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That's a bold prediction. It would mean finishing ahead of three of: Liverpool, Man City, Spurs, Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal.
Everton do look to be a good team this season, but top four is a real stretch, I don't think it's likely. They've made a good start, and have some good players... but I'm not convinced they have the strength in depth to maintain that position over the course of a whole season.

I tried to get around this by giving details to a couple of (very close) relatives who rarely meet one another, so are unlikely to be in the same place at the same time should some horrible event occur. Of course we can never really be 100% sure of anything happening or not happening in the future, so I went with 90% in the poll.

I thought Juve would win, too, even without Ronaldo. With all the chaos at Barcelona and the loss of some good players, and Messi being kept there against his will, and against the backdrop of that disastrous Bayern result last season, it's easy to see them as a team in freefall that has no chance of competing against the best teams in Europe... but that's clearly not the case, even when they are poor there is still a strong team there.

I'd be skeptical, too. If you were genuinely running no house edge, surely you'd need a phenomenal amount of advertising revenue to offset your risks? If you are actually running 0% on all games, then how for example do you cover yourself on something that's pure luck, such as roulette? To run 0% you need the house to play better than the player does, over the long-term. In pure luck games it's straight flow through - it's pure luck if the casino makes any money or not.

The relationship between Vettel and Ferrari broke down a while ago. He just has to see out his (extremely lucrative) contract now. He is disappointed in the company, they are disappointed in him. But we are nearing the end of the season now, and I can't see that Vettel's motivation - or the motivation of the team to help him - will improve. Both are just running down the clock until they can move on.

From an outsider's perspective, they're both right. Ferrari this season has a poor car. But Vettel has been disappointing too. The crucial factor though is that in the past couple of years Ferrari have had a car that's right up there with Mercedes, but Vettel hasn't been good or consistent enough to challenge. So forgetting this season and looking further back to when this all started... I have more sympathy for Ferrari than for Vettel.

I think that's a myth perpetuated by the rich. Don't tax us, or else we'll leave! I'm not convinced that in practice they do move. There are costs involved in moving, particularly away from what is their current favoured location, and there's no guarantee that the next place they move to will be low tax forever.
If no-one taxes the rich, it creates a 'race to the bottom' situation where jurisdictions are falling over themselves to offer better and better terms. It's not a viable long-term answer.

Probably something where:

There is equality of opportunity, with no inbuilt advantages for certain types of people;
Advancement and success are based on merit, talent, and hard work;
Taxation is truly progressive: billionaires pay higher % tax than millionaires, and millionaires pay higher % than those below them, etc.;
Leader's decisions are made with long-term success in mind;
Media are are held properly accountable for misleading and untrue statements;
Leaders are accountable for their actions, and can be removed/replaced democratically.

It does add a huge element of unpredictability. We might think that individual sports might be worst affected, but obviously team sports can be as well because the players are together, and once one contracts the virus it can sweep through the whole squad very quickly. As well as impacting results, there can of course also be a huge financial effect - the Champions League being an example, particularly once it reaches the knock-out stages, where one bad result can end your participation. If your squad gets the virus just before an important match, it can mean being knocked out and receiving no more Champions League revenue for the season.

There's a difference between automation of physical tasks and automation of mental tasks. You can look at an advanced humanoid robot, like one of the Boston Dynamics creations, and think yes it can walk and run and jump, but it has no mental skills. The thing is, research into the automation of mental tasks doesn't require building a humanoid robot with motor skills... it's a separate thing. There are already extremely advanced automated processes that are customised for individuals, and that are already embedded in everyday life. Log into Amazon and look at your recommendations, for example.

Being a mathematician doesn't help increase the odds of winning - because it's a lottery. All that you can do is to maximise your share of any jackpot by picking numbers that other people don't pick.

Yes, I think so. Unless all proceeds from lottery ticket sales (minus small admin costs) are fed back into supporting the poor, then it's definitely exploitative. It's selling a dream, and a way out, but taking care not to emphasise just how phenomenally unlikely you are to win.

I should have been clearer, sorry. You're talking about a curved path in three dimensions. I'm talking about a straight line in three dimensions, but with curvature applied through an inaccessible fourth dimension.

We can only conceive of three spatial dimensions, so have to proceed by analogy using one dimension fewer. If you travel direct - the shortest distance - between two points P and Q on the surface of a sphere, you are travelling in a straight line, d... but that line curves through three dimensional space. The equivalent straight line in three dimensional space, C, cuts through the surface of the Earth. You can see below that if your straight-line travel 'd' continues (the dotted black line) you end up approaching your starting point from the opposite direction.



This is what I mean - if (disregarding expansion) you travel directly 'up' into the air and then into space from the Earth's north pole, then if you continue in this straight line, eventually you would see the Earth's south pole coming into view above you. Same as if you travelled due East on Earth - eventually you'd arrive back at your starting point, from the West... same thing but one dimension higher.

Imagine the universe as the three dimensional surface of a four dimensional hypersphere. A straight line across a three dimensional volume returns to its starting point from the opposite direction, if that three dimensional volume is the 'surface' of a 4 dimensional hypersphere. We can do the 'd' journey, but we can't do the 'C' journey because our travel within the universe is restricted to the three dimensional 'surface', we can't tunnel through the fourth dimension.

