I take your point, but I'm addressing the attitude that because Muslim countries are different from us that must mean they're incapable of doing impressive things. That's just wishful thinking.

Of course "formidable" is a relative term. Iran's industrial capability isn't formidable compared to Germany, but it sure is compared to Iraq. Their automotive industry builds over a million cars a year.

Because you brought up automobile design.

And how do you know they have "zero know how"? Know how isn't a property of nations, it belongs to individuals who can be hired for a reasonable price.

If you mean "zero indigenous know how" that's something we can't take for granted either. The UAE is small (9 million -- just a bit larger than Switzerland), but it is very rich and no doubt has its share of talented individuals. What's more if they reached out to other Arab countries (as well as hiring a few key non-Arab personnel -- like we had Germans in the 50s and 60s), I don't doubt they could put together a reasonably "Arab" space program, which I see as a positive development. Such a program wouldn't build every jot and tiddle of their hardware right down to the nuts and bolts, but then we don't do that either.

Thought experiment. Suppose you're in charge of setting up a UAE and they give you a huge wad of cash to set up a space program. How would *you* go about doing it to maximize national scientific prestige?

Sure, but you've heard of King Saud University, right?

Really? You've never heard of Beijing University? Or the University of Heidelberg? Does "Max Planck Institute", "Moscow State University", or "Tel-Aviv University" ring a bell? Well then why not "King Saud University" or "Cairo University"?

As for the production of cars, that's not a measure of a country's intellectual attainment; it's a measure of a country's industrialization. Show me *any* region that has a resource extraction dominated economy that designs automobiles. I can name just *one* off the top of my head, and that's Iran.

There's an automatic assumption people make that when others disagree with them it's because they're stupid or ignorant. You can see that in the recent debate over the Iranian nuclear deal. There's an implicit assumption that the Iranian government is a bunch of uneducated, provincial hicks. Now I think Ali Khamenei is a terrible person, but it's not because he's ignorant. He is, in fact, superbly educated by any reasonable standard. As are many leaders in the Iranian government and opposition. The Iranian foreign minster Dr. Zarif holds three advanced degrees from US universities.

This kind of bigoted thinking is going to get us into trouble. Iran is not an Arab country, but it gets lumped in with Arab countries in American perception as an intellectually backward Muslim backwater. This is a dangerous attitude to take. Iran has substantial intellectual and technological resources to draw upon. Despite their names differing by only one letter, Iran is not Iraq. While Sadaam wasted his money on showy wonder-weapons like super-guns, the Iranians have built a fleet of advanced diesel subs that can operate in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. They have formidable industrial capability, including indigenous aerospace, automotive and electronic industries. While there is little doubt we would win in an invasion of Iran, it's far from clear it'd be the kind of cakewalk we had in the Iraq invasion.

Americans need to write this down and paste it in their hats: just because someone doesn't think like you doesn't guarantee he's ignorant or stupid.

Seriously. Good for you.

It sounds like you've got really interesting research goals for this mission, and I wish you great success.

On what do you base this "probability"?

Pop quiz: what is the top Arab engineering school? Alright too hard. Name *one* Arab research university.

Now answer this question: does the fact that most people find these questions hard reflect on *Arab* ignorance, or their own?

> in a state were Asians and blacks make up a similar portion of the population.

A quick peek at Wikipedia says that Asians (14.9%) are over twice the population of African-Americans (7.2%) in California. Just nitpicking.

I mean the full Python stack (IPython notebook + Spyder with IPython, PyLab, Pandas, statsmodels).

For almost everything in stats, I prefer the RStudio experience. The flow feels much better, even though my Python is much better than my R. Machine Learning is one stats topic though, where I still prefer Python - I just like Scikit-learn.

If I was doing linear algebra directly, I would have preferred the Python stack with NumPy. PyLab stack is more for Matlab users than R users. On the stats side, Pandas and statsmodels are still not yet an R replacement for me. They are a great start though and seem to have gotten everything right so far.

I use both R and Python. R itself is actually quite nice and more efficient for interactive use, once you get used to it. For interactive exploration with statistics, I actually prefer it to Python (and I have been using Python for ~15 years). Lots of helper functions. Everything uses the DataFrame datastructure. Good, concise and consistent documentation.

Unless you are a R library dev, for most users, its best to see R as a shell for statistics, rather than a programming language. So its language horribleness does not matter much.

I use Python to process data and R to explore it. Once I settle on something, if I need to put it into a larger pipeline, I either find an implementation in Python or link R to Python via rpy2.

> A python statistics library with some funky C linkage to the R library would take over in milliseconds

That's what rpy2 is.

What if we solve two problems at the same time by legislating that for some number of years self driving rigs have to have human co-pilots aboard (bear with me)... We'd still get most of the benefits of improved safety and 24 hour schedules and the humans could even do other work while on-board but they'd ostensibly be there to monitor the rig and take over in crazy situations (e.g. flat tire, fire, unexpected weather).

The flip side is that the public gets a (somewhat irrational but real) feeling of safety knowing that humans are on board... in the same way that I feel better about flying in a mostly auto-piloted aircraft because I know two people fully trained in the systems are trusting their lives to it.

So truck drivers turn into truck co-pilots for a few years, get an easier / safer job, and some of them retire during that time while we all get used to self-driving trucks on the road.
 

So which party is it that wants the government to assume the risks and pay for the damages created by a de-regulated industry? I seem to remember going through this recently...

Quite wrong. Gradual climate change has been extinguishing civilizations since the Dilmun were driven out of Bahrain. That's the point.

As long we're taking the long term perspective, sure climate change happens all the time. So population displacements, economic crises, civilization collapses -- we should all regard them as a natural feature of human society. That doesn't mean you want to be around when that happens.

Forest fires are natural. That doesn't mean you should play with matches when you're camping in Yosemite during a drought.

No, the alarm is triggered by events on the ground. The models are just responding to those.