In America, the speakers and writers are expected to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to getting the message across. I get that. It's their job. But don't you ever wonder how different your life would be if you didn't sit there passively expecting meaning to get spoon-fed to you? What ever happened to RTFM and actively wresting it out yourself?

I'm with all of you. The show is awesome and has many metaphorical layers in there. That's difficult to pull off when trying to make it realistic in tone.

I loved how the story was set up as walking up Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs. That took a lot of guts and artistic integrity, since it required a slower first season while they go through the "physiological" needs, before the needs of "safety", "love/belonging", "self-esteem", and "self-actualization". It's a story of both an individual person -- everyone has a Dr. Rush, a Col Young, a Camile Wray as impulses in their heads and body ... just trying to do the right thing. It's a story about humanity in general, with the same kind of characters at play in politics. And after the turning point where the crew takes conscious control of their "destiny" was a big win. Destiny isn't as hopeless as it seems.

And it's going to get cancelled.

How metaphorical is that?

I guess people want entertainment value not transformative value. They want titillating adventure and "good acting" (meaning acting conforming to their fantasies). They want to numb themselves with a good beer and leave a show on in the background so they don't have to think about how much their life -- their destiny -- sucks. People will happily flock towards a flawed fandom like Star Wars -- accidentally following Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey ... and then lying about it after the fact -- but not something that is too realistic in tone like SG-U.

I don't know about everyone else. I'm rooting for the home team. People are just not ready for a series like SG-U today, but maybe they will in the future.

Holy crap, maybe the main theme of Stargate Universe is so subtle, people just missed it. I thought it was subtle as a sledgehammer.

The story is about walking up Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, starting from the most fundamental need at birth: Air. Then water. Then food. Predictably, we’d expect it to progress through “safety”, “love/belonging”, “self-esteem”, and “self-actualization” and beyond. The seventh episode of Season 2 is the major turning point in walking up this tree when the crew (as it represents humanity as a whole, or a single individual) takes conscious control of their destiny.

The melodrama and the edgy anger and despair was put in context of the most incredible environment — humanity’s “destiny”. You think about your own life and what kind of petty, dark desires. How many people wake up and really think about how improbable life is? Or how most people grow up not knowing who they are, what they are here for, or feeling they really shouldn’t be here at all. And yet to continue living?

Come on people, wake up. Look deeper into the story. This is classic Robert A. Heinlein stuff, of ornery, disagreeable, petty, violent animals called humans that for all that has some incredible moments.

I have the same idea as you. I took the AP courses in high school and got my butt kicked in college. I hit Math 401, aka Differential Equations, and it hit back. I didn't have a solid understanding of the basics to really tackle diffq.

Years later, I was influenced by several things:

First was Neal Stephenson's Boroque Cycle. That novel brought home the idea that math was a tool invented to solve problems and expanded minds. The second was my growing fascination with Lisp -- specifically, MIT Scheme / SCIP. By the time I started watching the first lecture, the introduction was already echoing what I felt about calculus, that software engineering dealt with idealized machinery, much the same way calculus was tool that gives us leverage.

I chose the Schuam's Outline for Calculus and started some self-study. I had also taken AP Physics, and the teacher more or less ignored our nominal textbook and used the Schuam's Outline for Physics. Although I was able to follow the derivations on the blackboard, I retained none of it. We were assigned problems out of the Schuam's Outline, meant to be two problems per week, all handed at the end of each half-semester. There were no fancy pictures, no chatty text to wade through. It was straight up physics concepts, how the math worked, and condensed down to its essentials. And lots of problems to practice on.

Of course, I procrastinated on the assignments. The day it was due, I spent every spare break time doing as many of those problems as I could. I wasn't able to complete all of them in time, but the sheer pressure of attempting that many within a short amount of time got me to really understand the concepts and how to work the math. I had no trouble with college-level physics taught to engineering students, just the calculus that powers it.

When I picked up the Schuam's Outline for Calculus, the material was much like that for physics. The concepts were not taught from first principles so much as showing you *how* to use the tools first, then later, *why* those tools worked. I was quickly able to get a handle on basic stuff that I had been vague on -- the Chain Rule, for example. I realized there were really two parts to calculus: Describing the problem (setting up the problem) in the language of math, and then symbolic manipulation. I could generally do the first part OK, considering that I've been writing software for ten years now. The latter part was where I was more hazy on, since I simply didn't know the tool. In structuring the "how to" before the "why this works", I could dive into solving my problems, then satisfy my curiosity later.

Good luck.

If you say so. I don't use momentum to exercise the abs.

Good point. I retract what I said about doing those alternate ab stuff.

I still think squats that work the quads done without any bending of the waist at an aerobic speed (a la Matt Furey) is probably the best bang for the buck.

I had written elsewhere more passive things someone can do:

* Stand instead of sitting in front of the computer desk. Drop into "horse stance", so long as the knees are aligned and don't go over the toes. Merely standing triggers a metabolic gear shift.

* Walk in a half-crouch with the spine straight and the head level (no bopping up and down). The weight should be on the quads and some on the feet. Resist the temptation to fall into the step (by minimizing striking of the heel). In other words, you end up carrying more of your weight on one leg instead of doing a sort of controlled forward fall like most people do when walking.

On a crunch, you are supporting part of your your body weight with your abs against gravity. On the dive bombers, you are arching the opposite way.

Don't do crunches. There are plenty of other ab exercises that don't compress the lower back. For example "dive bombers" or "cat pushups".

Squats are better for burning off calories, as long as you are doing them correctly (i.e. don't bend at the waist, drop straight down). Check out YouTube videos for "Indian Squats" as they work many of the large muscle groups.

This may sound uninspired, but I think your best bet is to embed your exercise during work and spread them out throughout the day.

If you're in front of a desk often, another method is to stand during some or all of your shift. If you know how to sit in something called a horse stance, you can work at the same level as you normally sit in a chair. Simply standing switches on something in the body to burn more calories.

If you walk around a lot, you can change how you walk to get a better workout. Namely, bend your knees while keeping your back straight and your head level. Try not to fall into the forward steps. You end up walking like say, the animation in Counterstrike or Rainbow Six. It works your quads (similar to doing squats).

You can do mini-exercises, taking no more than 5 minutes at a time. Some exercises burn a ton of calories, such as Indian squats. 50 reps generally take less than 60s to do. Pushups are OK if you do the right kind. If you have your own office, you can get one of those as-seen-on-TV pull-up bars: attempt a quick pullup everytime you walk out or walk in through the door. The big downside to this is that you will sweat. If you're actually losing weight, your sweat will smell from the aromatics trapped in the fat you've accumulated. I generally do this onsite. Instead of taking the coffee break, I go off to a corner and run through a couple exercises. Then again, I work in software development, not IT.

Addendum: I wrote this in a rant as a response to someone who said he didn't think it matters whether a newbie learns OOP first or Data structures/Algorithms first. I thought the sequence matter. That's why I suggested Ruby/Smalltalk, more for the OOP. Obviously, if you are teaching *general* programming practices, it would be better to use a language *you* can teach, even switch up the language from stage to stage. The point is to teach a solid foundation of skills that is applicable to any programming language, so that the student knows what is under the hood.