joeclark77

I think you're evading babyrainbow's question. Many new technologies have been developed, true. But we've also spent the last century conducting experiments in communism and genocide. So on the whole, are we (and I'm including the whole human race in "we") better off in all respects or only in some?

The weirdest job interview I ever went to was for a sales position at a software development company. These guys had me do a Myers-Briggs test online a few days before the interview. After taking a day off and making a long drive to see these guys, the manager introduced himself by saying "We don't want you for this job. With your personality type you can't be a salesman. I let you come here anyway, though, because our web developer is really overwhelmed. Would you be willing to meet him and talk about working for him?"

It was so bizarre it took me a while to decide if they were insane or just incredibly rude. Upon reflection, they were both.

It meant "bourgeois bohemian", and referred to the sort of yuppies who shop at Whole Foods and style themselves as hippies. I knew a bunch of people who thought it applied to themselves or their friends in the early 2000s. But I haven't heard it much in five or ten years now.

Does anybody remember the terms DINK or BoBo? Some fun nicknames for demographics that I haven't heard in a while.

People who are formally excommunicated aren't banished from society; in fact, they're not even allowed to skip Mass.

The first type of excommunication you're talking about is the automatic kind. If you commit grave (not venial) sins and haven't been to confession yet, you cannot receive Communion without committing a sacrilege. No formal decree from the bishop is necessary for this. In fact, no one even needs to know you committed a sin, for you to be in this state.

A formal excommunication is a public announcement intended to shame a sinner into amending his life and re-entering a state of grace by repentance and confession. I believe in some cases it requires a public act by the sinner, to let the community know that the public charge of excommunication has been answered. So, to contradict your position, a public excommunication is not a shunning but rather is meant to bring the sinner back into the community.

It might be a useful practice for the Church to do more of...

I tell students that it would be good to have a "problem solving" major (such as engineering, computer science, business, or law) as well as a second major in a "problem" they care about, which could be anything from art to zoology. Then you have the ingredients for a career -- applying your problem solving methodology to a problem you know something about.

In your case, maybe you learn computer science and you apply it to some problem in art or the humanities.

Also worth mentioning: Galileo himself was "within the Catholic Church".

Honestly I would look toward manufacturing, particularly if you can incorporate ideas from the world of the digital -- for example crowdsourcing, mass customization, or continuous delivery of updates/modifications. I read an article in WIRED oh, I guess about five years ago now, called "Atoms are the new Bits" that talked about companies using 3D printing, crowdsourcing, etc, but to make real world products.

Part of the reason I think this area is hot is that it's harder to do than apps. Every "app" I can think of has already been done, and in fact there's probably a dozen versions of it languishing in app stores. Manufacturing is harder, and is often geographically local, so there are fewer competitors and more niches.

Another leading indicator for me is the general rebellion of young people against the fact that "shop class" has been taken out of schools. Lots of kids are trying to find ways to be "makers". In my state, when I was in school the "dummies" were pushed toward taking vocational classes in plumbing, welding, etc. Now (20+ years later) the vocational classes are the most competitive, prestigious classes that students fight to get admitted to.

If I had to guess, the new manufacturing is going to be smaller scale, extremely high quality, locally sourced materials, with some kind of digital "twist" on the business models.

I'm not sure that's really true. What would it take to wipe out all the denizens of a star system? Maybe a few million atomic bombs? Certainly less than the mass of a small moon. And if that then gave you control of a whole star system's worth of matter and energy, it should be more than enough to fuel the conquest of the next star, and so on.

So it's certainly feasible for an advanced race to build a star empire; the question is why they'd want to do it. If we're talking about humans you might say ambition or imagination. If Vulcans, maybe they'd think it logical to pre-emptively become stronger than any potential aggressors.

The essay "I, Pencil" is what you're referring to. http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

The big surprise line is that there's no one on earth who knows how to make a pencil. (It therefore serves as testimony in favor of free enterprise and against the idea of a centrally planned economy.)

