night, they fucked up. Craig should have pried open his fat ass wallet and toss millions of pocket change towards lobbying, branding, PR and advertising many, many years ago. Instead, they let their enemies, the media itself, define their brand and PR, and they lost control of the message, the agenda and the way they are presented to the mass public.

But Craig is apparently too hung up on his neo-hippy ideals of keeping Craigslist anti-corporate to realize that if he doesn't sink to the same dirty corporate warfare as the enemy, then they'll stab him in the back eventually. All they need is one good shot, and it's just a matter of time. I don't really get how a privately held $100 million/yr corporation is "anti-corporate." At that point it's just folly and self-delusion, he should have seen this storm cloud brewing miles away and years ago, and prepared for it to hit. Such as when Ebay tried to steal the company years ago. Too late now—say buh-bye to that $36 million a year in revenues from adult ads! Ouch!

I'm an unabashed Craiglist hater simply because he completely fucked up and missed the boat and failed us developers by not transforming the most popular and best single Internet site of high signal/noise anonymous contact into the best open mashup API of real-time, localized, semantic data. And this souped up mashup data API didn't have to be all corporatified either—Craig could have kept it hippy! Like Twitter! CL would only need to lift their pinky finger to instantly defeat the hundreds of millions invested in data mashup startups, Google, FB, AT&T, Ebay, etc who are trying to pin the market which CL dominates. Again, I see the opportunity cost—by CL not chasing change, we the users of the Internet have now lost more than we've gained from the potential of CL as force for good, community and the overall power of the Internet. I suppose my idealism is even purer than Craig's. :) At the very least, CL can stop sending C&D orders and DMCA takedowns to small websites scraping their data.

I believe a data API like this would have caused Craigslist to become even bigger and more unstoppable. Craig, Jim and whoever pulls the the strings are lazy, unimaginative fucktards who deserve to be dethroned so we, the Internet, can have a new winner in the next round of King-of-the-Hill: Winner Takes All Internet Edition. :)

—Abraham Lincoln

First, the only question that truly matters: Cui Bono?

What industry made ~40% of their revenues from classified listings within the last decade?

What industry has been slyly running hooker ads and profiting off prostitution for decades?

What industry has been anti-Internet from the start?

What industry has been running sensationalist, sexed-up hit-pieces scaring the public about rampant crime on Craigslist for several years?

And more importantly in the grand-scheme of things, from a level way above mere prostitution:

What hypocritical industry has been utterly incapable of understanding that the core tenet of online freedom of speech is intimately connected to the availability of online, open forums where anyone can say anything in an anonymous, online public space that is protected under the first amendment?

Newspapers.

And it's funny because no newspaper editor will ever let what I just said ever see print, as this tempest in a teapot about the world's oldest profession continues to simmer. Remember, it's an election year, so all these AGs who have been turning a blind eye to prostitution for decades now have the perfect political opportunity to play the morality police handed to them on a silver platter:

It has taken years to trend, but the MSM has slowly pumped up a moral crusade around Craigslist. Gee, isn't that convenient for them? Now they just want to hand off the ball to the state AGs. Then the AGs get to grand-stand from their corrupt moral soapboxes, which helps their political base, and the newspapers get to reclaim ~30% of Craigslist's revenue. Ahh, the circle of Life, ain't it beautiful!

You don't see Backpage, the 2nd largest site for the exact same adult classified ads being targeted at all now do you? Who owns Backpage? Why it's the Village Voice media corp, who has deep pockets, a long history, and many friends in high places.

Craig's biggest personal mistake was not doing what Google had to do a few years ago, what Microsoft learned to do in the 90's during the antitrust trial, and what countless other tech companies insulated in their Silicon Valley tech bubble all have eventually had to do: send one hundred or more paid lobbyists to DC.

Who has been public enemy #1 of the newspapers and their media conglomerates?

Who has almost single-handedly caused the entire newspaper industry to cave in on itself in just a decade?

Craigslist

What we're seeing here is just business as usual from the Great Houses of yellow journalism.

AND NOW FOR A RANT! :)

/rant

I know a thing or two about a thing or two in this particular niche of the classified industry, since once upon a time long ago I worked a very brief & desperate stint coding at some unnamed company in the adult classified biz. It's not at all what the general public thinks it is. It's a lot more organized, practical and intentional in subtle ways most people don't realize, while the sexy, titillating parts that you see Faux News and CNN play are not nearly as exciting in reality.

