Fraud in superconductor physics - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/gravity_levity/status/1029061204919177216 <comment><USER2> The comment by Brian Skinner who discovered the _correlated noise_ in a graph is available on Arxiv [1]. It's not claiming fraud but points out that such an effect of correlated noise below a threshold temperature between seemingly independent measurements has not been observed before.

Quit-your-bullshit played safe ;)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02929.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02929.pdf)

<comment><USER3> That is a really smart way to play it, because while it is astronomically unlikely, it's possible the answer is "woops, we charted the wrong data there, here's the actual results" and we enter a beautiful new world of room temperature superconductivity.

I get kind of exhausted of the typical response to Hot New Shit In Science, which hasn't changed in about four hundred years: outright, arrogant dismissal.

<comment><USER4> One would hope that the correlated noise was a problem in a plot command. Two observations. 1) The correlated noise in that plot seems obvious. If one was to fake data, why make it that obvious? 2) If it was a plotting error, that would be easy to check and to respond about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is giving me flashbacks to the whole STAP cells fiasco of a few years ago where a research group in Japan published a "simple" way to generate pluripotent stem cells. Everyone and their mother tried to replicate the result and eventually the paper was shown to be fraudulent. On the bright side, the larger scientific community acted as a backstop to the journal/peer- review system. On the other hand, the amount of resources expended to nullify this claim was probably enormous and is hard to quantify. Putting out bad data not only poisons the well, it also chews up lots of productivity cycles of everyone in the field.

<comment> T-A It's giving me flashbacks to

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal)

<comment><USER6> You are so right. It feels like a dejavu:

"Lydia Sohn, then of Princeton University, noticed that two experiments carried out at very different temperatures had identical noise.[3] When the editors of Nature pointed this out to Schön, he claimed to have accidentally submitted the same graph twice."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal#Allegations...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal#Allegations_and_investigation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title is a bit aggressive I think. While the correlated noise discussed in the tweets is suspicious, there doesn't seem to be any definitive evidence of fraud yet.

It's also possible that the plot of the noise was an honest error or something else.

<comment><USER8> Matching noise in plots isn't proof of fraud, but it's something that is so suspicious that it changes the game from "convince me that this paper is fraudulent" to "convince me that this paper isn't fraud." In that light, other worrisome elements of the situation are problematic:

* Claiming one of the holy grail properties of modern physics is achievable with rather pedestrian materials.

* The methodology section is apparently on the vague side. Sort of on the order of "we prepared silver nanoparticles using standard techniques, then incorporated them into into a gold matrix."

* Response to the announcement of "your data presentation has serious errors" is "we won't share our raw data to confirm."

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The reason this looks more like fraud then accident is the forged email and the weird facebook request, both described down thread.

A FB request from a rando by itself isn't weird -- FB pretty much invites this to happen -- and a FB request from a brand new account would be both believable and, in the detail, suspicious (because of the name). But a random request from an account name from the forged mail _but which was created a month before_ makes me wonder if somebody hired some sort of "reputation" service to defend the paper, which is, in my mind, just _completely_ bonkers.

</comment><comment><USER9> See also [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/room-temperature- sup...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/room-temperature- superconductivity-claim-has-side-dish-of-dodgy-data/)

</comment><comment><USER10> is there a service that turns these into readable correspondence to the editor? because I am not going to read a series of tweets alleging fraud. It's like there is an entire user-visible packetizing mechanism in the way of the content.

<comment><USER11> [https://threadreaderapp.com/](https://threadreaderapp.com/) will do it -- [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1027717419400392705.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1027717419400392705.html)

and yes, it's ridiculous that this is necessary

<comment><USER12> Have you got something that will handle replies (in date order) too?

<comment><USER13> It's not quite what you're asking for, but Treeverse represents the conversation (including replies) as a tree [https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse](https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse) (disclosure: I wrote it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> But what's the point of faking this? Wouldn't this be debunked very fast anyway if it was fake? So what's there to gain?

<comment><USER15> People can do irrational things under pressure to publish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd like to point out 90 Kelvin isn't the highest temperature superconductor (likely) reported, not even close. There were Mercury-based HgBa2Ca2Cu3O8 "high temperature superconductors" (thought to operate similar to the common YBCO ones) that have achieved up to 134 Kelvin years ago.

Recently, there was also a _conventional_ superconductor at up to 203 Kelvin (!) at extremely high pressure based on HS3 or somesuch and that seems to have been pretty widely accepted and replicated. [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14964](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14964)

It's thought that modifying the sulfur hydride based superconductors could result in near-room-temperature superconductivity (above 0 Celsius).

Occasionally, people claim room temperature superconductivity in carbon allotropes such as graphene, but take those with a grain of salt as they haven't really been replicated.

Anyway, yeah, this silver and gold material is almost certainly bogus.

</comment><comment><USER17> The plot has other problems also in the symbols choosen to print the values.

The gray cross into a square symbol looks particularly ugly. If the goal is to assure that nobody can understand the real structure of the data; is the perfect symbol. Many values printed in the red set are also hidden by the blue and green dots.

</comment><comment><USER18> As a guy who does a lot of scientific data analysis and plotting, I'm surprised that no one brought up the obvious explanation; in the general scrum of final manuscript preparation, the data analysis guy mistakenly made a plot with the same data replicated several times, but shifted each time so that the plot looked plausible at first pass. It would require a lot of things to go wrong at once, sure... but with experience, you learn to _count on_ a lot of things going wrong at once, _especially_ just before something like a manuscript submission. :)

But that the _authors_ , who presumably could check the raw data the plot is coming from, didn't immediately come back with this explanation, makes it sound much more likely that this is just fraud. Oh well.

