dctaflin

It also takes into account surface tension. Bubbles of denser/lighter materials cling to the interfaces, rather than sinking or rising.

I wish you all success. I'm intrigued by people who are determined to take primary control of their money-making, because I'm so different from that. I am so grateful that companies exist that can manage annoyances like medical insurance, taxes, payroll, etc. so that I can just show up, do stuff I'm good at and enjoy, and then go home in the evening and forget about it all until the next day. I have little skill or interest in finding exploitable markets, but in general I get along with people well and have no problem with other people deciding what large-scale projects to work on, as long as I have a bit of autonomy on actually implementing them. Thank God not everyone is like me, or nothing would get done! But I think without people like me, very little would get done as well. Good luck on finding your ideal niche.

Fascinating. I studied Finnish for three years and it never occurred to me that the numbers 8 and 9 (kahdeksan and yhdeksan) mean 2-from-10 and 1-from-10. Though 10 isn't "deksan", it's "kymmenen". Still the "yh" and "kah" should have been clearly seen as akin to "yksi" and "kaksi" (one and two).

And everybody keeps saying THAT. The problem is, that's a secondary effect. A secondary effect is going to have to be pretty strong to counter an obviously anti-competitive primary effect. You can construct scenarios, but I haven't seen any that seem particularly compelling. It seems to me that the default position of "it's not genetic" is much better supported by the data.

Crossover guy here. I worked as a ChemE for 11 years, then as a software developer for 20. Regardless of terminology, the two fields are very different. If I have to design a process to separate two liquids, I have a few options available, and all are highly constrained by physics and a lot of math and equipment design has gone into optimizing them. But when writing code to solve a problem, the number of possible ways to accomplish it are endless, and other than big-O notation there's not a lot of constraints put on the solution.

I lived through the "design patterns" trend, which seemed like an attempt to create a software equivalent to the "unit operations" we ChemE students all learned, but it was basically a flop because in the end you can use almost any design pattern to solve a given problem.

I don't much care whether you call it "engineering" - but the gap between the smokestack industries and software remains.

I have perfect pitch and find it impossible to "turn off" the analysis of music - what key is it in, what's the chord progression, and so on. Whether it has lyrics or not doesn't matter, it completely kills any productivity in any other cognitive activity. Only "noise" type sounds work for me when I'm trying to concentrate, like recordings of gentle rain or a babbling brook.

I can't quibble with anything in the article except the title. There are too many viable alternative scenarios to call Darwin's idea "probably right."

I used his books as a way to learn the things about computer science that I missed out on by not having a CSci degree. They are very mathematical, but that's just a bonus for me. They are certainly not light reading.

Two things: German and Differential Geometry.

German is just because it's fun and it's my best second language by far, so I'd like to get fully fluent.

Differential Geometry is a diversion from working through Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, et al. I found I needed more math. Now it has kind of become an end in itself, however. It's the hardest thing I've studied since college (which was a long time ago).