For more fiction, how about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, which Publisher's Weekly summarized as "Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched."
It has math problems scattered throughout.
Actually, I did a co-op (for which I received somewhat useless credit from my university) which sent me to Europe and Africa to do some computer work. They were specifically looking for a single person to do this, and it wasn't a common opportunity in my experience, but I jumped at the chance.
The following summer, I took part of the summer off from my required courses. For some courses, our short summer semester was divided in two, and in the first 6 weeks I took an outstanding gen-ed course, and in the second 6 weeks I went on a study abroad trip to Italy and studied Italian and Renaissance art, neither of which I had studied before or had a prior interest in. We studied at an Italian University from Monday to Friday (sometimes Thursday) and traveled around on the weekends, and then the last week was spent traveling full time.
That was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, and the irrelevant-to-my-degree but relevant-to-my-travels courses served as a nice break from my beloved 1's and 0's and greatly enriched the experience.
In short, I highly recommend finding a way to study abroad, even if it delays your graduation briefly.
You will need to do some tuning with a tool like Gimpel's PC-Lint, so it's best to use it from the get-go rather than try to start linting part way through or at the end of your project. Then you do some initial setup and make minor tweaks as you go, so the tuning process is not at all painful. Many tools, like PC-Lint, also integrate into IDEs like Visual Studio, and some have free add-on programs like ALOA (http://pera-software.com/htm/english/aloa.htm) which analyzes the output of PC-Lint to generate some metrics for the quality of the code.
I have found such tools to be invaluable. I had code like this:
class Lock {/*...*/};
void Foo( Mutex& m )
{
Lock(m);
//...
}
This is valid syntax, but I intended to use that lock instance for the duration of the function, so the first line should have read "Lock lock(m);". Multithreading is tricky enough, and I looked at the real code for a long while, reading right over this bug. PC-Lint found it for me right away (thankfully, it was already tuned, and I should have been using it before running my code).
But even though PC-Lint is pretty good, it ain't perfect. I have found that it has some trouble with advanced C++ templates (e.g., policy-based design). I have submitted bug reports for many of these problems, and they do seem responsive in working them in to the patches.
Finally, here's an article from 2006 discussing the available static analysis available tools for C, C++, and Java and describing how and why to integrate it into your development process.
I supplied this story to/., and I'd like to note that the title of the WSJ article is somewhat misleading since the researcher was concerned with medical studies, not science in general. (That is not to say, however, that some of the same problems of non-replication and unintentional data manipulation don't exist in other disciplines. However, one cannot draw conclusions on those fields from this work.) Also the global warming tag, which has now been removed, was not added by me and was inappropriate for the same reason.
A measure of character is how you act when nobody is watching. Do you want a child that knows he shouldn't be looking at midgets with horses porn, and keeps his own activity in check? Or do you want a child that you have to keep in check using technological measures?
In many cases, I agree that it is best to allow your child the freedom to do right or wrong and reap the consequences. However, in some cases where the consequences of doing the wrong thing can be grave or the wrong very difficult to avoid, I think it's perfectly right to take away the choice. For instance, you don't want to allow your toddler the freedom to run into the street to learn the hard way that cars hurt, and if I can't control my spending habits, it's not going too far to cut up the credit cards to make it harder to do wrong.
Besides, sometimes we all need help and support to do what is right. St. Paul himself said, "I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing." So if one takes the view that porn is always wrong (degrading to women, midgets, and horses, inveigling of men, offensive to God, whatever) and if one recognizes that it is still alluring to those who believe it to be wrong, I don't see a problem with helping them avoid it by technological means.
Of course, technology should not be a substitute for good parenting, but an aid to it.
Libertarianism at root has two planks: minimal government involvement in the economy (allowing the market to regulate itself) and minimal government involvement in private lives (allowing people to regulate themselves). Each of these has some appeal to intelligent people (nerds) because of their own self-interest.
The Car Talk guys once said that many driving rules are only for people who don't know what they're doing. While they were half joking, there's a kernel of truth to be found there. Perhaps we could rephrase to say that rules exist to keep dumb people from hurting themselves and others. Nerds are by definition smart, and therefore in many circumstances, behavioral restrictions intended to protect against dumb people serve to hinder nerds' freedoms.
Many nerds want to manage their own lives because they believe they are smart enough to do it themselves and think they can do it better. They want to allow the "invisible hand" to raise up those who are independent and resourceful enough to do the same and allow those who are dumb to be pushed down, rather than having the government push down the resourceful folks (themselves included) and lift up the incompetent.
Likewise, they want to let the forces of economics regulate the marketplace (excepting corruption, monopolizing, etc.). In theory, this will allow the best to rise to the top and the consumer to get the best prices, all thanks to competition.
The problems with this view, in my opinion, are that it is too dispassionate toward our fellow human beings, particularly those who are not as gifted as nerds (with power and smarts comes responsibility, as Uncle Ben said), and pure capitalism seems just as dangerous. There has to be some synthesis with socialism, or the society will fail.
For instance, take school vouchers. Everyone wants universal education (at least up to a point), and indeed a democratic republic demands that its voting citizens be educated. The libertarian idea is to let the market promote the good schools and drive bad ones out of "business." The problem is that special needs kids get overlooked in such a scheme, and the kids at the bottom end up with little chance to make their way out and only have a choice between bad and worse -- exacerbating the social problem. I'm not offering a better solution here (that wasn't the question), but just offering an example of how I think libertarian policy can neglect the weaker elements of society in harmful ways to society as a whole.
