Ok. Your logical flaw is a strawman argument. While the article claims entropy is responsible for the arrow of time, i.e., the directionality of it, you pretended it said it's responsible of the existence of time at all. Then you argued against your own statement and pretended that was a valid argument against theirs.

Here's what they're actually saying. Assume time exists. So entropy can either increase or decrease with the passage of time. However, there are many more configurations with increased entropy than decreased entropy, which means a statistically implied direction towards increased entropy.

This is a highly misunderstood topic, I'm going to try to clarify it.

You're correct about the concept of simultaneity in relativity. In the barn door example, depending on your frame of reference, the bars could open simultaneously or one after the other.

He's correct about causality in relativity. Causal events are invariant. There is no frame of reference in existence, regardless of your velocity or distance, in which an object shot by a bullet fired from a gun gets hit before the gun is fired. It can't happen. It doesn't happen because with such a causal event, at some point the bullet and the gun were at the same location and the distance between them was 0. Time dilation depends on speed and distance, because time dilation requires an accompanying lorentz contraction. After the bullet is fired, depending on your frame of reference, people can disagree how far the bullet is from the gun, how far the target is from the gun, and therefore how long it took the bullet to travel from the gun to the target. But no frame of reference exists in which people observe the target being hit and then the gun firing the bullet.

Well, reproducibility is part of peer review. If anyone is making decisions based on the results of one paper, they're idiots. Even if the research methodology was flawless, and the researchers are brilliant and honest with all their data, certain results can still come about as a result of chance. Obligatory xkcd

I wish we'd put more emphasis on reproducing published results, though. I've mentioned this before, but I feel like this would be the ideal work for grad students during their first few years, before they're deep in their own research. They need to get papers published, there should be journals devoted to publishing data from reproducing results. Students get experience writing papers and conducting research and everyone gets stronger peer review in their fields.

Yeah, but they replace the low-level introduction courses in college, not the more advanced ones. 100-level computer science courses in college ARE, "how to program in Java." And, like I said, my Calculus course in High School seemed better than the equivalent in college from what I was seeing.

If anything, those high school courses mean you don't have to take the BS introductory courses in college, and you can go straight to the more interesting / demanding ones during your freshman year.

Unless you're an actual statistics major (in which case you'll pick up whatever you missed in subsequent courses anyway), that's going to be true regardless of whether you take statistics in high school or college. I took AP statistics, but my university required me to take "Statistics for Engineers" as an EE major, and wouldn't allow the AP stat course to count towards that. Stats for Engineers was an absolute joke, and the high school class was for more rigorous.

It stands for "Advanced Placement." They're college-level high school courses. At the end of the year, you take the advanced placement exam, and depending on your scores and the college you attend, you can get college credits for them.

I think getting rid of an AP is a stupendously short-sighted idea. Having students take more advanced courses earlier is a great idea. If there's reason to believe the courses aren't actually as demanding as their college equivalent (and I don't think there is, based on my experience taking AP Calculus in high school and looking at what people taking Calculus in college were seeing. We covered the same material, and if anything my high school class covered more), then you can make an argument for the tests more challenging / add to the requirements of those courses. Getting rid of it is just an attempt to waste students' time and extract more money from them by forcing them to take more university courses.

To be fair, I also think it's right and normal for foreign intelligent agencies to try spying on Americans. It's our counter-intelligence job to prevent it.

The NSA should be sure as hell trying to spy on every single non-American out there. It's their counter-intelligence job to limit it.

If the only thing he did was expose the illegal spying being done on Americans, I'd agree with that. But he indiscriminately takes everything he can get his hands on and reveals perfectly legal programs, like this one. "Identifying and blocking foreign threats" is the NSA's job, and why wouldn't that include cyber attacks? What justification does he have for revealing this?

I think we should specifically pardon him for for the relevant whistleblowing, to encourage other people in those positions to do the right thing. But we should sure as hell prosecute him for everything else he's leaked.

The problem is that the article is saying this is bad science, when it's really bad science reporting

NASA did the right thing. They tested something, they got weird results, they published it. The article points out the results were no different than the null control, and that's true, so clearly the supposed design of the drive is bullshit. What the article doesn't point out is that the interesting part is that neither of them should have shown any thrust. So something is going on that the experimenters don't understand, and they've published the results to find out why. Is it a measurement / equipment / methodology error? Probably, actually. But if you can't find the error yourself, you publish the results you get, and let your peers help you. Papers will be published criticizing their methodology if there are problems with it, or proposing reasons for why the measurements look like they do. It's a long shot, but maybe there is some effect actually happening which we don't understand, and papers will be published with possible theories.