I don't pass any judgment on it—it's called the oldest profession for a reason. We're all mammals after all, what's wrong with that? In fact, I think it should be completely legal, across the board, and regulated by the health industry just like in Europe and most of the rest of the world.

Too many Americans are completely stupid in their expectations about what they think would happen if it were legal. It's exactly like with America's idiotic, failed War on Some Drugs and alcohol Prohibition. Make it illegal, no it doesn't stop, since any attempt to legislate the most basic and natural of all human behaviors is futile! Prohibition only makes it worse in fact, as it just empowers organized crime to take over. Who do you think is trafficking little kids for this? Who is keeping the modern day equivalent of female slaves? Who has international shipping networks to even do those kind of logistics? Who is committing 99% of the violence in an industry of "victimless crime"? Who is tying this illegal industry to others, like drug or arms trafficking, in order to capitalize on economies of scale? Not some 12 year old girl from some Asian country. And not John Smith who has been in a sexless marriage for 20 years. And it's not Corner Pimp Moe who still lives with his mother since he just got out of jail for a petty misdemeanor. No, it's the organized criminals and corporations pulling the strings in high places in America who only exist because our gov't has setup a system of (in)justice that enables them to operate.

And a massive amount of our tax dollars are wasted in law enforcement of this industry. There's a massive opportunity cost behind it—just remember, every hooker busted and given the average penalty of a $200 ticket with no jail time is one less robber, murderer, rapist, you name it, who is caught and taken off the streets by the cops. Not to mention that the cops don't really want to enforce prohibition, since they could care less about being the morality police, and they know they have a snowball's chance in hell of stopping basic mammalian reproduction, so they are already doing it half-assed. It's kind of like the military study where they found that 60% of soldiers on the battle fields were intentionally aiming high during Vietnam to miss their human targets—such is the subconscious social fear of hurting other human beings! We need our cops to be effective and trusted by society, not the opposite! So why are we setting up a judicial system that sets the cops up for failure?

And don't even get me started on the Feminist angle on all of this. I'll just say that I know of nothing else in society than making it illegal that has done more to exploit, injure and permanently disadvantage countless innocent women than the entire legal and social apparatus setup for prohibition. Most of these women have tough lives, tough backgrounds, they have fallen through the cracks in education and our social system, and they are single moms getting by in a decimated economy. That's not exactly what I picture when I imagine criminals. But here in America we can't treat people at the bottom of our social order in a decent, Christian way. As a society, what is our solution to this so-called problem? We add another layer of victimization on these innocent women who are already victimized! America is shameful in how always treats its least well-off citizens. Yes, I blame the hypocritical religious fundies who's modus operandi is to scare folks into the pews on Sundays, and who have apparently forgotten the level of forgiveness and tolerance which Jesus himself showed to prostitutes. Ultimately it's due to America's historic, unchangeable bedrock of Puritan culture. Even though America practically invented porn, culturally, we have a completely backwards view towards human sexuality and behavior, compared to the rest of the modernized world, who laughs at us. Ooh, the answer, I know, I know, let's criminalize it!

As for the consequences of legality, no, all marriages and relationships would not be doomed as everyone switches to hookers. In fact, the opposite would probably happen: the price would drop(you have no idea how much of the money is wasted on jumping through hoops to keep safe from organized crime and Johnny Law), and the labor supply would go up a little bit. But the social stigma would remain, and this is the important part. Since humans are entirely social creatures, legalization would probably have the completely counter-intuitive effect of making relationships better across society, since if sex is made nearly valueless, rather than equivalent to what a top attorney would bill you per hour, then the social shame aspect is suddenly bumped to the top of the list of concerns. Since you don't have to worry about being associated with illegality, slavery, crime, etc. And we all know that shaming within social groups is the most effective way to alter and control human behavior—even more so than relying on prison or economics to do it. QED.

—Paul Erdös

It may take another century, but I believe with absolute certainty that Einstein will be vindicated for thinking Quantum Mechanics was incomplete, rejecting the non-visualizable, non-intuitive, entirely algorithmic hoisting up of the mathematical machinery which Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, de Broglie et. al. built into quantum mechanics.

Einstein was on the far-most opposite end of the spectrum than all of them. Einstein was looking towards intuition to explain the physics and the experimental reality, while they were looking for mathematical models which seemed to fit the experimental data, while providing no understanding of what it all meant. Once Heisenberg & Schrödinger made a big break into QM, it's like all of physics jumped on it and forged ahead, damn whether anyone understands what is really happening.