<comment><USER19> your mixup does not make any sense: look at the 2 traces in question, on the left half both traces seem like a simple small vertical shift of the other, but in the right half of the same plot one plateaus earlier than the other, both plateauing at the same height.

the conclusion is unmistakable: either the data is real and unexplained (or at least no agreement on any explanation yet) or the data was doctored by summing vertically displaced noise with horizontally displaced sigmoid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If this is fraud, why on earth would you claim something that (theoretically) that is: 1) a holy grail of any field of science. 2) likely to attract a lot of attention 3) likely to be disproved quickly. 4) likely to result in you being compared unfavorably with Fleischmann–Pons?

<comment><USER21> People are irrational.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1027717419400392705.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1027717419400392705.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe it's been answered though I didn't see it addressed, but couldn't the noise issue simply be some sort of copy paste error in excel?

<comment><USER24> When you announce room temperature superconductors, you sure as heck better have found and fixed _every single error_ , including dumb ones like excel copy/paste errors. You touch that topic like you touch cold fusion.

And besides, if it was something as simple as that then all they need to do is release their data. They haven't.

<comment><USER25> It's an arXiv preprint. If it were submitted to a journal I'd agree with you, but the fast sharing of new data is the whole point of arXiv.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here somebody claims superconductivity above 200 Celsius.

[http://www.superconductors.org/216C209C.htm](http://www.superconductors.org/216C209C.htm)

<comment><USER25> Superconductors.org is an old and well-known sham.</comment></comment>


Grading Trudeau on quantum computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2694 <comment><USER2> In Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy the job of the galactic president, Zaphod Beeblebrox, is described as being "not to wield power but to draw attention away from it". Trudeau really reminds me of this quote quite a bit.

In terms of traditional metrics of performance, Trudeau was heavily outclassed in leader debates during the last election. He demonstrated almost no ability to address questions directly and instead resorted to pre-rehearsed sound- bytes for nearly everything, often on topics not even tangentially related to what was being discussed. His inability to stay on topic actually let the encumbent PM off of particularly vicious hooks on more than one occasion. However, those sound-bytes sounded great when taken out of context and chopped up into bits for news broadcasts, even if they were somewhat baffling to the very few people who apparently tuned into the full debates and paid attention to how well answers addressed questions. That election probably lowered the bar for quality discourse in Canadian politics by quite a bit. Next election, everyone is going to be talking in sound-bytes. We might as well just have debates on twitter, you know, "because it's 2019" or whatever the year will be.

Ever since the election, Trudeau hasn't stopped campaigning. Vogue photo spreads. Dining at the white-house. Touring the country. While the previous PM was almost a shut-in, Trudeau is tireless in his press appearances. It's almost as if somebody else is actually running the country and he's, well, distracting the public's eye.

When pressed, Trudeau does have a tendency to promise the moon to just about anyone though. He's been racking up unfulfillable promises left, right, and center. No doubt he left Obama with some pretty wild promises too. This could eventually come crashing down on him but, for now, the honeymoon is still going pretty strong. Most Canadians love having a glamorous PM and the international attention that brings. Would HN be upvoting this story if it was Stephan Dion or Stephen Harper trying to teach QM?

<comment><USER3> While I agree with your points about him debating more in sound bytes than in real answers...

In fairness he's actually been doing reasonably well on his promises, as tracked by the TrudeauMetre[1]. Off the top of my head, unmuzzling scientists, restoring the long form census, and legalizing marijuana are all big contentious points that are either done or seriously underway. Given the abysmal promise-to-result ratio of typical politicians he's earned a passing grade in my books.

[]1 [https://www.trudeaumetre.ca/](https://www.trudeaumetre.ca/)

<comment><USER2> 219 promises tracked: 29 achieved 15 broken 63 in progress 112 not started

So he's already broken 6.8% of his total promises just 1/8th of the way through his term. That's not good. He's also broken just over half as many promises as he's kept, which I'd say is pretty darned typical of politicians.

Legalizing marijuana is in progress, but I've heard nothing concrete. Unmuzzling scientists and restoring the long form census were both good. Reversing the transparency act was bad. I was most interested in his promises to increase government transparency, but some are reporting it's actually worse [1]. He also promised in an interview with Peter Mansbridge to reduce the concentration of power in the PMO, but he's done nothing about that so far.

We're just an eigth of the way through his term, so the jury is still out in my opinion. He's done some good, some bad, but at this point he's still mostly just a bundle of promises.

[1][http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thehouse/preston-manning-s- prescript...](http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thehouse/preston-manning-s-prescription- to-recharge-the-right-1.3463742/liberal-fiscal-plans-less-transparent-than- under-harper-kevin-page-says-1.3464078)

<comment><USER4> >So he's already broken 6.8% of his total promises just 1/8th of the way through his term. That's not good. He's also broken just over half as many promises as he's kept, which I'd say is pretty darned typical of politicians.

Sadly that's not that bad. For example you can check Ukraines MP's promises[1]. It's in Ukrainian, so yellow is WIP, green/red are self- explanatory and black is total.

[1] [http://www.slovoidilo.ua/ratings/persons/parliament/all/inde...](http://www.slovoidilo.ua/ratings/persons/parliament/all/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even if Trudeau learned the definition the morning of, it speaks well of his background in engineering and math that he was able to assimilate such information and reformulate it coherently.

Presenting a technical subject at just the right level of sophistication for a given audience is an invigorating intellectual exercise.

<comment><USER6> > Presenting a technical subject at just the right level of sophistication for > a given audience

I don't think the limiting factor here was the intelligence of the _audience_ , given that he was presenting at the Perimeter Institute.

That being said, I agree completely on your first point, and it's incredibly refreshing to see a politician make an effort to learn about a technical subject.