First, the "Mother of all Demos" by Doug Engelbart: https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY This was in 1968, at a time when most people thought about computers as being machines for solving computation problems, like processing payrolls or calculating rocket trajectories. Engelbart and his students had the radical idea that computers could be used for human "knowledge worker" productivity. In one 90 minute presentation, he introduces everything from the idea of a GUI, to the mouse, to word processing, hypertext, computer graphics, and (simulated) videoconferencing. You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the audience that has never seen this stuff before, and it'll blow you away.

Something more recent: Martin Fowler's great introduction to NoSQL: https://youtu.be/qI_g07C_Q5I Not so technical, this is a great overview of the reasons why (and when) NoSQL is valuable. He crams a lot into a short speech, so it's one of the rare videos I've required students in my database classes to watch.

Now, really getting away from the technical, I have to recommend watching the IDEO shopping cart video: https://youtu.be/taJOV-YCieI This is the classic introduction of Design Thinking to the world, in 1999. If you're using the Lean Startup or an Agile method, but have never heard of IDEO's shopping cart, you may be able to get along fine at work, but you should be kind of embarrassed like a physicist who's never read Newton.

The series of novels specifically deals with time frames much longer than "decades". The first book spans a few centuries, the second and third span millenia, the fourth spans tens of millennia, and the fifth and sixth (not out yet) are supposed to reach much farther.

The big idea of the book is that Einstein isn't wrong about C being the speed limit. Therefore, to be a starfaring race requires the ability to make commitments and hold to them over extremely long timespans. The connection to game theory is that, as in the Prisoner's Dilemma, the only way you can really make predictably right decisions in cooperation with other entities is if your decision-making formulas are spelled out mathematically in advance; so all can predict how you will act. The first book begins with mankind discovering the galaxy's "rules" on a kind of signpost at a nearby star.

Read the books!

I just keep hoping they'll get here before November, though, so I can write in Kodos on the ballot.

You might enjoy reading John C. Wright's "Count to a Trillion" series, which does some thinking about how starfaring alien races, governed by game theory, might actually operate.

I don't think there's ever going to be a point when a race has "enough" and doesn't want to explore or build any more. Our ambition should grow with our capabilities. Once you can control a star, why not work on a galaxy?

Throw out the TV, for starters.

Maybe it's Slartibartfast's workshop.

They don't have to be right there by the star. They could be small ships just a few million miles away, maybe.

You're just outsourcing the impedance mismatch problem to the database. Yes, we can write complex SQL (and I've written some really complex SQL) to combine multitudes of entities together and generate a result. NoSQL databases eliminate this.

Where it becomes extremely impactful is when a database is distributed or sharded across a cluster. If the various tables (article, author, comment) are stored on different servers, it takes time for the database to reassemble them. Moreover, modern web apps often have content that's written once, read many times: blog posts, photo posts, status messages, news articles, advertisements, catalog listings, etc. Why re-do that work of assembling the content every time people want to look at it? When documents are rarely or never edited, the relational model's defenses against "anomalies" become less relevant. Far better to use a document store like MongoDB, which stores a piece of content as an integrated whole at a single place in the database.

What's "junior craft school"? What age group are we talking about?

In teaching programming, I've found that often the hardest thing to learn is how to break down problems logically, not how to write code. For example, if I assign students to write a function that takes an average (mean) of a series of numbers, very few will fail because of syntax errors. Many more will fail because they've never thought about how to take an average!

Therefore, my latest thinking is that the first few programming lessons should be about basic mathematical problem solving. How to compute an average. How to estimate a square root. That sort of thing in a "math" class is assumed given. To a mathematician, the square root of two is "the square root of two" and no computation is necessary. I want to convey to my students that computers have to be taught a process, not an answer.

I'll find out next semester if that's a better approach. I hope you find it helpful or at least interesting.

A lot of the entities we deal with in web apps are complex, multi-table structures when stored in a relational database. Think about blog articles (tables: article, author, tag, comment), user profiles (tables: user, friends, follower, interests, etc.), photos, tweets, ads, and such. The beauty of something like MongoDB is that you can store all the data as one "record" in a collection. You can also retrieve it with a simple query. These "records" are structured as something like JSON, so you can just take the data structures you're using in your app's code (particularly Python or JavaScript), and store it as-is with no conversion.

