Considering that an IQ of 100 is average and an IQ of 100 wouldn't get one into virtually any profession in science, his comment is more like a statement of fact/reality than a put down. However, I do understand the need for modern Conservatives to always find a way to play the "victim", regardless of circumstance.
You don't even have to look at "socialists". Just look at GOP senators like Roger Wicker, who was instrumental in assuring over NASA's objections that $350,000,000 was spent to complete the construction of a vacuum chamber tower at the Stennis Space Center in Hancock County, MS, which was immediately mothballed the day it was completed. NASA won't see its budget shrink, it will just see more politically motivated pork projects push aside those based on science.
There is a very good reason that virtually every science organization on the planet is now focusing on the effects of climate change, namely the rate at which the climate is changing is now far faster than ever seen in the history of the planet.
Its worth repeating what I said earlier.
The reason that NASA and just about every other scientific organization in the world is now focusing on climate change results from the fact that the rate at which the Earth is now heating is 36 times faster than it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago, when in just a mere 10-30,000 years, Wyoming went from having redwood forests to having palm forests and nearly entire mammalian fauna in the Northern Hemisphere died out and was replaced by other species. Keep in mind that the current 36 times rate is just the current rate, which is increasing exponentially. Based on simple extrapolation, by the end of the century with just an increase of 1.5 deg C, some 1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide will be released by melting permafrost and another trillion tons will be released as a result of increasing peat and coal seam fires more than tripling the annual production of human generated greenhouse gas, which is now about 33.5 Gt/yr. In some areas such as Indonesia, where slash and burn agricultural practices have caused peat deposits to combust spontaneously, such fires already account for about 7-10% of greenhouse gas production.
The good news is that this won't raise the global mean temperature much beyond 4-7 deg C in the next fifty to hundred years, but it will increase the temperature beyond that by about 7-15 deg C in the second hundred. If this news wasn't bad enough, with most molecules of carbon dioxide going into the oceans, the pH of the oceans will likely become about 30% more acidic than they are now, having increased hydronium ion concentrations about this much over the past 150 years. This rate of change should worry everyone, since humans derive about 50% of their protein from the world oceans. As if this weren't bad enough news, in 200 years temperatures of the relatively shallow arctic sea will begin to reach the point at which the 10-11,000 Gt of methane will be released from marine clathrates, where it is presently stored in cold sediments, so that in as little as 300-500 years, global mean temperatures will accelerate towards those seen on Venus if present trends continue unabated.
The fact is that humanity needs to pour just about all its resources toward addressing the consequences of climate change while it still has time, time which will surely run out in about 200-300 years at the current projected rate of warming. Human survival depends upon it.
The reason that NASA and just about every other scientific organization in the world is now focusing on climate change results from the fact that the rate at which the Earth is now heating is 36 times faster than it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago, when in just a mere 10-30,000 years, Wyoming went from having redwood forests to having palm forests and nearly entire mammalian fauna in the Northern Hemisphere died out and was replaced by other species. Keep in mind that the current 36 times rate is just the current rate, which is increasing exponentially. Based on simple extrapolation, by the end of the century with just an increase of 1.5 deg C, some 1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide will be released by melting permafrost and another trillion tons will be released as a result of increasing peat and coal seam fires more than tripling the annual production of human generated greenhouse gas, which is now about 33.5 Gt/yr. In some areas such as Indonesia, where slash and burn agricultural practices have caused peat deposits to combust spontaneously, such fires already account for about 7-10% of greenhouse gas production.
The good news is that this won't raise the global mean temperature much beyond 4-7 deg C in the next fifty to hundred years, but it will increase the temperature beyond that by about 7-15 deg C in the second hundred. If this news wasn't bad enough, with most molecules of carbon dioxide going into the oceans, the pH of the oceans will likely become about 30% more acidic than they are now, having increased hydronium ion concentrations about this much over the past 150 years. This rate of change should worry everyone, since humans derive about 50% of their protein from the world oceans. As if this weren't bad enough news, in 200 years temperatures of the relatively shallow arctic sea will begin to reach the point at which the 10-11,000 Gt of methane will be released from marine clathrates, where it is presently stored in cold sediments, so that in as little as 300-500 years, global mean temperatures will accelerate towards those seen on Venus if present trends continue unabated.
