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in that the universe seemingly must exist for us to perceive it

Specific intelligence are apparently limited by many things whether the size of the brain/processor, or the materials it is made of, or the amount of energy to run it. But more than that, the though processes seem to be shaped by some combination of evolutionary pressures and chance (or possibly even design, like if we are living in a simulation). So, an extension of what you are suggesting is that all those shaping forces in some sense may limit the kind of ideas we can have about the universe as well as the questions we might think to ask about everything. I wrote my undergrad thesis in Psychology related to this topic in 1985 called "Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, and Model".

A related book from a database perspective:
"Data and Reality" by William Kent
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxr...
"Data and Reality illustrates extensively the pitfalls of any simplistic attempts to capture reality as data in the sense of todayâ(TM)s database systems. The approach taken by the author is one which very logically and carefully delineates the facets of reality being represented in an information system, and also describes the data processing models used in such systems. The linguistic, semantic, and philosophical problems of describing reality are comprehensively examined⦠The depth of discussion of these concepts, as they impact on information systems, is not likely to be found elsewhere.⦠the value of this book resides in its critical, probing approach to the difficulties of modeling reality in typical information systems... it is very well written and should prove both enjoyable and enlightening to a careful reader. -ACM Computing Reviews, August 1980"

There are other possible implications as well if we are living in a simulation -- although it is still possible we may live in the simulation but our minds could also not be of it (like a human can play a video game without the video game simulating the player's mind).

BTW, "TheLink", thanks for the link to the Zimbabwe 100 Trillion Dollar Bill Banknote 2008" at Amazon. I just bought a few such notes for home education and to give away. :-)

It is unfortunate the solutions to Zimbabwe's economic problems on this Wikipedia page do not include other possibilities of improving the subsistence, give, and planned parts of the Zimbabwe economy, or creating LETS systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe

The Wikipedia page on Zimbabwe talks about problems in Zimbabwe with lack of transparency and corruption. It just goes to show that any token is meaningless without some sort of democratically-accountable or otherwise generally-agreed-upon way of defining what it means. That goes the same for bank notes as twitter hash tags. So you are right to be concerned, but that does not mean the issue can not be managed in practice most of the time (at least until we fully transition to a post-scarcity economy where rationing via ration unit tokens like fiat dollars is not very important in practice, similar to how the USA does not generally ration access to public library drinking water fountains). See also on symbols and meanings:
"Data and Reality"
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
And on post-scarcity economics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

Still, as you point out, those Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar banknotes still can be useful in various ways. So, their symbolic meaning may just be different than the original printers intended. :-)

But that example does not mean all printed materials have no meaning depending on the social context. Clearly, LETS dollars can have useful value in local areas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system
"LETS can help revitalise and build community by allowing a wider cross-section of the community -- individuals, small businesses, local services and voluntary groups -- to save money and resources in cooperation with others and extend their purchasing power. Other benefits may include social contact, health care, tuition and training, support for local enterprise and new businesses. One goal of this approach is to stimulate the economies of economically depressed towns that have goods and services, but little official currency: the LETS scheme does not require outside sources of income as stimulus."

Realistically, there are hundreds of trillions of US dollars in the US financial system in various ways (including derivatives and future obligations). Printing even another 15 trillion (the US annual GDP) would likely have little effect overall if, say, the money went to invest in improved infrastructure., education, preventive health care, sustainable energy, rethinking national security to be mutual and intrinsic, and general scientific R&D (including on fusion energy and agricultural robotics) which all would increase the value of the USA as an ongoing community. China has already been doing some of that with great success. I'm suggesting it could do even more to even more success.

More on all of lots of other alternatives here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Expecations in our global society are changing. TFA about expectations rising in China is just part of all that. It is hard to predict where those rising expectations will lead us. Maybe the asteroids and then stars?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/22/space-mining-gold-asteroids

With space craft powered by LENR (aka cold fusion)?

I'd agree with Joe_Dragon that apprenticeships can make a lot of sense. Your post makes me think about something else, putting a few factoids together in a new way. I'm thinking, speculating a bit from what I saw in academia the 1970s and 1980s, that there was a time, decades ago (like before the 1970s) when academia was growing so fast (exponentially) that people from industry without PhDs or much anything beyond real knowledge could become well-respected reasonably-paid teachers (unlike today's somewhat disrespected and poorly-paid adjuncts). In the 1970s, exponential growth of academia stopped (as David Goodstein points out). So, at that point, there came a glut of PhDs on the market with few job prospects since academia kept churning them out at a rate appropriate for exponential growth that was no longer happening. Working conditions for most new faculty plummeted (supply and demand). It became impossible to get even a mediocre college teaching job without a PhD (or at least a Masters for lesser schools). So, academia over the last couple decades became staffed with *only* academics with little real-world life experience which it generated internally. The two-way interchange between industry and academia became essentially one-way, academia to industry. Add to this in the USA the loss of the family farm, loss of good hands-on union mechanical/electrical jobs with apprenticeships, the expansion of the school year, and the increase of opaque black boxes in industry, and the result is few entering academia had any practical non-academic experience or had any way of getting any (like by summer jobs). This of course is all a bit of an over-simplification, yet is may explain why courses are less useful now? References:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

More links here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

See also my: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

Bottom line: most real education is "self-directed education", whether it is in the garden, in the shop, in the library, or in the "classroom". However, self-directed does not mean we do not learn much from other people, whether face-to-face or through their writings or recordings. Thus, you learned from people who wrote the textbooks, even if the "teacher" you say regularly face-to-face may have had little to offer.