Compare this to an RDBMS-based web app, where to display a blog article for example you'd need to make multiple queries of different tables: first the "article" table to get the text, then the "author" table, then all the comments, tags, images, or whatever. The NoSQL way is much easier to code for this sort of thing. The lack of ACID doesn't matter so much because these kinds of data are usually written just once, read many times, edited rarely, so there are few opportunities for inconsistencies to creep in.

I think it depends on the company you're applying to. Big companies routinely get thousands of resumes and may use some form of automation to screen them. If the software can't pick out the basic details, the whole thing may be skipped.

On the other hand if a human is reading your resume, creativity may be a plus. So that might apply to small businesses, start-ups, etc.

It annoys me that I can't use uppercase letters in table or column names without wrapping them in nasssty quotation marks.

I'm skeptical even about (paper) cash. I'm thinking about learning to make my own silver coins.

A PhD can give you an opportunity to work on what you call a "real" problem, but it could also force you to work on "fake" problems. In many fields, the research we academics must do to get hired/promoted/tenured is somewhat artificial and unrelated to the problems we're in the classroom teaching our students to solve. On the other hand there are great stories of PhD candidates starting businesses. I think Google got its start as somebody's dissertation.

When considering a PhD, the best thing to do is look at the advisor(s) you'd be working for and their repertoire of projects. Looking at the "discipline" isn't precise enough; there's a wide range of stuff happening within fields like information systems or computer science, everything from very theoretical to very practical.

Yes, I've ascended four times. I had read all the spoilers, though!

Merkel gets what Merkel wants: free speech is silenced, and she's made an example of this comedian so that other writers, entertainers, journalists, etc, will get the message to keep their ideas about Islamism to themselves. Sure you can say "he'll have his day in court", but it'll take years and millions of dollars (Euros, or whatever). The TV network has already pulled the offending joke off their website. The comedian has had his show cancelled. Anyone else out there thinking about doing something similar has got the message about what happens when you disagree with the government. Yeah, he'll win his freedom in the trial, but "the process is the punishment". No free country tells a comedian that he and his employer are going to be forced to defend themselves in court for... writing a poem.

I remember my first tech jobs in the dot-com bubble of 1999-2001. I could see my managers doing everything wrong, but couldn't convince them why it was wrong. I thought it was because I hadn't been to business school. Now I know it was because I was 22.

You're just going to have to "grin and bear it" for 3-4 years before people will start listening to what you think. In the mean time, focus on showing up every day on time, wearing a clean shirt, using your manners, and learning to do whatever they're asking you to do, really well. Those things will distinguish you from the other fresh graduates more than you'd think.

This is interesting! I spent almost a whole school year (I'm a professor) trying to use Linux as my main operating system, tried Arch, Ubuntu, Mint. Ultimately the limiting factor was projectors. Every classroom I teach in seems to have a different brand of projector and I just couldn't get my laptop to work well with any of them. Windows does whatever magic is needed so that it always "just works" with a projector, therefore, I went back. I have been trying to raise money for a Mac because I figured it's the best compromise, but this could change it.

Python and Flask on Heroku. What you're describing is almost the "tutorial" web app (look up Grinberg's book on Flask). Heroku is a nice platform to work on that takes a lot of the complexity out of cloud hosting. Flask lets you do almost all the coding yourself, but it has add-ons available to take care of whatever you don't want to do.

Heroku gives you a PostgreSQL database with one click, but you could easily integrate a MongoDB database if you wanted to try NoSQL. In Mongo, you'd actually store and retrieve your data in JSON, so it's even easier than writing SQL.

In addition to the other great comments here, I would add: have some extra material. The worst thing would be to get through all of your slides in 10 minutes when you planned for 30. On the other hand if you only get through half your slides, skipping over some in the middle, no problem! If there's a Q+A session, people will naturally ask you to elaborate on certain points, and you'll then be prepared.