thebear

One would certainly not want to argue with the statement that many people are incompetent, or at least not very good, at what they're paid to do. On the other hand, much of that alleged stupid and incompetent behavior turns out to be not stupid or incompetent at all if one spends a little time and effort on reflecting upon it. The opening example of the article, the Department of Education requiring applications to be sent by registered mail, is a perfect example. Why won't they accept an application unless it's sent by registered mail? If there is ever any kind of challenge, possibly resulting in litigation, over the way they handled an application, they have to have a complete paper trail of the process. An important part of that paper trail are the details of when and by whom the application was received. It would be a sign of incompetence on their part to accept an application that was not sent by registered mail.

I come across examples like this all the time. I find it amusing how often alleged stupidity and incompetence reveals more about the accuser than about the accused.

The discussion of sterility and sclerosis seems reasonable to me. On the subject of stagnation and repetition, I find that my perception is diametrically opposed to what the author of the book and Peter Thiel say. I am a baby boomer, and I am absolutely blown away by things like 3D printers and rocket boosters returning from space and being reused, not to mention the possibility of quantum computing. As far as the arts are concerned, I believe the difference between the olden days and today is that today, there is way more of everything rather than less. This causes an odd distortion of perception. In the 1960s, you could easily name a few progressive bands, musicians, movies, etc., because there were so few. Today, the stuff you can find on the Internet is vast, but there are no few big names to stand out. Or, more precisely, there are a few big names, but that's the repetitive stuff that the author laments. The new, creative, progressive stuff doesn't have those. Go on the Internet, you'll be surprised!

Have you seen the old girl who walks the streets of London, Dirt in her hair and her clothes in rags. She's no time for talking, she just keeps right on walking, Carrying her home in two carrier bags. So how can you tell me you're lonely, And say for you that the sun don't shine. Let me take you by the hand and walk with you the streets of London, Show you something to make you change your mind.

I'd like to reinforce what an earlier commenter has already hinted at, with a story of a collapsing marathon runner. A lot of hobbies get much more dangerous with increased ambitions. Always ask yourself if that's worth it. As someone once said, "He who does not sore with the eagles does not get sucked into jet engines." And they didn't shoot Ringo, did they.

Same here. I find that essay enormously helpful for evaluating one's current living situation and planning your future. Also, it provides a great way for explaining to others why you live where you live. I've been in Salt Lake City for a while now. People's reaction to telling them that typically falls somewhere in that awkward territory between surprise, pity, and condescension. I then tell them that like every great city, Salt Lake sends its inhabitants a very specific message. In fact, I feel it more strongly here than I ever have anywhere else. The message is, "You should be more responsible, and you should be a nicer person."

Author of the blog post here. I think you just made me aware of the true and deeper reason for my discomfort with C++: it's the fact that the convolutions are in the basic things. I am perfectly willing to put up with convolutions, annoyances, bugs, weaknesses etc. in anything I use, be it a programming language, a piece of software, a gadget, whatever. Nothing is perfect, and who am I to criticize others for the imperfections in their work. What annoys me is when the annoyances are in the basic things, in the most commonly used features. Make the basic things reasonably good, and keep the crap off to the side.

Author here. A few years back, I wrote an article about the issues that you're asking about. Since the article still comes up as the #1 result of Google search for "C++ rvalue references", I believe it's ok for me to recommend it here:

http://thbecker.net/articles/rvalue_references/section_01.ht...

Warning: Read only if you have a serious interest in C++.

Author here. Quote from the first paragraph of my blog post: "The decision to implement the math backend of GreaterThanZero in Java was driven by other considerations, primarily the appeal of Google App Engine as a hosting platform."

Somewhat unbelievably, I still have that 1960's jeans jacket with the patch on it that says, "Do it today, tomorrow it may be illegal." And, all hail the Internet, that thing can still be bought online:

http://www.holidays.net/mlk/store/Old-60-s-70-s-Protest-type...

I'd like to add a "pro" for Codelite: the person who maintains it is very responsive when it comes to bug reports. Until a few months ago, the nodejs debugger had some fairly serious issues. Each of the problems I reported was addressed and resolved within days.

It's been so long that I can't even find the agreement that I signed with Springer back then. But I would assume that there was something in there that allows them to do what they did. And since it's more than fine by me that the book is now available for free, I don't care. But if you're concerned about the issue, then, in my opinion, there is only one course of action: have your agreement with the publisher reviewed by a lawyer before you sign it.

After the initial excitement ;-) had settled down in the mid-nineties, it was, on order of magnitude, about $100 per year. Every once in a while, an interested mathematician would buy a copy. Other than that, in order to sell such a book, there has to be a graduate level class on the subject at some university (attended typically by about 5 people), and the teacher has to pick your book over a handful of other options.

I haven't kept track of the grand total that I made off the book, but it would certainly be a rather crappy used VW Golf.

I am so far removed from academia now that I have never thought about how I would publish a book like that today. My first impulse would be to make it a free ebook. Web search for "free course textbooks" indicates that this is not unheard of. Does anyone know how common it is, at various levels of higher education?

Guess there won't be a royalty check for me this year.

http://tinyurl.com/hmwpf8e

I'm totally fine with having our book available for free; actually, I prefer it that way. Yet I find it a bit odd that Springer never even notified any of the authors. I suppose as copyright owners, they can do that.

Cruel death is always near, so frail a thing is man. RIP Douglas Tompkins.

At the risk of misusing and abusing the term, I find the author's point of view aspergerish: lack of social or emotional reciprocity. He finds it natural that there are things that are interesting and worth reading to him, but not to others. So why would he be stumped by the fact that there are things that others find interesting and worth reading, while he does not?

