Personally, I find it fascinating that if you just randomly put forward and back slashes on a screen then it forms a pattern like that. To me, it's much more interesting than an algorithm that generates mazes. I'd have expected that you just got a bunch of diamonds and things.

In elementary school in the late 1980's, our school librarian of all people -- a nice, fun older lady -- taught us LOGO programming. The class went relatively deep given that the students were all eight or nine years old. Our last assignment was to write a function that would draw a regular n-gon (taking n as a parameter), then incorporate that into a recursive function that would draw arbitrarily deep spirograph-type shapes using a callback function. Pretty much everyone figured it out on his or her own, as I recall. Our "computer lab" at the time consisted of someone going and setting up folding tables in a hallway or the cafeteria and then lugging a bunch of Apple //e machines out of a closet, then tearing the whole setup down after a couple of hours.

In middle school, we had a short unit on BASIC programming, by now on the Apple IIGS. By this time it was the late 1990's, and I'd started teaching myself QBASIC on our home PC; the computers we were using in school were around seven years old by this point.

In high school, I took a semester of computer science as a freshman and a year of "AP Computer Science" as a sophomore. This was largely just indoctrination into OOP. The entire course consisted of writing completely trivial C++ programs which would consist of several objects, none of whose member functions exceeded one or two lines. Nobody really enjoyed the course or learned much of anything, but we were pretty much bound to the AP curriculum so there wasn't much that could be done.

Had I my druthers, I'd design a computer science program for schoolkids by focusing more on the sort of stuff I did as a little kid, which was really conceptually much deeper and certainly a lot more fun.

You *definitely* don't need a PhD to work as a mathematician at the NSA, nor do you need a specific background in cryptography. If you failed abstract algebra in college you're probably not getting a job there, but my understanding is that it's not that difficult to get in so long as you're qualified, a citizen, and can pass a background check. The NSA is the single largest employer of mathematicians in the world -- they're certainly not just hiring the extreme elites.

Did you read his twitter post? It was an obvious joke. No reasonable person could possibly interpret it as an actual threat. Most unreasonable people would even understand it was a joke.

Your example of gears is bicycles? That's cool, I guess. But, you know, *cars*...

I'm pretty sure most young people have also seen calendars, clipboards, film cameras, and Manila folders outside of a museum.

Unless things have drastically changed since (recently) I went to Caltech, math is its own department -- part of the division of physics, math, and astronomy -- and CS is its own department as well -- part of the division of engineering and applied sciences. There's also an applied/computational math under the E&AS umbrella, but that's not anything like either math or CS.

Generally coursework is the least important component of a graduate education -- in some cases, people won't take any courses at all during certain terms. Additionally, the courses generally require much more work, and a 'C' is a failing grade.

So you figured out what was going on and you didn't help your friend out?

Some friend you are...

s/who books like "The Secret" outsell/who cause books like "The Secret" to outsell/

This study tries to figure out in what way the average person enjoys a story. Aside from the fact that asking people to rate things from 1 to 10 is a great way to determine their favorite numbers and very little else, even if the study were completely accurate I wouldn't care. Why? Because the average person is the guy who makes Michael Bay, Twilight, The Jersey Shore, and Justin Bieber popular. They are the people who books like "The Secret" outsell actual literature. It's already well-established that the average person is worse than useless, dragging us into the gutter and away from the stars. If this research could start to teach us to fix what's wrong with the average person then maybe it'd be worthwhile, but it's clear from the researchers' comments that they actually think that there's something *okay* about the fact that people have gotten so stupid that they can't even follow a simple plot without having the Cliff's Notes embedded into the first paragraph.

If your idea is that the average person alive today -- never mind the average high school student -- has any knowledge at all of relativistic mechanics, evolutionary biology, computer science/engineering, medical science, etc., I think you'll find you're sadly mistaken. Yes, the average teenager knows how to use a cell phone. Clearly this is an insurmountable obstacle, and Isaac Newton himself would be unable to figure out my Nokia.

At any rate, the material on the "arithmetic" and "algebra" sections is still taught and used in schools today, and I'll outright guarantee you that if I printed those out and took them to a Calculus III section at the local university I'd be unlikely to get a very high pass rate, despite the fact that most of them have memorized how to take dozens of integrals or apply Lagrange multipliers.

Knowledge isn't worth as much as people seem to think; at its heart, it's just trivia. What matters is the ability to think, and that doesn't change from generation to generation.

Please tell me you're kidding. Latin != Italian.

And for that matter, heaven forbid that college should be about getting an education instead of necessary vocational training. Clearly knowledge is worthless except as a bullet on a résumé.

Umm, you realize this is *Rob Pike* you're talking about, right? One of the original developers of UNIX? I'm guessing that, what with working at Bell Labs while they were *inventing* C, he might know a little more about the language than you do.

'Your stocks will be worthless (than any other's) in 23 hours if and only if those said others are allowed to sell sooner than you and *specially* sooner than the buyer's knowledge about the bankrupcy'

No, your stocks will be worthless, period. People won't magically be willing to pay more money for stock in a bankrupt company because they weren't allowed to trade the stock for a while. But this isn't really a great example of why liquidity is necessary, because in this case there's not much that can be done. Market liquidity is necessary to allow risks to be reallocated, and risks need to be reallocated on a regular basis, not just once a day. Just because you could conceivably regulate "official" stock prices doesn't mean you can regulate the instantaneous factors that dictate them -- the cost of oil, local and international politics, the weather, etc.