golwengaud

FWIW, Jonathan Shay's /Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character/ [1] touches on this. It's a good book.

IDK if Shay's book qualifies as "professional literature", but he was certainly a professional (VA psychiatrist), and I have the impression it was fairly influential.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Achilles-Vietnam-Combat-Undoing-Chara...

I found https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/no5jDTut5Byjqb4j5/six-and-a-... very helpful for getting intuition for what the K-L divergence is and why it's useful. The six intuitions:

    1. Expected surprise
    2. Hypothesis testing
    3. MLEs
    4. Suboptimal coding
    5a. Gambling games -- beating the house
    5b. Gambling games -- gaming the lottery
    6. Bregman divergence

> Maintenance is absolutely a possible issue, and due to their restrictions the engines are generally MORE needy than normal GA aircraft.

Interesting! How so?

> Part 103 compliant aircraft are meant to have limits low enough to be LESS immediately lethal, but they are still dangerous.

What do you have in mind?

Quite a lot of what worries me when I fly involves misjudging the combination of weather with the aircraft's capabilities & my capabilities. Time under the care of a good instructor helps a whole lot with that judgement: you get to see a whole bunch of conditions that are beyond your capabilities & struggle with them, without endangering yourself or the aircraft. And (e.g.) winds variable 13-23, 3G12 on runway 09 is not so trivial, even if your aircraft has a 15kt crosswind limitation.

Or---I fly gliders, and I've had it drummed into my head that you never ever fly between trees when you're landing in some random field, because there may be a power line and power lines are a great way to kill yourself.

There are a thousand things like this, that are more about environment & pilot than aircraft.

(FWIW I've flown power in the past, but mostly fly gliders now; still newish. Maybe that skews my perceptions a bit; glider pilots are pretty willing to fly in windy or gusty conditions, in search of ridge or wave lift, so it's not so uncommon that I'm standing there asking myself "sure, the much more experienced pilots are fine to fly in this, but am I fine?" This is really hard! I'm really grateful to my instructors for giving me knowledge & experience with which to make that decision, and for giving me good training to fall back on if I misjudge!)

Setting the legalities aside, flying any of these without the training behind a pilot's license sounds like a great way to have some fun, right up until you have a really bad day. Maybe you can skip the license---I haven't looked at those regs myself---but you can't skip the skills.

(I'd also want to take a hard look at the design, parts, and maintenance before I flew something like this---but I don't really have the training or experience to do that. I know some people who I might trust to do it for me, but I think they all have A&P certificates. Again, maybe you can take shortcuts & skip the expensive, highly trained mechanic, but that shortcut may not take you where you want to go.)

Real analysis takes balls.

Not quite. Metonymy is calling something by the name of a related object. The most common use of metonymy is probably "the White House" for President Obama's (Bush's, Clinton's, etc.) administration. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy

Original paper (linked in article): http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v105/i16/e161301

It looks like the author is attacking statement C from the official problem description (http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Navier-Stokes_Equations/n...). That statement asks for "a smooth, divergence-free vector field u0 (x) on R3 and a smooth f(x, t) on R3 x [0, ∞), satisfying [some physical-reasonableness conditions] for which there exist no solutions (p, u) of the [the Navier-Stokes equation, a physical reasonableness condition, and a sort of sanity condition]." In essence, you're finding a counterexample for uniqueness.

The author claims to have found exactly such a combination of initial-value field u0(x) and force function f(x), solving the millenium problem. I can't really judge his claim yet, as I haven't read the whole paper (and I'm probably not qualified to say even once I have), but slackenemy presents some good reasons to be rather dubious elsewhere in the thread. Also, applying Scott Aaronson's "Eight Signs A Claimed P≠NP Proof Is Wrong" (http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458) isn't pretty.

I've found Terry Tao's blog (in particular the stuff linked at http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/ ) fascinating and helpful.

(Single) integrals are freshman calculus, which is nominally taught in the first year of university. In reality, my experience is that many students (and, I would guess most science/engineering/math majors) take AP calculus during their last year of high school (17-18 years old), and proceed to differential equations, multivariable calculus, or whatever is next in their major's sequence during the first year of university.

Baroque vs. classical music: That is at best a very simplistic view of the situation: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_music#Transition_to_the... . Also, note that counterpoint remained alive and well, though it certainly did not have the importance it had in the Baroque period, through the Romanticism and the 20th century. The chorale (second movement) from Vierne's second symphony, Shostakovich's cycle of 24 preludes and fugues, and the canon section from the first section of his 7th symphony come to mind.

