In America, the speakers and writers are expected to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to getting the message across. I get that. It's their job. But don't you ever wonder how different your life would be if you didn't sit there passively expecting meaning to get spoon-fed to you? What ever happened to RTFM and actively wresting it out yourself?
I'm with all of you. The show is awesome and has many metaphorical layers in there. That's difficult to pull off when trying to make it realistic in tone.
I loved how the story was set up as walking up Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs. That took a lot of guts and artistic integrity, since it required a slower first season while they go through the "physiological" needs, before the needs of "safety", "love/belonging", "self-esteem", and "self-actualization". It's a story of both an individual person -- everyone has a Dr. Rush, a Col Young, a Camile Wray as impulses in their heads and body... just trying to do the right thing. It's a story about humanity in general, with the same kind of characters at play in politics. And after the turning point where the crew takes conscious control of their "destiny" was a big win. Destiny isn't as hopeless as it seems.
I guess people want entertainment value not transformative value. They want titillating adventure and "good acting" (meaning acting conforming to their fantasies). They want to numb themselves with a good beer and leave a show on in the background so they don't have to think about how much their life -- their destiny -- sucks. People will happily flock towards a flawed fandom like Star Wars -- accidentally following Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey... and then lying about it after the fact -- but not something that is too realistic in tone like SG-U.
I don't know about everyone else. I'm rooting for the home team. People are just not ready for a series like SG-U today, but maybe they will in the future.
Holy crap, maybe the main theme of Stargate Universe is so subtle, people just missed it. I thought it was subtle as a sledgehammer.
The story is about walking up Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, starting from the most fundamental need at birth: Air. Then water. Then food. Predictably, we’d expect it to progress through “safety”, “love/belonging”, “self-esteem”, and “self-actualization” and beyond. The seventh episode of Season 2 is the major turning point in walking up this tree when the crew (as it represents humanity as a whole, or a single individual) takes conscious control of their destiny.
The melodrama and the edgy anger and despair was put in context of the most incredible environment — humanity’s “destiny”. You think about your own life and what kind of petty, dark desires. How many people wake up and really think about how improbable life is? Or how most people grow up not knowing who they are, what they are here for, or feeling they really shouldn’t be here at all. And yet to continue living?
Come on people, wake up. Look deeper into the story. This is classic Robert A. Heinlein stuff, of ornery, disagreeable, petty, violent animals called humans that for all that has some incredible moments.
I have the same idea as you. I took the AP courses in high school and got my butt kicked in college. I hit Math 401, aka Differential Equations, and it hit back. I didn't have a solid understanding of the basics to really tackle diffq.
Years later, I was influenced by several things:
First was Neal Stephenson's Boroque Cycle. That novel brought home the idea that math was a tool invented to solve problems and expanded minds. The second was my growing fascination with Lisp -- specifically, MIT Scheme / SCIP. By the time I started watching the first lecture, the introduction was already echoing what I felt about calculus, that software engineering dealt with idealized machinery, much the same way calculus was tool that gives us leverage.
I chose the Schuam's Outline for Calculus and started some self-study. I had also taken AP Physics, and the teacher more or less ignored our nominal textbook and used the Schuam's Outline for Physics. Although I was able to follow the derivations on the blackboard, I retained none of it. We were assigned problems out of the Schuam's Outline, meant to be two problems per week, all handed at the end of each half-semester. There were no fancy pictures, no chatty text to wade through. It was straight up physics concepts, how the math worked, and condensed down to its essentials. And lots of problems to practice on.
Of course, I procrastinated on the assignments. The day it was due, I spent every spare break time doing as many of those problems as I could. I wasn't able to complete all of them in time, but the sheer pressure of attempting that many within a short amount of time got me to really understand the concepts and how to work the math. I had no trouble with college-level physics taught to engineering students, just the calculus that powers it.
When I picked up the Schuam's Outline for Calculus, the material was much like that for physics. The concepts were not taught from first principles so much as showing you *how* to use the tools first, then later, *why* those tools worked. I was quickly able to get a handle on basic stuff that I had been vague on -- the Chain Rule, for example. I realized there were really two parts to calculus: Describing the problem (setting up the problem) in the language of math, and then symbolic manipulation. I could generally do the first part OK, considering that I've been writing software for ten years now. The latter part was where I was more hazy on, since I simply didn't know the tool. In structuring the "how to" before the "why this works", I could dive into solving my problems, then satisfy my curiosity later.
Good point. I retract what I said about doing those alternate ab stuff.
I still think squats that work the quads done without any bending of the waist at an aerobic speed (a la Matt Furey) is probably the best bang for the buck.
I had written elsewhere more passive things someone can do:
* Stand instead of sitting in front of the computer desk. Drop into "horse stance", so long as the knees are aligned and don't go over the toes. Merely standing triggers a metabolic gear shift.
* Walk in a half-crouch with the spine straight and the head level (no bopping up and down). The weight should be on the quads and some on the feet. Resist the temptation to fall into the step (by minimizing striking of the heel). In other words, you end up carrying more of your weight on one leg instead of doing a sort of controlled forward fall like most people do when walking.
Don't do crunches. There are plenty of other ab exercises that don't compress the lower back. For example "dive bombers" or "cat pushups".
Squats are better for burning off calories, as long as you are doing them correctly (i.e. don't bend at the waist, drop straight down). Check out YouTube videos for "Indian Squats" as they work many of the large muscle groups.
This may sound uninspired, but I think your best bet is to embed your exercise during work and spread them out throughout the day.
If you're in front of a desk often, another method is to stand during some or all of your shift. If you know how to sit in something called a horse stance, you can work at the same level as you normally sit in a chair. Simply standing switches on something in the body to burn more calories.
If you walk around a lot, you can change how you walk to get a better workout. Namely, bend your knees while keeping your back straight and your head level. Try not to fall into the forward steps. You end up walking like say, the animation in Counterstrike or Rainbow Six. It works your quads (similar to doing squats).
