mechanician

Properly sharpening a chisel blade on a stone is an art.

I agree with the above, but exact number of hours aside, do you think there could be some validity to the article, akin to a Pareto principle?

Professor Bart Kosko at USC is an active publisher in this area.

Example: sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/TSP_May2009.pdf

Rumor aside, I'm surprised in general that ARM's stock has risen so much in the last year. I suppose the increase in price is due to the current, and anticipated, use of ARM designs in mobile devices. Still, in the long run would ARM really be able to maintain it's lower-power chip dominance over Intel? I know Intel isn't there yet, but they seem to be a fearsome R&D competitor.

This topic seems to come up quite often. I personally don't know whether an investment banker contributes more to society than a motor engineer. However the expected income for the i-banker seems to be higher. I.e. this is an incentive problem. People can talk all they want about the intrinsic satisfaction in producing actual goods, but at the end of the day we all need to pay rent, eat, pay back student loans, and spring for the occasional round of drinks.

"It is based on trying to integrate several comments by others that I do not fully understand at every level, and so may be somewhat inaccurate; please help in pointing out any deficiencies."

---

There is something to be said for a guy this smart, and with this many accolades, being so humble. One need only read Terry's blog to understand how much the guy DOES understand.

Great advice. Books these days, especially technical books, are expensive. However I've rarely ever regretted buying a book, even the (very) few I bought but never read. Probably due to the fact that buying technical books has a minimal and bounded downside, but a huge upside.

When is peak time?

The airport check-in security process.

I am an engineer. Being five years removed from undergrad, the most valuable parts of college were not electives in mechanics or control theory. They were the professors I interacted with, the football games I attended in the student section, the liberal arts and writing classes I was required to take, and the friends I made.

As an emacs newbie with a nagging desire to learn Perl, I would gladly commit to switching to an emacs implementation in Perl.

On a barely related note, I just noticed Amazon is now advertising the 'optimized for Amazon' feature of IE8. An interesting partnership.

"Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran.

The lean startup circle Google group is pretty active, with decent SNR.

I think correlation is being confused with causation. It is probably more that intelligence and ambition are traits of great entrepreneurs, but are also correlated with dropping out of college. In addition I bet that most people who graduated from college do not regret the experience.

Having to do this is really unfortunate. However it could be spectacular to see.

I guess I'm curious what the line is between disruptive and incremental, assuming of course they are only separated by a line.

A cup of coffee

I have toyed with R, and I think it's great. I love the data-focus of the language, and the capabilities of ggplot (for which there does not seem to be an equal to in Python). But to be honest as a controls guy, and not a software guy, learning new languages is not a trivial task for me. Python seems to meet both my computational and application aspirations.

As a controls engineer, I agree. I've been trying to learn/switch to python after years of Matlab, but the installation effort, programming environment and lack of controls tools compared to Matlab have hindered me.

Actually if anyone has any suggestions to address those issues, I'd appreciate it.

Interesting paper. I wonder if patents are the best metric for innovation though...

Thanks. Since I have started to learn Python (for a different application), is there any way to get these Matlab-like functions in Python?

Lovely.

Excellent essay, as usual. Question: does this imply that Silicon Valley will continue to grow as a result of being the dominant location for startups? And if so, is there a point at which its size will diminish its superiority?