Fiddlesticks! Baysean does not imply discrete. You are still going to have to learn about continuous distributions to do modeling with modeling with Bayesian models are applied to continuous variables. Look up Gaussian Bayesian networks for example. Furthermore if you are going to treat useful tools like the gamma function or MCMC as more than black boxes you are going to have to know calculus.

Yeah, but keep in mind that Apple has also been selling itself for years into the academic and research communities, and a lot of us are using Java for number crunching because it is reasonably cross platform and reasonably performant. This screws that community big time. HTML5 and Javascript are irrelevant for what we're doing. Yes, we can install OpenJDK, but at this point that involves turning on X11, JRF licensing restrictions, or building from source. As a developer that's feasible, for our end users its not. It's Apple's call if they want to keep serving that market or not, but I'm certainly going to point out to them that I won't be spending $10,000/5 years on hardware from them in the future.

I guess I can't argue with you about the overall success of the new math, but I have very fond memories of it. I was in third grade in 1965 and well remember the exercises in counting in base 2, base 8, and base 12 using popsicle sticks. I well remember the lightening flash of understanding: "Oh, there are numbers, and then there are the representations of numbers, and each number can have many representations". Then I switched schools, and math became an exercise in tedium until I got to college.

The "new math" taught in the 60s was designed by mathematicians. The new "new math" (AKA Discovery math) being taught today was designed by educational theorists. Maybe the new math of the sixties was only suitable for students who were going to go on to become mathematicians, computer scientists, or physicists, and only when taught by teachers who really understood the point of the material. From what I've heard of discovery math, it's only suitable for people who are never going to do any math, and who will rely on calculators for simple arithmetic.

Only if one is stupid enough not to understand the limitations of Black-Scholes which only works under a huge pile of assumptions that exist in very narrow and rare circumstances. Black-Scholes isn't responsible for our current mess. Black-Scholes is an equation. It can be used wisely or unwisely. We can encourage wise use but sometimes we seem to need to learn things the hard way.

What you say sounds very reasonable, but I'm troubled by the reflexive denials I have been reading from quants and financial engineers. I've read comments from too many who move smoothly from lauding the money making power of their models and their own skill in applying them, to denying any culpability for the recent meltdown: "hey I'm just a geek with a model, nobody listens to me, and the traders do just what they want anyway". I don't think you can have it both ways. At the very least the models like VAR were used as a fig leaf to persuade folks that junk was AAA. If people knew that their models were being used inappropriately, then they had a duty to make a stink about it, even if it meant walking away from their bonus and stock options. A handful of folks did walk away from places Enron, Lehman, and Washington Mutual, crying bloody murder, so it is not an impossible standard to meet.

Well it is a matter of taste, but bear in mind that it doesn't say he's coding 12 hours a day, 365 days a year. He may very well be enjoying some of the more obvious pleasures in life along with his coding. Some folks would happily spend years laying naked on a Tahitian beach drinking Pina Coladas, other folks would find that nice enough for a week or two, but then want to go back something more engaged with world. There is a pleasure and satisfaction all its own in exercising skill, particularly if the product of your skilled work is in high demand from other folks who's work you respect and admire.

Even worse, I totally screwed up the story. The Nobel prize for the work on GMR didn't go to IBM, but to Grunberg at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, and Fert at the Université Paris-Sud, and . Mea culpa. IBM researchers from the IBM Almaden research center did win the 1997 Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize for work on GMR, along with Gruenberg and Fert.

IBM has stopped to innovate (sic)

Did they stop before or after the work which won the 2007 Nobel prize in physics, and is one of the technologies that make it possible for your average consumer to walk down to the corner office supply store and buy a 1 TB disk for less then $200?

Just because they aren't innovating in the fields you know about, doesn't mean they aren't innovating at all.

Do you ever write to your congress person? Any damn fool can send an email but a hand written letter gets their attention. They get so few of them they are treated as special especially by those on their staff who have never hand written a letter before.

Since the 2001 anthrax scare I think physical letters actually get diverted for inspection and irradiation and may not get to your congress person until well after any particular vote has been taken.

I'm also 50 and was taught Palmer method in a Catholic grade school. I never mastered it, and II retreated to block printing after high school. I've since heard that Palmer was an arbitrary and capricious choice, and that there are other handwriting styles, italic for example, that are easier to learn, and easier to write legibly, but retain some of the esthetics of calligrapphy.

How come a 70/30 ratio makes this gap a myth?

Because 50 years ago the gap was > 95/5. The human nervous system hasn't changed much in fifty years, so surprise, surprise it turns out that cultural factors play a major role in the choice of education and occupation. And yes, there were folks 50 years ago who were happy to claim that the 95/5 ratio was the unavoidable result of the differences in the male and female brain.

Of course the statistical properties of groups don't tell you anything about the qualities of a given individual. Men are on average taller then women, but I'm male, and only 5'6" while one of my previous girlfriend was 5'10". I make my living in a mathematical field, and I work with plenty of women who are much better at math then me. The question is, when we see large group disparities between genders is it nature, nurture, or some combination of the two?

I did an undergrad degree in physics back in the early 1970s. At that time the number of women in upper-division math and physics classes was about 1/30th the number of men. I heard many folks explain this as a natural result of the innate differences between genders. I also heard several professors explicitly discourage women from taking upper division math and physics because it was not a "suitable" field for women.

In 2003 I went back to school to do an MS in Applied Math. I was surprised to see that women now made up between 1/5th and 1/3rd of the upper division and graduate classes. Furthermore, the women in the classes didn't seem to have any more trouble with the material then I did. I'm perfectly open to the idea that the distribution of talents in the two genders is influenced by neuro-development and anatomy, but human neuro-development and anatomy didn't change much between 1974 and 2003, which makes me think that the folks who ascribed the gender ratios in circa 1974 math classes entirely to intrinsic differences were full of shit.