You can do mini-exercises, taking no more than 5 minutes at a time. Some exercises burn a ton of calories, such as Indian squats. 50 reps generally take less than 60s to do. Pushups are OK if you do the right kind. If you have your own office, you can get one of those as-seen-on-TV pull-up bars: attempt a quick pullup everytime you walk out or walk in through the door. The big downside to this is that you will sweat. If you're actually losing weight, your sweat will smell from the aromatics trapped in the fat you've accumulated. I generally do this onsite. Instead of taking the coffee break, I go off to a corner and run through a couple exercises. Then again, I work in software development, not IT.
Addendum: I wrote this in a rant as a response to someone who said he didn't think it matters whether a newbie learns OOP first or Data structures/Algorithms first. I thought the sequence matter. That's why I suggested Ruby/Smalltalk, more for the OOP. Obviously, if you are teaching *general* programming practices, it would be better to use a language *you* can teach, even switch up the language from stage to stage. The point is to teach a solid foundation of skills that is applicable to any programming language, so that the student knows what is under the hood.
I've been training in martial arts for about four years now, all of which as an adult. I've always been interested in how to structure learning. The martial arts training I've learned was always layered, starting from the very basics, and working your way up. This was explicitly pointed out to me after reading Josh Waitzkin's Art of Learning -- though it doesn't talk about teaching programming, it talks about the learning process in general.
Many of the programming conventions were developed for good reasons to solve a particularly painful problem. If you just teach the conventions, it will not make sense without putting it in context. The student has to feel the pain and frustration first before you show how the convention will solve his problems.
This is a rant I wrote a while back on my blog:
If some eager kid wanted to learn programming from me, this would be the sequence I would teach him in:
1. Input/Output. The most basic function of a computer is to take an input, transform it in some way, and then spit out an output. Therefore, the basics for learning computer programming is playing with inputs and outputs. We'd start off simple by using a command line, and then printing out stuff. We'd work on all the major ways people receive inputs -- keyboard, flat-text files, CSV files, binary files, mouse, network sockets, HTTP, microphone, etc. Next, all the different outputs: text prompt, text files, lots more files, network sockets, HTTP, audio device, graphics (taste some bit of SDL, OpenGL, etc).
Just like in martial arts, the next step is combination. Keyboard + files. Mouse + graphics. Network sockets + audio. There's enough instant gratification to keep a newbie happy. There's lots of toys you can create just playing with this stuff. You can visualize datasets. You can crunch some numbers. Now, at some point, the newbie will realize that he wants to make his toys more sophisticated, more interactive. That leads to the next stage.
2. Flow control. The next basic building block is IF-THEN-ELSE, and all of its variations such as GOTO and loop statements. At this stage, it is more than OK to let the newbie play with GOTO statements and write speghetti code. Telling him to write structured code is like telling a kid not to touch the stove. He won't learn until he gets burned. The trick is to encourage him to make more and more sophisticated toys, challenging him until the flow logic gets so complex and tricky that he comes to you begging for help. This is key. If the newbie is incredibly intelligent, you had better find something convoluted enough to confuse him. The easiest way to do this is to give him something that would be very easy if he moduralized things as procedural calls, but difficult because he has to copy-and-paste things together. This is usually when you turn a toy into a game (a toy is just an interaction; a game has a goal). When he begs you for an easier way to do this, introduce the next stage.
3. Structured Programming. Here, the newbie learns all about procedure and function calls. Introduce the idea of writing libraries that works across applications. (Now, see here all your toys and games have similar functionalities? Try this... ). Show how all the Input/Output stuff he learned in Stage 1 were actually library calls. Introduce the idea of recursion. Introduce the idea of Unit Testing (the idea of writing and testing things in small chunks).
Now, he is mastering the idea of calling things and passing by value. He'll start using less and less global variables, but he should start getting frustrated with his data being unstructured. At some point, introduce a problem that requires the use of pointers and dynamic allocation. For example, loading and saving game maps. This leads to the next stage.
4. Data structures. Introduce pointers. Then memory alloc
I had a whole long list... and then the browser switched pages. Bah.
So I'm pointing out one series:
Rick Cook's Wiz Biz (Wizard's Bane, Wizardry Compiled), Wiz Biz 2 (Wizardry Cursed, Wizardry Consulted), and Wizardry Quested.
A Cupertino hacker got summoned to a parallel world where magic works. People expected great things of him but he is totally inept at the magic. He eventually figures out that he can peice components together just like calling a subroutine, and have something else perform the spell (this tool being called Emacs and manifests itself as a gnome). Beautiful woman is saved, much rejoicing... and then he goes out and does it again. Much adventuring.
Some others off the top of my head: David Weber's Honor Harringon; Dave Weber and John Ringo's March Upcountry / March to the Sea / March to the Stars / We Few; Larry Niven's Destiny's Road; Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosaigan series (starting with The Vor Game); Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (maybe not Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind), Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant... Heinlein's Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Space Cadet, Rolling Stones, Citizen of the Galaxy.
Oh. And the Foundation and I, Robot series sucks. And yes, I did read them.
I used to write swarming applications for a hobby. Back in the days before there was a blogosphere to popularize that term. That particular xkcd was something that I thought, "hey, wouldn't it be neat to implement this?" It obviously does not necessarily have to use Windows. We can just as easily use Genetic Algorithims to determine the combinations of Linux vulnerabilities (for example, Linux vs. 2.4.34 randomly combined with some version of OpenSSH and Apache) and send out worms to live in the eco-system.
When I had first showed that strip to a friend of mine's, he told me of an application he wrote. Conway's Game of Life, except that each cell in the matrix was connected in a directed graph, using UDP to connect to remote nodes.
There's something particularly satisfying at messing with Artificial Life algorithims, particularly when they start surprising you. They don't have to be superficially useful to provide intellectually-interesting entertainment.
