Indeed, Jamaica doesn't have strong anti-doping organizations and Bolt has teammates caught doping. I'd love to believe Bolt is clean, but I find it hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Same here. I really tried to believe that Carl Lewis was not doping, as he was one of my heroes as I grew up, but as the time passes I realize that he was most certainly doping. The same will probably happen to today's kids who grow up with Usain Bolt being their idol.
Keep in mind weightlifting has weight classes, so getting bigger muscles by taking lots of steroids is partially offset by moving up a weight class. Steroids can make small guys big, but big guys are expected to lift that much more.
Given the limits of what the human body can do within a weight class, a 10% boost in your total for the same weight class is huge. The article saying it's "modest" I think is misleading: while it's true 10% is small on an absolute scale, it's huge on a competitive scale.
To give an idea how overwhelming doping is on weightlifting performance, the IWF reset all the records in 1992 and again in 1998 as the old world records were essentially unbeatable as drug testing got better.
I tend to agree with GP that this is suspiciously simple. I've only skimmed it, but the novel part of the proof appears to only be Thm 5-6 which is less than 10 pages, and it's not especially dense writing. So this would be a relatively simple proof. Moreover, the technique used appears to be rather incremental over known techniques, so it's surprising it would be strong enough to prove PvNP which is so far away from the frontier of known techniques.
The known technique was a proof of an exponential lower bound on something extremely similar to an NP-complete problem. That moved the frontier of known techniques a lot closer to P vs NP.
Interesting that this is the second P!=NP proof from a University of Bonn researcher. Other one, by Mathias Hauptmann, is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04781
I never did hear the status of Hauptmann's proof (I'm not connected to academia so only know what I've read on the internet), but given it's been over a year without word, presumably there's something flawed.
I might not get too excited over this proof, either, until another member of the TCS community can vouch for it. There have been many serious-looking attempts at PvNP that turn out to have fundamental flaws.
Also interesting: if you look at the acknowledgements of Hauptmann's paper (at the end, just before references), he says, "I would like to thank Norbert Blum for carefully reading preliminary versions of the paper, for helpful remarks and discussions, for his guidance and patience and for being my mentor." This means Blum knew about this past attempt and presumably thought it correct enough to put on arXiv. I assume from the current paper that he has changed his mind since then.
If I could go back in time to my teenage self and give one piece of advice, it would be to do heavy squats. They're that good.
Though I'm not athletic by any competitive standards, being physically active has always been important to my health and well-being. I've tried a pretty good variety of sports and activities, and of everything I've tried, strength training--squats in particular--have had the best cost/benefit. Doesn't bother my joints and very few (if any) injuries. Doesn't take much time to get an intense workout done. Good for maintaining flexibility, especially after programming at a desk all day long. Fills my body with youthful hormones.
YMMV, but for me, squats are the best thing I've ever discovered for exercise.
Me too (not just squats, but getting getting strong).
Only started in my very late twenties, and it solved all sorts of niggles I had (occasional aches in one of my knees and ankle). It's improved my balance and I also noticed I no longer roll my ankles.
I'm now a few years in, in my mid-thirties and in the best shape of my life.
I also found the continual improvement aspect of training leaked into the rest of my life. Made me think hard about the other aspects of my life, what I was working towards and what I was doing to get there.
Start with Ripptoe's novice program and you'll see yourself do more than you thought possible.
One thing I would advise to those starting out from a completely untrained state, is take it slow, your muscles get stronger much faster than your tendons. And tendons also heal much slower than muscles, and if you screw them up bad, they may not actually recover at all on their own. Be aware that the quick initial progress will slow down. Take it slow and steady from there on out. Let your body deal with the load on its own timeline.
Agreed but you gotta get the form down. I'd say start with air squats, kettle bell squats, then work your way up. Plenty of ways to build up your stamina without putting heavy weight on your shoulders.
Should've specified. Meant more around the lines that you can build a strong lower body without back squats, and that you can learn proper form (keep chest tight, don't round your back etc) without putting a barbell on your shoulders.
For me, I hit a PR of 405 for one rep on squats in my early 20s with likely bad form. Couple weeks later, did a warmup set w/ a quality belt and felt a pull in my back.
3 years later, I'm foam rolling/modified yoga every morning and night to keep the 3mm separations on every disc from causing me massive pain.
Tl;dr version - don't gotta jump into heavy back squats and don't ego lift, slow and steady or you will pay the price.
No, this is not the approach at any of the large banks.
It's not the fine that kills you. It's when your customers lose your trust and no one trades with you any more. Goldman has a ton of competitors in all their businesses that would pounce on any angle they could use to lure away customers. Committing fraud, etc, is a quick way to lose all your customers.
Plus the SEC and other regulators have a lot of political pressure to nail the big banks for any misbehavior.
Big banks are paranoid about these things and have huge compliance departments to minimize the chance of anything going wrong with a regulator.
Research and trading have strong information barriers, to avoid just the sort of thing you're suggesting. Banks enforce this very seriously. Search for "Global Analyst Research Settlement" if you want the history.
The thing about this approach--where you learn by assimilation rather than structured study--is that it you need to have amazing intuition for it to work. One of the benefits of structured study is gradually building intuition of the definitions and theorems. For someone of Scholze's caliber, the intuition is already there before any study. Structured study of linear algebra probably wouldn't have done much for him other than assigns names to theorems and definitions that he already intuitively understands.
I might make an analogy to studying music: for the majority of people, it takes a lot of structured study to develop a good ear (i.e. being able to write down melodies and harmony after hearing it). For example, you'll study intervals, chords, and inversions, and extensive practice identifying them on hearing--just as you learn theorems and definitions in math class and do problem sets to practice applying them. But some people innately have a very good ear (e.g. perfect pitch) and don't need a course to teach them to identify intervals and chords. Even though they might not yet know the names of chords and intervals, they already "understand" them.
While I generally agree with your point, it's hard to make this into law. Do you think it should be illegal to have a company with only 1 programmer? If not, how do you prevent them from making catastrophic mistakes?
Law generally doesn't prevent catastrophic mistakes, it creates consequences for them which incentivizes those in a position to make them to find ways of preventing them.
