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Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments
Sep 19, 2017
The usual collection of science essays. Yes, even laymen now know that the standard model of physics has big problems, has been stalemated for decades (the higgs boson being the only twitch of progress for a long time). The only essay that introduced significant new research to me was "Inequality of wealth and income: a runaway process", by S. Raza. We all know that liberal democracies are collapsing under the weight of their own greed, that the poor are voting for populist ignoramuses like Trump because they know damn well that their pious leaders are just shills for the rich- but Raza, introducing Piketty's research to us, shows us how. I personally liked the essay, "Religious Morality is Mostly Below the Belt": 'It is sex, marriage, and reproduction - and not trust, honesty, and generosity- that lie at the core of moralization for most practitioners of the world religions.", but then science is great at accurately pointing out the foibles of religion(s) but is conspicuously silent at criticizing its own feet of clay [extinction of human race? powered by technology, but not our responsibility, oh goodness no!] Scientists are virtually all completely oblivious to their own madness. A beautiful illustration is the end of a piece on a new algorithm to solve graph isomorphism that apparently may accelerate quantum computing. He ends, "the point goes beyond that, and has to do with the dignity of the human race. If, in millions of years, aliens come across the ruins of our civilization, and dig up our digital archives, i'd like them to know that humans killed themselves off, at least we managed to figure out the graph-isomorphism problem is solvable in quasi-polynomial time and that there exist Boolean functions with superquadratic quantum speedups. So i'm glad to say that they *will* know these things...." Well, whoopee! Now i know there's an extremely tiny chance that aliens will recover this and similar research from our ruins i feel so much better about our collective suicide.