Even Schrödinger himself, in his own first paper presenting his wave mechanics formulation, said there is no hope of visualizing nor understanding what Psi really represents. It's all just empty mathematical symbols, that when manipulated according to a particular set of rules, within a particular context, will give somewhat accurate predictions about some physical experiment. It really doesn't help at all the the entire QM apparatus is just plain ugly, inelegant and incapable of justifying itself. I'm not condemning it, nor any of the enormous geniuses who tossed their own contribution onto our great, immeasurable & eternal bonfire of accumulated human knowledge which we call science.

But if you read through a few grad-level books about QM, it's blindingly obvious that nobody really knows what's really going on. This is more of a consequence of our current gaps in mathematics, more than a failure of any individuals. Believe me, once someone discovers how to solve The Eigenvalue Problem in quadratic time, all of QM, as it is currently formulated, is going to go away and be replaced by a much simpler model. It'll be just as simplifying as centuries ago when we replaced Ptolemy's epicycles with Kepler's elliptic orbits. I bet even the probability concepts embedded in QM will be entirely thrown out(they were never anything but trouble anyways), and replaced by something even more fantastic & currently unimaginable.

I cringe whenever I see someone drag out Ricardo's comparative advantage BS, dating from the 1800's. Economics, as it is taught in the schools, opposed to the real world of business, is mostly fiction.

Sure, you can demonstrate the validity of comparative advantage on paper using a simple matrix of Guns & Butter, and because it's so simple we get all these Randroids who believe they understand how the world truly works through the lens of basic freshman level math.

But these Macroecon textbooks are also wearing the kid gloves for the benefit of innumerate undergrads in order to pass off an illusion as scientific fact. (Econ is the dismal science after all).

Instead, let's scale the Guns & Butter matrix up to 1,000,000 variables, which is still embarassingly low compared to the complexity of real life, and let's add a time dimension too. Now just try to find the fucking comparative advantage! Good luck even finding the eigenvalues of that matrix before the heat death of the Universe. And if you happen to get lucky and find some minimum, you won't be able to know if it's global or if you're going to be wandering around in a false local minimum for eternity. Faced with this kind of uncertainty, your smartest evolutionary move is to grab whatever you can buy or sell and defend it within your territory. Period.

Ricardo's theorem is to economics as play-dough is to architecture.

I often amuse myself by wondering this: what if our entire idea that our post-modern global society has transitioned to free trade and free markets is a delusion, a folie a deux, a cynical ploy by the rich & powerful to control everyone, and in fact historical mercantilism is still the basis of global political economy? Just look at the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve sometime and ask yourself if hoarding currency is still the primary determinant of a nation's wealth?

Sure, we've changed the language we use to describe it, we've changed the playing field itself, added incomparable technology, and re-shuffled the boundaries and identities of nations through a few world wars, all underneath an expanding teleological architectonic of democracy and freedom around the world, but ultimately everything is still the same basic pattern being played out across the nations. Hoard currency! Perhaps mercantilism & protectionism is the only Game theoretic dominant economic strategy for any nation or collective group?

"I'm Google Blasting myself!"

Huh? What the hell is that?

"Well you see, I need to stop having all my online activity appear on page one on Google when people type in my name. So I paid this company to clog Google with a bunch of fake, generated content about me. Hopefully the real information about me which I want to hide from casual searchers will be drowned out in the fake information."

I had never heard of Google Blasting for the common end-user before this, but it's a brilliant idea. And I bet as all of our lives end up being more public through Google, Facebook, Foursquare, etc, the demand for services like Google Blasting will grow. It sounds like a great business idea, though the timing is still wrong, since we're at least a few years from reaching a mass-market demand.

Ultimately, I disagree slightly with Gibson saying We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. Simply because it will be far too easy to spam and blast this form of AI.

True AI in the sense of Wintermute/Neuromancer will happen, inevitably, just not yet. And the day it arrives, Google is instantly dead, a relic of a past era, an antiquated technology we'll all smirk at in history books.

I have a Too-Big-To-Fail theory—as any complex social system grows, it reaches some kind of equilibrium boundary, and if it tries to grow beyond that, black swans, catastrophes, and the usual apocalyptic implosion inevitably occurs. No I know this is going to put me out on the fringe of Anarcho-Libertarian-Fascists, but we all need to stop building social organizations that are too big to fail. The consequences of total failure just keep getting bigger(see WW2).

