J Larsen

I try to avoid piling on, but I have to say this movie looks like it's going to be about as good as The Phantom.

If your kids show no drive, you really should show concern. Simply smiling and patting them on the back would be poor parenting, IMO.

I actually relate to what Mny has been saying and I'm a little surprised by the reactions he's elicited. My chosen field is extremely competitive, as is Mny's. My colleagues and I are always competing for the same (very finite) funding, access to the same data, the same positions, etc. It was the same story in my brief stint as a financial consultant (which was done SOLEY for the VERY serious need of $$$s.) I'd much rather be a "driver A", but if I am, in fact, a "driver B" I could probably learn to live with it (although I'd fighting like hell to get at least one win).

Then I think this is probably as good a choice as any. Get a Nokia phone, and you might be able to sell it when you're finished with it. Hell, maybe you can even find it at a large electronics store with a 30-day return policy! (Make sure you deactivate the phone with your service provider before you get rid of it, though!)

Are you looking for a no-contract phone because you only want to use it for a short period of time, or are you going to continue using it after you get back from vacation? If you're planning to use it long-term, TracFone is very expensive. I get 600 anytime minutes plus 5400 evening/weekend minutes for about what they charge for 200 minutes. If you only want to use it for a couple weeks, this type of service makes sense. With the larger companies you can normally get no-contract service, but then you don't get subsidized phones and you don't get as good of rates. BTW, if you do go with TracFone, get a Nokia phone rather than Motorola. Motorola is thought of as a better brand, but the people I know who own Motorola phones are generally unhappy with them. Evidently they don't get great reception and the batteries don't have very long lifespans compared to other brands.

With Macs running UNIX now (the main reason I've stuck with them), who's going to buy Sun workstations after these come out? Sure, if you buy the fully loaded model you'll be spending about $5000, but Sun Ultra Creators are about ten times that for similar performace to what I expect from these new Macs based on the specs. EDIT: I've just been informed that Sun Workstations have already come down in price dramatically. Evidently you can get a very good workstation for $15,000 now. I remember my Ultra Creator 15 that was ordered for a project I was working on in 1999 costing around $40,000.

I was trying to wait for MRAM to come out before upgrading my laptop, but as that keeps getting pushed back I will probably pick one of these up sometime next year. The PowerBook I bought in early 2000 (the firewire model) is increasingly limiting for me. As mentioned above, it's not wise to buy one of these too soon after their release. The early releases of Apple hardware are almost invariably problematic. The earliest G4s were not as fast or reliable as the final G3s.

I find a lot of his music to be a little "light" for my tastes. I sort of like Bug Music, but that's his throwback New Orleans jazz album, so if you're looking for something modern it doesn't quite fit the bill. One album I recommend avoiding is "A Fine Line". I don't know how others feel about this album, but it sounds a little too close to smooth jazz for my tastes.

Fats Waller, Chucho Valdes, Jason Moran, Stefon Harris. Basically anything I can get cheaply at BMG, I'm discovering.

By any chance does this opinion have to do with the fact that you are currently 171 posts behind AfricaBrass?

Which team was the "team of the 90s" in baseball? The Braves made the playoffs every year (or did they miss once?) but only won one WS. The Yanks won three WS but had less playoff appearances. I believe the popular opinion is that the Yanks were the team of the 90s (as painful as it is for me to say it). Personally, I believe in winning big and losing big. I wouldn't want to be a perpetual also-ran.

It's not dead in the sense that it's been proven wrong, but almost no progress has been made for several years now.

Hey Mny - I'm not working in unification at all anymore. It's a tough road to take. There is very little progress being made, the leading stars of the field are all frustrated and depressed (and nasty to be around), and there's no funding available for it anymore. I may well return to it someday, but for now I'm working in low-energy QM, looking at mesoscopic phenomina in particular (where classical and quantum physics meet). The field has a lot of advantages: there are many experiments being done, there is, relatively speaking, a lot of funding available, and there is a lot of commercial interest. In addition to M and F theories, some ex-string people are working in large extra-dimension brane-world theories. Dvali is a big name in that field (he invented it, actually). One fascinating aspect of that field is that, in principle, experiments can be done, as these theories predict deviations from Newtonian gravity on millimeter scales. Of course, measuring deviations from Newton on scales that small is a monsterous challenge. Witten's last couple of talks have been on particle cosmology, with only passing reference to brane theories. Just to keep things on track, Driver A is still the superior racer.

In a sense, yes. Einstein thought that QM was accurate but incomplete. More specifically, he recognized that quantum mechanics gave accurate statistical predictions, but he thought that there existed a set of hidden variables that were necessary to complete the theory. He thought that once these variables had been identified, you'd have a new, fully deterministic theory (i.e. no more random variables). When he said "God does not play dice", this is what he was talking about. In a separate paper, the (in)famous EPR paper, he ridiculed QM for prediciting non-local interactions between particles (i.e. a measurement on a particle in New York could conceivably affect the outcome of a measurement of a particle on the moon, where the second measurement is outside the light-cone of the first). Bell showed that Einstein couldn't have it both ways. He showed that any local hidden-variable theory is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics, and he derived a set of experimentally accessable inequalities to decide the question of locality. The experiments have been repeated many times with breathtaking precision. Non-local quantum mechanics wins decisively. It is still possible (though extremely unlikely) that Einstein was right about the existance of hidden-variables, but any hidden-variable theory must admit non-locality. That's all from me until tomorrow night. I hope this is intellegible. I'm a sleep-deprived zombie at the moment. If there's any desire for me to write this in a clearer fashion, I can try to do so tomorrow. Sorry for derailing the thread!

