"Fermat's Last Theorem" by Amir D. Aczel (1996) , describes Andrew Wiles' seven year search for the famous mathematical problem. I've always been enchanted by Wiles' own description of the process:
"Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of—-and couldn't exist without—-the many months of stumbling around in the dark that precede them."
It's always made me think of searching for a particularly obscure bug in someone else's badly written code:-)
As David Cope discovered after producing AI-generated scores which emulate classical composers so well that even musically educated listeners couldn't reliably distinguish between "real" and "generated": this article provides more detail.
While the salary is the most important part of an employment package, there's a lot more to a good job that just it's salary.
Just my $0.02, after 25+ years as a programmer: salary falls well below a number of other considerations.
- Do you actively enjoy going to work each day?
- Does your job consistently strech your technical capabilities?
- Are your daily workmates more technically savvy than you, and happy to "mentor" you?
Answer "yes" to these questions, and salary doesn't matter: not only will you be happy, but you'll find that your salary increases quite quickly all by itself.
"Fortunately, the gravity on Mars is about 1/3rd of ours, so in theory you'd need only about 1/3rd as much force to move your giant beach ball"
I think the theory is actually "force = mass x acceleration" (hence "acceleration = force / mass"), and since the mass of the object is the same on Mars as it is on Earth, you'd need the same (wind) force to accelerate it to a given speed.
OTOH, rolling resistance would probably be lower on Mars than on Earth...
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"cognitive dissonance"
"Fermat's Last Theorem" by Amir D. Aczel (1996) , describes Andrew Wiles' seven year search for the famous mathematical problem. I've always been enchanted by Wiles' own description of the process: "Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of—-and couldn't exist without—-the many months of stumbling around in the dark that precede them." It's always made me think of searching for a particularly obscure bug in someone else's badly written code :-)
As David Cope discovered after producing AI-generated scores which emulate classical composers so well that even musically educated listeners couldn't reliably distinguish between "real" and "generated": this article provides more detail.
Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out. -- Oscar Wilde, "Lady Windermere's Fan"
While the salary is the most important part of an employment package, there's a lot more to a good job that just it's salary.
Just my $0.02, after 25+ years as a programmer: salary falls well below a number of other considerations.
- Do you actively enjoy going to work each day?
- Does your job consistently strech your technical capabilities?
- Are your daily workmates more technically savvy than you, and happy to "mentor" you?
Answer "yes" to these questions, and salary doesn't matter: not only will you be happy, but you'll find that your salary increases quite quickly all by itself.
"Fortunately, the gravity on Mars is about 1/3rd of ours, so in theory you'd need only about 1/3rd as much force to move your giant beach ball"
I think the theory is actually "force = mass x acceleration" (hence "acceleration = force / mass"), and since the mass of the object is the same on Mars as it is on Earth, you'd need the same (wind) force to accelerate it to a given speed.
OTOH, rolling resistance would probably be lower on Mars than on Earth...