So the solution for India is that it needs to be a few smaller independent nations. Even the idea of a single, unified "India" is a fiction created less than a century ago for the political purpose of throwing off the oppressive, exploitive imperial rule of the British.

Just look at Rome or any empire. It's the same exact high level pattern. I'd say the same applies to China, Russia, and the US too! (God knows I'd love to throw those Red-State weirdos out of the Union–just kidding of course).

If humanity wants to survive for the long-term, living in peace and prosperity on this Blue Marble, we're going to need to master our collective ability to break down inefficient social organizations without resorting to the same kind of barbaric warfare which we've always used.

Khan Academy will change the world!

Alas!

Thanks for making this, it's awesome!

It's exactly like how the banks are keeping their 1+ years worth of "shadow" housing inventory off the market, so as to keep a floor on prices and prevent everyone from panicking and running for the exits at once.

And just like how the Federal bailouts were passed through back channels(i.e. Maiden Lane I & II, reserve swaps with foreign central banks, etc), and arcane accounting tricks that no congress-critter can comprehend, and the biggest political smoke & mirrors America has ever seen, so too will it go for the bailing out involvent states. It won't be Obama handing Schwarzenegger an oversized $30 billion dollar check on TV like a grinning Ed McMahon. No, it'll be a thousand tiny accounting tricks to prop up California, and keep the markets in perpetual doubt about the overall fiscal status of California.

Our entire Federal fiscal and monetary policy is a waiting game. They don't know what will happen, but the thinking is if we can all just hang on long enough for everyone to adjust to the economic new normal, then we can at least avoid an outright national collapse. Nobody on the planet can even know if this will work, but there are zero alternatives.

Thanks a lot technologically myopic courts for setting such a dangerous legal precedent!

On the bright side, isn't it trivial and relatively cheap to make a radio detector of GPS and other such radio transmissions? Or even a signal jammer? Like what the spies use to sweep a room for listening devices? Let's just assume you're cool with temporarily violating FCC broadcast regulations within a small personal vicinity. ;)

Unintended consequences are my favorite however. Perhaps, if we're lucky, this situation might just invert, and if total surveillance becomes dirt cheap, then it also means we can watch the watchers. Imagine a Facebook for watching every LE agent in real time across the entire country. Sounds laughable, but technology changes fast! (I bet certain global crime cartels already have something like this, in crude beta—all it takes is one mole and you've got the right data to connect the dots.)

Vim ftw!

Your point hits right to the heart of the matter. And it's why I utterly despise the rich so much. When I look out on the world, I don't see what is actual, rather I see all the lost potential(opportunity cost). It's heartbreaking. And it's not just how much wealth they take—it's also how much resources they divert from the natural ebb & flow of capital to support their meaningless, empty, wasteful lifestyles. And all for no practical reason other than keeping up with the Joneses. Meanwhile people are starving and killing each other in ghettos not 10 miles away.

It's funny how such a stat like the French textiles leaps right out in historical hindsight, yet every era of human history has it's own economic sinkhole into which the rich and the powerful throw societies collective wealth. I suppose for the present day US, instead of lavish dresses for the royals, it's lavish military spending for the gravy-train DoD fucktards. (We'll hit a $1 trillion defense budget in less than 5 years! If that doesn't make you want to take to the streets with a molotov, then nothing will). They don't realize it yet, because they are all narrow minded pigs blinded towards their own trough, but their economic parasitism will inevitable trigger another revolution in America. Malcom X's proverbial chickens will indeed come home to roost, and it's going to be simple, unsustainable economics that triggers it. Archaeologists will dig us up in 1,000 years and wonder why we couldn't see the pattern.

Wealth = Exploitation.

QED, bitches. If this belief makes me a radical socialist, so fucking be it! I know I'm right from a high level perspective.

—Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I think I recently drove by a sign on the road that said this too. It was right next to another sign that read "Make Money Fast", and another sign that said "Get Rich Working from Home." However, a much wiser man than I once said: TANSTAAFL.

Now I know this is gonna get nuked, but I don't care because I can prove my point if you can understand me. Money is all you guys ever talk about here. Can we get more up votes on articles about oh say, extravagant assembly code or hardware hacks, instead of the daily echo chamber of TC driven $pablum?

