You’re kidding right? Instead of fluoroapatite (Ca5(PO4)3F), you get iodoapatite (Ca5(PO4)3I).

Let’s see rising levels of mercury in fish, arsenic in rice, methylbromide in bread, adding fluoride [*] to drinking water ON PURPOSE, BPA in plastic food containers, volatile PBDE flame retardant in yout furniture, VCOs in your paint and building materials, trans fats. I can go on and on and on.

Besides eating a diet excessively high in carbs and low in other nutrients, we’re poisoning the shit out of ourselves. And you’re surprised that some people aren’t handling it well?

[*] Fluoridation is controvercial, the target of commie conspiracy theories, etc. In reality, it’s shown to have a substantial positive impact on tooth development in children, it’s dirt cheap, and kills many pathogens in water. However, it’s also strongly linked with lowered IQs and thyroid disease. It’s basically poison. If you’re smart, you’ll get a fluoride filter for your water and give your kids high doses of iodine instead, which has the same effect on teeth, the same disinfectant properties, and is an essential mineral.

If Russia are not doing anything nefarious, why should they worry about what spies might discover? :)

In all seriousness, while it’s nice that NSA spying on US citizens has been exposed, it’s NOT good that so many US state secrets were revealed in the process. Contrary to what some lunatics would like to tell you, there ARE external threats that face America and the American people. You can’t run proper defensive operations if all of your strategies are visible to the enemy. I’m not sure that Edward Snowden realized just how much damage he was going to cause. And I’m not sure that the benefits necessarily outweigh the costs in this case. That being said, if the whistle-blower laws had provided contractors with a safe avenue for reporting legal violations, Snowden may have had the option to blow the whistle WITHOUT fucking with US national security.

Someone should mod up the AC’s comment.

The fly’s brain is not doing calculus (or rather, differential equations). It’s a neural net that has evolved to respond to stimulus in a way that appears like what we’d use diff-eq for. Within certain bounds of range and accuracy, we can make artificial neural nets do this. So why is it surprising that meatware that evolved over millions of years can do the same thing?

In fact, there are so many O(N**2) algorithms that they can parallelize that there’s really no excuse for continuing to use the ones that have O(n log n) versions. Yet they keep doing it! Why does everybody keep using O(n**2) n-body and shortest path algorithms? That you can parallelize those teaches us nothing about parallelizing algorithms unless all you care to do is benchmark the supercomputer (in which case there should be an appropriate footnote). This is just laziness.

It’s wrong to publish fabricated or falsified results, and people who do that should be slammed. There are other situations where people are being neglegent or hoping you don’t catch their slight of hand. For instance, there are the innumerable parallel computing papers that use O(N^2) algorithms to show a speedup on a GPU or supercomputer where there exists a serial O(log N) algorithm that runs faster on a PC. (No joke.) All of those sorts of things should be actively retracted.

However, what we don’t want to do is discourage publication of preliminary results that MIGHT be wrong. Honest, legitimate work that gets superceded should not be subject to retraction, and a wrong theory published can often inspire others to do a better job. When a researcher can say, “That was our best hypothesis at the time, and this was the most accurately we could represent the data,” then it should stand as a legitimate publication. Relativity and quantum mechanics supercede Newtonian physics, but that doesn’t mean we should retract everything Newton said.

Now, most people reading this will say “duh!” Because that’s obvious. All I’m saying is that we need to be careful to not create an environment where publication of preliminary work is discouraged in any way or where honest mistakes can hurt the career of an honest researcher. That would put a damper on science in general. The bar for retraction should be very high and require solid evidence of intentional wrongdoing.

There’s this one opponent to common core that made a presentation based entirely on quotes from people who originally contributed to and supported common core: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF16la1IiGI”. Originally it seemed like a good idea, but the cirricula kept getting watered down so badly that students wouldn’t leave high school with enough education to get into college. There are those who like to suggest that common core is now only about indoctrinating students with {liberal | conservative} ideas. I don’t know enough about that. But if you can’t do basic algebra when you leave high school, you’re in trouble.

This “no child left behind” idea has only resulted in the general cirriculim being dumbed down. You can’t fail anyone, so you have to teach something so lame that any idiot can do it, and then even the smart kids don’t learn anything.

I think there are some bird species with super efficient ATP generation due to superior mitochondria. I’d love to be able to replace all of mine with theirs.

Actually, it’s also time to not forget that many of the microorganisms living in our body are yeast as well, not just bacteria.

I currently work as a CS professor, but I still do some tele-consulting for a company I used to work for full time. Because I do tops 8 hours/week, I now consult under someone who used to be my subordinate while I was there. That may sound awkward, but it isn’t. My supervisor has a CS degree but his engineering skills aren’t rockstar, so he gravitated to organization and leadership roles, and that was precisely the best thing for him. I find him very easy to work with because he is technical enough that I can communicate with him, he listens to what I say, and because he manages me at exactly whatever level I need for any given task. If I’m having trouble keeping track of what I need to do (because it’s easy to lose track when I work for him once a week and have a whole other day job to do), he’s right on top of it. If I have a really clear idea of what I need to do, he gives me space and is available to answer questions, discuss strategy, etc. I’m used to being the babysitter, keeping junior engineers and grad students from getting off track. This guy does that for me, but he does it in a way that isn’t awkward at all; in fact, he makes me feel respected for the work I do. (Incidentally, he also directs an engineer that used to be an owner of said company before it was sold, and they have a very good working relationship as well.)

My point is that the technical skill of the manager is only somewhat important. Even more important is people skill and the ability to keep track of all the high and low-level details necessary to keep employees on track. You don’t have to know all the implementation details in order to maintain a clear vision of what everyone is trying to accomplish and help them get the resources to do it. In the most successful companies, “managers” spend little time “directing.” Instead, they primarily work to serve the needs of their subordinates, insulating them from company politics and ensuring that the engineers have all the tools and support they need to work effectively without distraction.

How do you share C code with a friend? Drag the text file in standard ASCII format or copy some text into your email program and send it.

How do you share visual programming modules with a friend? Screenshots? Some open or proprietary XML representation that isn’t human readable? Is there a way you can convert it to and from SVG?

Diagrams are great, but there isn’t a universal standard for representing them, making it very hard to share and replicate. Even with something structural, like chip design, we prefer text-based representations (e.g. Verilog) over visual representations (e.g. schematic capture). Indeed, schematic capture is generally considered to be a cumbersome and inefficient approach to circuit design unless you’re in the final stages of floorplanning. Complex algorithms and circuits are best represented in a more abstract, textual form.

Excellent point. Salaries cut into profits, and businesses are often too short-sighted to hire really good talent for good wages. On the other hand, every hire is a huge risk, so it’s statistically safer to hire less skilled workers at lower pay.

Sorry. I should have put quotes around that. I personally don’t believe they’re morons. But the businesses sure do. I’ve been on the receiving end of that assumption, despite the PhD, and it’s infuriating.

They charge too much and their hardware is always out of date.

I decided to buy some seriously high-end computing equipment for research, and I compared HP, Dell, and Red Barn. For the same price, Red Barn gave me newer hardware, more hardware, faster turn-around on quotes, better service, faster build times, and faster customer service. http://rbtginc.redbarncomputers.com