I think this is a very powerful post. Something I regularly thinking about. Especially the powerful self centered posted ideas. I like PG's idea that we should embrace randomness and avoid our self centered ness. Its something I do struggle with evry day. this article unfortunately at times reads like a suicide note.
I second the OCW reference.
Some of the Calculus for Dummies, type books are good.
Its good to remember that Calculus and Linear Algebra don't have to be that complicated.
I also recommend scan the books before you buy them, I wasted far too much money at college on txtbooks that I ended up despising
I love this post too, I spent a lot of my time at college, sitting in coffee shops doing mathematics/ pretending to study.
Third places are a very interesting tool.
Yeah I worry about the fact that this discussion became an emotional discussion in regards programming languages. There is a lot of evidence that students learn Java, because of the job market. I've worked in a school as Physics Teaching Assistant for a year (while at grad school) and the huge problem in Ireland, the UK and the USA is that people assume that students know best about choice etc. The fact is students are rubbish at telling what they'll enjoy, and most students will shirk away from thp the harder sciences etc. But the responsibility is to keep up the standards of academic rigor. Some wise young Cambridge scholar said to me recently 'When u audit something you change the standards, and the aims of it. League tables made schools focus on results, modularization make students focus on results, the job market makes people look for certain skills' and that is true. My most useful course in Philosophy at University, was a course I despised at the time. Perhaps we need to just let professors set the courses, or we get to the scenario that scares me the most when I get Physics graduates who don't understand what a Partial Derivative is.
A CS graduate who doesn't know what the Lambda calculus is, is perhaps the same?