morbia

The Higgs results were reproduced because there are two independent detectors at CERN (Atlas and CMS). Both collaborations are run almost entirely independently, and the press are only called in to announce a scientific discovery if both find the same result.

Obviously the 'best' result would be to have a separate collider as well, but no one is going to fund a new collider just to reaffirm the result for a third time.

There are many things wrong with the TV license system, but I think saying it is 'mandatory' is a little misleading. As the Wikipedia article states, you need a TV license if you want to watch or record live broadcasted material (and iplayer). You can own a TV and not pay for a TV license and use it for Netflix, YouTube, gaming etc legally.

For my entire adult life I've never paid for a TV license, and I have never broken the law and watched live content. Many in my generation have no interest in TV anymore.

You see I totally agree with you, but I am not sure if grindr is solely to blame for this. It is a fair generalisation to say that men struggle far more with emotions and open communication. This is clearly demonstrable by looking at the male suicide rates: in my country (UK) they are roughly 3 times that of women. I have no doubt that is common across western countries.

So really to me the problem is that men, on average, struggle with expressing their emotions more. Asking those men to form healthy, loving relationships with other men is then a challenge. Not impossible, but certainly more difficult.

To me, Grindr is a symptom not the cause. If you are taught from a young age that men don't cry, toughen up and be a man etc, then sex is reduced to the physical act. Add in some emotional truama, which is again very common in the gay community, and the problem is exacerbated. Of course Grindr doesn't help and makes it all worse, but really they're just making money off the damage which is already done.

If by ahistorical you mean we do not conform to Greek and Roman era of homosexual activity, you have to keep in mind there were societal pressures at the time as well. I don't think you can take those eras as a gold standard of laissez-faire approach to sexuality.

For the record, I am gay guy and whilst I can identify an attractive woman, it is such a fleeting attraction I can't ever imagine mustering the activation energy to even try.

Exactly, I got into quite a heated discussion with a company that offered me a job with "unlimited PTO". They wanted me to sign in the contract with a clause along the lines of "you have unlimited PTO within reason". The whole point of contracts is that you have to explicitly define what is deemed "reasonable". I insisted they put a number to it and they refused.

Needless to say, I didn't accept the job in the end.

I don't know the lead time from when they apply, but the time it takes to go from CVs hitting my inbox to first interview is about a week.

I'm not sure that is really a valid excuse though. I understand if you're making a lot of applications it's hard to keep track, but all it takes is a 10 minutes refresher just before the interview. I do exactly the same with candidate's CVs prior to the interview too and I've never mixed up candidates up to date. 24 hours afterwards I'll have forgotten everything without my notes.

Also a top tip, even if you're in a mad panic in the interview and your mind has gone blank, wording is key. "Can you give some more details about the role and the company?" comes across a hell of a lot better than "Sorry I've forgotten what I applied for".

The analogies here to dating are striking to me. Sure you might have gone on 3 dates in that week, but if expect one to work out you better not get their name wrong.

I'm a hiring manager for UK based FTSE 100 company, hiring software engineers and data scientists. I wanted to give a perspective from 'the other side'.

I've been involved in hiring for a few companies since 2018 ish, and I've noticed a really sharp decline in the quality of candidates this year. Recently I have interviewed no end of candidates who have 5+ years experience, made redundant and seem to think they can walk into a job with zero effort.

Some recent examples that I am slightly changing for anonymity:-

- a candidate could not remember how to do a for loop in python

- a candidate told me they forgot what the job they applied for was and who we are

- the only question a candidate asked me at the end of the interview was 'can I work on my personal laptop?' We are a multi billion pound company, not a startup.

If these were graduates I can forgive some of the poor interviewing skills, but these were for mid/senior positions, sometimes leads!

I would like to stress, there are some fantastic candidates coming through too, and I am deeply sorry for anyone who has lost their job. The challenge though as a hiring manager right now is wading through the vast numbers of candidates who really put in zero effort, and there are a lot of them.

I can't help but feel there is a selection bias here. We could pretend that Netflix's recommendation algorithm is totally random with some reinforcement factor (e.g. positive reactions to LGBTQ content leads to more of the same) and it would lead to this outcome for some people. With a large viewership even very dumb algorithms would successfully 'predict' someone is LGBTQ for someone.

Since we are taking sample sizes of one, I'm gay and it is extremely rare I get recommended LGBTQ content on Netflix.

> You may be too deep in the community to appreciate, but younger teens have had family supervision for millennia and for good reason. Their brains are not fully formed yet.