<comment><USER7> > I don't think the limiting factor here was the intelligence of the audience, > given that he was presenting at the Perimeter Institute.

As the PM, his audience is always far larger than those in the immediate vicinity. Not to mention the gaggle of non-technical journalists who _were_ there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the take-away here is not what so much what PM Trudeau knows or doesn't know about quantum computing. It reveals how low our expectations are of our leaders.

<comment><USER9> Imagine for a second that your roles were reversed and you were the politician who knew a lot about science, engineering and technology. Now it's your job to lead a nation, one of the worlds leading armed forces (yes Canada knows how to fight) and are responsible for trade policies that Impact all your constituents. Suddenly a terror group in <<insert war torn African country>> bombs a mall. How much do you know about the ethnic groups in <<insert war torn African country>> and what would your response be? Should you invade? What would happen if that government failed? Can you do startegic strikes? Hell, what do you do to prevent another bombing?

I mean, it'd be great if our leaders all had a better understanding of STEM but Herbert Hoover was an engineer and it's wife's accepted that his economic policies deepened the Great Depression.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like a non-issue. How many of today's "policy heads" would know anything about the situation on the ground of that hypothetical nation? I personally think anybody with sufficient STEM background has a higher chance of assimilating and interpreting policy knowledge than pure policy-heads.

You'll find plenty of Physics students with whom you can have an advanced policy or philosophy discussion, but I've never met a Policy or Philosophy student with any Physics knowledge.

<comment><USER11> Well sure, plenty of physics students are willing to engage in an advanced policy discussion, but once you tell them that you will not assume the country is a sphere they have a lot less to offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Trudeau did complete two years of engineering at a decent school and worked as a math teacher.

While we don't know if he was prepped or regurgitated a paragraph, he probably has the faculties and interest to have a general understanding of what he was talking about. Oftentimes it's easier to actually learn something than to cheat convincingly.

<comment><USER13> I can't seem to find much information with regards to his time studying engineering at Montreal. One article (albeit, the Toronto Sun so take it with a grain of salt) claims he dropped out. And I can't find anything that mentions what type of engineering he studied. It does seem a bit strange to go from studying English Literature, to becoming a teacher, to suddenly studying engineering before switching to environmental geography.

<comment><USER14> Is that strange? I switched from radiology to music composition to business to computer science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To me, he's sending a huge message that science is valued, not denied. And it's inspiring, which I think is one of the PM's jobs.

So what's the reporter's next question? "When will Canada start dropping quantum bombs on ISIL?" =(

<comment><USER14> > To me, he's sending a huge message that science is valued

I find it surreal that such a thing needs to be done, as if science has not proven its worth time and time again, but here we are.

<comment><USER16> Given his direct political predecessor's attitude toward things like funding experimental reactors, or funding NSERC, or funding basic research, any message that validates science is a good and probably necessary one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Jonathan Blow tweeted about this last night - I particularly agree with him about how everyone ridiculed the old politician who said the Internet was a "series of pipes", but here everyone is praising the young, hot Trudeau for his knowledge of quantum computing when really the two display a similar level of basic understanding about that subject.

In any case, it's not about the politicians' knowledge - it's not Trudeau's job to know about QC - but how the public's .

[https://mobile.twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/721407108852...](https://mobile.twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/721407108852232192)

<comment><USER18> Well, here's the original Steven's quote.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE)

He was mocked more at the time for the email bit, namely the idea that the reason why he didn't get his email for 4 days was because of people streaming videos on the internet.

However, it's not clear that he had a good understanding of the analogy himself (I'm sure that revisionists like Mr. Blow, who do understand how the internet work, can justify it, but it's not Mr. Blow's understanding that we're interested in here, as Mr. Blow is not proposing legislation to block Net Neutrality). In addition to the email bit, he seems to believe that the internet used to be a point to point communication network, whereas now the "industry wisely provided streaming, in effect, a kind of long distance, which is what we've got now". Given this, it's really not clear at all what "it's not a truck, it's a series of tubes" is supposed to clarify.

Now, if Mr. Trudeau was using his understanding of Quantum Computing to justify a large government subsidy of DWave, there would be good cause to look at this throwaway quote in more detail.

<comment><USER19> >Given this, it's really not clear at all what "it's not a truck, it's a series of tubes" is supposed to clarify.

I always assumed that was distinguishing between "quantized" and continuous network systems. That is, adding one more load to a truck ("just dump"ing something on it), one more person to a bus, doesn't make the roads any more congested, but trying to send one more gallon of water through a pipe system will slow it down or add to the queue length.

The internet, then, is more like the latter, in that every piece of information carries some opportunity cost to sending, rather than being a bunch of trucks with spare, underutilized capacity.

<comment><USER18> > but trying to send one more gallon of water through a pipe system.

If you actually forced an additional gallon of water into a pipe, you make everything flow out faster.

<comment><USER19> Right but the relevant user action here would be turning on a faucet, which slows things down for everyone else.

<comment><USER18> >I'm sure that revisionists like Mr. Blow, who do understand how the internet work, can justify it, but it's not Mr. Blow's understanding that we're interested in here, as Mr. Blow is not proposing legislation to block Net Neutrality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For me the most interesting bit was Scott's "10 second" hypothetical reply to the reporter/general audience on what quantum computing is (found in one of his comments):

"I say something about how a QC is a proposed device that would solve certain specific problems much faster than we know how to solve them today, by taking advantage of quantum mechanics, which generalizes the laws of classical probability.

Then I talk about how you'd never talk about a -20% chance of rain tomorrow, but quantum mechanics is based on numbers called amplitudes, which can be positive or negative or even complex numbers.

