rotorblade's comments

> That suggests that the typical Swedish person feels that sharing copyrighted content is a heinous crime, on par with homicide.

Well... I'm not sure that's how you should see it. For example, skimming the document I mentioned, they have a section "Konsekvensanalys"/Analysis of consequences. There they address for example socio-economic impact, but not "popular opinion on the matter", or similar.

I think it would be more appropriate to see the investigation as objective (to some degree), and the final voting by the parties (on a potential future bill) as their considerations how this would impact their popularity. If the objective conclusion is that X should be done, a party may still not vote to implement X because of peoples opinion on the matter.

> Well, it is technically not a bill [...]

Yeah, was not sure how to explain the distinction, hence my quotation marks. Sorry for being vague.

> I don't know Swedish law, but I will guess that like American law, any parliament/house member can introduce basically any bill saying anything.

So this "bill" is the result of an investigation started by the government. The investigation concludes (document posted by me elsewhere in this thread (in Swedish)) that it would be appropriate to change the law, and what the "bill" should look like.

Have not found the stage of the bill yet, the suggestion for a bill in the final document of the investigation is what I found so far.

The investigation appears to have been performed by people from various instances; governmental, academic, and industry. Only one person from industry; "Film och TV-branschens Samarbetskommitté", whose role was "sakkunnig"/subject expert.

They never got into the Swedish parliament, only to the EU parliament.

They did not perform very well in the Swedish elections (less than 1%, 4% is limit to get seats), and after their initial push their momentum seemed to die off.

According to my personal view, a large part why the Pirate Party would not succeed in Sweden was that the party members (not the 'sign up for free on a webpage'-members, but party leaders) and their activists were very different in ideology. Party members were strongly libertarian while activists were more on the left.

This, [0], appears to be the conclusion of the investigation that resulted in the bill, which contains a suggestion for a law.

[0] (Swedish) http://www.sou.gov.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/SOU-2018_6_...

> Is that what typically motivates a scientist today?

Just as a side-note: When I started my Ph.D. studies we had an "introduction course", going through requirements for graduating, seminars by more experienced scientists, what to expect and so on. In that course I encountered the absolute worst seminar speaker when it comes to the subject of motivation. The seminar speaker said that "If your research does not have a potential to receive a Nobel prize, stop doing it.". The speaker was at the time in industry because achieving wealth was a similarly admirable goal. It was extremely discouraging.

So, not typical (I hope), but some argues that fame and wealth are the only reasons to do science.

They added a clause in the law in which the service providers are allowed to sell prepaid cards with roaming disabled completely. Several (in Sweden all but one, France at least the one I'm using) service providers chose this option for their prepaid.

The why is quite obvious, instead of upping the price on the per-minute/-sms charges on prepaid, they disabled it to force you to buy a monthly subscription instead. For me, this means that my phone does not work anywhere in EU anymore except Sweden and France (and I have two SIMs) unless I increase my phone spending with about 2000% (yes, I do not use my phone much), I cannot change the contracts because I cannot live in two countries at once [#], and will most likely lose the number I have had for over 20 years.

Even so, if I change to a monthly subscription they are allowed to cancel my contract if I "misuse" the new roaming rules, which I will because I want to keep my Swedish number but I will not live there for several more years (at least).

The new roaming rules only helps tourists (although I believe that the monthly fees have gone up all over EU since the transition to "roaming free" rules, so only the service providers are gaining anything on the transition). For people who have to be mobile across the EU it is a total nightmare. This has made me very angry (perhaps unproportionately so), and it is my opinion that the EU MPs that put forth this law should be ashamed and this is a complete failure.

[#] I can change it in France, since I live here, but I'm moving away from here soon, so why bother, but not to Sweden. So I have to break some country's law by saying I move back to Sweden when I don't, change my contract, move to where I actually am, and then lose my number anyway at 1000% the cost of my old card. And when I move, since this is not to France nor Sweden, but still in the EU, my phone will not work at all moving there! All things you have to do when moving to a new country I have to manage without a phone now.

"free" is a bit misleading, imo. If you pay for a monthly subscription, then... yes, but really no (although this might be beside the point you make). And Pay-as-you-go cards are also a thing, where it is certainly not true (although such cards have been made borderline completely useless with the new idiotically formulated 'roaming free' EU rules).

I can possibly agree with that notion of experiment. My point, in the context of the discussion, was that just because we do not have a an idea for an experiment that would test string theory, in some definite way, does not exclude that there is some possible observation within reach.

Indeed. To emphasize '1)' you could mention most astro- related fields: astronomy, astrophysics, etc, which are almost purely observational.

For academic seminars, I have started to always go through David Tong's ``How to Make Sure Your Talk Doesn’t Suck'' [0], before and after writing the presentation. I believe that it has at least helped me improve and feel more confident.