Of course, I'm not claiming otherwise. Hell, I'm not even saying that legally children should be entitled to privacy from their parents, clearly that isn't feasible or desireable in any way.

However, morally and ethically it is not black or white. It is not a case of "lord of the flies" or parental prison as a binary choice.

Honestly, I'm not even disagreeing with the original poster I replied to. I don't think they were wrong for snooping on their child's internet history. I just wanted to start an open discussion on a legitmate concern caused by snooping which many families go through. It is something that heterosexual parents often do not consider or appreciate because it was not part of their experiences when they grew up. To use your terms, they are "too deep in their community" to appreciate it.

> His terms aren't universal or acceptable because it's my family not his. He's projecting his personal experience onto my kids, which I've clearly discussed prior is not the same generationally or ever personally.

I am doing nothing of the sort. In fact, I haven't made any comment towards which I disagree with your actions with regards to your example. I haven't really formulated any opinions on this, and certainly not towards your family. I was wanting an open discourse using a hypothetical scenario and received a rather personal defensive retort in return.

All I believe is LGBT children have a right to be protected, sometimes that is from their own parents. Yes, that is formulated through the lens of my experiences in the same way yours are through being a mother of a child in 2023. I am not trying to push a vision of family, culture or politics, I'm trying to make parents think about this that is all. My hypothetical scenario is not so hypothetical for many families.

Just to be clear, I am not a parent and I would not be so presumptuous to criticise someone's parenting skills when I have not gone through it. I wholeheartedly agree with you that the internet of 2023 is nothing like 2013 (or 2003 when I was growing up), and I don't think your reaction to the situation you described is wrong. Needless to say, parenting in this era is really, really hard and I don't envy you.

However, I want to exercise a hypothetical with you: what if you had discovered through access to her internet logs that she was a lesbian, or a trans man? How would you deal with that situation? Would you confront them, or would you pretend you didn't see it? Even if you have liberal views and are supportive*, that is a very deep and intimate piece of knowledge on your child that you hold now. Instead of them dictating the terms of their coming out, you effectively control that. That is quite a violation of trust.

Presumably your daughter knows you can see their internet logs, what if she does not feel like she isn't being her authentic self online because she knows you will find out? Even if you are supportive, discovering your sexual and/or gender identity takes time and takes having a safe space to feel comfortable to confide in someone.

This is all working under the assumption that you are comfortable with this, what about the many parents out there who are not? This becomes a weapon they can use to inflict psychological trauma on their child. Growing up as a LGBT kids is really hard for many of us, even today. Giving any more control or power to conservative parents is extremely dangerous.

You might think I'm exaggerating, or perhaps this is a niche point (it is far more likely your daughter is straight and cis-gendered) but the stakes are really high here. I came out to my parents when I was an adult, on my own terms when I moved out. I still got the 'it's just a phase' speech and all that sort of rubbish, but it was very clear to my parents that they had zero control over my life at that point. If they wanted to maintain a relationship with their son they had to change their viewpoints pretty quickly (and they did). Without hyperbole, if they had outed me when I was a child at best I would have been traumatised, at worst I would have killed myself.

I hope parents reading this really think about what I am saying here and take it seriously, because for some of you this will be something you'll have to deal with. How you do that will define everything about your relationship with your child.

* There is a whole separate discussion on what medical intervention for gender dysphoria is appropriate for children, but for the sake of this discussion I mean are you comfortable with the concept having a trans child more than specifics on medication.

Gay guy here.

I have always said that these sort of laws designed to protect children will do precisely the opposite. An LGBTQ child is effectively forcibly outed by this law, potentially before they've come to terms with their sexuality / gender themselves.

Whilst I don't doubt social media causes a lot of harm on children growing up, giving parents full access to your messages is not the solution. In my opinion, based off a scale of a child's age and maturity, children are entitled to some privacy. Clearly a 4 year old shouldn't be left alone with unfettered access to the Internet, but equally a 16 year old shouldn't have to feel like their parents are watching everything they do or say. Both can cause long term psychological harm to a child.

This is something that comes up time and time again with our recent string of conservative governments, going back to Cameron. At this point I'm pretty convinced that it is a dead cat strategy to avoid us talking about the lack of fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets.

Or maybe I'm just being hopeful.

There is a philosophical discussion to be had about whether 19 physical parameters is "a lot", and another discussion about fine tuning. However, I was primarily referring to the artifical parameters that arise from doing real calculations (renormalisation scale, mass factorisation scale, PDFs etc). These plague pretty much all perturbative QCD calculations, and then particle physicists play games like varying them by a factor of 1/2 and 2 to get something that looks like error bars...