I find the statement "Those predictions are optimized so that, for any point in the data set, the model’s error multiplied by itself (squared) is minimized" misleading. What's being minimized is the sum of the squares of the errors.

Thanks for the link to your personal favorite. Reminds me of something Woody Allen said in "Annie Hall": There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

Nice!

About Jack Kerouac's and Gary Snyder's climb of Matterhorn Peak, I wrote this in my trip account (see link in my original comment):

"No other book has shaped my youth—and much of my adulthood, for that matter—as much as Jack Kerouac's 'The Dharma Bums.' [...] In particular, I always remembered how Kerouac said that the performance of these three guys on Matterhorn Peak, Morley who stayed down at the lake, Kerouac who gave up just below the summit, and Gary Snyder who made it to the top, mirrored each man's personal Karma. This made me think that perhaps I could find out about my own Karma by trying the same thing. So really, this hike was all about Finding My Own Personal Karma. Wow, that ought to be fun."

And although I'm being sort of facetious about the Karma thing here, I kind of did find my own personal Karma there, as I explain on the last page of my trip account.

In the case of Nabokov and Lone Peak, it was part coincidence that I was house sitting in Sandy, UT at the time, with a perfect view of Lone Peak from the hot tub in the back yard. So I had to climb the darn thing anyway; it left me no choice. Then I met a girl at Sugar House Coffee in Salt Lake who knew much more about Vladimir Nabokov and his stay in Utah than I ever will. It became sort of an obsession for us to retrace Nabokov's steps, do what he did, see what he saw, savor the feeling to sit on that breathtakingly lofty rock in the sky where he sat.

So I guess the answer to your question is, I see an artist's work, be it a writer, musician, painter, what have you, as an act of sharing with the rest of us. By conversely sharing an experience like a mountain climb with them, be in the same place as they once were, I mean literally, your butt being where their butt was, perhaps we can intensify that feeling of sharing. That may be an illusion, but it's a pretty darn good illusion, especially if you share it with another person.

So far, I have done two mountain climbs in the footsteps of literary figures: Nabokov on Lone Peak in the Wasatch, and Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder on Matterhorn Peak in the Sierra Nevada.

http://thbecker.net/hiking/in_the_footsteps_of_jack_kerouac_...

Does anybody know of more climbs or hikes that offer this kind of perk?

We should take this opportunity to mention that al-Khwārizmī’s name is the origin of the word "algorithm." So the one word that we probably use more than any other in our field derives from the name of a man who was born in what's now Usbekistan, was an ethnic Persian, and lived and taught in Baghdad.

I looked at the first math question:

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/figures/sample_num1.asp

First off, the statement describing the graph ("The following graph shows the number of births in the United States 1957 to 2007. Data is presented every 10 years.") is a bit odd. The graph shows the number of births per year for 6 of the 51 years from 1957 to 2007, at 10 year intervals. That's not really "the number of births in the United States 1957 to 2007." But let's say that's fine. Then they ask, "During which period(s) was there a decline in the number of births?" There is no such thing as "a decline in the number of births." The number of births always increases. There can be a decline in the rate of births per time, e.g., the number of births per year. But giving the number of births per year every ten years is not enough information to make a complete statement about births per time during the ten year periods. There may have been (and probably were) declines during each of those periods. In other words, it is impossible to "click all that apply."

Case in point: Of the ten most dangerous cities in California, seven are small towns such as Nevada City (pop. ~3,000). The other three are Emeryville, Stockton, and Oakland.

http://www.telegraphtoday.com/10-most-dangerous-cities-in-ca...

De Moivre must be spinning in his grave.

"Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

OP here. Good point. I was thinking of the recurring "Is Java dead?" kind of post.

One additional small detail about the recognition that Jackson C. Frank received: he became widely known among fans of folk and acoustic music throughout Europe when his signature song "Blues Run the Game" was included in the 1975 4 LP box set "Electric Muse: The Story of Folk into Rock." Sadly, a 1990's CD version of the same name no longer included that song. Everybody who heard "Blues Run the Game" back then was blown away by it, and it was played a lot at open mics and similar occasions. Inevitably, every performer would then ask the audience, "Does anybody know what happened to Jackson C. Frank?" Every once in a while, someone would have some little anecdote, like having lived in a hippie commune in an old castle in Scotland where Jackson C. Frank had passed through, but nobody knew where he was. It wasn't until the arrival of the Internet and Wikipedia that the mystery was finally solved. But by then it was, of course, too late to bring him back to Europe.

The article keeps harping on the claim that humans cannot distinguish between 16 bit/44.1kHz and higher resolution. But the data from the author's experiment suggests the opposite: a good majority of his subjects were able to distinguish between the two resolutions. It's just that most of those picked the "wrong" one as their favorite. That's not surprising. Most people these days don't know what natural sound quality is, because all they ever listen to is recorded or grossly amplified music. As a consequence, the sharp and edgy sound of low-res audio sounds better to them than the softer and smoother high-res. That's of course a legitimate choice, but it is not a reason to dismiss high-res recordings.

I obtained the trademark for my company name in 2013, and the total cost was $275. I did it all online and without a lawyer.

In my experience, successful people tend to be nice to those who can be of use to them and ruthless towards those with whom they compete. It seems to me that startup founders would almost always perceive Mr. Graham as someone who can be useful to them.

Thanks, I checked the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck. It says in the first paragraph: 'He consistently spelt his first name "Alexander" rather than the French "Alexandre"', and they give a reference for that.