That's not bad science. It's the definition of good science. It's bad science to imply that you should ever not publish the results you get. And it's bad science reporting to look at what NASA published and incorrectly translate it to the public as, "NASA proves impossible drive"

On the other hand, I used to pick hotels based on my free WiFi experience. So if you charged for WiFi, I'm not paying for a room at your place. If two different places have free WiFi, but I had a flaky connection in one hotel,and an ok connection in another, that's the deciding factor. All other concerns were secondary.

Of course, I would also have considered the case where the $10 a day a hotel would charge for WiFi would make up the difference in room cost, but it always turns out that expensive hotels charge for WiFi and cheap hotels don't, so that never came up.

These days I don't care, because 4G.

Nope. All third-party browsers in iOS must use the iOS webkit framework. So yes, you can get "chrome" for iOS, but really it's just a Safari skin. Case in point, you can't use chrome extensions on it.

I agree completely. If you're going to make the trip for any item, plus dvd, the only fair comparison is the extra energy used to carry the weight of the dvd around as a percentage of the other items you bought. Which would, of course, be negligible.

Well, first, real-world price is the price at which people are willing to buy and sell the good. So, if there are trades happening over the course of milliseconds, then you should expect that price to change over the course of milliseconds. There isn't anything unusual about that. For example, if you want to buy oranges, and I say that I will sell you oranges for $1.00, the price is $1.00 to you if you want to buy oranges. If somebody else says they'll sell oranges to you at $0.80 instead, then you'll buy from them instead of me, and the price just fell $0.20. How long did it take the price to fall $0.20? However long it took the other guy to make the $0.80 sell offer. That could have been a month after I made my $1.00 offer, or it could have been 0.2 ms after I made my $1.00 offer. Clearly, if he wants people to buy his oranges instead of mine, it's in his benefit to make his offer as quickly as possible, because after you buy oranges from me, you won't want to buy any more oranges. So if he waits a month, he may have nobody buying at that price.

Conversely, if I offer to sell you 5 oranges at $1.00 and they immediately sell at that price, I'm going to offer my next 5 oranges at $1.20. How fast did the price rise $1.20? How fast did I make my next offer? I could continue selling oranges at $1.00 for a month, but if people are buying a ton of them, and I think I can sell all my oranges for more money, it's in my advantage to up the price as quickly as possible. So, milliseconds after your order went through, I could decide to sell the next batch at $1.20.

There's absolutely nothing nefarious about millisecond trades and price changes, if that's all that's going on. The only difference from "real world phenomena" is that the brokers have algorithms to increase or decrease the share price automatically based on the supply and demand it sees. In a very high trade volume situation, that time matters. If you're faster than your competitor, people are buying and selling *from you* because your prices are always better, closer to the optimal given the supply and demand for the stocks. That's how you make money being faster.

Second, HFT helps you get the "real world value" because the way you get a "real world value" is through iteration. When I decide to sell you oranges at $1.00, that's not the real-world value of oranges. That's a guess I made at the price, assuming there would be exactly enough demand for oranges at $1.00 as I have the ability to supply it. If people are willing to buy it at a higher price, I'll find that higher price faster the quicker I can perform trades and vary my price, and the more trades that I can make. Same if people are only willing to buy it at a lower price. It's no different than, say, if I want to find the square root of a number via the Babylonian Method. If I have a computer running at a low clock frequency, each iteration might take a second. If I have a computer running at a high clock frequency, each iteration might take a microsecond. They both get to the same answer, but a higher clock frequency gets you that answer faster. Again, nothing nefarious about that, and it means that at any one point a human looks at the price of stocks, it's a value that most accurately reflects that equilibrium price between buyers and sellers, because all the iterations are happening very fast.

What *is* somewhat nefarious is that apparently some trading houses are noticing you just bought all the oranges they were selling at a particular price. Then they assumed that you're likely trying to buy oranges from your competitors as well, for a similar price, at the same time. So, because they have a faster connection to the other trading house, they start buying oranges from competitors before your request to buy gets there. When your request to buy arrives, they tell you, "we're no longer selling at any oranges at that price." So the original place just bought up YOUR cheap oranges, and they get to sell it at a slight profit margin. It's not exactly front running, because that would be if your broker, once you've placed an order to buy oranges, instead of buying at your behest, goes out and buys himself a bunch of oranges, then sells them to you at a higher price. He knew what the demand was going to be, because you told him, and he caused the price to go up as a result. In this case, the trading house is buying up more oranges, but they don't *know* that you've placed on order elsewhere. They're making an assumption and taking a risk, based on some algorithm that predicts that type of stuff with some probability. That said, I will agree that's ethically iffy, because they are acting on knowledge nobody else will have for the next few milliseconds, and trading while they have that advantage.

Also, give this a try.

It's a good question. Try this video