Science!

[pacobird]

List does not include walk of life; time to get tenure

[Thad]

Study: Racially charged hate crimes go up as broadband expands

It bears further investigation (and obviously this doesn't mean we should slow the expansion of broadband access), but it makes sense. I can definitely speak, from personal experience, to how Internet access can help someone with views and hobbies that are unpopular among his local peer group find validation and encouragement. For me, that meant people who were into Mega Man; for other people, that could mean ranting about The Jews and plotting massacres.

[Mongrel]

Atlantic: Why It Was Easier To Be Skinny In The 80's

Basically, research is finding that, when caloric intake, exercise and other major life factors are controlled for, modern folks have higher weight gain between now and 30 years ago with no apparent explanation for the phenomenon. The implication is that something environmental is driving obesity rates.

The gut bacteria thing is a story on it's own too: Types of gut bacteria confirmed as having a significant effect on weight retention/gain

The idea that gut bacteria could be a partial solution to obesity issues is interesting. A long way to go before that gets anywhere, and there've been many false leads before, but it does seem like the research into obesity is getting less frivolous and more concrete.

[Romosome]

Study: Racially charged hate crimes go up as broadband expands

It bears further investigation (and obviously this doesn't mean we should slow the expansion of broadband access), but it makes sense. I can definitely speak, from personal experience, to how Internet access can help someone with views and hobbies that are unpopular among his local peer group find validation and encouragement. For me, that meant people who were into Mega Man; for other people, that could mean ranting about The Jews and plotting massacres.

have they controlled for access to internet comments or not

[Caithness]

Who has access to the internet but not to comments?

[Grath]

Who has access to the internet but not to comments?

China.

[Mongrel]

Turns out that the supposed notion that sleeping in only a single 6-8 hour block at night is an unnatural modern affectation is probably total bullshit.

[Mongrel]

One more from the Atlantic: Something really weird is going on in an invisible star between Cygnus and Lyrai

[Mongrel]

Tractor beams are now a real thing that actually exists

WOAH COOL.

[Mothra]

Reeeeally depends on there being a whole thing built below the beam and the item you wanna pick up, but still, pretty cool.

[Sharkey]

But can it do wood?

[Büge]

Petition to change the name of Kepler 22-B to Namek

[Mongrel]

PCWorld: NASA confirms that their Canadian-built D-Wave quantum computer is capable of performing some operations up to 100 million times faster than a conventional CPU of equivalent power.

Whoooooah boy.

[Mongrel]

Well, hold on, seems Scott Aaronson has some cold water to throw on the Quantum Computing hype train.

The blog is not intended for the general public and is often impenetrable without requisite engineering knowledge. Fortunately for the layman, many of the most relevant points are explained more clearly elsewhere, coming out in the lengthy arguments in that blog's comments or in linked pieces. I didn't grasp all of jargon references, but here's what I was able to put together. Of course you can still read the blog and associated comments, if you want the source, but I think I've got a decent executive summary here.

1) Other parties, most notably IBM and some academics are doing research on producing qubits (the sort-of transistor-equivalent any potential quantum computer would be based on) which can get "clean" computations without loss and haven't gotten there yet. The only qubits anyone has ever produced are "dirty", which seems to mean they're not consistently functioning on a true quantum level. It's essentially a reliability problem (reliability problems? When fucking around with quantum shit? Who'da guessed?)

2) D-Wave is also trying to do this, if we assume they are operating in good faith. D-Wave's approach is different from other parties in that they are simply trying to make quantum computers not so much by improving the quality of their qubits, but by simply accepting that they have dirty, imperfect qubits, and instead scaling up, piling lots of them together in a big heap and hoping to get enough true quantum computing in the aggregate.

3) The main argument is that the other parties have not been having success making clean qubits (which would in theory be just as scalable). D-Wave's critics liken D-Wave to trying to justify a violin that can't carry a tune by making a whole orchestra of them. Supporters point out that no one has had success, or even the hint of success at making a violin that can carry a tune. In fairness to D-Wave, the other parties have acknowledged that D-Wave has solved some big engineering problems in terms of actually connecting and controlling thousands of qubits, so it's not like D-Wave is doing nothing at all, but all parties, including D-Wave agree that they're not going to get anywhere unless they can improve the "cleanliness" of their qubits, and whether they can do so or not is a big big question mark given that the other parties have actually been working on this problem for longer than D-Wave has been around.

4) D-Wave may not in fact even be building a true quantum computer. D-Wave's detractors claim that D-Wave is building something with pseudo-quantum aspects, that has moments of pops and sparks of quantum computation, but whose fundamental qubits are so dirty and lossy that you lose any benefit quantum computers would have over regular computers at all. D-Wave has apparently improved in this regard, but crucially has failed to actually achieve the truly breakthrough "faster-than-the-universe" speeds (or, more concretely, faster-than-the-very-best-conventional-computers) which a theoretically effective quantum computer would be capable of. To be fair to D-Wave, they have been improving on this front. But crucially, they have yet to be able to solve things like Shor's Algorithm which a true quantum computer would be able to do (Shor's Algorithm is that supposed "bye bye to all the world's financial cryptography" algorithm, which makes people panic when they hear quantum computers might be a thing. However, in practice, there are already efforts well underway to quantum-proof cryptographic systems).

5) The problem D-Wave most recently computed can still be computed by a conventional computer using a different algorithm to reach the same result. As of yet, D-Wave has not built anything that can solve a problem which is wholly unsolvable or even practically unsolvable by conventional computers.

6) Supporters of D-Wave point out that you don't need faster-than-the-universe speeds to make a saleable product - you just need something that can provide significant increases over conventional computers, especially given that silicon chip manufacturers are starting to hit the wall in terms of being able to miniaturize transistors below certain sizes. Actual engineering has already decoupled somewhat from Moore's Law and the time required to design and build faster integrated circuits will only increase further as the engineering problems faced by conventional chip makers (in terms of overcoming basic physical problems of sheer size) becomes more and more difficult.

7) There's still an economic problem here. If this presumed "not quite quantum but kinda-sorta good enough" quantum computer costs a hundred million times what a regular computer does, it doesn't matter that you built a quantum computer which is a hundred million times faster than a regular computer, especially given that the quantum computer has been purpose-built for one narrow and very specific task. If you can't build them significantly cheaper, the whole thing is a wash. Right now, given a not-unreasonable amount of time (I'm not sure if it's weeks or years), a $600 processor can do anything a D-Wave machine can do in terms of pure practical outcomes.

[Büge]

tl;dr

[Mongrel]

Guardian: Evidence suggests there may be a legit 9th planet, and it's pretty damn big.

If they don't call it Planet X, I'm flipping a table.

[Büge]

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine... Xanax?

[zaratustra]

Planet IX, surely?

Holding up for Terminus. Although if a tenth planet is found that'd be awkward.

[Thad]

A circle has no end.

[MarsDragon]

Have we used Nemesis already?