Yes, very much. Growing up I used to scramble to get whatever computer equipment I could. My parents didn't have much money but many of my friends parents did. I hated asking to borrow stuff even though people didn't seem to mind. Now when I see my extra equipment not get used I imagine some kid really wanting to just use it for a bit. Maybe just my own mental issues here but I know what you mean.
Not so bad. Assuming a spherical Earth in a vacuum and a bunch of other slightly less reasonable assumptions we have:
1E+45 photons from sun per second
1.49598E+11 distance to sun in meters
6365000 earth radius in meters
2.81229E+23 surface area of solar flux at earth orbit
1.27276E+14 surface area of earth exposed to sun
4.5257E-10 ration earth area to solar flux
4.5257E+35 photons hitting earth per second
6.49E+15 one light year in meters
1.947E+25 meters in 3 billion light years
4.76367E+51 surface are of sphere 3 billion ly across
9.50046E-17 photons per m^2 at 3B ly
1.05258E+16 m^2 per photon
57883255.23 radius in meters for mirror to reflect 1 photon/second
57883.25523 radus in km (Only 10x larger than Earth!)
Then given a reasonably competent engineer to make a descent mirror with no aberration and a good telescope on a clear night away from the city, and a good bit a patience, you could watch a replay of the last 3 billion years.
In most ways, yes. For me the first 5 seconds or so were fantastic. It felt like seeing a behind the scenes "How it was made" documentary where I was seeing the actors out of character. Or like it removed the sense of being from another era. Soon the artifacts and warping became distracting, and then watching the original put it back in time. Maybe it was a sense of nostalgia but overall the original seemed better to me.
My (Chileanized) Castilian is pretty rusty but I thought your translation was in line with how I read it. Instead of "withhold" I would say "hold onto for myself" ; as in "Retener mis derechos". The broader context seemed to imply preserve the records as in don't delete anything as we investigate, but I can see how it could be taken the other way. In the sentence as written what word would you use in place of retener if you meant to be clear to stop dissemination or publication of the content?
I agree with the main argument but would like to note "crank" in not an all or nothing description. Sometimes the problem as publicized doesn't exactly match the precise problem. For example you can trisect an arbitrary angle if allowed an infinite number of steps. Sometimes the problem is in breaking the abstraction layer. For example one of my kids thought you could make arbitrarily slow motion videos by taking slow motion videos of slow motion videos. And that brings up the issue of how to handle a crank. I loved that my son thought through the video issue and didn't want to inhibit future thinking. We ran some experiments taking video of the tv and it was fun. Sometimes people won't accept counter arguments and evidence (sometimes that person is me) and there's a time to move on. Still, in my experience few people are true die hard cranks and most people respond well if given the right direction.
I wonder how they take into account the kind of people who take a test like this are likely to have a good vocabulary. I suppose that might not be true but I don't think I'd do something similar for a test that measured something along the lines of matching faces to pop musicians.
A few years ago the guy I was sharing an office with at work was cleaning off his desk and found a stack of resumes. He said they were all from the batch that I was hired from and asked if I wanted to know why I was picked. Very cautiously I said yes. He told me I was the only one who when really pushed during the technical interview said "I don't know". Their initial strategy had been to start easy on some topic and just keep going deeper until they had a measure of what level the applicant was at. After a certain point they were just surprised at how far people would carry on into nonsense.
Nice touch:
4.15 FERMAT’S LAST THEOREM:
...
General case when n>2 was proved by Andrew Wiles (1994). The proof is too long to be
written here. See: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~anindya/fermat.pdf
My last two projects have been for the military and a medical device. The example here seems so wonderfully simple (even as an example of how much has to happen on a simple change). Add in all the process/design/QA/validation documents that need to be created -> passed off -> executed -> recorded and you are at much longer than a day.
Having never worked on a search engine myself I will avoid guessing as to why Google's results are the way they are. As a search engine user I noticed Google's results seem to be less useful than they were before. After a particularly poor series of results I tried DuckDuckGo and found the results better. It seems similar to when I switched to Google from MetaCrawler. Whatever the reasons I just want to find what I'm looking for.
I've always been fascinated by the difficulties of translation.
There is the issue of expressing the original thought. Already I've edited this post several times.
Then there is the issue of the surrounding context which will be different for different people. Even for people in the same culture at the same time in the same place.
Then the issue of the attitude of the reader. It's not uncommon to get different meanings from the same text on different days.
Now with the Biblical text we have copies of text from a different time, culture, and language. I like how this article shows how hard it is to handle even one sentence.
My oldest brother had a real love of mathematics and got a masters degree but never even applied to a PhD program. When I asked him about it he just said he was tired of working on other people's problems.
He had a quiet programming position in a large company that gave him time to work on personal projects. Among other things he volunteered at the local schools teaching "fun" math. I guess I'm just agreeing with you about finding something that inspires you and go with it.
It's nice to read an article like this that doesn't try to invent some controversy. It looks like a supernova could cause a disruption large enough to cause an extinction. No, there's not enough evidence to say it actually. Yes, it is an interesting idea and if anyone has anything to add go for it.
A good story has some fight in it. Not every theory does and that's ok.