And how, if an event can happen one way with a positive amplitude and another way with a negative amplitude, the two possibilities can "interfere destructively" and cancel each other out, so that the event never happens at all. And how the state of a QC with (say) 1000 bits would have one amplitude for each of 21000 possible settings of the bits—an astronomical amount of information, if one wanted to write it down classically, for example in order to simulate what the QC was doing classically.

But about how, when you measure the QC's state, you just see a single random output (with its probability determined by its amplitude), not the gargantuan list of possibilities. And about how the goal, in QC, is always to choreograph things so that the possible paths leading to each wrong answer interfere destructively and cancel each other out, (say) some having positive amplitudes and others negative, whereas the paths leading to right answer reinforce.

And how this is a very weird and specialized capability—it's not nearly as simple as "trying all the answers in parallel" (if you did that, you'd simply observe a random answer), nor is it just a smaller or faster version of ordinary computing (a QC might even be "bigger" or "slower" than an ordinary one; all the hoped-for advantage comes from the QC's ability to create interference patterns).

Finally I talk about how a QC is known to give huge advantages over any known classical algorithm for a few tasks of practical importance (quantum simulation, breaking almost all the crypto used today…), and it might also give some advantages for broader goals like optimization and machine learning, but that's an active research topic, and if the advantages exist they'll probably be more modest and/or specialized."

</comment><comment><USER21> Someone on FB speculated that it was a trick just for this video:

> the person asking the question probably works for Trudeau and Trudeau had > previously memorized the whole quantum explanation just for this video.

and after reading an article about this claimed that:

> Trudeau had actually learned the definition of quantum computing that very > morning before this conference and admitted to the fact.

Source: [https://www.facebook.com/boeree.liv/posts/1092245874166258?c...](https://www.facebook.com/boeree.liv/posts/1092245874166258?comment_id=1092263554164490&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R9%22%7D)

<comment><USER22> How dare he educate himself on the subject of his government's funding?! /s

P.S: I didn't mean to be snarky. Any politician that educates himself to even appear smart , instead of trying come off as anti-intellectual "joe six-pack" or simply a spin master (see: Trudeau's predecessor) is progress to me.

<comment><USER23> You don't think him reciting a canned script made to give the impression of expertise and closing with "I could talk about this for ages..." is deceptive?

He was talking like he was well-versed in the subject, when he had really just read some cliff notes.

<comment><USER7> Nobody could watch the clip and thing Trudeau is _actually_ an expert in quantum computing. He was clearly joking about being able to talk about it for ages.

He came across as an intelligent and funny politician who had made the effort to at least develop a modicum of understanding for something he's funding. Nothing more and nothing less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems like we know the Prime Minister's position on this but we just can't tell how he's moving on it.

<comment><USER25> Well the Trudeau government just earmarked 50 million for five years to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

<comment><USER26> I think he's making a joke about a "quantum politician" :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I 've read this story in so many places. It's "good comedy", and I like the guy, but he used it to gain some popularity points (he seems to be good at that in general). I bet Angela Merkel could easily beat him in anything quantum, but what is the point? We should expect world leaders to have these abilities.

</comment><comment><USER28> Remember Obama and the bubble sort?

<comment><USER6> From the article:

> One could also compare against Obama's 2008 answer about bubblesort, which > was just a mention of a keyword by comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm wondering if massive bacterial computation will beat quantum computing on tasks like factorizing large integers.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/jul/24/bacteri...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/jul/24/bacteria- computer)

<comment><USER30> No, the amazing thing in the article you linked is that bacteria colonies can solve complex mathematical problems _at all_. No one said they will be faster than other classical computers.

If you like to read about this kind of problems: Many of Scott Aaronson's other post are about the limits of efficient computation. If you are interested especially in the limits of alternative approaches like protein folding, analog computing and anthropic computing I can recommend "NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality"[1].

[1] [http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf)

<comment><USER29> Well, thanks for the link, but I meant "faster" in the sense of being the first to provide a practical solution. By the way, I'm assuming that with bacterial computing, it (somehow) becomes simple to exponentially duplicate your computation building blocks.

<comment><USER31> Once the bacteria reach some limit of saturation, they can only multiply as fast as they can geographically spread to new area. If they have some maximum speed of physical spread, then that limits them to a maximum speed of n^2 in two dimensions, or n^3 in three dimensions. If you think they're going to keep up exponential growth long enough to make a difference, that implies that you think they'll spread faster and faster across the lab, like a bad movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm going to assume someone gave him notes prior to the interview and he read them so he would sound like he knew what he was on about. Having said that, I would pay for the comedic value of seeing GW Bush string that sentence together (even if someone else did prepare it for him).

</comment><comment><USER33> I think that story gets blown way out of proportion. If you picked random people on a street and asked them to integrate 4x³ from 0 to 2, you would maybe get somewhere between 1% and 10% correct answers, probably way closer to 1%. Still this is something that maybe half of the people once learned how to do in school, they just forget it because they don't need it in everyday life. But spend an hour or two and you can certainly teach them once again how to do it. And most of them will of course also forget it again pretty soon. Along the same line it shouldn't be to hard to give someone a rough idea of the difference between classical and quantum mechanics, notwithstanding that most people will pretty soon only have faint memories.

<comment><USER34> i think "half the people" is an overestimate. i don't think most people learn integration in school. i'd be surprised if half learn differential calculus.

<comment><USER33> This is probably pretty country specific, I just looked up which proportion of people in Germany reaches the qualification to enter university, about 50%, and calculus is mandatory on that way, differential and integral. But I ignored that this proportion increased over time, it was only 22% in 1980. So let's call it a quarter of the population or make the differentiate or explain something about plate tectonics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Jealous much?

