cbkeller

26 ms·

271.
by cbkeller 7y ago
The comment I was going to reply to disappeared, but for something closer in form to the Matlab example that used to be here: using Plots, DelimitedFiles d = readdlm("data.tsv",'\t') A = [ones(10,1) d[:,1:2]]; B
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by cbkeller 7y ago
I think you forgot one: "The principle of locality always applies" / "no spooky action at a distance" -- while local hidden variable interpretations have been ruled out, nonlocal ones are still very much on the tabl
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by cbkeller 8y ago
I don't know your field, but that hasn't really been my experience at all. Just about as much sloppiness all the way across the board. My only systematic complaint here is that short format means much of the substance has to go in
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Well yeah, obviously: high risk, high reward. Without the benefit of hindsight (and subsequent tests), a paper that proposes something truly transformative will look a lot like one that is just wrong (albeit, wrong in a creative/novel
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by cbkeller 8y ago
May have been three times even: in addition to the two Neoproterozoic "snowball earth" episodes they discuss here, there's also pretty decent evidence for an even older (~2.2 Ga) Paleoproterozoic one [1] I've worked a li
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Hold on one minute! Geologist here -- you're partially right, but "sea glaciers" are absolutely part of the theory! Just to give you a snippet of the sort of things we're considering, here's one relevant quote from
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Geologist here! I'm a fan of this project. The maps are only part of it; they're trying to build a three-dimensional scaffolding (based on drill cores, etc.). Almost all normal geologic maps are maps of the rocks at the surface, s
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Interesting article with a lot of great historical context. I think a significant part of the tl;dr is that the end of Dennard Scaling and trouble with Moore's law may mean that the best architecture will finally win out, rather than j
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Well, we like to say science is deductive, because induction doesn't give you perfect certainty -- but in practice induction and parsimony are and have been absolutely critical to scientific progress.. I think QED provides a nice examp
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Thanks, I hadn't seen that one before - some really interesting historical context. That's about the clearest articulation I've ever seen of the contrast between the idealized purely-deductive hypothesis-falsification paradig
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Confirmationist and falsificationist paradigms of science (2014)(statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
22 points by cbkeller 8y ago|9 comments
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by cbkeller 8y ago
I'll have to check it out!
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Sounds fair enough. I do wish that physical scientists, including myself, had more philosophical training though, even if its not science per se , such that we could reliably have original, educated opinions on empiricism, rationalism, etc
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Without having looked into it, my impression is that the popularity of astrology (and psychics, etc.) is down to the fact that they tend to make broad, vague predictions with a relatively high P(E) that people (emotionally) tend to underest
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Great points. It's one thing to say that a scientific theory should be falsifiable (as a necessary but not sufficient condition), but the Popperians lose me when they claim either (1) that the only valid scientific study is an attemp
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Obligatory xckd: https://xkcd.com/2078/
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Yeah, or Francis Bacon, or any of the original Empiricists. I find a lot more to like in the ASA's statement [1] than in any of these responses, which seem to act as if Karl Popper were the only one to ever have a worthwhile philosophy
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by cbkeller 8y ago
I assume they're referring to cases like this [1]. A few years ago I think there were some performance regressions in Julia relative to JIT'd Python (which, using LLVM like Julia, is way faster than normal Python). This seems to b
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by cbkeller 8y ago
This is what held me back for a long while too, but Juno (the Atom plug-in) seems to finally have all the features I was missing in Julia compared to the Matlab IDE, including a decent variable inspector.
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by cbkeller 8y ago
> Julia is even slower Huh? This has definitely not been my experience -- most of the things I've ported over seem to run about twice as fast in Julia as in the original vectorized Matlab (and probably more like 10x faster than naiv
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by cbkeller 8y ago
I've been porting over a bunch of my old academic Matlab to Julia. It's obviously nowhere as close to Matlab syntax as Octave is, but it's a lot closer than Python. YMMV of course, but there are enough similarities that a dec
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by cbkeller 8y ago
> We can't conclude "O is true, therefore H" Definitely, but if O had been false we might have learned something. More interestingly though: > another thing to consider is fallout incorporated into tobacco and then s
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Might be a sign that we're not in an epistemic bubble, which would be good!
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by cbkeller 8y ago
That's interesting -- doesn't seem to have a graph, but states a significant increase between 1914 and 1967 in nonsmokers. There doesn't appear to be any control for secondhand smoke, however, which could also be a significan
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by cbkeller 8y ago
This is missing their point: you can distinguish the two potential causes by comparing lung cancer incidence rate through time for smokers versus non-smokers . If nuclear tests are a significant factor in lung cancer rate, we should still
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by cbkeller 8y ago
There appears to be some evidence to suggest that traditional (grade-school style) "graded homework" at the advanced undergrad and higher level may just not be particularly good pedagogy though [1]. If possible, it may be better t
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Yeah, I never noticed them mention that possibility, even to dismiss it.
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by cbkeller 8y ago
NOVA's always been my favorite science documentary series. I don't know if they've ever covered snowball earth, but they have a somewhat recent series on geological history of North America: https://www.pbs.org&#x2
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Oh, and regarding the survival of life through a Snowball Earth state, there's been some interesting discussion of potential refugia such as polynyas [1] and cryoconite ponds [2,3], though for context the most advanced multicellular or
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Yeah, I think the vastness of geologic time has been aptly described as "geology’s signal contribution to human thought" -- the same way astronomy showed us we weren't the literal center of the universe. I think about Myr and

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