Interesting Links for 25-09-2014

[andrewducker]

• Please be careful with your iPhone 6 - looks like it bends if you apply too much pressure
  (tags: iphone apple )
• Cats aren't actually domesticated. (And they think of you as a large, not terribly effective, cat)
  (tags: cats )
• India now has a spaceship orbiting Mars
  (tags: mars India space )
• The Surprising Path to a Faster NYTimes.com (How do you

Comments

Welfare

[danieldwilliam]

I recall a conversation (or blog post) with (or from) a left winger which suggested that the problem the left had created with welfare was to stop talking about it as a solidarity issue, that we pay welfare because people like us starve to death or have diminished life opportunties if we don’t and started talking about it in technical terms.

Re: Welfare

[andrewducker]

Yup. We replaced conviction politicians with beige technocrats.

[cartesiandaemon]

Black holes don't exist

Wow, that's a pretty amazing result. I hoped to see more responses telling me how certain to be of it. It's certainly plausible to me as the sort of thing that could be true: IIRC we don't have any definitive evidence that black holes DO exist, and that sort of deduction that they can never assemble the mass to form is the sort of calculation that people have done before, like Hawking. And if it turns out that black holes are a strange quirk of GR without QM, that would be very satisfactory, there are lots of things that SOUND like they could happen, but turn out not to work like that in real physics, because the model that predicted them is correct, but the reasons why that can't happen aren't obvious in it.

On the other hand, even if the maths is correct, there are lots of things published (or put on ArXiv) that turn out not to be as revolutionary as they sound once someone other than the author gives an opinion on them.

[andrewducker]

It's a fascinating result.

I'm looking forward to the "Oh yes they do!"in a few months.

[cartesiandaemon]

Asking around in the pub, Simon thought there was reasonable astronomical evidence for black holes by now, which I hadn't quite realised. That would be evidence against this theory being complete, if correct :)

[andrewducker]

I assume that their maths leads to things that _look_ like black holes from a distance, but really aren't when you get close up.

Otherwise they wouldn't be doing it in the first place.