A typical child knows about one child with cancer. Back-of-the-envelope, the number a child knows would be (incidence rate of childhood cancer) * (typical K-8 size), but doubled since they observe all grades ahead and behind them. Incidence rate is about 20 per 100,000 and we might assume a typical K-8 is about 2000 students, so (20 / 100000 * 2000 * 2) ~ 1.
The first figure shows an order of magnitude decrease in mortality over the last few decades from childhood cancer. The average child growing up in the 70s would know a child that died from cancer, and today they would not!
Anecdata checks out. Had twin girls in my second grade class. One got leukemia. Even with a perfect match bone marrow transplant there was only one in my third grade class. Things have improved so much since 77
Basic research has a lot in common with startups. The unicorn rate is <1%, the best new ideas sound like bad ideas, and nearly all value from the best ideas is locked in the long-term future. The ideal startup/scientific program failure rate is not 0%, and could be 95%.
The current research system has serious problems, but we need accurate criticism to build a better future. "YC is all wasteful spending; why doesn't YC just choose to only fund the hits?" is absurd, but somehow we allow this argument when discussing NSF/NIH/DOE/DARPA.
Bush's report was submitted in the months between the German surrender and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. It was a remarkable context for scientific optimism, given the huge impact of science and technology on the war effort. Radar developments are obviously an unalloyed good for shooting down German bombers.
Scientific progress is arguably even more relevant today, but the vision of the future has changed for the average American. Many achievements of the ensuing eight decades (vaccines eliminating polio and measles, nuclear energy, computing and social networks, cheap solar and wind, fracking, automation and artificial intelligence, cheap spaceflight) are viewed with fear and suspicion by large, different fractions of the US. Unfortunately, ceding scientific leadership to other powers does not reduce the destabilizing force of progress -- but I think there's some explanatory power here in simultaneously shutting down science and pursuing economic isolationism.
While not fully economic isolationism, there was a drive to turn the national focus away from looking outward to gazing at the national navel. Apollo, and much of NASA's ambitious projects, were cut short thanks to defunding in order to deploy those funds towards social projects such as the War on Poverty. The Malthusian worldview of those like Paul Ehrlich led to a system less interested in risk management and more interested in employing the precautionary principle. This often resulted in decisions that were more concerned about the negative aspects of the short term rather than the necessary transitions required to achieve long term goals.
Passenger jet engines, nitrogen fixation, silicon fabs -- these don't just magically appear. It takes careful reasoning and years of exploration in the vast ocean of ideas. Most places in this ocean are not useful, so it's helpful to sail faster.
I'm an astrophysicist. I love the idea of shaking up how we do science, but MOND models really aren't that compelling for a practicing scientist (I would love to be wrong). I periodically consider working a modified gravity project, but it never seems that interesting. Maybe I can lay out my personal impressions for you in a software analogy.
There are simple situations where physics can be reasonably distinguished from the noise. Think Newton watching an apple fall from a tree -- these are test harnesses with a debugger and careful control of the environment. There are also astrophysical situations where it's very hard to squeeze insight out of the chaos. Instead of looking at an apple to derive Newtonian gravity, imagine instead trying to figure gravity out by looking at a flock of birds. There are tricky things in the way of our understanding, like lift, turbulence, and biomechanics. We hope to understand the bad situations someday, but right now it's tough. Instead of the nice test harness, these situations are like debugging through cryptic, un-reproducible user complaints. What's their OS? Do they have the right drivers installed? Do they have all of their ports blocked for some reason?
In astrophysics, one nice system is the Universe at very large scales: echos of the big bang, the clustering of matter, and the formation of structure. We have great data these days about the large scales, and general relativity (GR) + dark matter (DM) is a very predictive model here. To our chagrin, the data always matches the theory. It takes 5 or 6 parameters, but the model has withstood huge improvements in data quality without really changing since the 90s. The other nice situation is the small scales like our own solar system: we can measure things extremely precisely at home, and again GR works remarkably well. There are a few other good situations involving objects like pulsars. Finally there are the hard situations: intermediate scales that involve the messy physics of star and galaxy formation. We don't really know how these processes work, but we can cobble together simple models with DM that sort of match the data.
Modified gravities in the literature always seem to act exactly like general relativity + dark matter in the clean, understandable situations, although it takes various contortions (screening) for these models to do this. Modified gravity models seem to only act differently in the bad arenas that are hard to understand, when there trickier issues like galaxy and star formation. That's deeply suspicious, and really weakens the value proposition of these alternatives. It's like introducing a software feature to fix something that never happens on the dev machine, based on mysterious user reports that you can only half decipher.
In fairness the fine-tuning / epistemology / scientific method tap dancing seems to affect the string/supersymmetry crowd a lot more than the astrophysics crowd. The crossover act seems to be superpartners as WIMP candidates. My original comment didn’t reflect that.
Five or six freely chosen parameters is a lot. You know the von Neumann quote. If those parameters have continued to fit vastly more precise measurements without changing for 30 years that’s starting to sound like failure to falsify.
