They don't need to pay the editors a thing. The editors just need to have been early adopters. You can bet your bottom bitcoin that anyone raving about it has a stash of them saved up.

Actually it does, but by half the amount predicted by general relativity. This was known to Cavendish in the late eighteenth century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Deflection_of_light_by_the_Sun

Have you ever met someone who is *actually* autistic? Not someone who has Asperger's and is socially awkward, but someone who has the full-blown condition?

When I was in secondary school, we took a course where we interacted with autistic people on a day-to-day basis. Autistic people can not be expected to care for themselves in any way. Forget taking advanced maths. It's a hard slog to get these guys washed and dressed every day.

I think both the OP and the GP are romanticising the condition. Yes, sometimes people on the so-called autistic spectrum have "sitzenfleich" - the ability to sit down and slog through difficult technical material, day after day, hour after hour. Don't count on it though. In general, it's just a very sad condition that limits a person's ability to understand and communicate with others.

Ardra's return is imminent! It's the only way to explain the quakes!

On the other hand, using this method, you can only ever draw with any strategy - including rock-rock-rock-rock-....
With this in mind, is it really the best strategy?

I guess the point is that people tend to deviate from this strategy and the computer can take advantage of those deviations.

I would be very interested to know how the learning algorithm works. Given that the program is taking advantage of your deviations from the 1/3-1/3-1/3 strategy, it follows that the computer is itself deviating from that strategy. Therefore there should be some strategy that beats the computer on average.

I guess you could continue this reasoning ad infinitum, but I would say that the meta-meta-meta strategies would converge to 1/3-1/3-1/3 pretty quickly.

There's no way Assange or anyone internet-related will get it after the North African uprisings. Mohamed Bouazizi might have got it if he hadn't died.

Erdos offered many prizes for the solution of problems that he thought were difficult or out of reach of the mathematics of his time. These prizes were sometimes huge, worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of US dollars in today's money.

Erdos used to joke that he would get in trouble for violating minimum wage laws.

There's a brilliant historical example of this. G.H. Hardy, one of the foremost mathematicians of his day, once gave number theory and general relativity as examples of mathematical disciplines that were interesting in their own right, but which were unlikely to ever produce anything useful. Nowadays, relativity underpins the GPS system, and number theory provides the basis for a large amount of cryptography.

It just goes to show that you never can tell...

Facebook has five hundred million users. Is each user really worth a hundred dollars? Facebook is going public soon. What are the chances that this 'leaked' report is designed to pump up the stock, and therefore Goldman's profit?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair

The hard sciences aren't immune to this kind of thing either. The Bogdanov affair wasn't as serious as the Sokal affair, but it's still in the same ball park.

Would it be correct to call Marion Barry, former mayor of Washington, a cracktivist?

Sounds like they got back-traced. Consequences will never be the same.