At least all those biologists wandering around will have something to study, the greatest extinction on planet Earth since the Permian. So no, it isn't just you, there are plenty of uneducated people out there. The good or bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that there will be plenty of seats at the School of Hard Knocks.
NASA won't get shut down. Rather we will just see peer reviewed science squeezed out to fund more pork-barrel spending of the type created by Roger Wicker, who forced NASA to complete the construction of a tower-vacuum chamber at the Stennis Space Center for $350,000,000 that was then mothballed the day it was completed. The modern GOP have become what Lysenko was to Soviet Biology, where ideology becomes paramount to actual fact and science.
Actually, Obama has executed fewer executive orders than any modern president, but now that bearing false witness no longer a sin in GOP circles please proceed.
Yes, the bearing of false witness has become big business these days, as Fox News so admirably demonstrates. No one should be surprised, since Rupert Murdoch worships the Golden Calf.
With Ted Cruz running US science programs, its far more likely that the Chinese will be our new overseers. They already hold a massive amount of our debt, they are out investing us, for example $93B/yr vs $51B/yr in solar, and they are currently orbiting the moon as we speak. Given recent deals to prop up Russia, they are likely to become Russia's overseers as well. Then again, this is the price we must pay for the GOP to make good on their anti-Obama, anti-science agenda.
No, both actually called for bigger NASA and science budgets. Let's not try to bear false witness, even if doing do has become Fox News' business model.
That's the funny, yet totally brain-dead part of this anti-government argument. Rather than having citizens have input into the process, they would prefer that the 1% should simply own the process. Instead of trying to make America better, they are keen to make either smaller or private. How is a smaller and more privately run America better for the average American?
A major problem of estimating the costs of energy is failing to add the costs of transmission to the costs of production. It makes no sense to leave out relative transmission costs since without being able to get it to where it is used, the cost of production is meaningless. Solar and wind have in general lower transmission costs, because they can be sited closer to where they are used than can nuclear and fossil fuels and hence the relative cost of transmission is much lower. No need to transport fuels or waste by truck or rail or pipeline and often much less need for expensive transmission lines. In many cases its simply a short trip from a solar panel on a rooftop to the home heater or lightbulb, without the need for expensive transmission lines, except to transport the "excess" power generated back to the grid, where it lowers rather than raises costs.
The most efficient biofuels come from culturing algae, not producing corn and other human consumables. Consequently, the only thing causing a clash between biofuels and food production going forward is the inertia created by locking in the political kickbacks associated with ethanol subsidies in corn producing states. This won't change anytime soon as the GOP ideology is all about granting special favors to insiders, who then provide the kickbacks necessary to sustain the process going forward.
There are multiple solutions to that problem already in deployment. The two most common methods now in use is to use solar to heat sodium to about 400 deg and then use it to power steam generators at night and the other to simply pump water uphill by day and then generate power hydrodynamically at night. Both approaches are extremely simple, extremely cost effective, and already becoming increasingly common at many solar installations.
The demand for oil will definitely start to wane when soil temperatures become so hot that tires will melt and it will be impossible to grow crops in many parts of the world.
I suppose the good news is that humanity soon won't have that much longer to wait. Within less than 100 years the amount of carbon released from thawing permafrost will begin to equal that generated by humans. Just a 1.5 deg C increase in warming in the arctic will release more than a trillion metric tons of the greenhouse gases CO2 and methane. Of course, rising sea temperatures are simultaneously increasing the sublimation of methane clathrates, that contain even far more stored carbon. In roughly the past 150 years, ocean pH has fallen fallen from 8.25 to 8.14 or about a 30% change in hydronium ion concentration. Thus we can expect annual extinction rates soon to exceed those observed during the "Great Dying" that occurred during Permian times. Its already baked into the cake. No further input required, we are now just waiting for equilibrium given the current carbon dioxide load in seawater.
Let us all pray that Saudi Arabia brings this brief era of cheap gas to a merciful end so that we may soon be able to pay $500/gallon.
No. Alternative energies are gaining because they serve primarily to generate electricity and because technology is decreasing their costs faster than their profits are falling. That is not to say, however, that such technology doesn't play a role in the transportation markets where they will more directly compete in the future. For example, Tesla just recently increased the miles their cars can go on a single charge from about 250 miles to about 450 miles. Likewise, electric charging stations are rapidly increasing in number. Although these numbers are miniscule compared to conventional fossil fuels, it is the rate of their increase that drives profits and future investments, since that is where the new money is to be made. Keep in mind that at the beginning of the 20th century, buggy whips outsold autos several thousand to one, but now no fortunes are made selling buggy whips.