IMHO everyone here, or at least the most vocal minority, is far, far too obsessed with making money. And the kind of money amount always being talked about is literally winning the lottery. Fools! You want to know why the American Empire has hollwed out and is about to fall? Everybody is a fucking true-blue believer that they deserve to be rich,at the expense of everything and everyone else! Why can't people just be happy with enough to get by? Spend time with your friends and family, stop chasing the bullshit ideology of conspicuous consumption which much richer and much more powerful individuals want you to believe in order to trap you into their completely distorted mentality, a simulacrum of un-reality! And those biggest fish only benefit themselves by getting everyone else to chase their white rabbit btw.

Here's my one "TED" wish: instead of the pursuit of money and winning the lottery, I want more of you super-smart, elite, "WEIRD", technophiles to spend the same amount of time & effort doing something intrinsically meaningful, creative, in the pursuit of knowledge for yourself or others, or sacrificing & helping those people in your communities who are disadvantaged, oppressed and less fortunate, or the noble purpose of doing something(anything!) because it is Right and nobody else seems to be doing that thing.

What kind of ignorant fuck truly wants to live the hollow lifestyle of a wealthy young aristocrat? You might think you're making sacrifices now for freedom from money later, but I, and every single philosopher going all the way back to Thales would warn the pursuit of wealth, for it's own sake, or for the sole sake of being "freed" from money, ends up becoming a tragic, inescapable anchor you will be permanently chained to in your life, and it will fully consume and ruin whatever goodness and potential you might have started with.

There is another way. Take only what you need, don't need much, give generously without regard, and redirect all your newly found free time & energy into efforts that truly matter.

Fuck you, Money!

  —Socrates

The flaw is that you just can't compare apples to oranges and expect any kind of meaningful conclusion. In this case, it's cross correlating some super high dimensional manifold from 1964(or whenever) comprised of easily hundreds of thousands of variables, against a similar large manifold(2010). There are just too many totally different variables between then and now for it to be a fair comparison at all.

Sure, each side sees what it wants in whatever tiny slice of the data they choose to use. Blame the Mexicans, no blame the Rich, no blame the Liberals, no blame Reagan, ad infinitum.

And this guy, a professional in higher education, wants to step out on a far limb to make some grandiose claim about the status of California education. I am more fearful of him ruining his own students by teaching them to mimic his own flawed reasoning than I am of any of his exaggerated, inaccurate conclusions.

You know what? More likely than not, the world will keep going the way it has been, people, kids, and education will keep improving, albeit incrementally, and there is not going to be some apocalyptic doomsday in the future of public education in California, or anywhere.

In summary, he's basically following the same pattern so many old people follow: somewhere along the way they lose touch with reality, with the youth, get stuck in their ways, and believe the whole world has gone to hell in a handbasket, and all because of some imagined flaw in the entire youth population. Old people forget what it was like to be young, and lose their ability to rapidly adapt and learn as children do. And without fail, each generation grows up to believe they were somehow better than later generations. Bollocks!

I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me.

—Abe Simpson

Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year old what he is doing is a charlatan.

  —Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Also, it keeps several other super-important constraints in place too. That's the problem with gravity—it's more like an infinite Jenga puzzle and anything you add to the explanation must not contradict dozens of other old physics experiments about things having nothing to do with gravity. We can't throw out all the other stuff we do know after all. Like the constancy of the speed of light in any reference frame. And the conservation of energy. And Maxwell's electrodynamic equations. And a bunch of other specific experiments I don't even know much about.

I don't know how much of thermodynamics has been "relativized", but gravity can't contradict the laws of thermodynamics either. It's actually comforting that the world of thermodynamics is so tiny, cold, deals with such a large number of "particles"(ensembles), and is built from insanely complex mathematical machinery that we probably have no hope of ever devising an experiment that could say anything meaningful about gravity in terms of thermodynamics. (I so hope that I'm very wrong here.)

However, Gravity is famously in contradiction with Quantum Mechanics, though I haven't yet progressed far enough in either to be able to say specifically what the contradiction is. I suspect it's just the lack of a math "bridge" between Relativity, which is built up from calculus, differential forms, tensors, Rienmannian geometry, the calculus of variations and weird ways QM uses linear algebra, eigenvalues, infinite bounded operators and insane algebraic concepts like von Neumann algebras to setup infinite matrices of probabilities that map back to the periodic, bounded solutions of the Schrödinger wave equation that tell us what the energy levels of some physics experiment must be.

