jsyedidia's comments

If you don't like to read long articles, don't read them. I like to read them; they tend to be much easier to understand than artificially shortened articles. It seems to me that complaining that somebody wrote a long article because they take too long for you to read is exactly analogous to saying that since you only like to read short stories, nobody should write a long novel because it would take too much time for you to read.

What a strange attitude! There's plenty of zero-cost bits available to allow for articles of all sorts of lengths. For example, the "Foundations and Trends" journals (e.g. Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning, or Foundations and Trends in Optimization) publish articles that are usually at least 100 pages long. These articles tend to be well-respected and highly cited.

Longer articles have many advantages in allowing for a more in-depth explanation, and it is certainly not the case that every reader wants papers shoe-horned into an artificial page limit.

Maybe they didn't know about the ideal gas law. It seems like very few other people do. Maybe they did know about the ideal gas law and took advantage of it. In any case, they followed all the rules "to the letter", at least if you believe they did what they said they did. Most people say that when you follow all the rules, you are not "cheating".

Let's take it as a given that the Patriots balls deflated and the Colts balls didn't (we don't actually know that for certain, but I think it's reasonable to assume it's true). We know that if the Patriots prepared their balls indoors and worked on them up until the moment they gave them to the refs as they claimed they did and as is legal, the ideal gas law predicts a deflation of the Patriots' balls approximately equal to what is being rumored.

So the thing making people speculate the Patriots cheated is that the Colts' balls didn't deflate, combined with a lack of understanding of the ideal gas law, or a refusal to take it into account.

I take it as a given that the ideal gas law holds. That means that for the Colts' balls not to deflate when going from indoors to outdoors they must have prepared them differently than the Patriots. A simple explanation is that the gas inside their balls had already equilibrated to the outdoors temperatures before the balls were given to the refs (e.g. the Colts threw them around outside). It is speculation, but it seems to me more reasonable than the assumption that the Patriots' and Colts' balls both managed to evade the workings of the ideal gas law, and the Patriots' balls deflated because the Patriots cheated.

The reason that they didn't correct the pressure at game-time is that after the Patriots give the balls to the referees 2 hours and 15 minutes before game time, they are not allowed to touch them, and the refs do not have the procedure of re-checking them and correcting them. I imagine that there might be a rules or procedure change so that they do, and as early as the Super Bowl.

The "evidence" for my explanation is the ideal gas law and what Belichick said his team did in his press conference today. If the Patriots followed that procedure, which there is no reason to believe they didn't, and which is legal, one expects from the ideal gas law that their balls would seem under-inflated at half-time. It's basic physics and easy to understand theoretically and reproduce experimentally.

My speculation for what the Colts did rests on the reports that their balls did not deflate. For that to hold, given the laws of physics, something like the balls equilibrating to the outdoors temperatures before giving them to the refs must have happened.

No the BC professor speculated that they over-inflated them. I speculated that they prepared the balls outdoors. The reason for the speculation is that I know the ideal gas law holds. Therefore, if the Colts balls did not deflate when they took them to a colder temperature, there must be an explanation. I think the likeliest explanation is that the gas inside the balls had already equilibrated to an outdoors temperature.

Many people are speculating that the Patriots cheated on no grounds except that the balls deflated when taken outdoors, which is exactly what you expect from the laws of physics.

"They had the deflated footballs for a reason.": It's called the ideal gas law. http://nesn.com/2015/01/boston-college-professor-weather-had... If you're concerned that the chairman of BC's physics department didn't do his calculations correctly, I also have a Ph.D. in physics and corroborated them. Make sure you use both absolute pressure and absolute temperature if you want to do the computations yourself; it's really quite simple.

By the way, about why the Colts balls didn't deflate: the BC professor says they may have over-inflated them, but I think a simpler explanation is that if the Colts prepared their balls outdoors and they equilibrated to outdoors temperatures before giving them to the refs, you would not expect them to deflate. Watch Belichick's press conference today, with an understanding of the ideal gas law, and the fact that working in a ball will also increase the temperature of the gas inside it, and it becomes obvious that if they followed the legal procedure Belichick claimed they followed, the Patriots did not cheat, unless you think having your footballs obey the ideal gas law is cheating.

"Patriots backs simply don't fumble": Yes, because if they have a fumbling problem, they stop playing until they fix it (Ridley) or they cease being Patriots if they can't fix it (Maroney). Belichick is well-known for having a "doghouse" for running backs who fumble.

