There was a post about a week ago about how new computer science students don’t get the Unix philosophy and the power (and great responsibility) of the command line. I don’t know these people. Most of my dev time is between Emacs, a terminal, and a web browser. But during this discussion, or maybe in the article itself, there was an argument along the lines of: kids don’t need to learn how to use find or locate when they have Spotlight, and I nodded along, swallowing this like so much bad medicine.

There’s a link on Reddit to the sort of story that the internet can’t get enough of: police abuse. This time, the NYPD sodomizing a black man with a plunger. People love to hear about the abuse of power. Something along the lines of it keying into our gossip reward centers with a side of moralizing. To indulge in creating my own evo-psych just-so story: gossiping about the misdeeds of your hated rival, head-chimp Heephop, might be a way of polling public sentiment as to your chances at a successful coup.

I’m troubled by not only how much I don’t know, which is legion, but how much that I don’t know that I don’t know. There’s so much out there that I’m not even aware of most of my ignorance; it’s as dark matter, lurking unseen and unknown. Today, I stumbled on an entire scientific field that I wasn’t even aware existed: intellectual history, which is “the study of intellectuals, ideas, and intellectual patterns over time.

I was really amazed by my first encounters with serious mathematics textbooks. I was very interested and impressed by the quality of the reasoning, but it was quite hard to stay alert and focused. After a few experiences of reading a few pages only to discover that I really had no idea what I’d just read, I learned to drink lots of coffee, slow way down, and accept that I needed to read these books at 1/10th or 1/50th standard reading speed, pay attention to every single word and backtrack to look up all the obscure numbers of equations and theorems in order to follow the arguments.

There’s an art to knowing when; Never try to guess. Toast until it smokes & then 20 seconds less. —Piet Hein, “Timing Toast” When one first learns a theory, one tends to take it a bit too seriously. I’ve heard that people who later convert to Christianity tend to be much more fervent believers than those who are raised with it, for example, or note the brain damage that first exposure to libertarianism and Ayn Rand seems to do to young people, the same with economics, or the phenomenon where people who have just taken a psychology course tend to see disorder everywhere.

There is a famous distinction in prime number theory between the number theorists who like to multiply primes, and the number theorists who like to add primes. As the primes are very heavily multiplicatively structured, the mathematics of multiplying primes is very algebraic in nature, in particular involving field extensions, Galois representations, etc. But the primes are very additively unstructured, and so for adding primes we see the tools of analysis used instead (circle method, sieve theory, etc.

Well, I asked him, “How can I read it? It’s so hard.” He said, “You start at the beginning and you read as far as you can get, until you are lost. Then you start at the beginning again, and you keep working through until you can understand the whole book.” —Joan Feynman, Richard Feynman’s sister, recalling a discussion with her brother Taken from No Ordinary Genius.

From Luke’s recent interview of Scott Aaronson (theoretical compsci guy at MIT, who blogs here): Things like linear algebra, group theory, and probability have so many uses throughout science that learning them is like installing a firmware upgrade to your brain — and even the math you don’t use will stretch you in helpful ways.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Humans are evolutionary hacks. I’m often not of one mind, or even two, but of four and sometimes more. Our brains seem to be locked in an eternal struggle, a constant clash of warring preferences. Consider the would-be comedian who, instead of working on his act, spends the day watching Family Guy reruns. He is of two minds: one wishes to watch Family Guy while another wants to brainstorm new routines.