Nope, feel free to disregard it. It just came unthinkingly out of my mouth. (Not being sarcastic, just mildly embarrassed). The only source I have is anecdotal and is dated to 1992, and it does not refer to this directly. I've been told things have changed significantly since then. I'd love to be able to test this theory by grabbing a Chinese citizen and probing him.
This book was a memoir written by someone who went over to train in the Shaolin temple as a Princeton undergraduate, back in 1992. The book is American Shaolin, written by Matthew Polly, published in 2008. The relevant excerpt, pp189-190:
While China had some extroverts, like Deqing, introversion was the masculine ideal. you could guess who was the most powerful man at any banquet in China by seeing who talked the least. Unlike in America, where having power means everyone else has to politely listen to your blather, in China power means those lower on the totem pole play the clown whie you observe the patterns.
One day when Doc was working on my leg, he gave me some advice. "Every man has two faces. The outer face he presents to the world, and the inner face he saves only for himself and his family. Your feelings are too obvious. You must hide them."
As we played the Hand Game [a drinking game], I came to the conclusion that the Chinese were not, as early Western observers had pejoratively termed them, "inscrutable." In truth, they were poker-faced. The first European visitors had simply not been interested enough or spent enough time to learn the tells. The forced smile, the wandering gaze, the subtle shifts in vocal tone, these were all calculated gestures to buff or sucker or misdirect an opponent in order to achieve a particular goal. The contemporary American obsession with "keeping it real," "being true to yourself," "conveying a sense of who you are" was not only alien to them -- it was anathema. (The Chinese don't tend to write confessional memoirs.) The reason why Chinese interaction so often seem stilted to me was because both parties were trying to get one over on the other. The instant group topic of conversation after one person departed was not whether he had lied, but why. What was his angle?
In this sense, the Hand Game was more than a metaphor; it was a training regime for the skills a Chinese man needed to succeed.
The Chinese government is able to stay in control because of its level of domination throughout society. Even though there were many reforms to open up China post Cultural Revolution, the fact remains that the CCP is able to exert a large amount of control over the population with its economic policy and if need be the PLA. Historically, no Chinese government could exist when the peasantry completely hated the government (see Ming overthrow and CCP victory in the civil war), so there is some support of the government, but don't paint such a rosy picture of the situation.
Interesting. You said that the "no Chinese government could exist when the peasantry completely hated the government" -- how do you think this is impacted by the numbers of the peasant class moving into the city an taking up jobs in factories?
Taiwan and China are not the same place. I've heard my own father and mother debating pretty heatedly over the Chinese government oppression.
You've lived there long enough to probably know this -- the political rhetoric has always been, the Taiwanese nationalists consider China as a province of Taiwan, and the Chinese government consider Taiwan as a province of China.
But, the ties runs deeper than that. Taiwanese businessmen invest heavily inside China. When a company goes over there to establish a factory, the Taiwanese woo the Chinese local party officials as much as the local party officials woo the Taiwanese. Bribes are passed around, and when the Taiwanese go home, they roll their eyes and talk trash about those same party officials. It does not stop the flow of money.
I remember my family watching a documentary on the recent history of China and Taiwan, done in English and produced by either the Americans or the British. We saw film footage of the widespread famine, between '58 and '61. My mother made a curious statement which I didn't really understand at the time -- she said that she thought the famine was political propaganda of the Taiwanese government and didn't think it was that bad.
Two years ago, I went to the Mid Autumn Festival held at Auburn University. My father taught at Tuskegee at the time, but the Taiwanese student association was more of a gathering ground for the Taiwanese living in Auburn. When we went there, we feel in with some of folks who were already there. The people seem to be a tad too reserved. I thought it was just me. My father then realized that we were standing around with the Chinese Student Association. The Taiwanese Student Association was holding the festival twenty feet away at the pavilion.
So I watched how the Taiwanese and the Chinese carefully did not look at each other (face). I watched how each of them tried carefully tried to... out-party each other. I also watched how the kids don't seem to really differentiate between the group, they just ran around in the park. On this last point -- as a kid, I ran around with a kid who was obviously (to me) from the mainland, but I was never told not to go play with him.
I have not met any recent Chinese immigrants to Taiwan, but you do bring up a good point. The people who are not happy with the way things are over in China could either flee to Taiwan or to America. I imagine (but don't know for a fact) that for such people, getting to America is more difficult.
But whether a person is born in Taiwan or China, there is a connection between the too. The conflict is the conflict among siblings -- bitter and cuts deep. Both Taiwan and China owe much to ancient Chinese culture, even as each had shed or repudiated elements of the ancient culture. And as inflammatory pro-Taiwanese or pro-Chinese rhetoric is, it doesn't stop those same people from trying to make money.
Personally, I don't find the current Chinese government incredibly good. I'm judging based on the cultural value of whether it provides the harmony, peace, and stability it is supposed to provide. In that regard, they suck.
People are indeed reading this through cultural filters. I've posted a reply to jpmahala that explains what I mean more in detail.
The statement "It could well be that the Chinese have a mindset that makes government control work where it has failed in the West." demonstrates the cultural filters.
Many Western people have a difficult time understanding the Eastern cultures.
It isn't enough to look at the "individualistic" nature of western culture. To put it in simplistic (maybe overly-simplistic) terms -- here in the West, we have individual culture and mass spirituality, and in the East, particularly in China, there is mass culture and individual spirituality.
This is true whether the individuals we speak of consider themselves atheist or agnostic. Here, we can talk about "human rights", because individuals are entitled to certain rights. Or consider the idea that every person in America are given an "equal chance" -- you make the most of your life in your given life. For the religious here, an individual establishes a relationship with divinity; for the atheist, there is still that concept of establishing a relationship between yourself and the broader culture and society as a whole. The ideal, mature person then would naturally be someone who has developed a unique identity, expressing his own opinions within the broader society as a whole. An alpha male in American culture is the extrovert, the guy at the party who no one dares to shut-up even if he is a boor.