You may be beyond this, but this is probably a good way to learn computing almost from the ground up these days:
http://www.nand2tetris.org/

Or one can build programmable computers from Redstone in Minecraft? :-)

It sounds like anyone who teaches optimization by teaching assembly probably does not know much about optimization, since assembly is just a distraction from it, especially given today's compilers can generally write better assembly for most CPUs than most programmers ever could. The real optimization challenges are in algorithms, thinking about prioritization of values and managing complexity (of both data and implementations)...

Nand-to-Tetris is a bottom up book. "Data and Reality" by William Kent is a complementary book that is in-a-sense top-down:
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm

I'd also recommend playing around with Forth (or a latter day equivalent like "Joy") to get a good sense of factoring problem well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language)

My kid st

http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
"Data and Reality illustrates extensively the pitfalls of any simplistic attempts to capture reality as data in the sense of today's database systems. ... the value of this book resides in its critical, probing approach to the difficulties of modeling reality in typical information systems... it is very well written and should prove both enjoyable and enlightening to a careful reader. -ACM Computing Reviews, August 1980"

And also:
http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2003/Kent01/EML2003Kent01.html
"The identity problem is intractable. To shed light on the problem, which currently is a swirl of interlocking problems that tend to get tumbled together in any discussion, we separate out the various issues so they can be rationally addressed one at a time as much as possible. We explore various aspects of the problem, pick one aspect to focus on, pose an idealized theoretical solution, and then explore the factors rendering this solution impractical. The success of this endeavor depends on our agreement that the selected aspect is a good one to focus on, and that the idealized solution represents a desirable target to try to approximate as well as we can. If we achieve consensus here, then we at least have a unifying framework for coordinating the various partial solutions to fragments of the problem. "

I thought you were going to also make a point about non-Western cultures often being less "object oriented" in their language learning (and perhaps more "relation-oriented" which I've heard in the past)...

Also, Alan Kay, who coined the term "object oriented" for Smalltalk, and said C++ was not what he had in mind, suggested later he should have used "message oriented", since message sending and processing is really at the heart of Smalltalk.

Even as a CouchDB user, I've found your comments in this thread interesting, thanks. You might also like the book "Data & Reality" by William Kent on information representation:
    http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm

I agrre with you that changing application needs is a big issue, no matter what system you use.

That said, CouchDB's easy peer-to-peer replication is still pretty neat. :-) Can you point to a FOSS SQL-based system that can easily match that specific feature?

A lot of the "benefits" of object-oriented systems had little to do directly with things like data abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance.

In the case of Smalltalk (which I do like) they had to do with:
* garbage collection
* a good set of libraries with consistently named functions
* message passing (not quite the same as objects, though usually related)
* good tools including inspectors and debuggers (where you could restart code with corrections)
* GUIs and related support
* a virtual machine
* machine-architecture independent virtual images of computing structures
* version control
* a way of naming functions with keyword syntax where the meaning of arguments was clear
* a full numerical tower including fractions as a special case of representation
* often, an event loop
* probably other good stuff

Visual Basic had some of these even without having pure objects. A language like C++ has none of these even while having objects. Which mix is better depends on the task.

Ultimately, what matters most about object-oriented programming is actually "message passing". Alan Kay has said he misnamed it. He should have called it message-oriented programming. Example:
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3265
"For me, the bottom line is that modern, mainstream OO languages have been sold to us as a bill of goods. There's really nothing "real-world" about mainstream OO. I believe Alan Kay lamented the fact that he didn't call OO message-oriented programming."

If you do real-time programming or parallel programming, with message queues and semaphores and event loops, in a way, you are doing message-oriented programming.
http://www.google.com/#q=message-oriented+programming

And here is why it is always hard to model the real world as simplistic "objects" because of various data-representation problems (including splitting and joining representations of "objects" as needs change):
"Data and Reality [Excerpts]"
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm

==== From the preface to the Second Edition of Data and Reality:

Preface to the Second Edition

Despite critical acclaim, outside of a small circle of enthusiastic readers this book has been a sleeper for over twenty years. Publishers have recently offered to market and distribute it with more vigor if I would provide a new revised edition, but I've resisted. Laziness might be seen as the excuse, but I'm beginning to realize there's a better reason.

A new revised edition would miss the point of the book. Many texts and reference works are available to keep you on the leading edge of data processing technology. That's not what this book is about. This book addresses timeless questions about how we as human beings perceive and process information about the world we operate in, and how we struggle to impose that view on our data processing machines. The concerns at this level are the same whether we use hierarchical, relational, or object-oriented information structures; whether we process data via punched-card machines or interactive graphic interfaces; whether we correspond by paper mail or e-mail; whether we shop from paper-based catalogs or the web. No matter what the technology, these underlying issues have to be understood. Failure to address these issues imperils the success of your application regardless of the tools you are using.

That's not to say the technical matrix of the book is obsolete or antiquated. The data record is still a fundamental component of the way we organize computer information. Sections of the book exploring new models including behavioral elements are precursors of object orientation.

The scope of the book extends beyond computer technology. The questions aren't so much about how we process data