impendia

132 ms·

1201.
by impendia 16y ago
I suspect that one could show, by the same methodology, that each of the following is foolish: buying a house; going to graduate school; starting a business; mastering something difficult; volunteering; being active in the community; ...
1202.
by impendia 16y ago
"Mostly a theory...": I agree it's that too.
1203.
by impendia 16y ago
"I haven't read Hardy, but you make him sound like a jerk." Hardy wrote of Srinivasa Ramanujan's untimely death that it was "not a great tragedy" that he died at the age of thirty-two, as he was already too old to do serious mathematics. "A
1204.
by impendia 16y ago
Reminds me so much of SimCity, only you can't raise taxes.
1205.
by impendia 16y ago
After going to their website and reading their FAQ in its entirety, I am still confused. Why would anyone dream of offering goods, services, or other currencies in exchange for "bitcoins"?
1206.
Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note(nytimes.com)
1 points by impendia 16y ago|0 comments
1207.
by impendia 16y ago
"I don't think local pride, ambition, or even "we have smart people" really resonate with anyone outside of those locales. Smart people are everywhere..." Disagree. I've never been to Montreal, but I've heard from people who are from there
1208.
by impendia 16y ago
Get tenure at Stanford and you can do as you damn well please.
1209.
by impendia 16y ago
I highly recommend this over Hartshorne: http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/216blog/ In particular note Ravi Vakil's 500+ page book-in-progress on algebraic geometry, as well as a blog -- he is constantly soliciting and incorporating advice
1210.
by impendia 16y ago
As a small-scale example of this, see the book "A=B". http://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html The authors reduce the proving of a wide class of combinatorial identities, which were formerly regarded as extremely nontrivial, to a mechani
1211.
by impendia 16y ago
I see something distinctly odd about their proposal. It would actually make my commute (home at 22nd Street in SF) to work (Stanford, via Palo Alto) much more convenient. I could catch a train every fifteen minutes. I don't need this conv
1212.
by impendia 16y ago
Along related lines, Tim Gowers (a Fields medalist in mathematics) has started the Polymath Project, which has produced several excellent, massively collaborative, research papers in math. http://polymathprojects.org/
1213.
by impendia 16y ago
You seem to regard having fallen head over heels as a bad thing. Be grateful as hell. It doesn't happen to everybody.
1214.
by impendia 16y ago
"You can hop on a bus to the local elite school and convince a grad student or professor to explain something to you." Really. You've tried this? Because grad students and professors aren't busy at all...
1215.
by impendia 16y ago
Most certainly in San Francisco. http://www.fixmuninow.com/faq.html
1216.
by impendia 16y ago
That's a damn good picture. If they had put up an even slightly less cool picture, the number of signups would not be so crazy. With technology, as with everything else in life, appearance matters, and this proves it.
1217.
by impendia 16y ago
The article suggests that some readers had problems obtaining a copy of the book. If you can get a copy of the book legally, you should, but it seems like some customers weren't able to, and had to choose between obtaining it illegally, or
1218.
by impendia 16y ago
Something I've long been curious about, as an academic who is removed from the startup culture and never really gave a damn about getting rich. Suppose that the (US) marginal tax rate on income or capital gains over $500K was raised to 75%.
1219.
by impendia 16y ago
Have I been out of the programming world for too long, or do at least some of his complaints refer to using advanced features of programming languages in essentially the way they were intended?
1220.
by impendia 16y ago
It is not just the students that are pissed off. Walter Rudin wrote the classic book in advanced calculus, and when the publishers started playing games and jacking up the price, he fought them long and hard, and (as I recall) at considerab
1221.
by impendia 16y ago
Fair point. In math it is sort of hard to outsource the boring parts of your project to people working beneath you, so I didn't hear people complain that they were getting used. But I can imagine that this might not be the same in other dis
1222.
by impendia 16y ago
(Crosspost from my comments at economist.com:) Paul Halmos, a famous mathematician, was often approached by undergraduates who asked him if he thought they should go to grad school. He gave all of them the same advice: "No." Now mind you, h
1223.
by impendia 16y ago
I have a concrete suggestion along the lines of some of the suggestions here. I assume you live in at least a moderately big city (e.g. maybe SF Bay Area). Pick up one of those alternative weekly newspapers, or find something equivalent on