DrKrettin

I find your comment totally mysterious. I asked a purely objective question as to why nobody managed to produce this before now. What challenges did they overcome where others had failed? How could that be seen as unfair? Unfair to whom?

I read the paper (superficially). Why was this not achieved ages ago? I could not see what they did which was novel and the reason that it had not been done before.

Just use an Argand diagram and take every real number as a complex number with a zero imaginary part, i.e. somewhere on the x axis.

I used to work for the European Space Agency, in data processing. I can say that virtually without exception, nobody but nobody cared for the science involved, they were only interested in their own advancement in the agency and their pay cheque. The few people who just did their job without fuss did not progress as quickly as those who spent most of their energies in political manoeuvering and undermining their colleagues. When a new project was introduced, I would try and identify the issues and propose the cheapest solution, and I would be openly criticised for not blowing it up into something as big as possible so that the department could employ more staff, hence get more power and underline their importance. It was a peculiar situation in that it was not academically driven, but neither was it commercially driven. And it was populated by people who were greed-driven. I suspect that this is the driving force behind almost all institutions. Cynical? moi?

Often, numerology seems to be limited to English as well. Magic connections involving words in the English bible, discovered by experts who don't even realise that the bible was not written in English.

If you were your brother (sister?) would you always tell me the truth?

You explain in a later post, as everybody had already said, that lightning causes thunder. If A causes B, can A and B ever be simultaneous?

It's difficult to know what you are talking about. I guess you mean "law" and not "lav", and where is the attachment?

Why the hell is the Wagner necessary? I remember as a student dealing with this paradox in the following form: a rod of length x moves along its length across the top of a table which is of course infinitely thin and with no friction. In the table is a slot of length x plus dx, a tiny amount so that the rod will just fit into the slot and fall through it when dropped onto the slot. An observer at rest on the table will see the rod contracted, so when it moves over the slot, it will fall through it. But an observer moving with the rod will see the slot contracted, so the rod will be too long and not fall through the slot. How to reconcile these? The principle is that whatever happens at rest will also happen at speed. If the rod falls through the slot at rest, it will fall through at speed (given the obvious impossible Gedankenexperimente conditions). Even though the observer on the rod sees the slot as too small, the ends of the rod still meet their respective ends of slot at the same time. I make this purely as a confident assertion because I am not longer able to dredge up the maths to prove it, but I well remember doing it many decades ago, and convincing myself that this was the case. I certainly would not have been able to do it with all that music in the background.

My advice is not to leave things so that they become urgent. I hope that helps.

The performances involve spectacular leaps through hoops at great heights, drenching the crowd with tail swipes, being kissed by a young child in a boat etc. all of which is rewarded by copious supplies of fish at every move. Yes - they "looked" extremely happy - but how do you know what a happy orca looks like? If there is nothing else on offer, what would they not do for a mouthful of fish?

How about this for a dilemma? Our local zoo is Loro Park, Tenerife. Originally kept parrots (Loro in Spanish) and has hundreds of different species. Now has a brilliant penguin enclosure with artificial snow etc etc. They have dolphins, sea lions, but they also have orcas, and this is the problem. These creatures are kept in what must be aquatic cages - pretty big but woefully inadequate for these enormous animals. I've seen their display several times, and it is spectacular. The crowd is enchanted every time. Wonderful PR for the species. And yet I feel immensely sad seeing them in conditions which are so different from their natural habitat. Despite the love and care provided by their devoted keepers, it probably amounts to cruelty keeping them like that. It is generally accepted that they would not survive in the wild - born in captivity and so on. What is to be done?

Presumably the paper has been subjected to peer review, and so we can assume that it is not just a typo. I understand it that it is deliberately ambiguous in that optimism is significant in an undefined manner. My brother, a mathematician, once had some serious fight with an authority which required he fill in some questionnaire (I forget which). To the question "are you male or female?" he answered "yes". On being challenged he responded that the answer was absolutely correct, in that the question meant logically "Are you a member of the union of sets "male" and "female"?"

It's not going to improve with Trump, is it? Still, that's what democracy wanted.

Do deniers have metal feathers?

When asking the Gods for eternal life, it's a big mistake if you forget to ask for eternal youth as well. Tithonous could tell you about that.

.. and at the same time avoiding any ambiguities.

Having spend quite a lot of time in academia, my impression is that there can be a peculiar mix of people ranging from the balanced and civilized to the desperately inadequate. The civilized ones are those who treat their academic inferiors with kindness and display no snobbery because they do not feel the need to show superiority. The inadequate ones (the majority in my experience) feel the need to impress how good they are, so they display an intellectual snobbery, or they try to. (There is also a surprising number of autistic ones who don't really grasp the concept of students and teaching, and not being aware of other people don't display any snobbery.) Other factors which make for a toxic environment include competition for projects and grants, scrambles to get names on publications, redundancies, and other realities all of which encourage a lot of people to be rather nasty to each other.

I'm familiar with a few internet forums, and they all have the common trait that now and again a member feels badly treated by one or more moderators and devotes his/her** time to a ridiculously long thread about how unfair it all is. An internet forum is necessarily a tyranny, not a democracy, because the reality is that a member has the choice of either accepting the rules or going somewhere else. It's that simple. I've seen the alternative, where members are given free rein, and the result is anarchy. ** Come to think of it, it's always "his".

Clarity because one is an adjective and the other is a noun. (But I don't have the context.)

It looks to me like total honesty in recognizing that they don't have enough reliable data to draw any kind of conclusion. Where is the dishonesty there?

You are missing the point entirely. The message is "carpe diem", irrespective of whether the gods exist or not.

Not only is it an insult, but it is a particularly laughable one given that scientifically-minded people are (generally) the most open-minded people on the planet.

I'm not being closed-minded. OK - maybe he does have a personality disorder, but this disorder causes him to behave like a jerk. I'm looking at it from the point of view of a girl who is being bullied/manipulated/played with, and this was my first consideration.

Why bother with a psychoanalysis? He is an insensitive jerk not worth bothering with.