One of the big questions in science is how neurons control behavior. It's a tough thing to answer when you can't control the neurons. (E.g. "tell me what this software program works without using it or altering the source code.")

So this is a big help in figuring out how neurons control worm behavior. Since we don't know much about how neurons control the behavior of anything, this is a big step forward!

If he designs the arena, it might help him make up for your 50% faster response time.

Very sporting of you!

Maybe this will bring in a new era of competitive worm-games: you control your team (or single worm) with your system, and Stirman controls the other side with his. (You just need to put them in a microfluidic device and set up your system on one side and theirs on the other....)

Actually, Stirman, not Stewart. Anyway, there is a second independently developed system that does approximately the same thing, just without Harvard's PR department behind it.

It would be collegial to mention that this other project exists, no? (Especially since their software is also available, and since you know it exists.)

Mathematics is not one of the physical sciences, so it is free to expend more effort on impressing others than on instructing them.

Same thing with computer science.

There really is a difference when you are in a field where data can give particularly clear insight into how things are; and then the major burden becomes explaining why this data is relevant to the problem (or why this theory is relevant to that data), and how it provides insight. (There is of course a little bit of "look how smart I am!" around the edges, but rarely enough to detract from the point.)

It's such a small slice of "truth" that I'm not sure it escapes being dishonest--you've barely scratched the surface of the complexities involved. (E.g. Jewish terrorism against Arabs before Israel was created, the transformation from the ideas of living in harmony to ardent opposition on both sides, etc. etc..)

And, UN and UK aside, you could phrase it as "explain how Jewish apartheid in Israel has led to ongoing conflict" and be just as truthful as with the above (which is to say, the literal truth of the matter, while not entirely absent, is insufficient to consider the statement honest if presented alone).

Fortunately, school tends to be horribly boring, and most students won't pay significant attention to such lessons anyway, accurate or not, so the stakes are somewhat lower than one might fear when one realizes how hard it is to present information instead of propaganda in some situations.

It's (almost) possible but so fantastically improbable save for careful maneuvering that it's not worth considering.

(You could have it on a trajectory nearly parallel to the Earth where the Earth catches it from behind very gently (relatively speaking). This is a tiny fraction of all possible approach angles and a tiny fraction of all possible approach velocities.)

Yes, but they could pick you up because you were in the area at the time, or because someone said you had a fight with the victim, or whatever.

If this is to be alarming, it means that using DNA evidence would have to increase the rate of false positives.

Something is seriously wrong if you can get more information about a crime and yet do less well at figuring out who did it. (Something may be seriously wrong, but one should at least make a compelling case, not just take it for granted, because OMG, they might get my DNA!)

I don't quite understand what the big deal is. You're acting as though the incoming class is being asked to sign its soul away.

I think universities should do this sort of thing much more often. If universities turned around and made the results of their research available to students on an accelerated schedule, it would be exciting, inspirational, and motivate learning a lot better than, "Well, read this textbook about stuff that happened 20 years ago while we do a lot of exciting new things that we won't tell you about and are licensing to for-profit companies who might sell it to you after you graduate."

Of course there are privacy issues, but universities have access to a fair bit of private information (e.g. financial, if the student has applied for aid; academic transcripts; possibly personal essays, and so on). As long as they're not completely careless with genetic information, it's hardly different from anything else (especially since they're doing a limited analysis).

You think it's more likely for law enforcement to make a mistake when they get DNA than when they don't? How exactly does that work?

Supposing you want to run a program that I write, and I'm going to write it in exactly one language because it's just me and not a corporation with thousands of employees, and I'm not so in love with the Mac that I will write it to run only there.

Then what do you recommend I do in the face of "de-emphasized" Java?

Completely irrelevant. Sun seemed happy to support various platforms and to work with large vendors including Apple. But Apple...

...didn't want to leave it to Sun, from everything I've read, and took it over themselves. And then decided to support it unenthusiastically and slowly instead of competently. I don't blame them for wanting interfaces to look nice--I blame them for saying they wanted control and then doing a slothful job. If you're not going to do things in a timely fashion, don't take them over!

Why do I have to wait for that exact thing to happen in order to complain? I'm complaining because Apple's desire for control or purity or the perfect user experience or whatever it is has caused problems already.

I already can't easily write programs that run on all platforms with exactly zero changes (which I usually can with Java, at least during those periods when Apple's Java support is not too archaic), so the relative compatibility of Linux/UNIX packages isn't particularly relevant.

As someone who routinely writes in Java (or JVM-targeting languages) because it will run anywhere, it is hard to read Jobs' criticism that Adobe has been too slow with Flash support for OS X with a straight face.

Apple's track record with Java--from having 1.6 appear years late, to dropping 32 bit support, to insisting on packaging it themselves--seems to strongly indicate that they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to cross-platform compatibility.

Notice that Apple's only making a fuss now that Adobe is stepping up its support. That'll teach anyone to try to make their cross-platform tools work better with Apple's products, won't it!

Maybe you haven't seen as much abysmally slow code as I have that was created because the coder wasn't thinking about divide-and-conquer strategies. From what I've seen, I wouldn't be too dismissive of a "explain quicksort"-style question. It's a very simple algorithm conceptually (though getting the implementation details exactly right and avoiding worst cases and such is less easy). I wouldn't ask that for *every* programming job, just the ones that involve processing of data of non-negligible size in a fashion that is not entirely handled by high-level calls to some library.

I would, however, accept "it's in reference X" (as long as they were correct that it was there) unless X==Wikipedia (it _is_ in Wikipedia, but this provides no assurance of past experience, whereas picking out a section of a book on algorithms suggests that they've had exposure to a decent number of algorithms and would have some idea of when to go looking for details).

If the most famous starship representing the arguably most powerful political entity in existence (the Federation) shows up on your doorstep, wouldn't you want to talk to them personally if you were President?