I do not see that a space makes much of a difference.
Plenty of linguists would admit 'login' as a verb. There is very little difficulty in accepting that 'to log in' and 'to login' mean the same thing.
In this case "in" does not function as a preposition, it is part of the verb. The evidence for this is immediately apparent when we consider that "to log" and "to log in" really are two different activities. We do not mean that we record anything when we login to a machine, what we are doing is obtaining access to it by means of an exchange of previously established authenticating information - and while this step may involve making a record of our login, it need not for the basic sense of that action to remain intact.
Also, we have no trouble with a multi-word verbs in English, if you don't believe me, try googling 'phrasal verbs'. This article is either a gag, or really is just an example prescriptavist nonsense which attempts in futility to combat the last 50 years of linguistic consensus.
if (false) {
self.the_one_language_I_should_learn = "the best one";
} else {
delete(self.the_one_language_I_should_learn);
while (self.could_improve) {
self.programming_skills_and_insights_struggled_with++
}
}
There is intrinsic to the academic system a pervasive issue of trust.
Grades can indicate the depth of knowledge, but with the disclaimer that both the arbitrating grader is trusted (in a very special sense), and that the method used to decide grades be both defensible and explicable to others.
To provide a concrete example. A paper on the first book of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature attempts to bring a new argument to bear on the consequences to modern epistemology incurred by Hume's concept of abstract ideas. The paper is written as a final in a graduate level philosophy class, and the instructor is known to be knowledgeable, intelligent, fair, and honest. The paper receives a B+. It is arguable that the mark is generally reflective of the student's understanding and ability at the time the student wrote the paper. (this example is taken from personal experience - I wrote this paper, and I feel that the grade was reflective of my knowledge on the topic)
But without the trustworthy instructor, the grade would be meaningless. The problem, if I were to speculate, is one of numbers - too many students, too few professors. A basic premise of security is that the more parties involved in a pact, the lest reliable the pact is, and if grades are to be a faithfully representation of a students ability, the reliability of the academic pact is paramount.
For me it was quite the opposite. I didn't begin to show any particular interest in mathematics until proof based courses came into the picture. I would certainly not have earned a degree in mathematics were it not for my interests being piqued by a capricious used bookstore purchase of E. Kampke's Set Theory when just out of high school. It was the axiomatic proof based method that appealed to me. Calculation, on the other hand, seemed to my naive 17-year-old self to be terribly banal.
To put things in perspective, and to possibly invalidate the general application of my insight on the matter, Calculus was in fact the only course I passed my final semester of high school. I received a D shortly before I dropped out altogether. The D score was earned only after being the only student to ace the final, a task which was itself only possible after I proved the first fundamental theorem to myself (thanks to an especially verbose description of it in one of the exam questions) during the course of the test.
To this day I find that the actual solving of equations to be tedious and can only be interested in problems tenable to axiomatic and algorithmic approaches. Thats where all the fun is imho. Who cares about actually determining a number (or equation)? [the answer: all the smartest people do.]
personally, I think that the husband was lucky to last as long as he did without succumbing to torpid disillusionment with himself, his potentialities, and his powers. I'm so jaded and disgusted with myself most of the time that I tend to not trust anybody who doesn't seem to want to blow their own brains out.
Gardening. I give my self one computer-free-day each week in which I garden. Working with one's hands instead of one's head provides a much needed relief after a week of programming, designing, and hacking at software. During the winter, cooking and baking fill a similar, but not quite as satisfactory, experience.
The contrast from coding intrinsic to vegetable gardening is especially satisfying - one can sit back and watch the fruits of one's labor manifest themselves. When one codes, one knows that his inactivity results in nothing. Not so with gardening, aside from some maintenance, the initial work constitutes a self-fulfilling promise.
I did that for the last 18 months and have recently taken a temp (6 month) programming gig to amass some capital before I revert to crumbbumhood.
On the one hand - the professional slacker lifestyle is pretty brilliant: youu sleep when you're tired, work on whatever you like, and you can finally get that stack of books read.
On the other hand - the lifestyle can be somewhat isolating, especially so when you find that everyone else is asleep when you're awake. It becomes too easy to lose yourself in tangents, endlessly exploring to eternal infecundity.
So - while I agree - it is a great lifestyle - I make one small addendum: to be "magically unemployed" along with two or three other persons whose interests all overlap.
Listen... I studied Math (B.S), Philosophy (Minor), and Classical Literature(B.A). I'd like to take this opportunity to encourage a bit of perspective on your part.
Sure, read some books, give them good thought, encourage others to read them too. Write poetry, publish articles, and start groups to discuss and reevaluate the social, psychological, and aesthetic relationships expressed by and represented in artistic productions. Think about, read up on, and be interested in history, social geography, food politics, 10th century Latin lyrics, the structuralist writings of Roland Barthes (Mythologies is one of my personal all time favorite books), and the consequences of modernism in the 21st century - do all of that. I'm saying do it. But do not attempt to argue that the study of the natural world is bereft of its own wonder, beauty, and artistry. Science, and more importantly, the scientific perspective, has liberated us (as a civilization) from the oppression of authority-as-truthmaker, and imbued us with an inquisitive fact-seeking attitude that serves the progress of humanity.
I'm giving you a point up - you deserve a second chance.
And you're right, we must be somewhat disparate in our thought - If I were the architect of the world - I would have it that material property is the only sort that qualifies, and that nobody can make a living except by their work (or by the services they work to offer).
Precisely, the system requires reform - but abolishment would even further deprive that "lone inventor" of right to her own work.
Trouncing patents now would only give the already successful less to worry about, and would force the budding minds into the dirt.