In the East, divinity is both transcendent and immanent, that is, it is a part of the material world. There is no need to establish a relationship with it because it is already within you, as much as it is within other people and other things. A non-religious, thoroughly materialistic Chinese would still see no need to establish a relationship with the greater society as a whole. Water can change form -- it can flow rapidly, it can pool quietly, it can bubble, it can froth, but nothing tells water that it is water; it follows its own nature (that is, it "follows" the laws of physics). Thus, the ideal, mature Chinese is one who can interact in a harmony with the world at large. The alpha male in China is the guy at the party who doesn't talk an everyone else fawns on. He is the guy whom everyone else at the party subtly orbits around, and he watches and waits for his opportunities. He is an introvert, not an extrovert.
Which brings up another point. People in America, having an extrovert as the ideal for the alpha male, obsesses over things like freedom of speech. The person who is heard the most is the one who is dominant. People in China, those extroverted display shows how weak you are; only the younger, weaker men need to do those displays. Youth is celebrated in America, and it is not celebrated in China.
Americans by and large consider China's policies on human rights as backwards. Look at how people here are scrambling to make comments on Slashdot. But put that in the context of Chinese culture, people who get on their soapbox about Chinese policy comes off as weaker, younger, immature. It reinforces the image of a weaker, younger, more immature American culture that is less than 300 old.
This isn't a short-term memory of a civil war, though that does have an impact. A lot of Americans forget that the Chinese people consider their culture to have been extent for at least four thousand years. Throughout those years, it has survived many changes in government (changes in dynasty). It has survived being conquered by outside ethnic groups, such as the Qing and the Mongols, because the culture ended up assimilating those ethnic groups. The Qing were so afraid of becoming assimilated that they created elaborate rules to segregate their ethnic group as a ruling class. Non-Qing had to wear their hair in a certain way. Non-Qing Imperial bureaucrats had to each be paired with a Qing bureaucrat. It did not work.
The words "freedom", "rights", and "oppression" have deep cultural significane in America. They come loaded with potent emotions. They are like running a program on the command line -- Stuff Happens. People get riled up, excited, and upset over it.
Those equivalent Chinese words do not have the same kind of emotional impact. Instead of fearing oppression, the Chinese fear "luan" -- civil disorder, anarchy, and chaos. And lest you think this was only true for the past hundred years, you can read about it in the Chinese literary classics that are over two thousand years old-- those describe the consequences of bad government rule: civil disorder and anarchy.
They are not mistaken. People in democratic societies fear oppression, particularly in the US. Here, the war on terrorism is sold as protecting American freedom.
People in the Chinese culture fear disorder, chaos, and anarchy. Ask a Chinese sometime about "luan" and watch his face. If someone tried to sell a war on terrorism to the Chinese using, "protecting Chinese freedom", the people would not really understand. What's so great about freedom? But show how terrorism in China is threatening anarchy and civil disorder, the citizens will want Something Done About It. Think about that in context of Tibet. This is the reasoning/emotional chain that leads Chinese to pro-government Chinese. You can test this theory by asking your Chinese friends what would happen if the Chinese government became too incompetent to keep civil disorder.
People in America wants politicians to be honest, or at least, act honestly. Despite evidence pointing the contrary. For the Chinese in Chinese culture, it is assumed that a politician has a hidden agenda and a cover story. People are not offended by the idea that a politician is lying to them. In general, that is how average, mature Chinese citizens deal with each other.
Here in the "West", the cultural value systems is heavily skewed towards Judeo-Christian values, even if that person may be atheist. We're talking culture here, not religion. There's a vague notion of good and evil, of sin and redemption. That is why people can talk about "history has demonstrated that even the best intentions are almost always corrupted." That is loaded with these cultural values that simply don't exist in China. When you read the Chinese classics such as the government-spiritual-philosophies of Confucius, the consequence of bad government rule is civil disorder, anarchy, and chaos. There's certainly no mention that liberty needs to be renewed with the price of blood.
I was born in Taiwan, though I was raised in America. I got to see the Chinese and American cultures up close.
Every culture and language has "lean" words, words that have special significance and emotionally potent. In America, those words include, "freedom", "liberty", "justice", "dream", and "oppression". Here, people have great fear of "oppression", and words and concepts like that.
In the Chinese culture, the individual's greatest fear isn't "oppression". It is "luan", or "anarchy", "disorder". The Chinese people in general will tolerate a great deal of "oppression" so long as the government is doing its job: keeping the nation from running into chaos. "Human rights" in China doesn't include the right to be free; instead, it includes the right to be live a peaceful life.
I remember back in 2005 when I had just started up a consulting firm with several of my buddies. To make ends meet, we did some contracting from online sources. One of the contracts we won was to produce a marketing plan for a small hospital up in the North East. They had some money and they were looking at starting up some sort of carbon nanotube startup.
While researching, we came across Dr. Benavides's discovery. I read the paper she published. It was pretty neat. The technique is relatively simple. You use a heli-arc torch to zap a rod of carbon. This is the "arc" method of carbon nanotube deposition. However, you do so in a chamber filled with water vapor. Somehow (the paper did not specify), the water vapors acts as a catalyst to help form single-walled carbon nanotubes. Compared with lasers and chemical vapor deposition, a heli-arc setup is much cheaper, both to setup and during manufacturing. I'm not sure if you needed to treat the resulting carbon nanotubes with sulferic acid; however, in general, you get high purity at a low cost.
We were able to contact the NASA office of technology transfer, and even went as far as setting up a phone conference between our client and Dr. Benavides. At about the time we contacted the tech transfer folks, they said that Dr. Benavides's technique has been out on the market for at least two years, but by the time we contacted them, their phones were ringing off the hook. Our client never managed to talk to Dr. Benavides -- heck, they didn't even pay us -- but I'm glad this technology is finally seeing some commercialization.
Incidentally, there was a paper published in Jan/Feb of 2005 by a Japanese research group whose technique (water-catalyst deposition) sounded awefully similar to Dr. Benavides's work...
