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So can a person ever love their day job? It seems that moneymaking/entrepreneurship should be the only reflectively stable passion.
Obviously, many people do love their day job. However, your question is apt, and I have no answer to it---even with regards to myself. I often have struggled with doing the exact same things at work and for myself, and enjoying one but not the other. I think in my case, it is more an issue of pressure and expectations. However, when trying to answer the question of what I should do with my life, it makes things difficult!
In response to
Superstimuli, setpoints, and obesity
almost any "traditional" food seems to taste better than almost any "modern" food
As has been pointed out, modern "traditional" foods are of a quality that was available only to the very rich, if even them. Moreover, that perception is easily biased by social norms; it's fairly likely you have been predisposed to dislike foods more associated with low social class and poor health.
Also, "nutritious" does not mean what you think it means. People have a taste for nutrient rich foods, not nutrient dense foods, and the main nutrient scarcity in the ancestral environment was likely (if not almost invariably) macro-nutritional, i.e. people didn't get enough calories, rather than people didn't get enough vitamins (people might also have not gotten enough vitamins, but this is somewhat less urgent). If you're eating whatever natural food you can find, and you're getting a fair amount of calories, you're not terribly likely to be severely malnourished.
The result of this is that taste now directs people to nutrient rich foods, like red meat and refined grains, and they consume them in volumes that exceed what the body can properly process. Nutrient dense foods (like spinach), on the other hand, don't taste very good, because our ancestors were so busy trying to get enough to eat that if they found nutrient-dense foods tasty, they'd starve to death.
I'd throw out an exception to the micronutrient point: sodium. We're suckers for sodium. I'm not aware of any other micronutrients that we can really taste directly.
Sodium also provides a fairly potent example that superstimulus theory makes more sense than setpoint theory. Salty foods are tasty because they are salty, not because the lack in other nutrients.
The same appears to be true for sugar. Adding sugar to foods generally makes them taste better (even foods that we don't think of as sweet, like french fries and tomato sauce); if setpoint theory was true, we would expect those foods to taste no different as long as haven't significantly altered the nutrient density.
You seem to already know Lisp, so probably not. Read the table of contents. If you haven't written an interpreter, then yes.
The point in this context is that when people teach computability theory from the point of view of Turing machines, they wave their hands and say "of course you can emulate a Turing machine as data on the tape of a universal Turing machine," and there's no point to fill in the details. But it's easy to fill in all the details in λ-calculus, even a dialect like Scheme. And once you fill in the details in Scheme, you (a) prove the theorem and (b) get a useful program, which you can then modify to get interpreters for other languages, say, ML.
SICP is a programming book, not a theoretical book, but there's a lot of overlap when it comes to interpreters. And you probably learn both better this way.
I almost put this history lesson in my previous comment:
Church invented λ-calculus and proposed the Church-Turing thesis that it is the model of all that we might want to call computation, but no one believed him. Then Turing invented Turing machines, showed them equivalent to λ-calculus and everyone then believed the thesis. I'm not entirely sure why the difference. Because they're more concrete? So λ-calculus may be less convincing than Turing machines, hence pedagogically worse. Maybe actually programming in Scheme makes it more concrete. And it's easy to implement Turing machines in Scheme, so that should convince you that your computer is at least as powerful as theoretical computation ;-)
I think that λ-calculus is about as difficult to work with as Turing machines. I think the reason that Turing gets his name in the Church-Turing thesis is that they had two completely different architectures that had the same computational power. When Church proposed that λ-calculus was universal, I think there was a reaction of doubt, and a general feeling that a better way could be found. When Turing came to the same conclusion from a completely different angle, that appeared to verify Church's claim.
I can't back up these claims as well as I'd like. I'm not sure that anyone can backtrace what occurred to see if the community actually felt that way or not; however, from reading papers of the time (and quite a bit thereafter---there was a long period before near-universal acceptance), that is my impression.
In response to
Open Thread: March 2010
What programming language should I learn?
As part of my long journey towards a decent education, I assume, it is mandatory to learn computer programming.
- I'm not completely illiterate. I know the 'basics' of programming. Nevertheless, I want to start from the very beginning.
- I have no particular goal in mind that demands a practical orientation. My aim is to acquire general knowledge of computer programming to be used as starting point that I can build upon.
I'm thinking about starting with Processing and Lua. What do you think?
Relevant answer to this question here, recently popularized on Hacker News.
In response to
Open Thread: March 2010
I'm considering doing a post about "the lighthouse problem" from Data Analysis: a Bayesian Tutorial, by D. S. Sivia. This is example 3 in chapter 2, pp. 31-36. It boils down to finding the center and width of a Cauchy distribution (physicists may call it Lorentzian), given a set of samples.