Amen. Her sermonic style was just too much for me in Atlas as well as Fountainhead. If you want to write an essay, write an essay, not an essay thinly disguised as a narrative.
Slashdot Mirror
For more fiction, how about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, which Publisher's Weekly summarized as "Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched." It has math problems scattered throughout.
Do what I did and take a summer off.
Actually, I did a co-op (for which I received somewhat useless credit from my university) which sent me to Europe and Africa to do some computer work. They were specifically looking for a single person to do this, and it wasn't a common opportunity in my experience, but I jumped at the chance.
The following summer, I took part of the summer off from my required courses. For some courses, our short summer semester was divided in two, and in the first 6 weeks I took an outstanding gen-ed course, and in the second 6 weeks I went on a study abroad trip to Italy and studied Italian and Renaissance art, neither of which I had studied before or had a prior interest in. We studied at an Italian University from Monday to Friday (sometimes Thursday) and traveled around on the weekends, and then the last week was spent traveling full time.
That was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, and the irrelevant-to-my-degree but relevant-to-my-travels courses served as a nice break from my beloved 1's and 0's and greatly enriched the experience.
In short, I highly recommend finding a way to study abroad, even if it delays your graduation briefly.
I have found such tools to be invaluable. I had code like this:
// ...
class Lock {/*...*/};
void Foo( Mutex& m )
{
Lock(m);
}
This is valid syntax, but I intended to use that lock instance for the duration of the function, so the first line should have read "Lock lock(m);". Multithreading is tricky enough, and I looked at the real code for a long while, reading right over this bug. PC-Lint found it for me right away (thankfully, it was already tuned, and I should have been using it before running my code).
But even though PC-Lint is pretty good, it ain't perfect. I have found that it has some trouble with advanced C++ templates (e.g., policy-based design). I have submitted bug reports for many of these problems, and they do seem responsive in working them in to the patches.
Finally, here's an article from 2006 discussing the available static analysis available tools for C, C++, and Java and describing how and why to integrate it into your development process.
FWIW, the op-ed referenced discussed the notion of "non-overlapping magisteria", which you describe here.
I haven't found the "New Scientist" reference this article cites, but I did find another, better article on the subject: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/09/21/sciuni121.xml
I supplied this story to /., and I'd like to note that the title of the WSJ article is somewhat misleading since the researcher was concerned with medical studies, not science in general. (That is not to say, however, that some of the same problems of non-replication and unintentional data manipulation don't exist in other disciplines. However, one cannot draw conclusions on those fields from this work.) Also the global warming tag, which has now been removed, was not added by me and was inappropriate for the same reason.
In many cases, I agree that it is best to allow your child the freedom to do right or wrong and reap the consequences. However, in some cases where the consequences of doing the wrong thing can be grave or the wrong very difficult to avoid, I think it's perfectly right to take away the choice. For instance, you don't want to allow your toddler the freedom to run into the street to learn the hard way that cars hurt, and if I can't control my spending habits, it's not going too far to cut up the credit cards to make it harder to do wrong.
Besides, sometimes we all need help and support to do what is right. St. Paul himself said, "I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing." So if one takes the view that porn is always wrong (degrading to women, midgets, and horses, inveigling of men, offensive to God, whatever) and if one recognizes that it is still alluring to those who believe it to be wrong, I don't see a problem with helping them avoid it by technological means.
Of course, technology should not be a substitute for good parenting, but an aid to it.
Libertarianism at root has two planks: minimal government involvement in the economy (allowing the market to regulate itself) and minimal government involvement in private lives (allowing people to regulate themselves). Each of these has some appeal to intelligent people (nerds) because of their own self-interest.
The Car Talk guys once said that many driving rules are only for people who don't know what they're doing. While they were half joking, there's a kernel of truth to be found there. Perhaps we could rephrase to say that rules exist to keep dumb people from hurting themselves and others. Nerds are by definition smart, and therefore in many circumstances, behavioral restrictions intended to protect against dumb people serve to hinder nerds' freedoms.
Many nerds want to manage their own lives because they believe they are smart enough to do it themselves and think they can do it better. They want to allow the "invisible hand" to raise up those who are independent and resourceful enough to do the same and allow those who are dumb to be pushed down, rather than having the government push down the resourceful folks (themselves included) and lift up the incompetent.
Likewise, they want to let the forces of economics regulate the marketplace (excepting corruption, monopolizing, etc.). In theory, this will allow the best to rise to the top and the consumer to get the best prices, all thanks to competition.
The problems with this view, in my opinion, are that it is too dispassionate toward our fellow human beings, particularly those who are not as gifted as nerds (with power and smarts comes responsibility, as Uncle Ben said), and pure capitalism seems just as dangerous. There has to be some synthesis with socialism, or the society will fail.
For instance, take school vouchers. Everyone wants universal education (at least up to a point), and indeed a democratic republic demands that its voting citizens be educated. The libertarian idea is to let the market promote the good schools and drive bad ones out of "business." The problem is that special needs kids get overlooked in such a scheme, and the kids at the bottom end up with little chance to make their way out and only have a choice between bad and worse -- exacerbating the social problem. I'm not offering a better solution here (that wasn't the question), but just offering an example of how I think libertarian policy can neglect the weaker elements of society in harmful ways to society as a whole.
Amen. Her sermonic style was just too much for me in Atlas as well as Fountainhead. If you want to write an essay, write an essay, not an essay thinly disguised as a narrative.