The recent drop in oil prices will only spur the electric car industry to become more efficient and cost efficient sooner. This is the way natural selection works.
It won't be that simple, since those who do shut down will be out of business more or less permanently, having given up their market share. Also the investment profit cycle of shale oils are quite different from those of fracking and they must continue to produce regardless just to pay back billions in loans already spent on infrastructure. This is a particular problem for the Canadians, who the Saudis see as their first target. The battle is over market share and who will be the top dog, the current price is incidental, since the winner will be able to set whatever price they want. The Saudis with their ability to make a profit even at $10 per barrel are likely to win out, but the Koch brothers and others will fight tooth and nail before letting that happen and one reason their recent Fox News propaganda is increasingly pushing policies that will further destabilize the Middle East and Saudi influence there.
The reason alternative energy will continue to gain ground is that ever increasing efficiencies and long term costs are becoming increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. Recent breakthroughs in solar, which will increase current efficiency by about 40%, haven't even come to market yet. Likewise, there is considerable profit to be gained in alternative energies by increasing scale and mass production that are only now being realized. Fossil fuels on the other hand face increasing costs going forward, higher costs to drill with less return on investment, greater costs associated with cleanup and pollution controls that alternative energy simply don't have. Further, there is increased realization that fossil fuel burning will cause humans to go extinct unless curtailed. This means the fossil fuels industry will have to dramatically increase their spending on propaganda just to maintain the current drill, baby, drill mindset.
The worse news for fossil fuels is that the smart money on Wall Street and other global markets increasingly see the that it is in smaller alternative energy companies and technologies that new fortunes will be made, while fortunes will be lost trying to sustain antiquated fossil fuel technologies on an ever warming planet, with increasingly higher extraction and maintenance costs. This is the primary reason why China is currently outspending the US on annual solar investments of $93B to $51 per annum and their 5-year plan indicates they are just ramping up. They intend to be the world leaders, while the US falls all over itself trying to prop up the fossil fuels industry. The transition from fossil fuels isn't over by any means, but it is well on its way and there is nothing the fossil fuels industry can do about it other than drill, baby, drill while they can still do it. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for the rest of humanity that window is starting to close.
Actually, the "Wolfram Language" is a relatively new component of the Mathematica application, and in fact the Wolfram Language platform is built from the atomic and composite components of Mathematica. Consequently, it is probably just as meaningful to regard Mathematica as a language, particularly since one expresses (in a very literal sense of the word, since everything in Mathematica is an expression), there is no "Wolfram language" without it.
My sense is that recently, Wolfram recognizes that function development has proceeded to a point, where the various components can be considered a language since it is has a syntax, a grammar, and that together create contextual meaning that is actually much larger in scope than previous versions of Mathematica, particularly its newer cloud, alpha based, and computable document format components. Thus, calling it a language is a useful marketing device.
Matlab and Mathematica have very different approaches to linear algebra. The former is primarily a procedural oriented language. The later is a functional rules based language. Although one can program procedurally in Mathematica, one's programs will be extremely inefficient, difficult to compile and even more difficult to parallelize. Believe it or not, there is quite a bit more to learning a computer language than hubris for anything other than toy programs.
Same is certainly true with Mathematica, which is primarily a List-oriented, symbolic and functional programming language. It takes quite a while to go from either a procedural oriented framework such as FORTRAN, Pascal, or C or from an object-oriented language such as Java to functional and rule based programming that go into writing Mathematica code.
Obviously, if one is unfamiliar with the underlying concepts, such as complex analysis, integration, partial differentiation, special functions, combinatorics, graph theory, or PDF's then its only going to be even that much harder to discern which of the several thousand functions in the language are the most appropriate for a particular task. It takes more than hubris to develop such skills. Like anything else, to do it well takes lots of practice. Learning to play chess is easy. Becoming a grand master is not.
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Considering that an IQ of 100 is average and an IQ of 100 wouldn't get one into virtually any profession in science, his comment is more like a statement of fact/reality than a put down. However, I do understand the need for modern Conservatives to always find a way to play the "victim", regardless of circumstance.