Furthermore, my impression (though I cannot find a citation to back this up) was that many if not most of Bach's compositions were produced by taking elements of popular culture and trying to produce from them something people would find meaningful on the next Sunday. Consider the Passion Chorale, which Bach used in (among other things) the Christmas Cantata and the St. Matthew Passion. The tune was originally composed 50 or 100 years earlier by Hans Leo Hassler for a song whose title was something like "my heart is beguiled by a pretty maid"; the most common words ("O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden") are from a German translation by Paul Gerhardt of a mediaeval Latin hymn.

All of this is not to deny or even to downplay Bach's genius. He simply, as derefr says, took popular inputs and did amazing, wonderful things.

re: Bach: agreed. I've found that really listening to Bach -- even starting to understand his use of counterpoint -- requires enormous concentration, but is totally worthwhile; for that reason, it's easy to tune out when I just need some background noise.

Terry Tao, a mathematician, agrees: http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/continually-aim-...

Distros: that's exactly why I've ended up with Debian, over and over again. I'll install something else, spend a weekend getting it working, learn all sorts of interesting stuff, and then get frustrated at all the little things I have to do to make it a satisfactory experience. I then go back to Debian, where everything just works. (I tried Ubuntu once; it was just different enough from Debian to really irritate me, but not enough that I was really learning anything.)

>>>For example, if I am writing an essay/code and I have to switch to command line to type in a long command to access some book somewhere in my system then in the heat of the moment command line would just drive me crazy. <<< See, for me it's the opposite: the command line is perfectly natural, almost more like an extension of myself, but GUIs drive me nuts. I think that's just a personality thing.

Other resources online: you seem to have already discovered MIT's OCW. I know other universities (e.g. Yale) have similar programs, but they're nowhere near as extensive as MIT's, and they tend not to have what I want. I've also found course websites from all sorts of universities useful.

If you can get access to a good research library, that's enormously helpful, as a lot of things (e.g. TAoCP) just aren't online.

And of course Wikipedia is awesome; I often use its "references" and such for textbook recommendations.

I have no java (programming) experience, and it took me ~45 s:

#apt-get install closure

#closure

user=> (+ 2 2)

4

Most of that 45 s was waiting for apt-get.

Now it's not going to be this easy on platforms that don't have such nice package management (e.g. Windows). Furthermore, Raphael_Amiard makes a good point that there's a lot more infrastructure that has to go into web application development (or any other kind of application development, for that matter) than computing the sum of 2 and 2.

Nonetheless, it just doesn't seem that hard. At worst, put a "clojure /path/to/project.lisp" in rc.local or equivalent.

(Caveat: my web development experience consists entirely of a couple of toy projects I ran on my laptop for my own amusement. Take all this with a grain of salt.)

EDITed for formatting.

So, in essence, you want to learn everything there is to know about computers and computing :-) . I have a similar impulse -- whenever I see some program, protocol, or even hardware device, I want to learn enough about how it operates to form a good, thorough mental model.

Some immediate, relatively practical steps: - If you're not running one of the free Unixes, start now. I learned an enormous amount from first trying to get coLinux to work on my windows box and then actually installing various distros. That was four years ago, and things have gotten much easier (hardware support, guided installation, etc.), so you won't learn as much as I did, just as I didn't learn as much as the people who did it in, say, the mid-90's, but it's still worthwhile.

Distro: I currently run Debian, but I think for the purpose of learning, it (like a whole class of similar distros, like Ubuntu, RedHat derivatives, and even OpenSolaris) is too easy: it doesn't force you to keep learning past the basics in order to get it running and keep it running. Slackware (http://slackware.com/) and the BSD's (http://www.freebsd.org/ , http://netbsd.org/ , http://openbsd.org/ ) are probably good; I don't have any personal experience with (Gentoo http://www.gentoo.org/ ), but my impression is that it would work.

- Learn the Unix ecosystem: the command line and associated tools, the init system, daemons, etc. The "do one thing, and do it well" philosophy makes for programs that are easy to understand; once you understand that kind of program, it becomes much easier to look at, say, a browser and think about the components required to make it work.

Books/articles: - ESR's "How to Become a Hacker" (http://catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html) tries to answer a question not unlike yours. - ESR's /The Art of Unix Programming/ (http://catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ ) explains the philosophy of Unix: why things are the way they are. - /Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming/ (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ ) is a fantastic book on how to think about programming. One of my favorites.

On my to-read list: - John Lions' commentary on Unix (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th_Ed...) for a deep understanding of Unix circa 1976 - Donald Knuth's /The Art of Computer Programming/ for a similarly deep, low-level understanding of a whole bunch of really important algorithms and data structures.