I recently looked for scientific articles supporting the claim that fish makes you smarter. It seems the scientific consensus on omega 3/fish oil is inconclusive at best. Here's an example of what I found:

"However, Cochrane reviews of these studies have indicated that most of them are observational studies, that hardly any RCTs have been done and that all studies have led to inconsistent and contradictory results that do not support most of the claims."
http://digitaljournal.com/article/284399

Here's another article with a list of contradictory studies. One of the studies was on alzheimers and showed no effect.
http://www.pcrm.org/search/?cid=2723

I do C++/Python hybrid programming for a living. I do it exactly because it is so easy to rewrite performance/memory sensitive parts in C++.

And no, you will not "rewrite half the project in C/C++". I'd say at most 1/5th. I spend the majority of a regular working week programming in Python. Every now and then when speed becomes an issue, I find the bottlenecks and move them to C++ (if necessary, sometimes numpy is enough). Since I'm probably twice as productive in Python as in C++, about 1/10th of the program is in C++.

Oh, and I do numerically intensive work (for example, monte carlo simulations). Most often the major bottlenecks can not be removed by switching programming language. If it takes forever to calculate stuff on long time series in C++, it hardly matters if it takes an additional 2500 instructions to use the final result in Python.

Python is great for it's intended use.

In other news: Walther sues Bond movie for not using a real gun...

The politicians wanted to "calm down" the markets so things would get back to normal. The loans were not that short (1+ years as far as I remember) because they wanted to "show strong, long term support". Banks have rather long mismatches in their balance sheets (like 30 year house loans but no 30 year deposits) which usually isn't a problem as long as the flow of new loans/deposits is more or less predictable over time. If the government had provided only short loans, the market would not know how long the banks would survive since the gov't could change its mind any day. The government had to provide loans that were long and large enough to make the market believe the banks would survive the crisis.

Also, many banks were in really deep shit. Asking for a large interest could have caused a couple more defaults and thus added to the mess. Yes, it was a donation to the financial industry but the fear of the alternative (a long and deep liquidity crisis) was real. The liquidity crisis was rather short lived though so that actually worked out well. We still have a crisis but not a liquidity crisis. The real crisis is about bad debts all over the world. That has not been resolved yet.

This is based on what I remember from the news and discussions back then so it may require a grain of salt or two. I'm sorry for sounding like a politician/banker. I don't exactly buy all the crap above but I do understand some of the reasoning behind it.

From a very general view, banks manage cash flows. There are in flows and out flows from both loans, deposits and various instruments. There is never a one to one match between the in flows and the out flows and there are gaps in both time and nominal amounts. The banks manage these gaps by keeping a liquidity buffer by borrowing and lending from/to each other. Banks make money by making sure their inflows are greater than their outflows. For example, a very simple way is to lend money with long maturity (high interest) and borrow money with short or no maturity (deposits, low interest).

In a liquidity crisis like the one we had, the inter bank borrowing and lending stops dead because no one knows who's gonna go bust next. So, even if a bank has solid finances with 100 billion of loans maturing next month they may still go bust if a client wants to withdraw 50 bucks and they simply don't have the cash today. That's why the government stepped in, to provide liquidity when no one else dared to (it was one of the official reasons anyway).

This is also why they lent money to foreign banks. They had obligations in dollars and couldn't get dollars any other way. I'm not an expert on this large scale banking stuff but I was quite surprised to see RBS as number 4 on that list.

Quantum theory doesn't have to be wrong for quantum computers to be impossible. We know that quantum effects are only present microscopic and not macroscopic systems (with some few, very particular exceptions like crystals, plasma etc). It is plausible that there are yet unknown consequences of the standard QM model that would prohibit quantum effects in sufficiently complex systems, thus "forbidding" quantum computers without making quantum mechanics wrong. I for one hope there are not.

I made a gingerbread ball out of hexagons as a teenager. The only difficulty was to make hexagons that were flat enough, hexgonical enough and with straight enough edges. The shape was distorted when cutting the warm gingerbread and also when it cooled down. I remember grinding the edges afterwards to get a better fit. Small distortions also created larger distortions as the ball grew (I used a lot more and smaller hexagons than they do in TFA).

Also, by moving the production of physical goods to China the developed countries have reduced their emissions by simply moving them abroad. If you would count the emissions from the production of a product as belonging to the country where the product was consumed, the statistics would be even better for China and worse for the developed countries. I think the best metric would be: (country emission + emissions related to imports - emissions related to exports) / inhabitants

Further more, manufacturing a phone in Sweden will use mostly nuclear and hydroelectric power but a phone made in China will use more coal and oil as power sources. Add strict vs lax regulations regarding chemicals, polution etc and it's easy to see how outsourcing the production causes increased emissions and pollution. Still, the emissions counts as 'theirs' and not 'ours' so we don't have to do anything about it. Our statistics improve, our politicians can claim success in reducing our emissions and we can still buy cheap trinkets. That's what I call a win-win situation!

It's easy to be green by outsourcing the dirty stuff.

And, only classical mechanical systems can be modeled by cellular automata. I remember reading a few pages from the quantum mechanics and relativity pages when the book first came out. It seemed like he simply side stepped all the discussions in the 1930s to 1960s about the EPR paradox, locality, hidden variable theories etc. Here's someone who took the time to prove it:
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

Quote: "We show that this proposal cannot be made compatible with both special relativity and Bell inequality violation."

I was a simple graduate student back then so finding flaws in (some of) his arguments can not be considered hard.

I mostly agree with you. Insightful posts could be wrong in some way but still insightful. Informative on the other hand should be informative. If it is incorrect, false or misleading it should be modded overrated. Of course, if there is no proper reply yet, posting is a better choice. It hopefully stops others from modding up a faulty post.

The efficient spreading of incorrect information is one of the worst side effects of the internet.

Oh, I just realised this is actually Offtopic... The topic was Google patens the slashdot moderation system...