The one thing that is hard to tolerate in this thread is the negative comment that makes sweeping generalizations about other people based on their choice of programming language.
You haven't been in many programming language discussion threads have you? ;)
IME C coders are a fairly relaxed bunch on average, definitely more relaxed than some of the younger and more "radical" language communities in C's neighborhood.
I wish Musk/Bezos/Branson et al would spend their billions on colossal space telescopes rather than Mars vanity projects. Imagine being able to image the surface of an exoplanet...
Any progress on "Mars vanity projects" directly helps the project of colossal space telescopes. The reason the James Webb Telescope is so expensive is because old spaceships didn't have enough cargo volume to hold the telescope unfolded, so they had to create an incredibly expensive and error-prone unfolding mechanism. SpaceX's Starship is big enough to hold the JWT unfolded - something that would dramatically lower costs on any future telescope of the same size or bigger.
That depends on the Georgia runoffs in January. If the Dems win those two seats, then along with Harris's tie breaking vote they would have a senate majority.
"With the new database-based science, there is often no moment when the complex becomes simple enough for us to understand it. The model does not reduce to an equation that lets us then throw away the model. You have to run the simulation to see what emerges. For example, a computer model of the movement of people within a confined space who are fleeing from a threat--they are in a panic--shows that putting a column about one meter in front of an exit door, slightly to either side, actually increases the flow of people out the door. Why? There may be a theory or it may simply be an emergent property. We can climb the ladder of complexity from party games to humans with the single intent of getting outside of a burning building, to phenomena with many more people with much more diverse and changing motivations, such as markets. We can model these and perhaps know how they work without understanding them. They are so complex that only our artificial brains can manage the amount of data and the number of interactions involved."
> The model does not reduce to an equation that lets us then throw away the model. You have to run the simulation to see what emerges.
This is true of simulation in general, not just data-drive models. E.g., a lot of applied mathematics uses PDE models that don't have closed-form solutions and so you just run a ton of simulations sweeping a parameter space.
> For example, a computer model of the movement of people within a confined space who are fleeing from a threat--they are in a panic--shows that putting a column about one meter in front of an exit door, slightly to either side, actually increases the flow of people out the door.
The crux of this type of science is that you don't know whether the computer simulations are telling you anything about reality. You just have to run real-world experiments and see what happens. And even if the experiment turns out to work, you still don't know for sure that your model was reasonable.
It's also worth saying that there's an emerging discipline devoted to formalizing and developing tools for this kind of problem (complex computer models of real-world systems, say).
One decent place to start is this National Academies report [1] on Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification.
Verification = did you implement the math correctly in the computer;
Validation = does the implemented mathematical model compare against the real system in controlled experimentss
Uncertainty Quantification = analysis and prediction of the accuracy of the model approximation.
This work was given a big push by the nuclear test ban treaty - you have to really validate the model predictions in this case.
Double blind so that neither the thrower of recipients of said cocktail doesn't know wether it is real or placebo? It's the only way to know if they are panicking because of a bottle or a fireball...
Me too, but if you put yourself in the photographer's shoes, I guess you wouldn't just walk around taking pictures of random stuff in your office (it's just the equipment you work on, after all, who would ever care about that?), but rather the people you interact with every day. Reading the article's text, the photographer was clearly fond of the people he worked with. I'm also glad it turned out to be this, instead of that. I've seen plenty of photos of old equipment; it's cool to see candid shots of people actually performing the work that was done on the equipment.
As a neutral observer, I have to smile over Americans complaining about the Chinese influencing US culture.
Americans are used to others having to tiptoe around their sensibilities, and now they're finding out what adhering to a foreign culture's value system is like.
I don’t really ever hear Americans complaining about Chinese influence on our culture. If you’re talking about TikTok, we love that app. It’s just a handful of politicians that don’t