</comment><comment><USER36> Damn, the Canadians must be so proud to have such an awesome leader. video link - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZBLSjF56S8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZBLSjF56S8)

<comment><USER37> Yes, this is a great achievement. But there are precedents - the Singapore PM is a Senior Wrangler [1], a former Indian president was a rocket scientist [2] - oh, and some nasty fellow in the middle east was an ophthalmologist in London [3], lest we forget.

I believe technical competence is uncorrelated to adminisitrative effectiveness.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hsien_Loong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hsien_Loong)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._J._Abdul_Kalam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._J._Abdul_Kalam)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_al- Assad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad)

<comment><USER7> > I believe technical competence is uncorrelated to adminisitrative > effectiveness.

I don't. Many Asian nations (including Singapore, China, etc.) are largely governed by engineering majors and I do believe this has been helpful for improving administrative effectiveness. This stands in stark contrast to countries where governance is dominated by either lawyers (the US) or military members (many other developing nations).

<comment><USER38> I don't think any meaningful correlation can be drawn from what a head-of- state or high ranking politician studied in college or where they went to college to their aptitude/competence for governance.

Our last two presidents have professional degrees from the same institution (Harvard) and they do not govern in the same fashion in most areas other than counter-terrorism. China also doesn't choose it's politicians via elections, thus someone who is highly technical and let me stereotype here for a second... most likely not charismatic and/or having developed a sense of political empathy... facets that a lawyer or career manager (MBA) are more likely to develop, would be able to move up in the ranks (in the CCP in this case).

However, this doesn't really reflect on HOW someone chooses to implement policy or govern, comparing China vs U.S. is apples and oranges because you can't legitimately protest the CCP, this isn't the case of the major parties in the U.S. Thus the policies will be molded to some extent of popular opinion, which is normally not true in a dictatorship.

<comment><USER7> First of all, in the world scheme President Obama and President Bush are quite close together in their governing strategies and policies. That's the nature of the kind of politician we elect in the United States.

However, it extends _far_ beyond the head of state. All levels of government in Chinese government are dominated by engineers instead of lawyers or career politicians.

> However, this doesn't really reflect on HOW someone chooses to implement > policy or govern

Of course it does. We even have a word for it: technocracy. There are dramatic differences and if you _don 't_ think that then I'm curious why you delved into perpetrating negative stereotypes about engineers.

<comment><USER38> I don't agree that Bush and Obama share governing strategies. For example GWB was very comfortable out-sourcing large problems to his lieutenants, whereas Obama seems to do it only if he feels it'd result in a better outcome if he wasn't personally involved. Items such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the VP/Rumsfeld, Mortgage crisis to Paulson/Bernanke, etc... Contrast this to Obama where he held multiple cabinet meetings with regard troop levels in Afghanistan early in his presidency. On foreign policy they also differ where GWB seemed to be very decisive (or overly depending on who you ask). Whereas Obama to this day exercises extreme caution, at least publicly. I could cite a lot of examples, but of course this is more the realm of opinion.

On my somewhat poorly worded point about engineers on average being less interpersonal than a typical lawyer/mba. I don't view such attributes negatively; my intention was to point out that engineers' day-to-day jobs don't normally involve work oriented social interaction with people they don't know(i.e. someone other than their team). Putting it another way a lawyer/manager without strong interpersonal skills has a lower career ceiling than an engineer with personality trait. Thus it isn't unreasonable to assume said fields attract different types of people. Thus governance being a partial function of what subject someone opted for in school would in my opinion act as a very small variable in contrast to why X person choose said subject.

> Of course it does. We even have a word for it: technocracy.

It's an apples to oranges comparison if it's China(or Singapore) vs. the U.S. The governments of the former don't have anything close to real representation for it's people(More China than Singapore), thus the policy makers don't have to seriously consider popular opinion outside of keeping the populace from revolting, which is a far cry from the American system where an individual politician can be unseated within a short time frame.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/01/24/jeffries/

<comment><USER2> There is something very wrong about that picture. It's like a picture of a 20 year old with a 60 year old's facial features photoshopped onto it.

<comment><USER3> plastic. surgery.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand how a smart person becomes so hopelessly out of touch with a reality that he make himself (his physical self) into something approaching grotesque.

<comment><USER3> Some people have a condition around constantly finding fault with their bodies and seeking enhancement. Their perceptions are skewed in ways similar to those with eating disorders.

I'm not saying this guy has a problem, just that I'm not surprised people can be unaware of how a great many people view them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A&F: revenue - $2 billion a year, valuation - $5 bil

Facebook: revenue - $150 mil, valuation - $15 bil

<comment><USER6> Growth potential, dude!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Mike Jeffries is the Willie Wonka of the fashion industry.. Examples of his strange behavior abound. According to Business Week, at A&F headquarters Jeffries always goes through revolving doors twice, never passes employees on stairwells, parks his Porsche every day at the same angle in the parking lot (keys between the seats, doors unlocked), and has a pair of "lucky shoes" he wears when reading financial reports."

I am friends with a former A&F employee, who is very attractive and confident. Behind the soft-porn young american look/magalog that is the A&F marketing ethos, there is a darker side of requiring low-hourly-wage earning employees to spend nearly all their wages on A&F clothes (lawsuit was settled) and attractive employees being required to recruit other attractive employees (either sex) to work for A&F, whenever they were out and about (e.g. partying).

</comment><comment> a-priori Regardless of his tactics and business ethics, I found the most interesting part to be his attitude and devotion.

One quote I found interesting is, "I really don't care what anyone other than our target customer thinks".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is it legal to openly discriminate for attractiveness when hiring?

Or do they not have to discriminate, because ugly people never apply to work there?

