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I would hazard to guess its due to two things: 1) a lack of understanding about how the machine works, and in particular the way the memory is organized; and 2) lack of explanation of why anyone would need to use pointers. Introducing pointers in the context of a linked list, or explaining call-by-reference would probably help make things more concrete.

Google has a history of doing things like this. In their IPO filing, they intended to raise $2,718,281,828 [see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/E_-_base_of_n...].

As a math major, my view is probably biased, but I feel like one of the reasons mathematics is so widely used and applied in other fields such as physics, CS, and even biology these days is that they express or model, to a high degree of accuracy, patterns that recur in all these fields. The mathematical notation is the most general and abstract form of expressing these patterns. My feeling is that to not learn the language of math dooms one to reinvent the wheel because they don't realize that the problem she is working on has been solved before in a more general case by some one else. In those cases where the problem hasn't been solved before, the solution leads to new areas or notation which can show up in unexpected ways in different branches of science.

Without this common language, we would have a specialized language for every field, allowing little "cross-pollination". As an example, in evolutionary biology, take the NK model of epistatic interactions which models gene interactions. It just so happens that this model is extremely similar to a thing in statistical physics called a spin-glass. Without mathematics the biologist would have to sit and work out all the details of these epistatic interactions before getting to actually do biology. So in short, mathematics saves you time by expressing common patterns or ideas.

The great G.H. Hardy felt similar:

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

as did Bertrand Russell (one of my favorite quotes):

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

I suspect many mathematicians view themselves, at least to some extent, as creative types similar to poets.

This is a pretty interesting topic. I'm reminded of the famous trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel after WW2 and Hannah Arendt's book about the trial, "The Banality of Evil".

Eichmann was responsible for over-seeing the trains that sent Jews to concentration camps. He tried, to no avail, to employ the "just following orders" defense. If anyone is interested, definitely check out Hannah's book.

Knuth's observation on money appears to be explained by the economic 'law' of diminishing marginal utility.

I recommend The Apology of Socrates and The Republic, both written by Plato.

The former because it's an excellent introduction to one of the west's most influential figures (Socrates). As a testament to that influence, any philosopher before him is called 'pre-Socratic'. Not to mention Socrates' tale of traveling around Athens questioning the populace after visiting the Oracle is a great story. It wouldn't hurt to follow up with the dialogue Phaedo next, which details the end of Socrates.

The latter for many reasons. The Republic is the most complete statements of Plato's philosophy, in addition to being beautifully written (Plato's writing seems to shine through in just about any translation that I've seen, but the Allan Bloom translation is particularly enjoyable).

Plato, and this book in particular, have been extremely influential in western thought. Indeed, one philosopher wrote that "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." And here in America, the founding fathers often quoted Plato in their pamphlets prior to seceding.

Following the dialogues in the book will take you from discussions on the nature of justice and reality, to the best mode of governance. It serves as a wonderful introduction to what it means to do philosophy and hopefully you find it as enjoyable as I have.

Something slightly interesting might be the Rubik's cube group. By considering the Rubik's cube a group under the rotation operation, then we can essentially completely solve the Rubik's cube puzzle.

If you are familiar with the Quaternions, take a look at the 3D rotation group SO(3). This group apparently has applications in computing where one needs a way to perform rotations in three dimensions. According to the Wikipedia article, https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Quaternions_a..., this method of representation has certain important advantages over other methods, including being numerically stable and avoiding a problem called gimbal lock, where rotation about one of the possible axes is no longer possible.

I think integrating would be better, because it seems wrong to judge a products "success" only at some specific instant of time, rather than judging it over a full period of time.

The sign of the first derivative only gives you the present rate of adoption/abandonment of the platform, while integrating gives you a measure of success over the platform's entire existence.