The standard model is far from a 'theory of everything'. To name but a few problems:

* gravity * massive neutrinos * dark matter * dark energy

It is also a highly parameterised model tuned to fit the data.

The biggest concern is whether we can realistically probe the failings of the standard model using a collider at ~TeV scale? If that is the case, then the standard model may be the best model of particle physics we will ever achieve.

I think you're sort of misinterpretting what I'm asking for, and I suspect our views actually align pretty well. I was not implying that we need more camp queens to represent gay men, I was referring more to presenting LGBTQ+ people in a heteronormative light which just comes across as totally unrealistic to those of us who are a member of the community.

Perhaps a concrete example would clarify my point. There is a character in Stranger Things who is a lesbian. Throughout the final series, she has a crush on another character. They have a scene at the end of the series where they are talking, the other character says they're lesbian/bisexual (I don't recall which now) and they hit it off.

The idea of your school crush happening to also have a same sex attraction, and also likes you, makes it such a vanishingly small probability that something like this could ever happen. It came across as a straight writer shoe-horning in a weak straight romance plot point, only replaced a man with a woman for LGBTQ+ brownie points.

If they wanted to cover this properly, why not show us how lesbians in the 80s really met? I assume though gay bars, being neither a lesbian nor around in the 80s I don't know and I am curious to find out. What I can say is that that scene was not a fair resprentation.

So my point is, be it dating, love, family or any other fact of LGBTQ+ life, there are statistically significant deviations from the average cis-gendered heterosexual experience. If you choose to cover LGBTQ+ life in your media of choice, do so authentically. Yes, I appreciate there is a fine line between this and stereotyping, but presenting gays as straights with one gender swapped is so unrealistic.

To use an analogy, representing all your female characters as good housewives who are subservient to men is enforcing a poor stereotype, analogous to the gay camp stereotype. Representing all your female characters as behaving precisely like men however is not the solution to the problem. You should represent women like women.

Another gay man here.

To me it seems like we have this paradoxical situation where the media want to simultaneously present inclusivity and diversity, but don't dare present any of the real diversity for fear of stereotyping. The end result is some token LGBTQ+ characters who are heteronormative, which is disingenuous.

If it is a choice between no gay character and some gay character who is essentially 'straight acting', I'd choose the former every time.

A computer scientist would see all that as technical debt that needs to be resolved to streamline due process. PPE graduates see it as a grandiose theatre which adds gravitas to the process.

I think my point still stands, the whole system could be transformed if some real problem solvers involved. Alas, I don't see it happening any time soon.

Some anecdotal evidence ahead.

I've been interviewing graduates in the UK for many years now from a very broad range of universities, all focused on CS or stem degrees.

In my experience, I've yet to interview an oxbridge graduate who wasn't at least great academically, and this is speaking as someone who went to a lesser university. Clearly whatever standards they have for teaching and entry selection criteria really work.

That said, graduates from other universities are easily on par with oxbridge, just that there were some total morons amongst their peers as well.

In my opinion, the problem is not that the UK fetishes oxbridge candidates, the problem is politics is dominated by arts and ppe graduates which does not offer the problem solving skills stem degrees do. I genuinely think we'd be in a much better place if our leaders weren't trained just in communication, but instead on actually logically thinking through problems and resolving them.

> As another gay man, I used to be radically skeptical of monogamy. Like in my 20s I was spouting the line that it's a heterosexual construct falsely imposed on us for moralistic reasons. But both personal experience, and a widened social group, has led me to believe that, for a significant number of gay men a monogamous relationship is ideal. They're happiest in them, and seem to be able to make them work. Perhaps with some compromises and perhaps not entirely happy, but for what it's worth, I'm not sure I've met any couple that was perfectly happy.

Funnily enough I am precisely the opposite. I spent my 20s trying to hunt for "the one" and had a series of short, failed relationships. Now I'm in my 30s I am in a 9 year long successful (I think?) open/polyamorous relationship.

Really I think gay men (and men in general) struggle with communication skills and emotional maturity. Gaining those skills are key to maintaining long, healthy relationships. Non-monogamy is an avenue towards working towards achieving those skills because maintaining a healthy, open relationship means a lot of communication is required. In my opinion, it is a high risk, high reward strategy to a maintaining a relationship.

> but for what it's worth, I'm not sure I've met any couple that was perfectly happy.

I think we have to distinguish minor annoyances from major communication issues due to sex. Like it or not, sex is a big part of being human and sex drive is something can be wildly different between people. Non-monogamy can be an outlet for this.