<comment><USER8> I believe you can discriminate however you want as long as it doesn't involve race, age, sex, physical handicaps, military background, polygraphs, or explicit IQ testing. These things are specified by statute.

<comment><USER9> That can't be the whole story. A company hiring a roofer can't discriminate on the basis of physical handicap? What if he is in a wheelchair?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That 'campus' sounds scary. Like Hitler Youth but with nicer shirts.

<comment><USER8> The Nazis had very nice shirts. The SS uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss.

<comment><USER11> Why was this downmodded? The close relationship between the Nazis and many prominent artists is well-known. Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most influential modernist directors. Rudolf Laban is taught to acting and dance students today. Nazism was highly aestheticized, and to great effect; Hitler's rallies were choreographed and so on. No doubt this is partly why many artists, including some great artists, were attracted to the Nazis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> $80 shirts, $100 pants ... no thanks.

<comment><USER8> I'd love to see what fraction of sales are ultimately paid for by mom and dad.

$100 isn't unreasonable for well made wool pants that can last the better part of a decade. But for cheap shit that will disintegrate within two years?!</comment></comment>


iPad Air 2 costs $275 to $358 to build, implied profit margin of 45% to 57% - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/10/28/apples-latest-ipad-costs-about-the-same-as-the-first-but-with-slightly-lower-profits/

<comment><USER2> In comparison, Apple's laptops have around a 20% to 37% profit margin. These profit margins are ridiculously high no matter how you look at it.

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/2513587/apple- mac/macbo...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2513587/apple-mac/macbook- air-more-profitable-than-other-apple-laptops--says-analyst.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This article misleads in that it only includes cost of components. What about assembly, labor, R&D, shipping, and other overhead costs?

<comment><USER4> Technically, they probably meant "contribution margin"

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contribution_margin](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contribution_margin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > iPad Air 2 costs $275 to $358 to assemble, implied profit margin of > <unknown>

Because developing a product isn't free.

</comment><comment><USER6> Actual title:

Apple's Latest iPad Costs About the Same as the First but With Slightly Lower Profits

</comment><comment><USER7> Well their competitors are free to charge even more if they want :)</comment>


Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness - <AUTHOR> https://blog.uchujin.co.uk/2019/07/retro-5-black-and-white-tv-as-a-computer-monitor-a-tale-of-pointlessness/ <comment><USER3> At about the age of 14 I somehow came into ownership of 5" black and white TV. I wasn't allowed to have a TV in my bedroom, but this thing probably looked useless to my parents so they didn't say anything.

Little did they know, while they were at work, I went up into the attic and ran a coaxial cable from a splitter down into my room and into the back of the VCR, all neatly tucked behind my desk. I spliced an old mono 1/8 jack onto an RCA component for the video (ext.ant to VCR) and did a similar splicing for the audio, but I had to run it through an old 8 track player to amplify the audio. It may be obvious that I collected a lot of old junk and cables (I still do).

I did this all so I could primarily watch Conan O'Brien... which was available on channel 4 anyway (accessible via antenna) but I just wanted to watch the show in the highest definition possible.

Having my first kid soon, I'm curious if he'll be as determined to work around the rules.

<comment><USER4> He will. Kids try to find loop-holes in every single rule, and they will deliberately misinterpret everything you say in order to use it against you later on. :)

<comment><USER5> When my daughter asks me "Daddy, can you <something>", I usually reply with "Yes" and then leave it at that. Then should responds with "WILL you <something>", and I do it. I very clearly taught her the difference between can and will by doing so. And now she does the same thing to my wife. And I get in trouble for it. It's great.

<comment><USER6> What's the point of that "lesson"? In English and many other languages politeness in asking for something is achieved by beating around the bush. That's just how it works.

"Could you do me a favor and look into that issue?". Answering yes implies you'll do it. Same goes for the "woulds" and "cans" and "mind doing ... s".

<comment><USER5> They two different questions. One is asking if you are you able to, the other if you are willing to. I don't teach my daughter to correct people outside the house, but I do want her to speak properly when out there.

It's the same as everyone knows what she means when she says "libary", but I correct her to pronounce it "library".

<comment><USER7> Pragmatically, _neither_ of them is a question: they are more and less polite requests (or a request and an order). Your daughter is perceptive enough to have worked this out; probably you did too, but at some point decided to override your unconcious competence with concious nitpicking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> LGR has a couple of related videos on YouTube.

Regular old B&W TV connected via HDMI: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMiMz1uGCXI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMiMz1uGCXI)

A tiny 1/2 inch CRT used as a display: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY7olqQF8iM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY7olqQF8iM)

</comment><comment><USER9> Hah! I had one of these hooked up in my car around the turn of the century! Mounted under the dash, with a micro (mini?) atx computer in the trunk, all powered by an inverter. I controlled it with a thumb ring trackball, and a mini keyboard that I would stow under the driver's seat. Once I got going, I only needed the trackball, since I was just using it with Winamp to play my mp3s. No wireless anything back then (at least not reliable). It looked cool enough that someone broke my window to steal it!

</comment><comment><USER10> I think that this TV is from the 1990s, not from 1980s, because design screams it. Also there is no brand name anywhere, so the manufacturer is not proud of this cheap device, the front panel captions are screen printed, DC barrel connector has the modern polarity sign with a negative sleeve.

<comment><USER11> Interestingly, you can buy similar ones on Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/Coby-CX-TV1-Black-White- Tuner/dp/B000...](https://www.amazon.com/Coby-CX-TV1-Black-White- Tuner/dp/B00006I56A/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1563904426&refinements=p_n_feature_keywords_two_browse- bin%3A7070353011&s=electronics&sr=1-1)

<comment><USER12> Probably wouldn't have a digital TV tuner, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yeah, so _mumble_ years ago my second monitor was a B&W workstation monitor that I picked up for next to nothing. It was actually slightly higher resolution than my other "proper" monitor, and much sharper. I had to make a converter from a VGA output on my video card to a single coaxial signal for the monitor. Luckily the monitor just wanted pull-to-ground for the blanking signals (both of them), so I could make a passive converter with just a few resistors (to mix the three colours) and a couple of transistors (to pull the signal to ground when blanking).