[0] www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/talks/talk.pdf

All _fundamental_ particles gets their mass from the Higgs (up to some issues with the neutrinos). Composite particles, say the Proton, is a strongly coupled system (that is, can not be described by perturbation theory) and it does not have the mass being the sum of its constituents (not even most of it). Hence, it is not known what gives most of the mass of particles such as the Proton.

Contrary to _dilerium's answer, I think this, in at least Sweden, was a quite significant factor. But that must(?) have changed now. During the last wave of immigrants coming to Sweden, the whole range of parties, except for the Left Party, made a 180 degree turn and agreed with the Sweden Democrats narrative. Even the Social democrats are now saying that Sweden is under a social and economic collapse due to immigration which was lauded by the Swedish Democrats.

See for example [0] (Swedish) and links within.

http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/internationella-medier-sver...

Not sure how it works in Denmark, but in Sweden the life sentence is also usually refereed to as being "max 16 years", or some similar number between 10-16 years.

However that is not quite the whole story. In Sweden, a life sentence is a sentence with no upper bound on the time, if you were immortal, you would be there forever. But, usually you are considered rehabilitated after, say, 10-16 years, if you indeed show signs that you have rehabilitated. Then there is no need to keep you locked up.

The "max X years" is meant as the number for which it took the longest time for someone to be considered rehabilitated. In the Swedish sense of it, it is not a "magic" number, but a case-by-case number.

EDIT: the user "nl" quotes the wikipedia article for Denmark in another reply which indicates it is more or less the same.

I'm in string theory as well, most of my knowledge about LQG is mostly from other string theorists. From my experience, string theorists can be extremely hostile towards the ideas in LQG and the people involved in it. So I would not quite share your view.

Then from LQG there is for example this [0], which portrays string theorists as a bit naive and ignorant.

I know that LQG is not purely focused on quantum gravity, there are some papers out there that discuss how to combine Yang-Mills theories to LQG, and it is suppose to be "easy" (see discussion around page 15 of [0] for example). But, as you might mean when you say that they are purely focused on QG, is that it is (or seems to be (to my very limited understanding of LQG)) to some degree considered a solved problem.

[0] http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0310077

In the way string theory does it -- unify SM (or generic QFTs) and GR, that is -- there emerges several new things that could give answers to dark matter (for example weakly interacting SUSY particles) and dark energy/cosmological constant (possibly ("anti"-)branes and other sources of positive vacuum energy).

> photons are gauge bosons and thus are automatically their own antiparticle

So is W^+, but it is charged, hence not its own antiparticle. W^- should in this case be considered the antiparticle.

Well, it is a good feature of a theory. Imagine that you would have two competing theories but they give different predictions, then a measurement on those predictions would determine which is which. (If they give the same predictions, an interesting questions would be 'is there a mathematical proof that they are the same?'.)

For example with GR, it explained for example the precession of Mercury's elliptical orbit, and predicted time dilation (used now in GPS for example) and bending of light. It is true that gravity waves remains to be directly detected.

This is how physics have usually progressed in the past: Have an old theory, have some experiments not explained by that theory, invent new theory that can be reduced to the old theory and explains these new experiments and give new predictions. (The subject of string theory is somewhat different however.)

I'm not sure how to explain it in non-technical terms, but the problems of neutrinos and their mass is basically:

One is not allowed to add mass-terms to the Standard model (that is a term in the expression that explains the particle physics we know of), because they break symmetries that we know hold (gauge symmetry). So in order to add a mass-term it must be generated by a dynamical field -- the Higgs field -- such that those symmetries are still respected. Hence, the Higgs is able to give the mass-terms to the fermions.

However, the neutrinos are not like the other fermions. Fermions can have different chirality, but the neutrino only has one chirality. Due to the neutrinos being different, the Higgs field needs to be different in order to also generate mass-terms to the neutrinos (or another mechanism than the Higgs-mechanism must be used). Whatever that is, it is probable that it involves something that is beyond the Standard model.

Might be a bit technical, hopefully someone else can make it more understandable.

I have only used some of the modules that are available for SymPy. Most of them are not complete enough to use professionally, but I try to spend some time to learn them since I would prefer to use them when they get more complete -- but that's one reason why they are inferior.

At one point I was using SymPy and I wanted to invert a symbolic matrix, a rather small one but it had some off-diagonal elements. This took a few seconds in mathematica, after a few hours in SymPy I had to halt the execution of that line. I never got around to look at the code to see what caused it, probably some simple bug, but that's another reason.

I have used Sage somewhat as well. It has more features than SymPy, for what I do professionally. Still some features are missing that I would need. But this might also just be a problem of the amount of experience I have with these tools.

The last problem is that these are much slower than mathematica. I would certainly not say that I'm a good programmer, so my code is probably very slow and badly written. In mathematica I have done some calculations that take days to complete, but they were quite heavy calculations. For these projects I could in principal have used SymPy, I know it has enough features, but with how much slower it is, it would be useless (unless I was able to improve my code to compensate).

With more experience I could give more specific concerns.