The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

Indee it's not about actual bipolar disorder (a.k.a. maniac-depression) at all. It's just a figure of speech. It's describing more a combination of cronic procrastination, unwillingness to do "boring" things even when it arguably goes against their self-interest (e.g. failing Intro to Philosophy), etc.

(I wish I could make myself clearer but I have no time for that now, as that would be procrastination).

If you're truly bipolar, you need medication. This is not my opinion, this is the current obligated medical treatment.

What I have seen from my bipolar friends who go off their meds has often been horrifying. It's incredibly common, unfortunately, largely stemming from beliefs like this post posits: it's just a discipline issue, it's a phase, it's an attitude, etc.

As always, try to avoid medical advice from usenet posts. Your loved ones will thank you.

All the same I'm glad the article was reposted as I am relatively new to the site.

On the flip side, that's not a useless thing to learn - about 10-25% or so of my "Professional life" is some form of drudge work. So I did need to learn to suck it up.

Whenever I really felt like "too smart for school", I remembered the manual labor I had done in summers prior and that helped put some steel in my spine.

<quote>

They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?

Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.

Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river.

Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations.

Along the way, he realised that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier-Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem.

If that didn’t prove his intelligence, what would?

Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.

Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada.

The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.

</quote>

When I'm depressed, my thinking is skewed. I admit it. And here's an important point: if rational reasoning leads you to one conclusion and emotional reasoning suggests something else, then doesn't that mean that your meaning of life depends on how you feel in a given day? My emotions aren't predictable enough for me to accept that.