A study, with so much bluster, and they studied just 94 people. Chuck a couple of zeros on that, then perhaps you have the makings of a worthwhile study and not just an anecdote.
Ugh. Not another math illiterate person complaining about the sample size. For the last time, your intuitive notions of statistics are worthless. The gamer study had a lot of people repeating this stupid objection too.
I am increasingly sick of these kinds of studies that use a sample pool so small as to be statistically irrelevant.
No, it's just that your intuitive ideas of what kind of sample size is statistically relevant are invalid. I am sick of how many people keep saying this even though it was addressed in an earlier post http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1341207&cid=29120539
Also, the complaints about the sample size being restricted to Seattle are probably unwarranted. The sample size is large enough to provide a 95% confidence level for a reasonably small interval, and it would be highly unusual for such a general result that's true in Seattle to be significantly different for other cities.
It would imply that there was some confounding variable that's exclusive to Seattle that modifies the characteristics of gamers, which is an absurd assumption, and the only reason you would think so without other evidence is if you just didn't like the results of the study.
extremely fragile it being at the limits of it's tenuous exitence after a long space journey.
This is completely unjustified. Might be true in a few special cases but no reason to assume it in general.
when your alternative is wage parity with taxi drivers, not such a bad choice. Rail on you rebel you.
Which taxi driver makes over 100K? He is a tenured professor. The point of tenure is that you can say what you think is right without being worried about your salary/livelihood.
What we have is that classical mechanics is a particular approximation of general relativity, at one end of the scale, and of quantum mechanics, at the other.
Not quite, they describe different things, so you can put them on the same scale. Classical mechanics is a framework for describing the dynamics of a system once you specify the forces. QM is a different framework. But GR is a theory for describing a particular force, gravity.
A wonderful example iirc is the spinning top. In classical mechanics, the top cannot be solved exactly. But in general relativity, the top can be solved exactly in about one page
This doesn't make any sense IMO, unless you can come up with something to back it up. If you mean the precession of a top in the presence of gravity, then sure it can be solved analytically in classical mechanics, but the general two body problem has no analytical solution in GR, and I doubt the restriction to a top simplifies it enough to allow a closed form solution. But I can give you valid examples that suggest the opposite. In classical mechanics, the dynamics under a linear potential (constant force) is very simple: constant acceleration in one direction. But try solving that in quantum mechanics, and what you get are hideous Airy functions to describe the position of the particle.
The designer, then, still has the last laugh, until there is a TOE, if there ever is.
Not even then. I don't know what it means among laypeople, but for a physicist TOE means a quantum field theory that describes gravity, electroweak and strong force. I can guarantee that we will have such a theory in 100 years, and probably a lot less. I can also guarantee that this TOE will eventually be superseded by a more accurate theory.
it is interesting to note that the universe is mainly built out of second order laws. This means that in many cases there are a small number of poles or zeros that can control macroscopic behaviour and often analytic solutions exist. This would be how a designer would do it.
Nope. It is just that scientists use simple models like harmonic oscillator for most systems, simply because they are easy to solve. That doesn't mean that the universe is 'built' from second order laws. The rest of your post is also similar misinterpretations of QM, optics etc
If you think the system is working, ask someone who's waiting for a prompt.