forkandwait

Depending on your background, you probably don't have enough information to pick a long-term goal anyway.

I am afraid that sounds curmudgeonly, but I have also seen students shoot themselves in the foot because they decided they didn't need a class for their not very well informed goals.

I always got more from working problems on my own with an occasional consult from peers or a teacher. A danger is that you think your group sessions substitute for working problems.

Well, we disagree. Plus, taking on some crazy problem without background saps motivation as well.

I suggest you get the syllabi from a state college, and then follow that. "work through" the books : copy each page of exposition by hand, try to do the examples and proofs before looking, do all or most of the problems with answers, and get ready for a long journey.

I find a page of math textbook takes about 30 minutes (at least) to really work it over until you understand it.

Personally, I don't much like working in groups or watching video lectures. To learn math, you have to be able work problems by yourself, so you might as well just do that.

David Morin has some great self study books:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Edjmorin/book.html

I have a math BA from a regional state college, usually scored in the top 5 on the tests, and I am self teaching physics / me /ee about 5 hours per week after work.

Personally, I think this is bad advice, because without an undergrad+ background, the projects above will either be impossibly frustrating or you will make up some crackpot bullshit. Plus, the undergraduate curriculum is its own reward.

What I especially like is that he knew that public life should be full of art and personality, not just pasty faced bureaucrats who try to avoid attention.

My (poorly articulated) point is that all the non-class markers we use to oppress people - whether skin color, religion, accent, clothing style, music preferences, etc - just disguise class oppression. In the USA, I think we emphasize color in order to avoid the hard truth that society was created so that a few could fuck the many.

And I meant "white" literally, to point out the absurdity that poverty is a function of skin color as opposed to deep class organization. If light skin color is what made one rich and powerful, then Catholic Irish would be at the top. But...

Poverty is a class issue, not a race issue. Sometimes they are correlated (US cities, all of the US southeast), sometimes not (west Virginia, rural everywhere EXCEPT the southeast, everything Irish - - you can't get whiter than Irish)

It's crazy to say, but no one with a college degree takes the current president at all seriously.

A lot of Chinese organizations make stuff and sell that.

A lot of us don't really think intellectual property is actually property and thar the notion of IP is, well, bullshit.

I think you picked the only nice example of powershell in the entire universe (yuck!). Also -- guess which script is shorter....

> The big fundamental structures describing nature its working are more or less known. It's about details nowadays and it takes more time and effort to get the details right.

This (bullshit) is what they thought in the 1890s,and is why physics was considered boring, basically a dead field. Oops!

Am I the only one who considers companies like Internet pollution and hopes they all die?

> Of course, the reason we invest so much in mathematics is because it is somewhat mysteriously effective for describing the observed world.

Any particular "arbitrary formalized language of symbols" is validated by experiment, either explicitly or implicitly. Humanity/ culture keeps the string games that works and jettison the ones that don't; it is a slow, collaborative process. We have worked out a pretty good "arbitrary formalized language of symbols", but not because we derived these string games or intuited them, but rather because we test them daily.

To be a formalist doesn't imply that a person under-appreciates the mysterious power of mathematics, just that they don't believe in an underlying psuedo-Kantian "truth".

Also, as I understand it, advanced physics is necessarily done formally only, since our intuition is so ridiculous at the atomic scale and all the equations like Schrodingers are only postulated, then verified empirically.

Also, it is snarky and under-informed, but I think of this debate as Hilbert (Hilbert!) and Some Guy.

I would like something with simple functionality, where I can just specify the table name, the category column, and the data column and get a new table transposed ibto columns. I would be happy to do the aggregation outside the pivot process. PROC TRANSPOSE in SAS would be a good model.

Thanks for a perfect example of a strawman fallacy. Nobody is arguing completely independent, just free of masters

Is there a roguelike engine?

The act of clicking on links and adding bookmarks, well, just doesn't feel the same as interacting with a physical book. I think the 3 dimensionality of the book adds intuition, cues, and a coherence that are lacking in the free for all of hyperlinks.

I also think an experienced reader can navigate more quickly (yes fraction of seconds) in a physical book than possible when you have to set bookmarks and use them in some drop down system.

I would love to see a human factors study comparing hyperlink eReader versus paper book.

I think for reading fiction, ereaders are great, bascially because you read straight through and illustrations/ equations are not important.

I find for technical books, paper is far superior. The layout is much better for graphics/ equations, plus the traditional layout of a book (with some post it stickies) is optimized for easy navigation/ jumping back and forth.

One thing I miss about paper books is their three-dimensionality. If you are an experienced reader, knowing where you are in the thickness of a book is just as important for navigating the book as a whole as where you are in any given page. And I don't think the GUI bookmarks work quite as well as paper, personally.

Really, it is all about fractions of a second, but it adds up.

(Personally, I don't care about the aesthetics, feel and smell of the paper, blah blah, I just still think paper technical books win for .)

In the pnw it's because of a remarkable storm free October. The trees are progressing the same as always, but the leaves aren't getting knocked off. I think.

I think it's just the human condition.

The same can be said of private industry. True in my experience.

Nice, places, but I don't think they count as "affordable" by most standards.

I think the turn sequence in Diplomacy is actually the genius of it, and I am surprised it isn't incorporated into more boardgames.

They are tech, just not silicon valley tech. More engineers per capita in Michigan etc.,etc.

There should be an international Learn SQL day, with free all day workshops by volunteers, etc. Maybe on the date of one of the first big Codd papers or something...

Slightly on topic: when giving unsolicited tech career advice, my favorite trope is "learn sql". Don't have any computer background? Start with SQL. Already write compilers for living but don't know SQL? Of course you should learn sql. A www dev who is tied to ORMs? Learn SQL. A manager who wants to understand the IT that runs your department? Yep, SQL. Etc, etc. SQL is probably the most ubiquitous language under hood today.

So why not pure SQL, which everyone knows already?

I taught myself atmega328 C programming in a breadboard blinking led context last year and thought that was a wonderful learning experience. I sort of knew C, and didn't get much pointer practice, but it was great nevertheless.

Also, Stevens Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment is a great book to work through.