And if so, ultimately you folks have posed the particle/high-energy folks a problem: we found a shitload of weakly/non-interacting mass, where’s my particle bruh?
To the layperson, exotic undetectable mass sounds like something that will turn out to be a good metaphor for something deeper, but that doesn’t mean a lot via the definition of layperson.
Even laypeople know the string folks are full of shit: Witten has a Fields and not a Nobel for a reason.
The language of science is mathematics, so code that more closely resembles mathematical notation can be more efficient for practicing scientists to understand. There's a lot of value in code that looks like the expression published in the paper, because when another scientist wants to build upon or modify that code, they'll read and understand the paper first, not the package code.
Also in physics, sometimes you get really large expressions with a lot of Greek letters and operators. In the paper, you make it a double-wide multiline equation with LaTeX. It makes a big difference if that corresponds to a few lines of Greek symbols in your code, and not twenty.
(I'm actually immigrating to Toronto later this year.)
I understand your frustrations over immigration policy, and it's certainly not racist to wish for Canadians to enjoy the fruits of Canada. I just want to gently bring up the historical context that you've left out, but of which you are likely aware. ~5% of Canadians are indigenous, and most humans in Canada descend from recent immigrants who came to pursue a higher standard of living. Barring other humans, born in a slightly different time and place, from that same pursuit: doesn't that seem to be in tension with history?
Don’t listen to this guy. I’m Canadian and lived in Toronto for eight years. Toronto housing is expensive because of lax lending, bad zoning, and bad regulations. That’s it, Canadians are to blame for this. For an example Berlin is a similar physical size and population as Toronto, and has similar rate of high immigration, but has a lower cost of living relative to salaries. This is guy may not be racist, but he’s doing the classic lazy thing of blaming newcomers when its really the locals that did this to themselves.
I am blaming our immigration policy, not the "newcomers" as you say. Newcomers are obviously just doing what is best for them personally. Also, more than half of Germany's population rents housing. Most Canadians would not be satisfied with that.
And your still wrong. Too much of Toronto is zoned for single family homes which is the main driver of lack of affordable housing. When you walk around midtown Berlin you don’t see any single detached houses with big front yards. What you see are mid rise apartment blocks that the city of Toronto literally makes illegal to build in large parts of the city. Then you have the federal government that has totally failed to pump the brakes on lending. This is 100% above bad planning by Canadians, stop blaming immigration it’s a lame cop out when the city only has a population density of about 4500 per sq km which is quite a bit on the low side for a major city. Look in the mirror.
Look you can use whatever mental gymnastics you like to insist why we should all be content living in tiny condos and literal commie blocks but as I stated nobody wants to live in that because we have better standards. People want affordable single homes to raise a family. The solution is so absurdly simple yet you grasp at straws to avoid it.
Population growth is too high to meet demand for proper housing. Therefor, the solution is you cut back immigration, within a couple years demand for housing will fall dramatically. But no, you don't want to see prices fall, or you have something to gain with the immigration rate being high.
I suppose you don’t read anything about population demographics in Canada. If you did you’d realize we have a very low birth rate. Without immigration Ontario and Canada will fail, like Italy and Japan we’ll be stuck in economic stagnation and ever increasing debt load, until we can’t pay for basic social services or people are forced to work 80 hour weeks to get by.
When did your family come to Canada? Why do you think you should be the abetter of when it’s full? It’s been growing for 200 years and and at any point people could point to a Canadian city and say it’s full because that’s completely subjective in a country that could easily fit the world’s population.
You’re also completely missing the mark on what I’m saying a increasing density. I’m not talking about shoving people in tiny condos, I’m saying the housing that’s zoned for single detached houses should be zoned to be five story walk ups with beautiful courtyards like London, Paris, or the city I live in now, Amsterdam. These aren’t small condos, they’re large flats that families can live in, it’s not uncommon for families to have multiple floors. You know what people and kids do that don’t have back yards, they walk to a local park and interact with their community, and it make a much healthier and social community. Compared to most European capitals Toronto is a bland shithole, keep your ugly McMansion, keep your ugly car depended suburbs, keep your obesity, and bad food, keep your lame two weeks of vacation where you come to visit European cities you refuse to learn lessons from. Honestly get fucked, I’m over it, people like you are so ignorant it makes me never want to come back to Canada. There, are you happy, Toronto minus one person.
It is not a contradiction and it is not wrong for immigrants themselves to want to lobby for strict new limits on immigration numbers. The rest of your question/argument sounds like an appeal to emotion or guilt.
You can certainly achieve the Rust plotting solution for Julia by compiling a plotting package with PackageCompiler. I use this for day-to-day research tasks.
However, Julia users are greedy! They want their cake (composability, portability, dynamic language features) and eat it too (performance). Lots of effort has thus been put into the language towards not needing solutions like PackageCompiler.
The first figure shows an order of magnitude decrease in mortality over the last few decades from childhood cancer. The average child growing up in the 70s would know a child that died from cancer, and today they would not!