Not really - in this analogy grit would be the engine, intelligence would be knowing where to drive it. As Einstein put it “Science is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”. You need the 'grit' to get you through the perspiration and your 'intelligence' to provide the inspiration. So it is just like a North American road trip: you spend 99% of your time driving down a long, boring motorway getting to the city but once you get there you need some intelligence to navigate the one way system to get somewhere interesting.

I thought grit was what you put under the tyres to stop them slipping when it's -30C and icy.

Well technically none at all - absolutely no effort was put into changing the climate whatsoever it was just a byproduct of doing something else. While I would tend to agree that I think that the environment is particularly stable and will be very hard to affect I would expect that if we deliberately set out to change it we will probably find it an order of magnitude or two easier to do than changing it inadvertently.

Yes, and you'll note from the fact that we still have oxygen to breathe that this did not happen. Similarly the LHC did not create a Black Hole that set off a chain reaction to swallow the Earth. Planets are bombarded by lots of high energy radiation all the time and have been for billions of years. Setting off a chain reaction is going to be incredibly hard because any reaction we can produce will already have happened many, many times over in nature. Indeed after all the CO2 we have pumped into our atmosphere over the past century or more we have only managed to create a tiny deviation in the temperature so far.

Mathematica does not sound that unique - CERN's ROOT allows you to mix compile-time and run-time constructs in a very complex, not-well documented and extremely buggy environment. I imagine that if you can survive that Mathematica will be a breeze by comparison. As for major paradigm shifts the switch from procedural to OO programming is far more major than the addition of a feature like 'yield' to Python. Indeed I'd put meta-classes (for Python) or templates (for C++) as a far more major language feature than 'yield'.

However this misses the point somewhat which is that features like 'yield', meta-classes and templates are not needed to write any program. They may make your code more elegant and easier to maintain in the right circumstances but you do not need them. The priority is to do good science not write the most efficient and beautiful code that anyone has ever seen (although that's certainly nice if you can manage it). Hence knowing all the intricacies of a language is unnecessary: you just need to know enough to do the job well.

Why do you assume that? I would agree that it is hard to imagine anyone with a strong technical background only knowing Fortran in this day and age but, should such an individual exist, I would not see it as a barrier to hiring them. During my time as a student and a postdoc I taught myself Matlab, Perl, C, C++, Python, Alpha CPU assembler, SQL, ROOT and an interesting variation of BASIC which ran on an old Caviar CAMAC crate controller from the late 1980s! Learning a new language when you already know how to program probably takes a day for basic proficiency and a bit longer to get fully up to speed. It's far more important that you have someone who understands the science and has a strong technical background: if you have that the language is easy to add, if it isn't then you do not have someone with a strong technical background.

You are absolutely correct. I laughed when I read the line in the article which said:

since it shows how clueless the author is about programming languages in science. When I am hiring a postdoc I could not care less which programming language they have used: if I am looking for someone with technical skills all I care about is that they have experience programming. The delay in learning whatever specific languages and packages we use is minimal so long as they have a strong technical background.

This is only ever true if you happen to live precisely on the meridian for your time zone. Given that almost nobody does and that timezones often are determined more by politics than science most people on the planet are already living out of sync with the strict astronomical definition of time by many tens of minutes if not hours.

If we can handle timezones which are an hour wide then we can handle being an hour off between astronomical time and legal time and so if should be fine to buffer the changes until they make up an hour which will take ~7,200 years if the rate is one second every ~2 years (a period longer than any human calendar has ever remained in use for).

Actually it is true for speaking as well. I agree that accent-wise it is far easier for us to pronounce German than French but that accent does not usually hinder comprehension. However not knowing the vocabulary because it is completely different can significantly hinder comprehension. There is also the issue with the very different, and very strict, word order in German which can be hard to get right for an English speaker.

Just curious but how do you actually choose whether or not to believe in something? Generally I find it is a process of listening to the evidence and then making up my mind whether or not something is true. That 'belief' can be changed by evidence, thoughts or ideas - either ones I come up with or ones others share in a discussion - but it never seems to me to be a conscious decision about whether or not I want to believe something: either something seems correct or it doesn't.

This is what I find fascinating about an argument like this. You can certainly act like you believe in $deity but can you really make yourself actually believe in something (or not believe) by making a conscious decision to do so? I'm not sure that I could in which case such arguments become utterly invalid since your belief, or lack of it, is not something you really control.

Yes the critical universe was always rather improbable but the early supernova data pushed us into eternal expansion (before it was realized that it was actually accelerating) which ultimately is the same thing: heath death.

I don't buy the religious input at all though. The reason for assuming a steady state universe was simply because the local universe appears relatively constant and unchanging i.e. in a steady state. It is only when you look at the largest possible scales that you realize that things have changed very significantly and that has only been possible in the past century. Indeed one of the strongest proponents for the 'steady state' universe was Fred Hoyle (he actually coined the term Big Bang to deride that theory) who was a lifelong atheist.

You are comparing apples with oranges. Our common, everyday words are far more like German than French: bruder=brother (vs. frere), Ich war = I was (vs. j'étais) etc. However our more complex words are largely from French e.g. economics=economiques (vs. Wirtschaft).

One of the things which makes French so much easier than German to speak for an Englishman is that if you don't know the word (which usually means rarer vocabulary) you can often get away by picking a suitable English word and saying it with a French pronunciation (it does not always work but it is worth a try). With German you cannot do that since the overlap is with the simple, everyday words that you learn when you learn the language. This makes it far harder to both speak and to understand since you have to relearn every word in German whereas with French not so much.

Not really. Before we had Dark Energy the ultimate fate of the universe was to expand up to a finite size and sit there for ever until all the stars died and the Black Holes evaporated leaving and empty, dead universe going on forever.

Now we have an unknown fate since we have no idea what will happen when the Dark Energy density causally disconnects points at the Planck-length, the so-called "Big Rip". I'll take the unknown over permanent, eternal heat death any day.

...and right up until the invention of the transistor computers would never be smaller than a large room or a small house. I would not be so sure about there being no clever idea possible unless there is a mathematical proof to support it. Until recently there was no need to go parallel now there is a growing need to be able to program in parallel and necessity is the mother of invention. While parallel does incur an overhead as CPUs become more parallel and less serial this will presumably eventually overcome the cost of the parallel algorithm.

You might be right but I'm far less certain of it. The problem we have is that further shrinking of silicon makes it easier to add more cores than to make a single core faster so there is a strong push towards parallelism on the hardware side. At the same time the languages we have are not at all designed to cope with parallel programming.

The result is that we are using our computing resources less and less efficiently. I'm a physicist on an LHC experiment at CERN and we are acutely aware of how inefficient our serial algorithms are at using modern hardware. What we need is a breakthrough in programming languages to be able to parallel program efficiently, just like object oriented programming allowed us to scale up the size of programs. Until this happens I agree than not much will change but if there is some clever CS researcher/student out there with a clever idea for a good parallel programming language the conditions are right for a revolution.