When I switched my analysis to Python, I became so much more productive. And other science researchers I have known have echoed this sentiment. Even writing a C module to speed up my Python was pretty straightforward, if tedious.

Python had the fewest surprises. And debugging other people's Python is exponentially less annoying than debugging other people's Fortran or C. It's still my go-to language to get stuff done without fuss.

In Malay it's "ball red large"

Also this has been making the rounds:

https://imgur.com/a/tDzy2

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http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/05/poverty-map/

The hospital is in census tract 016300 with poverty level 58.5%

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"serfdom", "Marxism"... Let me guess: Libertarian Party propagandist.

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E.g. number of kids falling and breaking their arm will be larger, but the population is larger and medical care is better, now. So, overall, I think the risks are actually lower than when I was a kid running around unsupervised.

I don't know about the number of pedophile predators per capita, but I imagine that may be a roughly fixed proportion of the population. Kids now also have cellphones, so that's a lifeline kids never had in the past. So, I'd imagine that percentage would not really rise, either.

Numbers are made up.

Perception is not reality.

Another example: Trayvon Martin was a dark-skinned young male wearing a hoodie. Perception: he is a criminal casing the houses in order to commit a future crime. Reality: he was a kid walking home to his house.

Other examples: * Perception of the likelihood of terrorist attack, vs likelihood of dying in a fatal traffic crash.

* Perception that vaccinations cause autism, vs reality that vaccinations prevent fatal disease.

When confronted with complexity, throwing up hands is not the correct response.

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Indicative example. I was writing code to characterize the datastream from an instrument. It was a compiler of sorts: the end user could write some domain-specific language file to specify certain metadata to observe, e.g. power spectrum in a certain band, etc. These could be reused by other users so one could have a global standard for some state of the instrument. So, I decided on a hash table to store these user-written rules since it was a constant time lookup, and the characterization program ran real time while the instrument was running. Talking with a senior physicist who only wrote Fortran 77, he asked me why I didn't just use an array since "everything ends up being an array, anyway."

There are some things that one may not pick up just from practical experience.

However, you are not pushing frontiers in computer science. That's the key issue here: the physics autodidacts all think that they have an idea that can blow away several hundred years of well-tested scientific theory.

CERN and every single particle accelerator in the world can run only because Einstein's theory is taken into account.

GPS timekeeping works only because Einstein's work is taken into account.