You don't even have to look at "socialists". Just look at GOP senators like Roger Wicker, who was instrumental in assuring over NASA's objections that $350,000,000 was spent to complete the construction of a vacuum chamber tower at the Stennis Space Center in Hancock County, MS, which was immediately mothballed the day it was completed. NASA won't see its budget shrink, it will just see more politically motivated pork projects push aside those based on science.
There is a very good reason that virtually every science organization on the planet is now focusing on the effects of climate change, namely the rate at which the climate is changing is now far faster than ever seen in the history of the planet.
Its worth repeating what I said earlier.
The reason that NASA and just about every other scientific organization in the world is now focusing on climate change results from the fact that the rate at which the Earth is now heating is 36 times faster than it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago, when in just a mere 10-30,000 years, Wyoming went from having redwood forests to having palm forests and nearly entire mammalian fauna in the Northern Hemisphere died out and was replaced by other species. Keep in mind that the current 36 times rate is just the current rate, which is increasing exponentially. Based on simple extrapolation, by the end of the century with just an increase of 1.5 deg C, some 1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide will be released by melting permafrost and another trillion tons will be released as a result of increasing peat and coal seam fires more than tripling the annual production of human generated greenhouse gas, which is now about 33.5 Gt/yr. In some areas such as Indonesia, where slash and burn agricultural practices have caused peat deposits to combust spontaneously, such fires already account for about 7-10% of greenhouse gas production.
The good news is that this won't raise the global mean temperature much beyond 4-7 deg C in the next fifty to hundred years, but it will increase the temperature beyond that by about 7-15 deg C in the second hundred. If this news wasn't bad enough, with most molecules of carbon dioxide going into the oceans, the pH of the oceans will likely become about 30% more acidic than they are now, having increased hydronium ion concentrations about this much over the past 150 years. This rate of change should worry everyone, since humans derive about 50% of their protein from the world oceans. As if this weren't bad enough news, in 200 years temperatures of the relatively shallow arctic sea will begin to reach the point at which the 10-11,000 Gt of methane will be released from marine clathrates, where it is presently stored in cold sediments, so that in as little as 300-500 years, global mean temperatures will accelerate towards those seen on Venus if present trends continue unabated.
The fact is that humanity needs to pour just about all its resources toward addressing the consequences of climate change while it still has time, time which will surely run out in about 200-300 years at the current projected rate of warming. Human survival depends upon it.
The reason that NASA and just about every other scientific organization in the world is now focusing on climate change results from the fact that the rate at which the Earth is now heating is 36 times faster than it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago, when in just a mere 10-30,000 years, Wyoming went from having redwood forests to having palm forests and nearly entire mammalian fauna in the Northern Hemisphere died out and was replaced by other species. Keep in mind that the current 36 times rate is just the current rate, which is increasing exponentially. Based on simple extrapolation, by the end of the century with just an increase of 1.5 deg C, some 1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide will be released by melting permafrost and another trillion tons will be released as a result of increasing peat and coal seam fires more than tripling the annual production of human generated greenhouse gas, which is now about 33.5 Gt/yr. In some areas such as Indonesia, where slash and burn agricultural practices have caused peat deposits to combust spontaneously, such fires already account for about 7-10% of greenhouse gas production.
The good news is that this won't raise the global mean temperature much beyond 4-7 deg C in the next fifty to hundred years, but it will increase the temperature beyond that by about 7-15 deg C in the second hundred. If this news wasn't bad enough, with most molecules of carbon dioxide going into the oceans, the pH of the oceans will likely become about 30% more acidic than they are now, having increased hydronium ion concentrations about this much over the past 150 years. This rate of change should worry everyone, since humans derive about 50% of their protein from the world oceans. As if this weren't bad enough news, in 200 years temperatures of the relatively shallow arctic sea will begin to reach the point at which the 10-11,000 Gt of methane will be released from marine clathrates, where it is presently stored in cold sediments, so that in as little as 300-500 years, global mean temperatures will accelerate towards those seen on Venus if present trends continue unabated.
At least all those biologists wandering around will have something to study, the greatest extinction on planet Earth since the Permian. So no, it isn't just you, there are plenty of uneducated people out there. The good or bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that there will be plenty of seats at the School of Hard Knocks.