<comment><USER14> Waaay back in the day of PCs (late 80s, early 90s) the way to get "high res graphics" and "dual screens" was to hook up to your PC (which was usually an actual IBM machine) a CGA monitor for regular usage, and then add a Hercules card and monitor for the "second display".

Downside was that the Hercules - while being very high resolution for the day - was only monochrome, and amber. But it was a common solution for many CAD systems (with a price to match of course).

IIRC, it was also a setup that some later game programmers used (I may be wrong, but IIRC, Carmack used something like this?) - because they could run the debugger on the monochrome Hercules, while outputting the game on the color monitor (CGA/EGA/VGA). This was well after better solutions came around for CAD, so the Hercules setup was a relatively inexpensive upgrade.

<comment><USER15> I had Hercules for my first "IBM PC" computer, while everyone else either had CGA, EGA or even VGA! - It was the computer that my uncle left, before leaving for US - And yes, it was meant to run AutoCAD - <USER2>

Being bored of not too many games working, I decided to take matter in my hands. Early on, I got into making various resident applications - and made one (used Turbo Pascal with inline assembly), where I would "convert" the 320x200 VGA buffer into Hercules bits. It was not taking care of what the palette was, but just happened to work by accident for some of the games (like Trolls). I also had to hack Trolls to first ignore the fact that I did not have VGA, then hack it instead of using 0xA0000 as VGA buffer (the standard address for an VGA adapter), but I would hack that location with my own buffer.

It kind of worked, real slow - I've got about - I dunno - maybe 5-10fps - lol.

Fun fact of trolls that I've found, but could not completely understood it back then (I was probably 9th or 10th grade, english is my secondary language) was this: [https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trolls/trivia](https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trolls/trivia)

"This game was written on a very slow schneider 10mhz 286 with lots of wait states. If for some reason on your very fast xxxx 25mh 486 this game seems to be fast or unplayable, do no blame us for it was a penny pinching boss who would not buy us reasonable pc's to work on. signed THE PROGRAMMERS OF FLAIR SOFTWARE"

So having hercules card made me - lol - did a bit of fun hacking :)

<comment><USER16> simcga was a similar utility, it used B800h for the CGA-compatible frame buffer (the card also had memory in that location as a secondary graphics page): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card#CGA_emu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card#CGA_emulation)

<comment><USER15> If I only knew back then, but it might've not been been available to me. Or it's possible that I've tried it, and might've even relied on it, as I played other games, but this one, along with few others were VGA only. Wow, now that i think of it... it was long time ago... Just trying to squeze that last bit of 640kb with QEMM... looool

<comment><USER16> Real mode x86 is certainly not the most accomodating environment for hardware emulation :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yep, been there, done that.

Just knocking up a VGA to composite circuit similar to the one linked below (AD724 chip) to put my laptop onto a 21" Philips colour TV from the 1990s:

[https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/403637/vga-t...](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/403637/vga- to-composite-circuit-does-it-work)

</comment><comment><USER18> I still use a CRT. Works great, no fuss. Its just heavy to move, which I don't do often. People comment on how rich the colors are. 85hz refresh solves the 'flicker' issue.

<comment><USER19> I reluctantly discarded my last CRT a few years ago. They're not just heavy to move, they also take a lot of room on my desk and they generate a lot of heat.

For a long time LCDs really couldn't compete with CRTs. They had bad resolutions, terrible viewing angles and terrible colors (and especially horrendous blacks).

Resolution is (finally) no longer an issue, colors and viewing angles are still meh but steadily improving. Hopefully we'll get OLED or something similar in the near future that will solve that once and for all. I decided that it was good enough to finally make the switch definitively.

<comment><USER20> "Resolution is (finally) no longer an issue, colors and viewing angles are still meh but steadily improving."

Are you buying _good_ LCDs? There's a whole range of types: [https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types- explored/](https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types-explored/) The worst LCDs today are crap, but the best ones are going to be hard to tell apart from a CRT without putting it next to one. Since the only CRTs made today are high quality CRTs because there's zero market for bad CRTs anymore (and only barely a market for CRTs at all), a modern CRT may still outclass the best LCD, but mostly because of the fact that if the CRT couldn't outclass the best LCD it wouldn't exist at all.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to buy a good LCD screen. Monitors you may have to dig into relatively technical reviews of to find out (generic tech magazine reviewer may not tell you), and finding out what specific kind of screen a laptop has can be very difficult sometimes. Manufacturers don't really want to talk about it as they tend to benefit from being fuzzy about exaggerated specs, and a lot of "reviewers" aren't really aware enough of these issues to make a point of it in their review.

I'm not an expert but I'd swear even in the TN space there's a lot of variation. I once accidentally bought a latop that basically literally didn't have a viewing angle; even at the "optimum" angle only the vertically-middle 50% of the screen was correct and the top and bottom were already showing major brightess drop-off and color inaccuracy. I don't just mean "I don't like to admit it but sometimes I can be a bit of a videophile" sort of complaints, either, I mean more like "literally can't read the word 'Start' on the Start Menu because the text and the background have both color shifted that much". Ironically, sold as a media laptop that only the most casual casual would have wanted to actually watch movies on. Dumped that one right quick. And this particular laptop was priced in the range where it really should have had a decent screen.