I, for one, am so anti-capitalist that I don't use a single piece of proprietary software, and I own only what I can carry. I'm an idealist with the causes that I can control (personal use) - I'm a realist when I want to actually see change in the right direction (political voice).
Alright, trash patents right now - tell me what would happen.
"where is the evidence..." I was having this discussion with a friend of mine, an engineering PhD. At first, I took your side, and ideally, I still do. Don't get me wrong: I WANT a patentless world to work.
He put it like this: what do you do when you work for years on an idea, you finally get enough to publish, and to get your idea patented. You know that your career depends on your getting the "first stake" on this idea - others (who you can name) are working on the idea too. If you cannot patent it, then you cannot build the rest of your career on your having gotten there first.
Now I know, immediately, this notion sounded utterly evil to me. You SHOULDN'T, I protested, be able to found your career on having gotten there first. You should want to share your idea with all of those people who are also working on it - and afterall - isn't this how academic science moves forward?
Yes, he said, but still - if you cannot patent your idea, then somebody who ALREADY has the resources will snatch it up and use it to dominate the field BEFORE you can acquire the resources to do it youself. And so you end up just giving somebody an idea for free, and you get nothing in exchange for your years of work.
Ideologically, I am still rubbed the wrong way by this argument - on the other hand, what else is my friend the engineer supposed to do?
The benefit of patents is not to civilization as a whole - that is the problem with them - their benefits are local and incremental to individuals - and even that benefit is imperfect. The system requires reform - but I do not think we are ready for the system to be abolished.
As a disclaimer: in an ideal civilization, in which the market ceased to operate, wealth ceased to appeal to people, and our individual ambitions collectively coincided to the mutual benefit of all, then patents would, and should, cease to be.
While I despise the concepts of owning an idea, owning the right to propagate an idea, and possessing control over the use of an idea, I cannot help admit their (mottled, provisional, and entirely realistic) use. Patent law should, undoubtedly, be reformed - limitations on what owning the idea means should be reworked. Just as, for instance, owning a piece of land doesn't mean you can do whatever you like with it, owning an idea should be similarly subject in order to benefit the intellectual community in whose landscape the idea sits.
Should we get rid of ALL patents? Yes - but not until we (being ironical here) get rid of all companies whose capital is founded on owning the ideas that make them money. In the case of software, however, there is right now an immediate dysfunction in patent law, made evident by the examples in the article, that should be immediately addressed.
Well, unless you're terribly interested in moving on to things like differential geometry, I'd put analysis off a bit longer were I you. If you'd like something stimulating and potentially useful, more advanced combinatorics, number theory, or algebraic geometry might all be good choices. The first two tend to overlap a bit when they are presented in textbooks (with some group theory tossed in as well). If you do crazy graphics programming, or if you program robots' spatial reasoning, algebraic geometry might pay off - though, AG doesn't have as easy an entry. (One exception might be via the book Computational Algebraic Geometry by Hal Schenck).
As far as number theory "paying off": 1) Many proofs in number theory are algorithmic in nature; 2) Computers understand integers with greater facility than they do the psuedo-reals we call floats - often times efficient integer approximations will be more appropriate than slower floating point solutions, and knowing the integers will help you develop/understand these approximations; 3) If cryptography is your bag, number theory is a must; 4) Martin Davis, Yuri Matiyasevich, Julia Robinson, Hilbert's 10th problem, Turing Machines, computability theory, and (the number theory bit) diophantine equations (sorry to be cryptic, this is getting rather long winded).
> "... do your best to make sure your kids are challenged. Praise them for succeeding..."
I especially agree with those two thoughts. I might be inclined append the the caveat that giftedness qua giftedness does not constitute an achievement - does not constitute a success. It is doing, and not being, that counts. While Socrates was surely a brilliant fellow, we'd know almost nothing about him or his philosophy were it not for his equally brilliant but vastly more dynamic pupil. Without the doings of Plato the wisdom of Socrates would have amounted to little of consequence.
As for me, I eschewed the applied topics (no ODE's no PDE's) in favor of the "pure" (algebra, analysis, topology, etc) only to discover that, because I had little interest in becoming a professor, most of it would only serve to keep my happily diverted on what are now ridiculously rare lazy Sunday afternoons. In these topics, so long as one is interested in the propositions in need of proof, real study is relatively useless. I first learned what it meant to study in the "real world" - in the lowly field of IT - when the fiat came down the line to transform format X into formats Y and Z, and ensure that changes to one translate to the others, keeping in mind that simultaneous changes may occur, in which case on the 'right' change should be kept. The old dictum is true: there is no substitute for experience.
A trivial tangent: oddly enough I find that, whether I'm programming for distributed applications or animations, it is the number theory, and not (surprisingly) the linear algebra, that I am most grateful for having learned. Boutade's Law: do not underestimate the algorithmic utility of knowing your way around the integers.
Plenty of linguists would admit 'login' as a verb. There is very little difficulty in accepting that 'to log in' and 'to login' mean the same thing.
In this case "in" does not function as a preposition, it is part of the verb. The evidence for this is immediately apparent when we consider that "to log" and "to log in" really are two different activities. We do not mean that we record anything when we login to a machine, what we are doing is obtaining access to it by means of an exchange of previously established authenticating information - and while this step may involve making a record of our login, it need not for the basic sense of that action to remain intact.
Also, we have no trouble with a multi-word verbs in English, if you don't believe me, try googling 'phrasal verbs'. This article is either a gag, or really is just an example prescriptavist nonsense which attempts in futility to combat the last 50 years of linguistic consensus.