Slashdot Mirror
In America, the speakers and writers are expected to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to getting the message across. I get that. It's their job. But don't you ever wonder how different your life would be if you didn't sit there passively expecting meaning to get spoon-fed to you? What ever happened to RTFM and actively wresting it out yourself?
I'm with all of you. The show is awesome and has many metaphorical layers in there. That's difficult to pull off when trying to make it realistic in tone.
I loved how the story was set up as walking up Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs. That took a lot of guts and artistic integrity, since it required a slower first season while they go through the "physiological" needs, before the needs of "safety", "love/belonging", "self-esteem", and "self-actualization". It's a story of both an individual person -- everyone has a Dr. Rush, a Col Young, a Camile Wray as impulses in their heads and body ... just trying to do the right thing. It's a story about humanity in general, with the same kind of characters at play in politics. And after the turning point where the crew takes conscious control of their "destiny" was a big win. Destiny isn't as hopeless as it seems.
And it's going to get cancelled.
How metaphorical is that?
I guess people want entertainment value not transformative value. They want titillating adventure and "good acting" (meaning acting conforming to their fantasies). They want to numb themselves with a good beer and leave a show on in the background so they don't have to think about how much their life -- their destiny -- sucks. People will happily flock towards a flawed fandom like Star Wars -- accidentally following Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey ... and then lying about it after the fact -- but not something that is too realistic in tone like SG-U.
I don't know about everyone else. I'm rooting for the home team. People are just not ready for a series like SG-U today, but maybe they will in the future.
Holy crap, maybe the main theme of Stargate Universe is so subtle, people just missed it. I thought it was subtle as a sledgehammer.
The story is about walking up Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, starting from the most fundamental need at birth: Air. Then water. Then food. Predictably, we’d expect it to progress through “safety”, “love/belonging”, “self-esteem”, and “self-actualization” and beyond. The seventh episode of Season 2 is the major turning point in walking up this tree when the crew (as it represents humanity as a whole, or a single individual) takes conscious control of their destiny.
The melodrama and the edgy anger and despair was put in context of the most incredible environment — humanity’s “destiny”. You think about your own life and what kind of petty, dark desires. How many people wake up and really think about how improbable life is? Or how most people grow up not knowing who they are, what they are here for, or feeling they really shouldn’t be here at all. And yet to continue living?
Come on people, wake up. Look deeper into the story. This is classic Robert A. Heinlein stuff, of ornery, disagreeable, petty, violent animals called humans that for all that has some incredible moments.
I have the same idea as you. I took the AP courses in high school and got my butt kicked in college. I hit Math 401, aka Differential Equations, and it hit back. I didn't have a solid understanding of the basics to really tackle diffq.
Years later, I was influenced by several things:
First was Neal Stephenson's Boroque Cycle. That novel brought home the idea that math was a tool invented to solve problems and expanded minds. The second was my growing fascination with Lisp -- specifically, MIT Scheme / SCIP. By the time I started watching the first lecture, the introduction was already echoing what I felt about calculus, that software engineering dealt with idealized machinery, much the same way calculus was tool that gives us leverage.
I chose the Schuam's Outline for Calculus and started some self-study. I had also taken AP Physics, and the teacher more or less ignored our nominal textbook and used the Schuam's Outline for Physics. Although I was able to follow the derivations on the blackboard, I retained none of it. We were assigned problems out of the Schuam's Outline, meant to be two problems per week, all handed at the end of each half-semester. There were no fancy pictures, no chatty text to wade through. It was straight up physics concepts, how the math worked, and condensed down to its essentials. And lots of problems to practice on.
Of course, I procrastinated on the assignments. The day it was due, I spent every spare break time doing as many of those problems as I could. I wasn't able to complete all of them in time, but the sheer pressure of attempting that many within a short amount of time got me to really understand the concepts and how to work the math. I had no trouble with college-level physics taught to engineering students, just the calculus that powers it.
When I picked up the Schuam's Outline for Calculus, the material was much like that for physics. The concepts were not taught from first principles so much as showing you *how* to use the tools first, then later, *why* those tools worked. I was quickly able to get a handle on basic stuff that I had been vague on -- the Chain Rule, for example. I realized there were really two parts to calculus: Describing the problem (setting up the problem) in the language of math, and then symbolic manipulation. I could generally do the first part OK, considering that I've been writing software for ten years now. The latter part was where I was more hazy on, since I simply didn't know the tool. In structuring the "how to" before the "why this works", I could dive into solving my problems, then satisfy my curiosity later.
Good luck.
If you say so. I don't use momentum to exercise the abs.
Good point. I retract what I said about doing those alternate ab stuff.
I still think squats that work the quads done without any bending of the waist at an aerobic speed (a la Matt Furey) is probably the best bang for the buck.
I had written elsewhere more passive things someone can do:
* Stand instead of sitting in front of the computer desk. Drop into "horse stance", so long as the knees are aligned and don't go over the toes. Merely standing triggers a metabolic gear shift.
* Walk in a half-crouch with the spine straight and the head level (no bopping up and down). The weight should be on the quads and some on the feet. Resist the temptation to fall into the step (by minimizing striking of the heel). In other words, you end up carrying more of your weight on one leg instead of doing a sort of controlled forward fall like most people do when walking.
On a crunch, you are supporting part of your your body weight with your abs against gravity. On the dive bombers, you are arching the opposite way.
Don't do crunches. There are plenty of other ab exercises that don't compress the lower back. For example "dive bombers" or "cat pushups".
Squats are better for burning off calories, as long as you are doing them correctly (i.e. don't bend at the waist, drop straight down). Check out YouTube videos for "Indian Squats" as they work many of the large muscle groups.
This may sound uninspired, but I think your best bet is to embed your exercise during work and spread them out throughout the day.
If you're in front of a desk often, another method is to stand during some or all of your shift. If you know how to sit in something called a horse stance, you can work at the same level as you normally sit in a chair. Simply standing switches on something in the body to burn more calories.