"Your explanation isn't supported by the data": I wasn't trying to give an explanation supported by the data. I was trying to give an explanation for the data that makes sense and is supported by observing the Patriots play.

It's like saying Magnus Carlsen must cheat at chess, because the chance of him making so few errors is effectively zero assuming he makes errors at the rate that other grandmasters do.

If you watch Patriots games, you'll see that if Patriots running backs fumble, they get benched. If they do it again they get released. Belichick is maniacal about getting on his players about fumbling. That is a simple explanation. The team has been well-coached for a long time. If you think the Patriots' success is all from deflated balls, you need to explain how they out-scored the Colts 28-0 in the second half (and didn't fumble in horrible conditions).

About the second point, the U.S. population has been growing (from 179 million in 1960 to 308 million in 2010 according to the US Census). So a particular station that was in the same location in 2014 as it was in 1964 could well have a more urban surrounding in 2014. In fact, one knows that surely on average this will be the case. Since more urban surroundings lead to higher temperatures, this must be a biasing factor. Does anybody have any idea how large this biasing factor is? Is there any literature on that issue?

Actually, Carlsen was playing for tricks (as might be reasonable when you have just 30 seconds). Bill Gates had a winning position on the 9th move. If instead of 9. Nxe5?? which allows an immediate checkmate, he had played 9. Re1!, he would have had a huge advantage. I'm an international master, and more importantly, my computer backs up my opinion.

I'm surprised Carlsen played a game with just 30 seconds on his clock; it's easy to lose in that situation since you simply don't have enough time to make more than about 30 moves. And by the way, the best player in the world at ridiculously short time controls ("bullet chess") like 1 minute for the game is Hikaru Nakamura, the top-rated American player, not Magnus Carlsen. Nakamura tends to play soundly in these time controls. Look at this video for a game where Nakamura plays against Grandmaster Max Dlugy (another bullet chess expert) with kibitzing by Grandmaster Ben Finegold: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzrap8Vtyq8

The Washington Post is only a small piece of the WPO company, which has a market cap of $4.4 Billion. So by my math Buffett paid $11 million for a 20% share of a company that's now worth $4.4 Billion, or a net return of 80 times over 40 years, which isn't up to Buffett's usual returns, but not too bad.

I think it would be difficult to find any scientific research that somebody, somewhere didn't consider to have sinister applications. If we discouraged anybody from doing any scientific research that seemed related to what some science fiction program showed a villain using in the future, we wouldn't have any scientific research left to encourage.

Yes. The passenger in the car sitting next to you senses when something tricky is happening with the driving and shuts up or otherwise calls your attention to the danger. Someone conversing with you on the phone doesn't. Kids talking to you from the back seat are also a potentially more dangerous distraction for the same reason.

freebsd.

If they found bugs in TeX, they should have reported them to Knuth. If they didn't want to "bankrupt" him, there could have turned down Knuth's check or just not cashed it, like the vast majority of people who have received Knuth's checks for bug reports. I'm sure Knuth would have greatly appreciated receiving the bug reports (and in fact would still appreciate receiving them now, if in fact those bugs exist).

My previous comment was an attempt at humor, but actually, the notion of "smartest person" is too ill-defined to be very useful. People are smart at different things. For example, one person might be smarter at playing chess than another, while the second might be smarter at writing computer programs.

So let's replace the notion of "smartest person" with something better defined, like "most successful at playing chess, as measured by their chess rating." In that case, we know who the best in the world is, it's Magnus Carlsen. It would indeed be a waste of time for him to seek chess matches where there was somebody better than him, but it is in fact good advice for everybody else to seek to play against better opponents.

However, the strongest players all find that inevitably, they are nearly always stronger than their opponents. For example, the #2 in the world, Levon Aronian, is stronger unless he plays Carlsen. Every grandmaster finds that the large majority of his games are against weaker opponents.

So if you're really "smart," it's good advice to try to surround yourself with "smarter" people, but don't beat yourself up if you find it hard to do--it's an inevitable consequence of mathematics that the "smartest" people will tend to surround themselves with less "smart" people, at least if you're only measuring "smartness" in one way.

Unless you're the smartest person in the world. In that case, trying not to be the smartest person in the room is wasted effort. Of course, if you're the smartest person in the world, you already know that.

You can get the complete EB on the iPad for $1.99 per month.

If you want videos, use the videos of Sussman and Abelson: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...