I remember that morning. I was watching the launch on TV as I was getting ready to go to work, and had to head out during a launch hold. Later that morning one of our part-time folks came in and asked if we had heard about Challenger? I felt myself go grey and took the rest of the day off.

Every generation has events where everybody remembers exactly where they were. I wasn't born when Sputnik 1 was launched, and I was a bit young to remember Kennedy. But I do remember Apollo 8, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Challenger, Lady Di and 9/11. Funny that four of those events are related to space...

Side note: a shame the pictures only show the left SRB, not the right one that caused all the trouble.

...laura

A few years ago I was doing some development that involved AES encryption, and needed to create some test tools.

One evening I was watching some program about the misdeeds of some computer hacker, and the screen background was perl. It mentioned Crypt::Rijndael.

I had my test tool the next morning... :-)

...laura

So, you have a testable set of hypotheses. Those hypotheses have non-testable consequences also. Calling those consequences "faith" seems off. For example, consider the following hypothesis "Every state is majority hydrogen." Now, there are stars which are in the process of disappearing from our future light cone due to the expansion of space. This hypothesis which we can get a lot of evidence for also implies that those stars are majority hydrogen. We will never be able to test that. Does that make that conclusion "faith"?

There are tests for inflation. Depending on the version of inflation in question one can get different predictions, but one major issue is how close to flat the universe is. Another major aspect is the exact behavior of the cosmic microwave background. Study of these issues are both ongoing.

From TFA:

They don't discuss any of the ideas about differing constants although others have done so.

Note that this isn't talking about the quantum mechanical multiverse where whenever a decoherence occurs you get branching of different copies. This is talking about a more concrete notion of multiverse where the early inflation spreads out so much that there are lots of little regions of observable space time which cannot observe each other.

Here's my report on the actual ruling which is being reviewed: 2nd Circuit affirms denial of plaintiffs' preliminary injunction motion in WNET v Aereo

I guess it would take a litigator to notice this, but it's quite unusual that a preliminary injunction denial would be getting this kind of appellate attention.

In the first place, it was unusual for an interlocutory appeal to be granted from the denial of the preliminary injunction motion. In federal court usually you can only appeal from a final judgment.

Similarly, apart from the fact that it's always rare for a certiorari petition to be granted, it's especially tough where the appeal is not from a final judgment, but just from a preliminary injunction denial which does not dispose of the whole case.

No really.

I took a pass at Python 3 a while back. The amount of hoops I needed to jump through, to deal with compilation errors around Unicode handling, was terrifying. It was simply a poor user experience.

Python 2.7 just works. Sure, it's a nightmare past a certain scale point. But until you get into the dregs of OO it really is executable pseudocode.

Python 3 is some other language that lost that property.

The big problem is that we don't ship languages with telemetry that reports when they fail to work. So things that are completely obvious to outsiders never make it to inner circles. Not that I can really see any way for Python 3 to mend its errors.

This is ok. For many purposes, software improvements in terms of new algorithms that are faster and use less memory have done more for heavy-dute computation than hardware improvement has. Between 1988 and 2003, linear programmng on a standard benchmark improved by a factor of about 40 million. Out of that improvement, about 40,000 was from improvements in software and only about 1000 in hardware improvements (these numbers are partially not well-defined because there's some interaction between how one optimizes software for hardware and the reverse). See this report http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast-nitrd-report-2010.pdf. Similar remarks apply to integer factorization and a variety of other important problems.

The other important issue related to this, is that improvements in algorithms provide ever-growing returns because they can actually improve on the asymptotics, whereas any hardware improvement is a single event. And for many practical algorithms, asymptotic improvements are occurring still. Just a few days ago a new algorithm was published that was much more efficient for approximating max cut on undirected graphs. See http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.2338.

If all forms of hardware improvement stopped today, there would still be massive improvement in the next few years on what we can do with computers simply from the algorithms and software improvements.

None of the above, in other words...

I have a license for driving cars (British Columbia class 5) and a license for flying airplanes (PPL). I'm working on my commercial license.

In Canada a pilots license is a little booklet that looks like a passport. Your license, ratings and medical, all in one document.

...laura

Sure, hence I said this was evidence, not that this was a perfect argument. There are massive selection issues. And there are other issues besides. For example, you could conceive of a situation where the NAS was less likely to give membership to believers.

There's actually evidence for this sort of claim. For example the majority of American scientists are atheists or agnostics, and over the numbers for members of the National Academy of Science are even higher. See http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html. There's other data that suggests a similar pattern in terms of education. The GSS data shows that more educated people are less likely to believe in God. Curiously, there is evidence that people who don't self-identify as atheist or agnostic but don't identify as religious (e.g. "spiritual but not religious" or believe in God but no particular religion, or just don't care, etc.) know less about religion than most other groups, even as atheists and agnostics are some of the highest knowledge groups. See http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey/.

If you exchange your Foundation credits for kalganids you get a lot of kalganids. Sounds like a good deal to me!

What good are quatloos? All you can do is place bets with them. I'm confused.

...laura, probably showing her age

I make sure that my vacations are out of cell coverage, so my cellphone is irrelevant. I turn it off for the duration. All the better to hear the wind rustling through the leaves, the birds calling, and so on. One favourite getaway includes howler monkeys whooping it up at dawn. So be it.

I take my iPad with me. I can read stuff on it if I want to. At the airport yesterday I checked the weather via the airport's WiFi, did my own forecast of the flight conditions and compared that with the airline's briefing on turbulence and stuff. Nailed it. :-)

My employers have emergency contact information, but they understand that if they call me it had better be an emergency. The one time they called me (in 14 years) it really was. My boss is of the same mindset on this stuff, so it's cool.

...laura