NASA won't get shut down. Rather we will just see peer reviewed science squeezed out to fund more pork-barrel spending of the type created by Roger Wicker, who forced NASA to complete the construction of a tower-vacuum chamber at the Stennis Space Center for $350,000,000 that was then mothballed the day it was completed. The modern GOP have become what Lysenko was to Soviet Biology, where ideology becomes paramount to actual fact and science.
Actually, Obama has executed fewer executive orders than any modern president, but now that bearing false witness no longer a sin in GOP circles please proceed.
Perhaps not, but saying that the fundamental idea in biology comes "straight from the pit of hell" surely does.
Yes, the bearing of false witness has become big business these days, as Fox News so admirably demonstrates. No one should be surprised, since Rupert Murdoch worships the Golden Calf.
With Ted Cruz running US science programs, its far more likely that the Chinese will be our new overseers. They already hold a massive amount of our debt, they are out investing us, for example $93B/yr vs $51B/yr in solar, and they are currently orbiting the moon as we speak. Given recent deals to prop up Russia, they are likely to become Russia's overseers as well. Then again, this is the price we must pay for the GOP to make good on their anti-Obama, anti-science agenda.
Actually, Dems received nearly 20,000,000 more votes national than the GOP, which goes to show just how badly the GOP has gerrymandered the Congress.
No, both actually called for bigger NASA and science budgets. Let's not try to bear false witness, even if doing do has become Fox News' business model.
That's the funny, yet totally brain-dead part of this anti-government argument. Rather than having citizens have input into the process, they would prefer that the 1% should simply own the process. Instead of trying to make America better, they are keen to make either smaller or private. How is a smaller and more privately run America better for the average American?
A major problem of estimating the costs of energy is failing to add the costs of transmission to the costs of production. It makes no sense to leave out relative transmission costs since without being able to get it to where it is used, the cost of production is meaningless. Solar and wind have in general lower transmission costs, because they can be sited closer to where they are used than can nuclear and fossil fuels and hence the relative cost of transmission is much lower. No need to transport fuels or waste by truck or rail or pipeline and often much less need for expensive transmission lines. In many cases its simply a short trip from a solar panel on a rooftop to the home heater or lightbulb, without the need for expensive transmission lines, except to transport the "excess" power generated back to the grid, where it lowers rather than raises costs.
Not to mention adding even more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere.
The most efficient biofuels come from culturing algae, not producing corn and other human consumables. Consequently, the only thing causing a clash between biofuels and food production going forward is the inertia created by locking in the political kickbacks associated with ethanol subsidies in corn producing states. This won't change anytime soon as the GOP ideology is all about granting special favors to insiders, who then provide the kickbacks necessary to sustain the process going forward.
There are multiple solutions to that problem already in deployment. The two most common methods now in use is to use solar to heat sodium to about 400 deg and then use it to power steam generators at night and the other to simply pump water uphill by day and then generate power hydrodynamically at night. Both approaches are extremely simple, extremely cost effective, and already becoming increasingly common at many solar installations.
The demand for oil will definitely start to wane when soil temperatures become so hot that tires will melt and it will be impossible to grow crops in many parts of the world.
I suppose the good news is that humanity soon won't have that much longer to wait. Within less than 100 years the amount of carbon released from thawing permafrost will begin to equal that generated by humans. Just a 1.5 deg C increase in warming in the arctic will release more than a trillion metric tons of the greenhouse gases CO2 and methane. Of course, rising sea temperatures are simultaneously increasing the sublimation of methane clathrates, that contain even far more stored carbon. In roughly the past 150 years, ocean pH has fallen fallen from 8.25 to 8.14 or about a 30% change in hydronium ion concentration. Thus we can expect annual extinction rates soon to exceed those observed during the "Great Dying" that occurred during Permian times. Its already baked into the cake. No further input required, we are now just waiting for equilibrium given the current carbon dioxide load in seawater.
Let us all pray that Saudi Arabia brings this brief era of cheap gas to a merciful end so that we may soon be able to pay $500/gallon.
No. Alternative energies are gaining because they serve primarily to generate electricity and because technology is decreasing their costs faster than their profits are falling. That is not to say, however, that such technology doesn't play a role in the transportation markets where they will more directly compete in the future. For example, Tesla just recently increased the miles their cars can go on a single charge from about 250 miles to about 450 miles. Likewise, electric charging stations are rapidly increasing in number. Although these numbers are miniscule compared to conventional fossil fuels, it is the rate of their increase that drives profits and future investments, since that is where the new money is to be made. Keep in mind that at the beginning of the 20th century, buggy whips outsold autos several thousand to one, but now no fortunes are made selling buggy whips.