I can present a reasonable Bayesian handling of it -- this is nearly mechanical, but I'd really like to see a competent Frequentist attack on it first, to get a good comparison going, untainted by seeing the Bayesian approach. Does anyone have suggestions for ways to structure the post?
I don't have the book you're referring to. Are you essentially going to walk through a solution for this [pdf], or at least to talk about point #10?
This is a Bayesian problem; the Frequentist answer is the same, just more convoluted because they have to say things like "in 95% of similar situations, the estimate of a and b are within d of the real position of the lighthouse". Alternately, a Frequentist, while always ignorant when starting a problem, never begins wrong. In this case, if the chose prior was very unsuitable, the Frequentist more quickly converges to a correct answer.
Recommendations on the above? Books, essays...
Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation is a tiny little book with a lot crammed in. It's also quite expensive, and advanced enough to make most CS students hate it. I have to recommend it because I adore it, but why start there, when you can start right now for free on wikipedia? If you like it, look at the references, and think about buying a used or international copy of one book or another.
I echo the reverent tones of RobinZ and wnoise when it comes to The Art of Computer Programming. Those volumes are more broadly applicable, even more expensive, and even more intense. They make an amazing gift for that computer scientist in your life, but I wouldn't recommend them as a starting point.
In response to
Open Thread: March 2010
What programming language should I learn?
As part of my long journey towards a decent education, I assume, it is mandatory to learn computer programming.
- I'm not completely illiterate. I know the 'basics' of programming. Nevertheless, I want to start from the very beginning.
- I have no particular goal in mind that demands a practical orientation. My aim is to acquire general knowledge of computer programming to be used as starting point that I can build upon.
I'm thinking about starting with Processing and Lua. What do you think?
I agree with everything Emile and AngryParsley said. I program for work and for play, and use Python when I can get away with it. You can be shocked, that like AngryParsley, I will recommend my favorite language!
I have an additional recommendation though: to learn to program, you need to have questions to answer. My favorite source for fun programming problems is ProjectEuler. It's very math-heavy, and it sounds like you might like learning the math as much as learning the programming. Additionally, every problem, once solved, has a forum thread opened where many people post their solutions in many languages. Seeing better solutions to a problem you just solved on your own is a great way to rapidly advance.
Yes, I've considered that. There are people who can and do help, but not to the extent I'd need. I believe they help me as much as they can while still having a life that isn't me. I shouldn't ask for more, should I?
If you have tips for getting more efficient help out of them, suggestions of people who'd help though I don't expect them to, or ways to get help from other people (professional caretakers?), by all means please shoot.
You indicated that you had trouble maintaining the behavior of getting daily morning light. Ask someone who 1) likes talking to you, 2) is generally up at that hour, and 3) is free to talk on the phone, to call you most mornings. They can set an alarm on their phone and have a 2 minute chat with you each day.
In my experience if I can pick up the phone (which admittedly can be difficult), the conversation is enough of a distraction and a motivation to get outside, and then inertia is enough to keep me out there.
The reason I chose my father is that he is an early riser, self-employed, and he would like to talk to me more than he gets to. You might not have someone like that in your life, but if you do, it is minimally intrusive to them, and may be a big help to you.
I didn't download the .pdf, but it looks like this was probably conducted by paying volunteers for all of their volunteer work. If someone got paid for half of their hours volunteering, or had two positions doing very similar work and then one of them started paying, I'd expect this effect to diminish.
The study concerns how many hours per week were spent volunteering; some was paid, some was not, though presumably a single organization would either pay or not pay volunteers, rather than both. Paid volunteers worked less per week overall.
The study I referenced was not the one I intended to reference, but I have not found the one I most specifically remember. Citing studies is one of the things I most desperately want an eidetic memory for.
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I'm not disputing your general point, but I hate sugar on foods I don't think of as sweet. I have a marked sweet/savory divide, with only a few things like butter and flour able to participate in either sort of food. I can sometimes enjoy savory foods that have some added sugar but it never improves them, unless the sugar is there to be food for yeast in a bread product.
You might be misunderstanding my point, or I might be underestimating how much you dislike sugar.
McDonalds (and most other fast food companies, I assume) puts sugar on their French Fries, though most people aren't aware of this. Likewise, when I make tomato sauces (for pizza or chicken parmesan or whatever), I add about a teaspoon of honey to each quart of sauce, which doesn't make the sauce taste detectably sweet, but does balance out the acidity and makes the overall taste better. In this way, sugar is sometimes salt-like in that it can improve foods at a threshold that doesn't make them taste sweet or salty.