Recent content by goingmeta

It's different for math? Imagine that.

Because theory always precedes practice, right?

I tend to think that in an area for discussion like this (sub)forum, people should be open to questions and should strive to address them as long as the people asking them are sincere. Instead, "general discussion" here is taken to mean "non-philosophical discussion" and "discussions only among...

This is about as shallow and one dimensional as you can get: let's decide a career by reading a book which approaches some theory, which may not actually be at all relevant to the career. There would be different approaches to group theory from those books. What then? Somehow you managed to...

I don't think there was any attachment or commitment to finance just because he enumerated it in a list of options. Maybe you should pay attention to what's actually being asked instead of gratuitously telling us about what physics grad students have to go through.

I don't think his list is ridiculous. Competent programmers need to know the whole stack. I don't think you need in-depth knowledge of assembly, make, or bash (this is something you can easily learn on demand), but you should be able to pick out appropriate tools for each job. Whether or not...

Yes, many people will tell you that you need to write the critical and most time consuming code in assembly, but how many people *actually* do that? How many people actually do that better than the compiler? How many people actually do it better than the programmers who wrote the matrix multiply...

Who writes assembly by hand? Unless this is popular with people in computational physics, I would say that's really poor advice. It's really not a marketable skill.

... depends on the domain and who you're working with. I wouldn't recommend learning C++ before you know what you're getting yourself into. It might just be a waste of time. If you go into web development, you're going to be using python, ruby, javascript, or something similar. *Nobody* uses C++...

Just look at the textbooks universities use. Also look at their curriculum. This message should be posted at the top of this forum.

It really doesn't matter what you start with. There isn't a fundamental, architectural, or big conceptual difference between the two. Most of the differences are syntax related, and new conventions for things you could already do before. Python <2.7 has/had a lot of momentum, so you might find...

I can't tell if you're trolling or not.

I asked you if you thought IQ was a static measurement. I guess I assumed you would have specified that it would be decreasing.

You want to conclude that not everyone is equally able. If somebody can improve, and hence score higher later, at what point can you be sure, based on a previous score, that the person will not have the capacity to achieve a higher education? I never said anything was not measurable. I also...

In such a situation, where you have nontraditional students such as the African refugees, how personal is the material made? I suspect that if it is taught in a traditional way (here is this concept, here is that concept), the ideas may seem completely unmotivated and foreign (of course, this is...