> Similarly, a very large % of gay men who are partnered romantically, are in open relationships. And by large % I mean around half. At least with American gay women, open relationships are a very minor thing, similar to the rates with heterosexuals.

I would love to know the actual number here, as someone in the gay male open relationship category.

I remember discussing this with a friend of mine, who is also in an open relationship. He came out with a fascinating statement that he had never seen a long term monogamous gay relationship where both parties were perfectly happy. After he said it, my first thought was that was ridiculous and then tried to think of friends who were the exception... I couldn't name a single one either. Every monogamous gay couple I've met going for longer than >1 year had at least one person in the relationship air that they were sexually frustrated to me in private and wanted more. Most were jealous of our relationship, but worried about the consequences of opening their relationship.

I am sure the monogamous gay couple who are happy is out there somewhere, but I've yet to meet them.

> I have someone on my team who took 12 weeks PTO last year, yet still created outsized value for the company.

Hypothetically, what if this individual was taking 12 weeks PTO and were underperforming? Would your business encourage them to take less leave next year to perform better? How much leave would be 'too much' for them to get back on track?

The thing is all of that requires a lot of trust in both directions, as you pretty much said. If I am a candidate for your company, how do I know that trust is there?

Recently I interviewed for a company which had unlimited PTO. They marketted this to me as some fantastic perk, and then when I got the contract they had a clause which said that they ask people to only take 'reasonable' amounts of time off. I asked them to define what is 'reasonable' and they could not. At that point, all of my red flags were waving and I walked away.

High performance computing will drive demand for faster hardware, for example in machine learning. It is extremely computationally intensive and expensive to train large NLP models. The big companies in this game have a lot of money to invest in bringing those costs down, and in turn train better models.

That said, I don't see a reason why speeds will increase significantly on personal devices. We're seeing a situation now where personal devices are really 'fast enough' for normal use cases. Instead the focus is more on improving efficiency and battery life.

The GIL gets even more complicated than that because it can also be released during CPU bound tasks that don't interact with python objects (e.g. Array operations in numpy)

> The silver bullet, as it were, is open communication about your needs, wants, and fears. Sometimes, that leads to ethical non-monogamy -- when that is actually what you want, and when you can manage the genuine fears that come with that.

I think you hit the nail on the head there.

The thing is you really need to dig down into what those fears are and determine if they're legitmate or not. My partner and I talked about opening our relationship for at least 6 months before we acted on it. We talked about it in great detail and found that a lot of our fears really are unjustified. Things we discussed were topics like:

"you might fall in love with someone else" - that is always a risk with relationships regardless of being open or not, and part of being in a relationship is the trust that they wouldn't run away with someone else. We took the pragmatic view that if it did happen, we were never meant to be together anyway and an open relationship allows us to get to that outcome quicker.

"I'm not good enough to satisfy your needs" - this is where I think societal pressure comes into play. People compare themselves to others a lot, and they see happy monogamous couples and think that their relationship is dirty or failing compared to the ultimate gold standard. You come to realise that monogamy is seen as the gold standard purely because that is what western society says it is. Instead, you should be truthful to yourself and your partners wants or desires.

There are serious and legitimate fears that need to be talked through, for example how much time you devote to others, or more practical concerns like STIs. This is where the communication part comes in and you ultimately need to decide if it's right for yourselves.

> It would definitely help to stop having society declare non-monogamy the ultimate sin, even if that's what the partners want. Relationships are hard enough without having to satisfy people who aren't even part of it.

Couldn't agree more.

I once told a very close friend of mine that we were considering opening our relationship and the hostility I received was crazy. His conclusion was that 'you just agree to cheat on each other'. To me, this misses the entire point of why cheating is bad. Cheating isn't bad because of the act of having sex, it is bad because you chose to lie to your partner.

After that incident we decided we'd never to tell heterosexual monogamous people again about our relationship, most just don't get it and it's not worth the risk.

Ok so to answer your first question, you have to isolate the divergent piece of the terms. So we typically write it as an expansion in epsilson, where you have 1/e as e -> 0 (there are higher order terms, but let's keep it simple). So if we had two contributing terms*, what we should end up with is

X * ((1/e) - (1/e)) + finite terms = finite result.

Easy right? Only there is a problem: the different terms have different dimensional integrals. You can't just do some alebra to cancel these terms, instead what you have to do is construct something called a subtraction scheme which moves the contributions between your different integrals, such that the subtraction terms don't contribute anything to final result and cancel each other, but render the whole calculation finite. This is a by-hand crafted thing, and takes years and years to calculate properly, which is very easy to get wrong.