By contrast, I'm coding on what is almost certainly a TN monitor, and I really don't care. I wouldn't want it on my personal laptop, the Macbook screen driving it is much, much better by comparison, but I don't do anything color sensitive at work. There's very minimal viewing angle distortion and that's all I really need. (I mean, push comes to shove, I could pretty much do my job on a monochrome monitor and only be somewhat annoyed.)

<comment><USER19> >Are you buying good LCDs? There's a whole range of types: [https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types- explored/](https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types-explored/) The worst LCDs today are crap, but the best ones are going to be hard to tell apart from a CRT without putting it next to one. Since the only CRTs made today are high quality CRTs because there's zero market for bad CRTs anymore (and only barely a market for CRTs at all), a modern CRT may still outclass the best LCD, but mostly because of the fact that if the CRT couldn't outclass the best LCD it wouldn't exist at all.

You're right, I should've been a bit more explicit, I was mainly comparing "average" CRTs from up to about 2005 (back when they were still relatively mainstream) from an average LCD monitor today. Not the top of the line but not the bargain bin either.

For a long time switching from CRT to a comparably-priced LCD was a massive downgrade. You had a lower resolution, ridiculous ghosting, bad colors, black levels that looked like the rising sun and a viewing angle on par with the angular diameter of Pluto.

Nowadays you can find relatively cheap 4k LCDs that perform decently. Sure the blacks aren't perfectly black and it's not good enough for any serious color- sensitive work but for coding and gaming it's good enough for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know someone who converted one of these into a home-made terminal, so they could connect to the computer at school and work from home. They drilled a hole into the TV, added a socket for video input which bypassed the antenna/demodulator, and hooked it up to a home-made 8-bit computer. 32 columns!

<comment><USER14> Sounds like Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This was not so pointless 'back in the day' when and old black and white was all you had access to and not a real computer monitor.

Times was hard for some of us!

;-p

<comment><USER23> I was lucky--we had a spare little _color_ TV I could use as a monitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like I need to hook up my 2" Sinclair MTV1 or Seiko wrist TV watch, both of which have just been gathering dust. However, neither have any sort of input -- is there a USB or HDMI ultra low power VHF or UHF transmitter so I can go total Terry Gilliam in the house with multiple displays??

<comment><USER14> The TV watch is all-in-one? I thought those usually had an external tuner that plugged into the wrist "monitor" via a cable of some sort? If so, then find the pinout and type of connector it is, and try to hack it that way.

Whatever you do with that TV watch, though, don't destroy it. It might not be right now, but someday in the not-too-far future it could be worth some serious cash by a TV collector. Honestly, it might be that way now - so check into that before jumping into something like this.

<comment><USER25> > The TV watch is all-in-one?

The Seiko T001 does have an external tuner and routinely go for $400-500+ on eBay, depending on condition.

[https://monochrome-watches.com/seiko-t001-mother-smart- watch...](https://monochrome-watches.com/seiko-t001-mother-smart-watches/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ha, I got the same model 5" portable TV from Goodwill - the composite input work perfectly with the Raspberry Pi's composite output (some basic soldering is required on the RPi Zero).

My plan was to make it a self-contained old-school PC (with green cellophane film on the monitor for aesthetics) and internally mounting the RPi inside the shell, but I'm being held back by my fear of the high-voltage circuitry of the CRT, and a couple of stripped screws.

</comment><comment><USER27> "Retro" isn't the right word here. I thought this was going to be about building your own monitor, not simply using an old one...

<comment><USER13> Okay. For my first-year university physics project, I made a jumble of wires attached to the parallel port of a computer on one end and the X/Y inputs of an oscilloscope on the other end, and could get it to display vector graphics. (Badly. Very badly. There was far too much stray capacitance in the circuit.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> came here for the FPGA and got instructions on buying premade-adapters

<comment><USER29> Yep, a blog post that teaches you nothing except 'adapters exist' and is also poorly written. Not sure what the criteria are for making the front page is, but I'm baffled how this could meet them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Now you can buy Xiaomi Mi Box S Android TV Media Streamer coneced to you TV and you will able to watch Netflix. But quality will be hard to watch :)

</comment><comment><USER31> cool, permanent terminal window?

</comment><comment><USER32> good one

</comment><comment><USER33> Also a good way to damage your eye sight given the low refresh rate.

One thing I don't miss from CRT monitors from the 90s.

<comment><USER34> How does a low refresh rate damage eyes? Got a link? Legit question, not looking for an argument.

<comment><USER35> The counter proof is TV viewing skews extremely old, and there's plenty of elderly who've been staring into 60Hz screens for multiple decades with no obvious TV related illnesses.

<comment><USER33> You are typically not watching them at the same distance either, and the fact that TV screens are interlaced might also affect the flickering effect (I understand 1990s monitors weren't).

I remember that my 67Hz macintosh monitor was really stressing my eyes as a teenager, while I never had this problem with a TV.

<comment><USER13> You're misunderstanding interlacing. Interlacing was a way to still keep 50Hz (or 60Hz in some parts of the world) while having twice as many rows. It didn't give you a higher refresh rate than that.

<comment><USER36> No, but the difference in scanning pattern does provide a quite stark perceptual difference between 15KHz interlaced and 31KHz progressive at 60Hz. The scanning of fields seems to provide a higher chance that field 1's bottom lines won't have disappeared by the time the monitor is scanning field 2's bottom lines. Of course, it's largely dependent on a monitor's specific phosphor persistence, and why high-persistence monitors were so common in the earlier days of personal computing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


JavaScript SunVox Player (demo of WebAssembly build of SunVox modular synth) - <AUTHOR> http://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/jsplay/ <comment><USER2> This is freakin awesome. SunVox for life</comment>