Oh and the model of gravity has to be able to fit in well with any new stuff we discover too. Being able to pull off all of that is why I place Einstein in the pantheon of geniuses! He's kind of like a one-armed man who holds off an entire army of swordsmen using only a pocket knife.

My top goal right now is to live cheap, pay off all debt, and never again take on any debt. Ever. Debt is a fool's game, like any well-designed casino, "the house always wins." Hopefully an enormous number of Americans will learn this lesson and do likewise, and utterly punish the banks where it counts—on their bottom line. It wasn't too long ago that American's were amongst the most frugal and biggest savers in the world, which laid the foundation for a great cultural-Puritan work ethic.

We sure take a lot of our hindsight knowledge for granted.

What is gravity? We sure think we have pinned it down because we can measure its effects on very precise scales. But measuring a thing is not at all the same as understanding a thing, in a teleological sense. I am not a physicist, but then again, I'm pretty sure most physicists are equally in the dark about what gravity is, so there's little harm to be done firing blindly in the dark.

The way I understand it so far, the explanation of gravity is intimately tied into the way we measure, model and predict the behavior of gravity. And all of that is equivalent to our mathematical formulation of gravity.

Newton was fortunate enough that the precision of measurements in his era were orders of magnitudes worse than now. So he could create calculus to explain his notion of gravitational force, assuming all space and time in the universe were a single, absolute "reference frame", and not run into any real problems. I've always seen the creation of the calculus and the formulation of the central force field hypothesis as being flip sides of the same coin—without the notion of one, you would never arrive at the idea of the other. So that's one way of explaining it.

In Netwon's day, the primary objection to gravity was that you had to believe in "action-at-a-distance", and that the force of gravity "travels" instantaneously across the entire Universe. I don't recall, but there was some Aristotilean or Scholastic hang-up on this point. And we still have this problem—it'sonly slightly alleviated by General Relativity sweeping it under the rug of "things-we-can't-hope-to-measure-until-we-get-intergalactic-starships"

Einstein's genius lay in being a great connector of existing ideas. He managed to take Newton's gravity, a dash of Bolztmann's atomic hypothesis & statistical mechanics, a pinch of Riemann's non-euclidean metrical ideas, and notice the very staggering pattern that Lorentz transforms and Minkowski space on paper exactly match how gravity appears to work, even with relaxing Newton's assumption of a single, universe-wide, unchanging space-time. It does seem far, far too convenient that of all the possible models the Universe could take, it "chose" to make gravity appear locally Euclidean, yet globally Minkowski, and that the hyperbolic metric of non-euclidean geometry can be made to exactly model the behavior of gravity in non-inertial-frames. All of that explanation exists only on paper too.

As an aside, I cannot recommend this book enough for a not-too-difficult, motivated-sophomore-level calculus based explanation of gravity—just 60 pages in and you will "get it", as least the bigger picture of gravity: The Geometry of Spacetime: An Introduction to Special and General Relativity http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000YJ4ZTE/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...

I also highly recommend Westfall's definitive biography of Newton, "Never at Rest." He spends a lot of time picking apart Newton's conceptual problems with gravity. It's like looking over Newton's shoulder, with added commentary, so you can glimpse a lot more about the weird nature of gravity without being drowned in mathematical equations.

So again, the explanation is almost entirely mathematical. While this may turn off a lot of folks who (incorrectly) believe they can never understand enough calculus to even glimpse what Newton & Einstein were saying, I personally believe the opposite—wanting to know what gravity really is serves as a great motivation for learning more math Which everyone ought to do!

It was about 6 months ago that a paper was published(and linked to on HN) saying no separate effect of gravity could be detected even right down to the Planck scale(the smallest theoretical "distances" we can ever hope to measure!). Gravity, being the weakest of the 4 forces, is even weaker than we thought, and yet it is the "prime mover" of the entire Universe. If gravity cannot be easily detected even on the Planck scale, this is going to be a huge, huge problem in figuring out gravity. What the gist of the experiment seemed to suggest is that we have no hope of ever detecting "gravitons." I am not a physicist, so I may not fully understand this new research, but I think that's what it was implying if you read between the lines.

We may never know what gravity is. But I would say it's all about the journey anyways, and never the destination. So all of the mathematics you have to pick up along the way to grok that we don't know what gravity is, is itself of more possible value than knowing what gravity really is. (Of course I might be wrong—a gravity manipulation machine would be most excellent!).