Overall I have mixed feelings about the value of a computer science education, mostly because of the personal benefit I have gotten from mine. For most cases though, I think it is severely overvalued. It’s very strange to observe an industry with major talent shortages, and then to know perfectly good self-taught programmers get prematurely rejected in interviews because they don’t have a computer science background. I hope to see the industry improve in this respect, but in the meantime I’m happy to exploit this imbalance as a competitive advantage.
Monthly Archives: June 2016
The War on Stupid People
I just read this great article in the Atlantic.
80 MILLION Americans have an IQ of 90 or below. What is your first gut reaction about those people when you hear that?
Throughout human history, the most valuable substance on Earth has been… the human brain. Even the dimmest of humans can be taught to do tasks that we still have trouble getting machines to do.
But that is changing rapidly. And just like jobs that require “muscle” (agriculture, manufacturing) have mostly disappeared, jobs that require structured thought (finance, law) are starting to disappear as well.
So that piece of wetware in your skull is going to be scrutinized further and further, as its economic value plummets and your worth as a cog in the GDP falls with it.
Source: The War on Stupid People
What is a “particle”?
Excellent article on a question I’ve had for a long time.
“In the broadest sense, ‘particles’ are physical things that we can count,” says Greg Gbur, a science writer and physicist at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. You can’t have half a quark or one-third of an electron. And all particles of a given type are precisely identical to each other: they don’t come in various colors or have little license plates that distinguish them. Any two electrons will produce the same result in a detector, and that’s what makes them fundamental: They don’t come in a variety pack.
Source: What is a “particle”?