Fine, change "100-meter olympic dash" to "professional athlete in the USA". Sample size is sufficient (NBA+NFL+NHL+MLB comprise of 3000+ players), athletes hold a much higher position in society than computer scientists, and quality is easy to determine (# of wins, points, rebounds, interceptions, etc). Number of japanese trans-men in pro-sports in the US: 0, afaik. We need to tackle this issue as a nation, immediately.
> This suggestion ignores the purpose of a Ph.D.: to produce a piece of original research, which is necessarily extremely specialized.
Tell that crap to the tourists, the purpose of the Ph.D. is afaict to get the student a high paying job that requires a Ph.D. (because existing phd's say you need one), and the professor tenure and grants.
I learned Perl initially for sysadmin'ing from Minimal Perl (http://www.amazon.com/Minimal-Perl-Unix-Linux-People/dp/1932...). It teach a subset of Perl necessary to use it as a more powerful replacement for awk/sed/grep/find, primarily with one-liners. By far the best bang/buck of any programming book I've ever read.
Or maybe their work doesn't require billyjobob's personal approval and understanding, and therefore they don't feel like putting in the effort of reducing their life to 30 seconds?
Issuance for bitcoin is not "algorithm", it's all the resources expended in running miners and developing new miners. Storage of fiat currency is arguably very cheap as well, since only a tiny fraction of it actually exists as paper and coins. Scarcity is fixed for precious metals as well, since there's only a fixed amount available on the planet (unless you want to go mine on other planet). Security, Counterfeiting for Bitcoins should have a giant asterisk pointing to a footnote about the difficulty of securing them, and how often they are stolen from both individuals and exchanges. Bitcoin Fiduciary Media is possible and inevitable as soon as bigger banks and institutions (esp. insurance companies) get involved (there's nothing technically stopping the creation of Bitcoin 'derivatives').
But the quality and sophistication of software in, say, astronomy makes bioinformatics software look like it was written by 14 year old spammers in the former soviet bloc. The real problem is that biology went from being essentially a liberal art, more like history or sociology than a science, to an extremely quantitative field in only a few academic generations. You can get a PhD in Molecular & Cell Biology from Berkeley without ever having taken a statistics, linear algebra, multivar calc, or CS course. Biologists need programmers more than the other way around, so they should start by taking a few courses with actual numbers and stuff and learn the bare basics first.
SV and SF techies hate the homeless b/c they think they are all self-made. They walk out of Philz with their $4 coffee, look down at a bum, and think to themselves "Why doesn't he learn Ruby on Rails and become YCombinator millionaires like us?" At least in "third world" countries cited by the author, the wealth disparity is much older and there is a social contract between the serfs and lords.
> Biology is completely different from Computer Science and metaphors between the fields build no understanding and can only be misleading, every time I hear someone comparing DNA to a computer program I fall into pieces.
That's the kind of attitude that pushes competent programmers away from bioinformatics. End result? Almost all bioinformatics software is a steaming pile of crap.