The recent drop in oil prices will only spur the electric car industry to become more efficient and cost efficient sooner. This is the way natural selection works.
It won't be that simple, since those who do shut down will be out of business more or less permanently, having given up their market share. Also the investment profit cycle of shale oils are quite different from those of fracking and they must continue to produce regardless just to pay back billions in loans already spent on infrastructure. This is a particular problem for the Canadians, who the Saudis see as their first target. The battle is over market share and who will be the top dog, the current price is incidental, since the winner will be able to set whatever price they want. The Saudis with their ability to make a profit even at $10 per barrel are likely to win out, but the Koch brothers and others will fight tooth and nail before letting that happen and one reason their recent Fox News propaganda is increasingly pushing policies that will further destabilize the Middle East and Saudi influence there.
The reason alternative energy will continue to gain ground is that ever increasing efficiencies and long term costs are becoming increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. Recent breakthroughs in solar, which will increase current efficiency by about 40%, haven't even come to market yet. Likewise, there is considerable profit to be gained in alternative energies by increasing scale and mass production that are only now being realized. Fossil fuels on the other hand face increasing costs going forward, higher costs to drill with less return on investment, greater costs associated with cleanup and pollution controls that alternative energy simply don't have. Further, there is increased realization that fossil fuel burning will cause humans to go extinct unless curtailed. This means the fossil fuels industry will have to dramatically increase their spending on propaganda just to maintain the current drill, baby, drill mindset.
The worse news for fossil fuels is that the smart money on Wall Street and other global markets increasingly see the that it is in smaller alternative energy companies and technologies that new fortunes will be made, while fortunes will be lost trying to sustain antiquated fossil fuel technologies on an ever warming planet, with increasingly higher extraction and maintenance costs. This is the primary reason why China is currently outspending the US on annual solar investments of $93B to $51 per annum and their 5-year plan indicates they are just ramping up. They intend to be the world leaders, while the US falls all over itself trying to prop up the fossil fuels industry. The transition from fossil fuels isn't over by any means, but it is well on its way and there is nothing the fossil fuels industry can do about it other than drill, baby, drill while they can still do it. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for the rest of humanity that window is starting to close.
They have a heart. That's why we love them instead of you. No one could ever love you, which upsets you doesn't it? Go ahead. Admit it to yourself.
That's often true, but it may well mean the difference between eating table scraps and not eating at all.
Actually, the "Wolfram Language" is a relatively new component of the Mathematica application, and in fact the Wolfram Language platform is built from the atomic and composite components of Mathematica. Consequently, it is probably just as meaningful to regard Mathematica as a language, particularly since one expresses (in a very literal sense of the word, since everything in Mathematica is an expression), there is no "Wolfram language" without it.
My sense is that recently, Wolfram recognizes that function development has proceeded to a point, where the various components can be considered a language since it is has a syntax, a grammar, and that together create contextual meaning that is actually much larger in scope than previous versions of Mathematica, particularly its newer cloud, alpha based, and computable document format components. Thus, calling it a language is a useful marketing device.
Matlab and Mathematica have very different approaches to linear algebra. The former is primarily a procedural oriented language. The later is a functional rules based language. Although one can program procedurally in Mathematica, one's programs will be extremely inefficient, difficult to compile and even more difficult to parallelize. Believe it or not, there is quite a bit more to learning a computer language than hubris for anything other than toy programs.
If you love games and group theory then check out
http://www.wolfram.com/broadca...
Same is certainly true with Mathematica, which is primarily a List-oriented, symbolic and functional programming language. It takes quite a while to go from either a procedural oriented framework such as FORTRAN, Pascal, or C or from an object-oriented language such as Java to functional and rule based programming that go into writing Mathematica code.
Obviously, if one is unfamiliar with the underlying concepts, such as complex analysis, integration, partial differentiation, special functions, combinatorics, graph theory, or PDF's then its only going to be even that much harder to discern which of the several thousand functions in the language are the most appropriate for a particular task. It takes more than hubris to develop such skills. Like anything else, to do it well takes lots of practice. Learning to play chess is easy. Becoming a grand master is not.