TradeSports is a brilliant idea. I had thought about making a site of this nature as a startup idea and even tried a very naive implementation of it for my cis422 project (which failed miserably, btw). This was right after I read about Nassim Taleb (thanks to Prof. Hsu's blog). Taleb proposes that being an 'expert' isn't (perhaps shouldn't be) worth that much because even experts get dominated by statistics when it comes to making predictions and do no better and even worse than non-experts. (this is a good talk on the subject). After having listened/read ...

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Lecture

• Make all lecture notes available and discourage note-taking in class.
• Have lecture twice a week on UH + an informal optional session.
• Treat lecture like a discussion section during which the formalism is developed by the class. That is, I'm merely leading in the sense of determining what should be done next, not the usual instructor talks and writes derivations on the chalkboard.
• Make clear what to read before each lecture (kinda like English classes are treated).
• Encourage coming with questions. Even better, require questions.
• 5 minute quiz at the beginning of each or every other lecture (to get ...

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Thanks Zack, for pointing me to the excellent essay.

Horgan has many good points. Especially the one about diminished returns. Even if we experimentally detected extra dimensions or could verify what dark matter is, does it really matter all that much? To us who like this stuff, sure. Will it change the world the way QM did? Not so sure. But, I guess you never know. I still believe, though, that there are enough problems scientists care about to keep us busy discovering stuff for a few decades at least.

Secondly, I agree with the 'technological evangelists' that science is ...

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