If you walk around a lot, you can change how you walk to get a better workout. Namely, bend your knees while keeping your back straight and your head level. Try not to fall into the forward steps. You end up walking like say, the animation in Counterstrike or Rainbow Six. It works your quads (similar to doing squats).
You can do mini-exercises, taking no more than 5 minutes at a time. Some exercises burn a ton of calories, such as Indian squats. 50 reps generally take less than 60s to do. Pushups are OK if you do the right kind. If you have your own office, you can get one of those as-seen-on-TV pull-up bars: attempt a quick pullup everytime you walk out or walk in through the door. The big downside to this is that you will sweat. If you're actually losing weight, your sweat will smell from the aromatics trapped in the fat you've accumulated. I generally do this onsite. Instead of taking the coffee break, I go off to a corner and run through a couple exercises. Then again, I work in software development, not IT.
Addendum: I wrote this in a rant as a response to someone who said he didn't think it matters whether a newbie learns OOP first or Data structures/Algorithms first. I thought the sequence matter. That's why I suggested Ruby/Smalltalk, more for the OOP. Obviously, if you are teaching *general* programming practices, it would be better to use a language *you* can teach, even switch up the language from stage to stage. The point is to teach a solid foundation of skills that is applicable to any programming language, so that the student knows what is under the hood.
I've been training in martial arts for about four years now, all of which as an adult. I've always been interested in how to structure learning. The martial arts training I've learned was always layered, starting from the very basics, and working your way up. This was explicitly pointed out to me after reading Josh Waitzkin's Art of Learning -- though it doesn't talk about teaching programming, it talks about the learning process in general.
Many of the programming conventions were developed for good reasons to solve a particularly painful problem. If you just teach the conventions, it will not make sense without putting it in context. The student has to feel the pain and frustration first before you show how the convention will solve his problems.
This is a rant I wrote a while back on my blog:
If some eager kid wanted to learn programming from me, this would be the sequence I would teach him in:
1. Input/Output. The most basic function of a computer is to take an input, transform it in some way, and then spit out an output. Therefore, the basics for learning computer programming is playing with inputs and outputs. We'd start off simple by using a command line, and then printing out stuff. We'd work on all the major ways people receive inputs -- keyboard, flat-text files, CSV files, binary files, mouse, network sockets, HTTP, microphone, etc. Next, all the different outputs: text prompt, text files, lots more files, network sockets, HTTP, audio device, graphics (taste some bit of SDL, OpenGL, etc).
Just like in martial arts, the next step is combination. Keyboard + files. Mouse + graphics. Network sockets + audio. There's enough instant gratification to keep a newbie happy. There's lots of toys you can create just playing with this stuff. You can visualize datasets. You can crunch some numbers. Now, at some point, the newbie will realize that he wants to make his toys more sophisticated, more interactive. That leads to the next stage.
2. Flow control. The next basic building block is IF-THEN-ELSE, and all of its variations such as GOTO and loop statements. At this stage, it is more than OK to let the newbie play with GOTO statements and write speghetti code. Telling him to write structured code is like telling a kid not to touch the stove. He won't learn until he gets burned. The trick is to encourage him to make more and more sophisticated toys, challenging him until the flow logic gets so complex and tricky that he comes to you begging for help. This is key. If the newbie is incredibly intelligent, you had better find something convoluted enough to confuse him. The easiest way to do this is to give him something that would be very easy if he moduralized things as procedural calls, but difficult because he has to copy-and-paste things together. This is usually when you turn a toy into a game (a toy is just an interaction; a game has a goal). When he begs you for an easier way to do this, introduce the next stage.
3. Structured Programming. Here, the newbie learns all about procedure and function calls. Introduce the idea of writing libraries that works across applications. (Now, see here all your toys and games have similar functionalities? Try this ... ). Show how all the Input/Output stuff he learned in Stage 1 were actually library calls. Introduce the idea of recursion. Introduce the idea of Unit Testing (the idea of writing and testing things in small chunks).
Now, he is mastering the idea of calling things and passing by value. He'll start using less and less global variables, but he should start getting frustrated with his data being unstructured. At some point, introduce a problem that requires the use of pointers and dynamic allocation. For example, loading and saving game maps. This leads to the next stage.
4. Data structures. Introduce pointers. Then memory alloc
I had a whole long list ... and then the browser switched pages. Bah.
So I'm pointing out one series:
Rick Cook's Wiz Biz (Wizard's Bane, Wizardry Compiled), Wiz Biz 2 (Wizardry Cursed, Wizardry Consulted), and Wizardry Quested.
A Cupertino hacker got summoned to a parallel world where magic works. People expected great things of him but he is totally inept at the magic. He eventually figures out that he can peice components together just like calling a subroutine, and have something else perform the spell (this tool being called Emacs and manifests itself as a gnome). Beautiful woman is saved, much rejoicing ... and then he goes out and does it again. Much adventuring.
Some others off the top of my head: David Weber's Honor Harringon; Dave Weber and John Ringo's March Upcountry / March to the Sea / March to the Stars / We Few; Larry Niven's Destiny's Road; Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosaigan series (starting with The Vor Game); Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (maybe not Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind), Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant ... Heinlein's Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Space Cadet, Rolling Stones, Citizen of the Galaxy.
Oh. And the Foundation and I, Robot series sucks. And yes, I did read them.
Heh
I used to write swarming applications for a hobby. Back in the days before there was a blogosphere to popularize that term. That particular xkcd was something that I thought, "hey, wouldn't it be neat to implement this?" It obviously does not necessarily have to use Windows. We can just as easily use Genetic Algorithims to determine the combinations of Linux vulnerabilities (for example, Linux vs. 2.4.34 randomly combined with some version of OpenSSH and Apache) and send out worms to live in the eco-system.
When I had first showed that strip to a friend of mine's, he told me of an application he wrote. Conway's Game of Life, except that each cell in the matrix was connected in a directed graph, using UDP to connect to remote nodes.
