Radio interference from man made sources is the biggest issue for radio telescopes in the traditional radio band. So it's not really the weather that decides, but the crappy radio skies of the UK.
Indeed, its an "Artist concept of Ganymede and Jupiter"[1], which only further highlights the pointlessness of having an collection of space images without any metadata.
Most of the examples of the brevity of the old style seem to be quite unconcerned with actual formatting. Honestly I just do simple print "Hello: " + a when I'm not too picky, and use .format when I actually want a nice output; the time of the few extra chars in format is unimportant compared to the time it takes to choose good field widths for the first time anyway, and I find the old syntax more cryptic.
Early on the author states
"the Fed is keeping them low. That’s true only in a very narrow sense."
He then proceeds to stay in this narrow sense, while explaining the theoretical framework driving the Fed's decision. While it is of course interesting to better know their reasoning, this article does not amount to a more nuanced response than "the Fed is keeping them low because the Fed thinks its best".
Personally I think that's close enough to "the Fed is keeping them low" to not really bother with the distinction.
Piketty's big contribution is the creation of time series of top wealth distribution going back to the ~1850. In the linked paper, all the time series start at 1960 at the earliest, thus dismissing most of the new empirical data.
So whatever technical merit the critique has, it doesn't seem to concern itself with the big picture results since it neglects the empirical work.
Piketty's thesis is that the concentration of wealth in the permanent upper class of the 1800's is the historical law, and that the mid-20th Century prosperity of the middle class is a historical anomaly that was created by unprecedented destruction of real property by the two world wars, and further that now that the world wars are receding into history, we are returning to the 19th Century status quo.
If post-1960 data does not show a return to the status quo, then that undermines the core of Piketty's claims. Nobody is claiming that the 19th Century had a strong middle class.
Economic and political conditions of the mid 19th century led directly to the development of ideologies that we fought wars over in the first half of the 20th century.
I've always wondered whether humanity would enter a new cycle of competing ideologies. Maybe we are...
With a discussion centered on ability, but no attempt to define this nebulous concept, it seems impossible for this argument to be "true" in any strong sense.
To begin with, this discussion is almost totally void of even the mention of education (the word not appearing once), acting like all children are objects in in the global school array, with a method called "getIntrinsicScore" that gets called a few times in their life before the are casted into adult objects.
However, a simple recollection of your time in school will tell you that not everyone was treated equally by the teacher and the other students, and also that school was a pretty big deal in your life at the time.
So to talk about the correlations in test scores of children and neglecting to mention the influence of the school is not very informed. But since the influence of a school on the test scores of a child is not particularly well understood (witness the debate on "how to fix the schools"), it is really hard to make any firm claims if you include it.
It is also remarkable how the text underlies that the gap in scores appears with age, but does not attempt to explain this observation while advocating a static theory of "ability". The author states outright that there a property fixed at birth that determines your "ability", and then always talks like "ability" and test-score are perfectly correlated.
(For effect I will here do the semantic simplification the "ability" and "test-score" are perfectly interchangeable,because if the implied perfect correlation.)
So, the thesis is that the test-scores are fixed at birth, but the author also accepts as empirical fact that the difference of test-scores appears first around puberty. This is a curious behavior for something that is "fixed". It is highly worrying that this is not addressed at all in the exposition of the theory.
A survey (published in Science[1]) of ~1800 academics across 30 disciplines in the US saw a non-significant positive correlation between estimates of how selective a department is with graduate students and the female representation in that disciplines.
In other words a field that was more selective (as measured by the proportion of applicants being admitted) might have more women in it.
This evidence is is not compatible with any reasonable prediction from the "different high tail" theory.
