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By that reasoning, we should not teach kids how to spell, or about punctuation, and just aim for them writing essays/stories/novels.

I'm afraid I disagree. I programmed in a variety of languages in grad school (physics): C, C++, Fortran 77, Tcl, Perl, Matlab, Maple, Mathematica, IDL, Emacs LISP, etc. Not to mention the stuff I started on in high school.

When I switched my analysis to Python, I became so much more productive. And other science researchers I have known have echoed this sentiment. Even writing a C module to speed up my Python was pretty straightforward, if tedious.

Python had the fewest surprises. And debugging other people's Python is exponentially less annoying than debugging other people's Fortran or C. It's still my go-to language to get stuff done without fuss.

Because you're an English speaker?

In Malay it's "ball red large"

Also this has been making the rounds:

https://imgur.com/a/tDzy2

Loren C. Larson; Mathematics Magazine Vol. 50, No. 2 (Mar., 1977), pp. 69-74

For some context, here is a map of poverty in Philly:

http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/05/poverty-map/

The hospital is in census tract 016300 with poverty level 58.5%

Bristles are brass (alloy of copper and zinc; corrosion resistant, food-safe), and not magnetic.

Solution: Uber.

From the article: A report this past week from investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein, titled “The Silent Road to Serfdom: Why Passive Investing Is Worse than Marxism,”

"serfdom", "Marxism"... Let me guess: Libertarian Party propagandist.

The prevailing attitude is "I want to do biology, not computer science". I find it pretty frustrating. This is probably one of the last fields of science to be seriously computerized.

Like all questions, the answer is "depends". :)

E.g. number of kids falling and breaking their arm will be larger, but the population is larger and medical care is better, now. So, overall, I think the risks are actually lower than when I was a kid running around unsupervised.

I don't know about the number of pedophile predators per capita, but I imagine that may be a roughly fixed proportion of the population. Kids now also have cellphones, so that's a lifeline kids never had in the past. So, I'd imagine that percentage would not really rise, either.

For scientific work, I find it worth the effort to compile from source using Intel compilers + MKL (or a compiler + math library that can optimize well for your particular hardware platform).

Perception: there's a 75% chance my kid will be kidnapped by a pedophile. Reality: there's a 0.01% chance of the pedophile kidnap, but a 75% chance of drowning in the bathtub.

Numbers are made up.

Perception is not reality.

Another example: Trayvon Martin was a dark-skinned young male wearing a hoodie. Perception: he is a criminal casing the houses in order to commit a future crime. Reality: he was a kid walking home to his house.

Other examples: * Perception of the likelihood of terrorist attack, vs likelihood of dying in a fatal traffic crash.

* Perception that vaccinations cause autism, vs reality that vaccinations prevent fatal disease.

The climate system on Earth is subject to the butterfly effect, but we frequently have good-enough predictions, e.g. the stuff airline pilots rely on.

When confronted with complexity, throwing up hands is not the correct response.

You need to split them, first. ;)

Ditto. I went to grad school for physics, and pretty much all the code there is written by self-taught programmers. I was, too, to some extent, though I did take a grad level algorithms class. A lot of the code was pretty rough.

Indicative example. I was writing code to characterize the datastream from an instrument. It was a compiler of sorts: the end user could write some domain-specific language file to specify certain metadata to observe, e.g. power spectrum in a certain band, etc. These could be reused by other users so one could have a global standard for some state of the instrument. So, I decided on a hash table to store these user-written rules since it was a constant time lookup, and the characterization program ran real time while the instrument was running. Talking with a senior physicist who only wrote Fortran 77, he asked me why I didn't just use an array since "everything ends up being an array, anyway."

There are some things that one may not pick up just from practical experience.

Sure: you're skillful, and you and your team can produce something of value.

However, you are not pushing frontiers in computer science. That's the key issue here: the physics autodidacts all think that they have an idea that can blow away several hundred years of well-tested scientific theory.

CERN and every single particle accelerator in the world can run only because Einstein's theory is taken into account.

GPS timekeeping works only because Einstein's work is taken into account.

Would people argue over the proper treatment for cancer as prescribed by physicians and oncologists?

Don't answer that.

Physicists who need a little help with the math become experimentalist. JK. (I was an experimental physicist.)

Physics is already open in a real way. It's just that the natural language of physics is math. And people don't like math, for whatever reason.

Re dismissing things out of hand: unfortunately, sometimes the errors are so obvious that all it takes is one look to see that it's wrong. I mean, if it's easy for a practicing musician to identify a chord by ear, why should one think a physicist is arrogant if they can spot the error right away?

(See my other comments here on arguing about conservation of energy and momentum in an online forum.)

It was a long forum discussion, and well over a dozen engineers, mathematicians, and physicists kept saying the same thing. Some wrong long (>500 word) posts. We were all ignored. This person was invested in the idea that they had an insight that centuries' worth of work had overlooked.

Oh god. "Formula for primes" - I was involved in a way too long forum discussion where everyone involved was trying to convince the guy putting forth his idea for generating primes that he was merely going round in circles, proving and reproving identities.

As a former physicist, I think that math is way harder to talk about to laypeople, though there can be a wide variation in difficulty by subfield. Maybe number theory can be accessible, but analysis, say, would be pretty opaque. Not to mention some of the more exotic branches of math.

Yeah, I hear this all the time: "municipal broadband services would be anticompetitive", while ignoring the fact that there is a de facto monopoly in place and municipal broadband would actually introduce competition.

I noticed that line of argument seemed more common when I lived in the south (NC).

One can argue that a municipal government is a better representation of the people in the city (who want broadband) than some distant bureaucrat in the state capital. But this allows state to overrule municipal.

"Bottoms up" means that municipalities come before states, no? The smallest unit of government first.

But it seems like state gov'ts are blocking municipalities. [0]

[0] State of N. Carolina blocks municipal broadband: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/north-carolina-su...

QM does not open up any avenues for violating causality. bmeacham.com is crackpot based on my reading the first 2 paragraphs.

Usually, misunderstandings about causality come from a naive reading of the terms "advanced" and "retarded" solutions to wave equations, which also show up in classical electromagnetic theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green's_function_(many-body_th...

I've had my share trying to convince someone that a perpetual motion system they described did not conserve energy or momentum. They refused to believe my assertion that momentum and energy were conserved quantities.

The English refer to London as a "town". E.g. Town and Country Magazine (est.1769). [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_Country_Magazine