There's something particularly satisfying at messing with Artificial Life algorithims, particularly when they start surprising you. They don't have to be superficially useful to provide intellectually-interesting entertainment.
-K
http://xkcd.com/350/
This book was a memoir written by someone who went over to train in the Shaolin temple as a Princeton undergraduate, back in 1992. The book is American Shaolin, written by Matthew Polly, published in 2008. The relevant excerpt, pp189-190: While China had some extroverts, like Deqing, introversion was the masculine ideal. you could guess who was the most powerful man at any banquet in China by seeing who talked the least. Unlike in America, where having power means everyone else has to politely listen to your blather, in China power means those lower on the totem pole play the clown whie you observe the patterns.
One day when Doc was working on my leg, he gave me some advice. "Every man has two faces. The outer face he presents to the world, and the inner face he saves only for himself and his family. Your feelings are too obvious. You must hide them."
As we played the Hand Game [a drinking game], I came to the conclusion that the Chinese were not, as early Western observers had pejoratively termed them, "inscrutable." In truth, they were poker-faced. The first European visitors had simply not been interested enough or spent enough time to learn the tells. The forced smile, the wandering gaze, the subtle shifts in vocal tone, these were all calculated gestures to buff or sucker or misdirect an opponent in order to achieve a particular goal. The contemporary American obsession with "keeping it real," "being true to yourself," "conveying a sense of who you are" was not only alien to them -- it was anathema. (The Chinese don't tend to write confessional memoirs.) The reason why Chinese interaction so often seem stilted to me was because both parties were trying to get one over on the other. The instant group topic of conversation after one person departed was not whether he had lied, but why. What was his angle?
In this sense, the Hand Game was more than a metaphor; it was a training regime for the skills a Chinese man needed to succeed.
The Chinese government is able to stay in control because of its level of domination throughout society. Even though there were many reforms to open up China post Cultural Revolution, the fact remains that the CCP is able to exert a large amount of control over the population with its economic policy and if need be the PLA. Historically, no Chinese government could exist when the peasantry completely hated the government (see Ming overthrow and CCP victory in the civil war), so there is some support of the government, but don't paint such a rosy picture of the situation.
Interesting. You said that the "no Chinese government could exist when the peasantry completely hated the government" -- how do you think this is impacted by the numbers of the peasant class moving into the city an taking up jobs in factories?-Q
Taiwan and China are not the same place. I've heard my own father and mother debating pretty heatedly over the Chinese government oppression.
... out-party each other. I also watched how the kids don't seem to really differentiate between the group, they just ran around in the park. On this last point -- as a kid, I ran around with a kid who was obviously (to me) from the mainland, but I was never told not to go play with him.
You've lived there long enough to probably know this -- the political rhetoric has always been, the Taiwanese nationalists consider China as a province of Taiwan, and the Chinese government consider Taiwan as a province of China.
But, the ties runs deeper than that. Taiwanese businessmen invest heavily inside China. When a company goes over there to establish a factory, the Taiwanese woo the Chinese local party officials as much as the local party officials woo the Taiwanese. Bribes are passed around, and when the Taiwanese go home, they roll their eyes and talk trash about those same party officials. It does not stop the flow of money.
I remember my family watching a documentary on the recent history of China and Taiwan, done in English and produced by either the Americans or the British. We saw film footage of the widespread famine, between '58 and '61. My mother made a curious statement which I didn't really understand at the time -- she said that she thought the famine was political propaganda of the Taiwanese government and didn't think it was that bad.
Two years ago, I went to the Mid Autumn Festival held at Auburn University. My father taught at Tuskegee at the time, but the Taiwanese student association was more of a gathering ground for the Taiwanese living in Auburn. When we went there, we feel in with some of folks who were already there. The people seem to be a tad too reserved. I thought it was just me. My father then realized that we were standing around with the Chinese Student Association. The Taiwanese Student Association was holding the festival twenty feet away at the pavilion.
So I watched how the Taiwanese and the Chinese carefully did not look at each other (face). I watched how each of them tried carefully tried to
I have not met any recent Chinese immigrants to Taiwan, but you do bring up a good point. The people who are not happy with the way things are over in China could either flee to Taiwan or to America. I imagine (but don't know for a fact) that for such people, getting to America is more difficult.
But whether a person is born in Taiwan or China, there is a connection between the too. The conflict is the conflict among siblings -- bitter and cuts deep. Both Taiwan and China owe much to ancient Chinese culture, even as each had shed or repudiated elements of the ancient culture. And as inflammatory pro-Taiwanese or pro-Chinese rhetoric is, it doesn't stop those same people from trying to make money.
Personally, I don't find the current Chinese government incredibly good. I'm judging based on the cultural value of whether it provides the harmony, peace, and stability it is supposed to provide. In that regard, they suck.
-Q
People are indeed reading this through cultural filters. I've posted a reply to jpmahala that explains what I mean more in detail.
The statement "It could well be that the Chinese have a mindset that makes government control work where it has failed in the West." demonstrates the cultural filters.
-Q
Many Western people have a difficult time understanding the Eastern cultures.
It isn't enough to look at the "individualistic" nature of western culture. To put it in simplistic (maybe overly-simplistic) terms -- here in the West, we have individual culture and mass spirituality, and in the East, particularly in China, there is mass culture and individual spirituality.
This is true whether the individuals we speak of consider themselves atheist or agnostic. Here, we can talk about "human rights", because individuals are entitled to certain rights. Or consider the idea that every person in America are given an "equal chance" -- you make the most of your life in your given life. For the religious here, an individual establishes a relationship with divinity; for the atheist, there is still that concept of establishing a relationship between yourself and the broader culture and society as a whole. The ideal, mature person then would naturally be someone who has developed a unique identity, expressing his own opinions within the broader society as a whole. An alpha male in American culture is the extrovert, the guy at the party who no one dares to shut-up even if he is a boor.