I think Hawkings deserves a Nobel because I trust the data. But I also respect the skeptics who distrust black hole data, because science needs skeptics! (I also have to say I'm not the most knowledgable person about observational black hole physics. It's more accurate of me to say that people who I know and trust who are very familiar with the data trust the data.) In addition to those who simply distrust the data, there is evidently another camp of quantum cosmologists who think that the effects described by Hawkings theory are better described by a quantum-mechanical theory. Of course then you're faced with the problem of quantum gravity, which most theorists seem to be giving up on. (Even Witten isn't working in string theory anymore. I was originally a string theory student but quickly jumped ship myself.) You've remembered the Aspect experiment correctly. The really amazing things about that experiment are the distance over which they were able to maintain the correlations and the mechanism they came up with for randomizing the detector orientations between measurements. Oh yeah, the result was pretty impressive, too!

I knew there was another multi-winner, and I just remembered who it was. Marie Curie won in physics for the discovery of radioactivity and in chemistry for the isolation of various isotopes of uranium.

I said three Nobel-prize worthy ideas; I didn't mean to imply he won more than one. Yes, he won primarily for the photoelectric effect, but his work on special relativity was commended on the certificate accompanying his medal and check. General relativity wasn't published until eight years later (oops, make that 14 - I was thinking he won in 1927 for some reason). When he won his award, the experimental status of special relativity wasn't secure enough to merit a Nobel for the theory. I don't know that Hawkings ever will win a Nobel. All of the black hole data is in much more dispute than what you'd think from the popular press. The guy who REALLY should have a Nobel by now is JS Bell, for his theoretical proof (verified by experiment!) that quantum non-locality is an essential part of nature and that no local theory can accurately describe the universe! Actually, Alain Aspect should share in that award for the ingenious experiment he devised to decisively demonstrate the violation of the Bell inequalities.

Here's another analogy. Say the Dodgers go 0-162, but they lose every game by only one run. The Giants go 110-52, but they get their 110 wins by only one run each and in all of their 52 loses they are blown out by at least 10 runs. Which team had the better season? Obviously it was the Giants. If you think of each game as a race, I think it's a decent analogy. Driver B (the Dodgers) barely loses on a consistent basis while Driver A (the Giants) wins a large portion of the time while losing badly the rest of the time. Okay, this is admittedly a totally lousy analogy, but as a lifelong Giants fan, it's fun to imagine the Dodgers going 0-162.

This doesn't necessarily apply here, but does anyone else get tired of lit crit types interpreting anything longer than its width as a phallus?

It's clearly driver A. Driver B is at best a second-tier hall of famer. Driver A, winning half of his races, would likely go down as the greatest of all time. Which team is more dominant: the one that has the most playoff appearances, or the one with the most championships? Clearly, the team with the most championships. Who is the greater physicist: Einstein, for his three Nobel-prize worthy ideas (photoelectric effect, special relativity, general relativity), or T. Suzuki for his record of 1,312 published academic papers? Well, I sort of doubt many of you have even heard of Suzuki, which goes a long way towards answering my rhetorical question.

I think the thread has been taken a little too seriously. There is a distinct difference between the faux-malady ADD and simply being scatterbrained. The later condition, which is what I think Berigan et al. are describing, and which I often suffer from (especially when stressed and/or sleep-deprived, which is most of the time lately), CAN be recitified in many (perhaps most) individuals by practicing concentration exercises and possibly through meditation. I'm not the meditating type myself, but it does seem to work well for my girlfriend.

Hey, I really am a "visual mathematician". I guess I can leave all that self-doubt behind. I actually remember taking one leg of the real IQ test when I was very young. Aside from the vocabularly questions (which I don't think are included in authentic IQ tests), these questions are fairly similar to what I remember. I recall I had a couple of questions that went like this: "Imagine light is shone on the object depicted below from the upper right-hand corner of the page. Which of the following is the resultant shadow?" At the time they didn't tell us we were taking an IQ test, and we were probably too young to have understood the import of that even if they had they told us, so it was actually kind of fun. BTW, I was recently reading about the history of the IQ test. Evidently they were originally designed at the turn of the century to help elementary school teachers differentiate between underachievers and students with legitimate learning disabilities (although back then "learning disabilities" were not thought of in the same way as they are now, obviously). The inventor of the test was reportedly quite embarrassed as he saw the test scores fuel "intellectual elitism" among certain people. He repeatedly said that was never the intention of the test and that the meaning of the scores was being taken out of context.

No offense intended, but I find most of Joy of Cooking's recipies to be rather bland. They are generally quick and easy, though, and it does have a couple winners. The Chicken Kiev is good, and I like the manicoti recipe. The deserts also generally come out well.

As I'm doing more and more of my listening (and living) in my office, I'm looking to upgrade my office sound system. Currently I just have a Sony Discman (circa 1996) plugged into a set of Altec-Lansing computer speakers. I used to have a pair of much-better sounding Labtec computer speakers, but they died on me. The Altecs sound embarrasingly bad - very boomy base, brittle treble and basically zero mid-range. Any recommendations for a decent sounding boom box, mini system, or computer speakers for under $200? Thanks in advance. PS: I can't go the headphone route. It's not practical for me.

Hey Phil, what part of SF are you from? I grew up in the 94109 part of town (just above Polk St. near California St.).