The complication in particle physics is actually constructing the equations and evaluating the integrals either numerically or alebraically. The algebraic calculations are extremely hard, and checking you are right is really difficult. Typically that involves two independent research groups attempting the same calculation using different approaches and checking you get the same result.

Similarly, for the numerical evaluation of the integrals you really are pushing what a computer can do to the limits. If we consider the term:-

X * (1/e - 1/e) + finite

and I'm trying to integrate this numerically, you typically put in an artifical cutoff term as you get close to the singularity. Problem is you reach the limits of floating point precision pretty quickly: asking for the difference between two massive numbers is the worst case scenario for numerical evaluation. Trying to work around these problems are really, really challenging.

* There are many more than two terms in a real calculation

Disclaimer: I'm gay and polyamorous so I have quite a biased view on these things.

I actually think that really deep down monogamy doesn't work for a fair chunk of the population. The model of having your one life partner to satisfy all of your sexual needs for eternity has a number of problems:

* We are not always in the mood for sex. Your sex drive can be low for days, weeks or even months and it be perfectly normal. Having the pressure to perform when you're not really in the mood is a horrible feeling. This has a side effects of resentment between the couple.

* Repeating the same sexual experience with the same individual with no changes (e.g. exploring kinks, new positions etc) gets monotonous. No matter how attracted you are to that person, monotonous experiences really impact sexual arousal.

I don't think these problems are new society, but I think there were non-ethical outlets in the past. To the first point for example, in a time gone past the good housewife barely had a say in consent. Prostitution, cheating etc were outlets for the second point.

People feel a lot of shame when talking about ethical non-monogamy, particularly slut shaming women. In reality it's the ultimate level of trust in a relationship. I don't want the pressure of having to satisfy all of my partner's sexual needs for eternity, I trust them to explore other individuals if I'm not in the mood.

To be clear, non-monogamy is also not a silver bullet to a failing marriage, nor is it for everyone. However I really think as a society we should be less judgemental and critical of people who have unconventional relationships and keep an open mind for your own.

edit: typos

There are many components to such a calculation that can be split up amongst different research groups. I won't go into detail on all of those but essentially it boils down into two main categories of components to the calculation:-

* Analytical integrals - This is a big algebraic task where you're trying to compute an equation that can be written by hand. For example, if you have 1-loop diagram [1] then the particle in the loop effectively becomes an integral over all possible momentum configurations that particle can have. One-loop is a hard problem but reasonably 'solved', 2-loops is extremely challenging.

* Numerical integrals - This is typically using Monte Carlo techniques to numerically integrate over all possible momentum configurations of the incoming and outgoing particles. Because you can have many particles, it becomes a high dimensional integral pretty quickly. Monte Carlo scales well with dimensionality, but not that well. Therefore you need serious computation power for non-trivial numerical integrals.

Added to this fact is a fun feature of these calculations that infinities spring up all over the place. You have both a numerical and analytical game of getting these guys to cancel (they do, the calculation must be finite) but it is not a straightforward task at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-loop_Feynman_diagram

Yeah as someone who spent 4 years of his life calculating a second order term (Next-to-Next-to-Leading-Order), I have often wondered the same thing! In my original post I grossly simplified how challenging it is to calculate terms in perturbative QCD, even when in the perturbative regime. To name a few:-

* Two loop calculations are extremely challenging on an algebraic level

* You get low energy (called 'infrared red') infinities appearing at low energies. These need to cancel between all your contributing terms, and getting them to cancel is really really challenging.

* The numerical Monte Carlo approaches become extremely computationally intensive because of high dimensional integrals and numerical instability caused by point 2

It was not uncommon for calculations of single terms to involve multiple PhD students over a decade or more.

Throughout my PhD I certainly felt like something was fundamentally 'wrong' with the approach. Alas, I wasn't smart enough to rewrite the field with a whole new way of thinking so bailed instead.

Actually there's a bit more to it than that. Coupling constants change as a function of their energy, they're called 'running coupling constants'. As a result of this phenomenon, there are domains where alpha_s is small and therefore a perturbative expansion of terms is possible. This happens at very high energies, so at the LHC we can happily calculate the higher order terms that you talk about and each successive term is a smaller contribution than the last.

Unfortunately, alpha_s is large at low energies, and by low I mean at the atomic and nuclear scale. There you are well and truly in the domain that perturbative QCD is impossible. The only option at that point is something called lattice QCD at the quark/gluon level.

Edit: Typo