Gravity, yes, can be conceived of as a higher dimension, in the sense that it can be explained not as an attractive force, but as a curvature of spacetime. For simplicity I think we should consider this a separate topic, because it is distinct from the 'straight line across a thing that is one dimension higher' argument, which holds regardless of gravity.

Yes. The ease with which he dispatched of Bottas was very revealing. He won by almost half a minute. He has the best car, but so does Bottas. Over one lap in qualifying, there's not much between them. In a race the story is very different. Hamilton is able to consistently hit good lap times, in a way that Bottas can't. He can manage his tyres better, which was a factor in the simple overtake today. He's better in the wet. He makes fewer mistakes.

A few laps in, and we had Bottas leading with Hamilton a couple of seconds back. Everyone knew what would happen: Hamilton would close in, pressure Bottas - who may or may not make a mistake - but regardless, Hamilton would likely pass him. But once Hamilton had passed, that was it, end of race - barring some anomaly like bad pit stop, rain, safety car. There is almost zero chance of Bottas attacking and passing Hamilton and holding him at bay in a race situation.

Not necessarily. In fact it is simpler if it has no spatial edge - a finite but unbounded universe, where if - in theory - you travel in any direction in a straight line, you end up approaching your starting point*. Finite unbounded is the simplest shape - consider walking around the edge of a circle, it has no end, but has finite extent. This is one dimensional travel in a two dimensional space. Increase dimensionality by one, and you have the surface of a sphere - the surface of the Earth, finite yet without an edge, travel in any direction in a straight line and you end up approaching your starting point from the other side. This is two dimensional travel in a three dimensional space. Now increase dimensionality by one again, and consider the three dimensional 'surface' of a four dimensional space, a hypersphere, and you have the simplest possible shape for the observable universe. For simplicity this ignores any curled up additional dimensions as we see for example in string theory.

The analogy makes even more sense if we consider the established fact that the universe is expanding. This doesn't mean it is just accumulating more 'space' at the edges, rather space is expanding at every point. The common illustration (in one fewer dimensions) is the surface of a balloon - draw on some dots to represent galaxies, then start to blow the balloon up. The surface gets bigger, and every point on the surface moves away from every other point.


_{*In theory. But in practice this is an expanding universe, and even travelling at maximum possible speed c, it is difficult to ever return to your starting point because it would have expanded away from you.}

Bitcoin - and blockchain in general - is often lauded for its anonymity. What is sometimes forgotten is that it is also an immutable and publicly available record. If you ever withdraw to a bank account or submit KYC on an exchange, it becomes trivial for governments to determine your identity and to link this to your tax submissions. Pay your taxes, people! Don't get caught out years from now by a government demand for huge retrospective tax payments.

I'd not heard of that. I've just had a quick look, but I'm not remotely convinced by this theory. I don't want to be rude, but it reads like something out of the flat earth thread. It has zero evidence to support its claims, and disregards established and experimentally verifiable and reproducible physical laws and phenomena. It's also vague, which is a huge red flag in anything purporting to be scientific: Electricity is real! Therefore the big bang is false! This is patently nonsensical. It's almost as if someone started from a supposition that the big bang didn't happen, then scrambled some random pseudo-science and buzzwords together and said: here's why it didn't happen!

It's fine to want something to be true or false, but in order for it to be taken seriously it needs to be supported by a solid theoretical and ideally experimental framework, and - more than anything else - it needs to built from mathematics.

Not so easy, it was very close. One key takeaway from qualifying for me is the similarity between Hamilton and Verstappen, and how they differ to Bottas. The standard approach is to have an 'out lap' to get the tyres in the right window, before going for the qualifying lap. However this time around, both Hamilton and Verstappen - independently of one another - decided the conditions meant that having 2 warm up laps might be better... which they both did, which led to Hamilton securing pole and Verstappen being right on their tails.
Note that Bottas was ahead of Hamilton in practices and qualifying sessions right up until the final attempt at the end of Q3 when it really mattered. The difference for Hamilton and Verstappen in this instance is that they both had a better and more nuanced understanding of conditions than Bottas did, and that 2 lap warm up paid dividends.

There's an inevitable discrepancy between the stuff that people enjoy doing, and the stuff that needs doing. This is why it is difficult for many people to find jobs that match their perfect desires. Fortunately a career is not the only source of meaning in life, and for many people is not even the major source of meaning. We are defined through our actions, and our interactions with others... this is not limited to work.

Ultimately from a genetic perspective the purpose of life is the continuation of life... which suggests another source of purpose: family and children.

Maybe. You can't do much with it other than just hold it, so it's kind of pointless... but I'm tempted just because this is a big mainstream company dipping their toes into crypto, and I want it to be a success so that they expand on this and allow buying and selling using bitcoin. Overall I do think this development is positive news, and we should welcome it. Mainstream integration starts with small steps, this is one.

No, I don't think so. The position this year determines the work you can do next year.

https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.how-f1s-new-sliding-scale-aero-testing-rules-work-and-what-impact-they-will.pn0sG8N4A0cjbNRbdYx8a.html

The rules will be implemented in 2021, but are based on the previous season. The 2021 allocation is based on where teams finish this year. Of course there is the question of whether testing done in 2021 is for the improvement of the 2021 car - which will by that point already exist and be racing - or whether it's for the development of the 2022 car. But the work is definitely based on the previous season, not two seasons ago.