In the East, divinity is both transcendent and immanent, that is, it is a part of the material world. There is no need to establish a relationship with it because it is already within you, as much as it is within other people and other things. A non-religious, thoroughly materialistic Chinese would still see no need to establish a relationship with the greater society as a whole. Water can change form -- it can flow rapidly, it can pool quietly, it can bubble, it can froth, but nothing tells water that it is water; it follows its own nature (that is, it "follows" the laws of physics). Thus, the ideal, mature Chinese is one who can interact in a harmony with the world at large. The alpha male in China is the guy at the party who doesn't talk an everyone else fawns on. He is the guy whom everyone else at the party subtly orbits around, and he watches and waits for his opportunities. He is an introvert, not an extrovert.
Which brings up another point. People in America, having an extrovert as the ideal for the alpha male, obsesses over things like freedom of speech. The person who is heard the most is the one who is dominant. People in China, those extroverted display shows how weak you are; only the younger, weaker men need to do those displays. Youth is celebrated in America, and it is not celebrated in China.
Americans by and large consider China's policies on human rights as backwards. Look at how people here are scrambling to make comments on Slashdot. But put that in the context of Chinese culture, people who get on their soapbox about Chinese policy comes off as weaker, younger, immature. It reinforces the image of a weaker, younger, more immature American culture that is less than 300 old.
-Q
This isn't a short-term memory of a civil war, though that does have an impact. A lot of Americans forget that the Chinese people consider their culture to have been extent for at least four thousand years. Throughout those years, it has survived many changes in government (changes in dynasty). It has survived being conquered by outside ethnic groups, such as the Qing and the Mongols, because the culture ended up assimilating those ethnic groups. The Qing were so afraid of becoming assimilated that they created elaborate rules to segregate their ethnic group as a ruling class. Non-Qing had to wear their hair in a certain way. Non-Qing Imperial bureaucrats had to each be paired with a Qing bureaucrat. It did not work.
The words "freedom", "rights", and "oppression" have deep cultural significane in America. They come loaded with potent emotions. They are like running a program on the command line -- Stuff Happens. People get riled up, excited, and upset over it.
Those equivalent Chinese words do not have the same kind of emotional impact. Instead of fearing oppression, the Chinese fear "luan" -- civil disorder, anarchy, and chaos. And lest you think this was only true for the past hundred years, you can read about it in the Chinese literary classics that are over two thousand years old-- those describe the consequences of bad government rule: civil disorder and anarchy.
-Q
They are not mistaken. People in democratic societies fear oppression, particularly in the US. Here, the war on terrorism is sold as protecting American freedom.
People in the Chinese culture fear disorder, chaos, and anarchy. Ask a Chinese sometime about "luan" and watch his face. If someone tried to sell a war on terrorism to the Chinese using, "protecting Chinese freedom", the people would not really understand. What's so great about freedom? But show how terrorism in China is threatening anarchy and civil disorder, the citizens will want Something Done About It. Think about that in context of Tibet. This is the reasoning/emotional chain that leads Chinese to pro-government Chinese. You can test this theory by asking your Chinese friends what would happen if the Chinese government became too incompetent to keep civil disorder.
People in America wants politicians to be honest, or at least, act honestly. Despite evidence pointing the contrary. For the Chinese in Chinese culture, it is assumed that a politician has a hidden agenda and a cover story. People are not offended by the idea that a politician is lying to them. In general, that is how average, mature Chinese citizens deal with each other.
Here in the "West", the cultural value systems is heavily skewed towards Judeo-Christian values, even if that person may be atheist. We're talking culture here, not religion. There's a vague notion of good and evil, of sin and redemption. That is why people can talk about "history has demonstrated that even the best intentions are almost always corrupted." That is loaded with these cultural values that simply don't exist in China. When you read the Chinese classics such as the government-spiritual-philosophies of Confucius, the consequence of bad government rule is civil disorder, anarchy, and chaos. There's certainly no mention that liberty needs to be renewed with the price of blood.
-Q
I was born in Taiwan, though I was raised in America. I got to see the Chinese and American cultures up close.
Every culture and language has "lean" words, words that have special significance and emotionally potent. In America, those words include, "freedom", "liberty", "justice", "dream", and "oppression". Here, people have great fear of "oppression", and words and concepts like that.
In the Chinese culture, the individual's greatest fear isn't "oppression". It is "luan", or "anarchy", "disorder". The Chinese people in general will tolerate a great deal of "oppression" so long as the government is doing its job: keeping the nation from running into chaos. "Human rights" in China doesn't include the right to be free; instead, it includes the right to be live a peaceful life.
-Q
I remember back in 2005 when I had just started up a consulting firm with several of my buddies. To make ends meet, we did some contracting from online sources. One of the contracts we won was to produce a marketing plan for a small hospital up in the North East. They had some money and they were looking at starting up some sort of carbon nanotube startup. While researching, we came across Dr. Benavides's discovery. I read the paper she published. It was pretty neat. The technique is relatively simple. You use a heli-arc torch to zap a rod of carbon. This is the "arc" method of carbon nanotube deposition. However, you do so in a chamber filled with water vapor. Somehow (the paper did not specify), the water vapors acts as a catalyst to help form single-walled carbon nanotubes. Compared with lasers and chemical vapor deposition, a heli-arc setup is much cheaper, both to setup and during manufacturing. I'm not sure if you needed to treat the resulting carbon nanotubes with sulferic acid; however, in general, you get high purity at a low cost. We were able to contact the NASA office of technology transfer, and even went as far as setting up a phone conference between our client and Dr. Benavides. At about the time we contacted the tech transfer folks, they said that Dr. Benavides's technique has been out on the market for at least two years, but by the time we contacted them, their phones were ringing off the hook. Our client never managed to talk to Dr. Benavides -- heck, they didn't even pay us -- but I'm glad this technology is finally seeing some commercialization. Incidentally, there was a paper published in Jan/Feb of 2005 by a Japanese research group whose technique (water-catalyst deposition) sounded awefully similar to Dr. Benavides's work ...