I think this could raise some first amendment issues. Whereas it is a valid point that unfortunate consequences can sometimes arise when people get harassed in forums such as MySpace, legally, people have a right to be rude. It might be deplorable, but it is not illegal, per the first amendment.
This is really good. I like the idea of using statistically relevant answers in lieu of absolute answers. Like in this case, 75% of the time, Linux servers may be the best type of server, but there is always that other 25% of time where there are exceptions.
Reminds me of using the principle of mediocrity proposed by physicist Alex Vilkenkin to make cosmological predictions when dealing with things like inflationary theory. If there is a bell curve for some constant we are trying to establish, we predict this constant will be somewhere in the middle, chopping of the two extremes at both ends. Thus, say the theory is some version of Guth's inflationary theory, and it predicts a constant that varies over some spectrum. Thus we predict we will see that constant to lie somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. Thus, if we observe or measure that constant to be somewhere around where we had predicted it, that lends weight to the theory we were working from. The idea being that we live in an average world, e.g. in an "average" inflationary bubble, hence the principle of mediocrity. The key point is that we CAN actually use statistics to make predictions about the world, and need not have to always make precise predictions, which, in some versions of string and/or inflationary theory, one cannot, simply because of the infinite number of bubbles in inflation or the near-infinite number of possible string theories (10^500 values for the false vacuum I think I read somewhere).
Anyway the idea that there is no one right answer to a question that works everywhere seems sound in some cases.
Given the options listed above, provided option 1 is financially viable for you, I might suggest going with that. I know that may be disappointing, just going on to the final year of university, but that might be the safe bet.
Also, QA is a good "entry point" for aspiring developers. People transfer to and from QA from development all the time. I am in the automation side of QA, so I am kind of in that gray nether world between QA and development, since my job is to develop, but the deliverables I work on are test scripts, rather than the product deliverable. So if you are starting out, just getting a QA job is at least a foot in the door.
So I might say, that, to play it safe, given your current situation you might want to go ahead and plan on just continuing with university - if I am not mistaken I think this is still largely subsidized by Whitehall since in theory the subsidy is offset by the graduate tax - correct me if I am wrong there, but if I am right, this should be viable for you. But then, also, on the side, I'd keep my eye out still for gigs, even if just part-time, or looking towards when you graduate, and I would keep QA in mind as an option, since if you do well in that and demonstrate your technical competencies, often there is opportunity to segue to more technical stuff in QA (i.e., automation), and from there, often into development. Good luck.
Option 1 is financially viable and probably what I'll end up doing. Looking for entry points from which I could transition upwards is something I will definitely look at after graduation.
That is just really cool. We need more parents like that who can spend the time to teach their kids about general relativity. Seriously. Too often parents either ignore their kids or brainwash them with their own narrow minded cultural take on the world. Very rarely do the actual facts about the actual world get passed along. Maybe parents just rely on schools to do it, but any kind of passing along of enthusiasm about the natural world is highly commendable. Bravo.
Yes, I agree it is cool for the Dad, and fun for the kids, but, umm, do you think these kids really learned general relativity? They'd have to be real brainiacs, considering their young age. Perhaps later in their education, they may be able to look back on their practical experience tagging along with Dad on his experiment and it may make more sense.
I do agree that the kids may learn. ... not about general relativity in particular, but about doing experiments and the notion that ideas can be "tested" to see if they are really true or false.
"they may be able to look back on their practical experience tagging along with Dad on his experiment and it may make more sense."
I can say that has been the case for me personally. I was shown lots of cool stuff when I was a kid, I didn't completely understand it then, but I have been able to look back on past experiences to help me make sense of concepts I ran across again later.
At that age I think it's more about teaching them to identify themselves as scientists. I'm sure they didn't understand a lot of what was going on but they were aware they were participating in something cool with wires and digital readouts. They'll tell their friends at school about it and at that age other kids will start to identify them as science geeks. That will give them something to live up to and as they get older they will always have the story of that adventure to think about and talk about. It's very nice for the whole family.
The boys look like they're in 5th grade or so...the girl looks like she is probably in 3rd? They aren't infants, and their dad obviously works in this field. This was a great opportunity for them to see what dad does beyond sitting in a lab all day.
When I was that age I would have been ecstatic to see what my dad did, doubly so if it had had something to do with science.
I think this shows (and I'm probably wording this poorly) that all scientific facts can be verified. We (mankind) have built up this body of knowledge, and if you are determined enough you can validate each link of knowledge in that chain to determine the truth.
Knowing that a plane flies vs. knowing how it flies is a valuable thing indeed.
Kudos to this dad for encouraging curiosity in his children. All too often this trait is squelched.
I think they could comprehend at that young age that something weird is happening to the clocks. What would make a clock tick slower at one place than the other?
LLD is a doctorate too (Doctor of Laws) - the next step up from the LLM (Master of Laws) - to be a solicitor or a barrister, one needs at least an LLB (Bachelor of Laws).
I (almost) decided to study law once which is how I know. I was so enamored with Cole Turner (Julian McMahon's character in 'Charmed') I very nearly decided to pursue an online law degree, since Cole was a lawyer. Who knows. Maybe I still will one of these days, but since all my experience is in SQA, it would not be the most logical thing in the world in the long run I don't think.
But anyway, LLD is also another kind of doctorate, along with Ph.D. MD, DDS, DVM, etc.
Regarding the discussion of "real" arrays in Fortran vs. "pointer arrays" in c, it seems in the real world often we need resizable arrays, which means the only way to do that is to have pointer arrays. A Fortran array cannot be resized. What if I want to read in a tab delimted file that has ints, and read that into a 2-D matrix, where the matrix rows correspond to the file rows, and the matrix columns correspond to the tab delimited columns in the file. And I have say no idea how big the file is. So the only way I can do this is to have a resizable array. I can "guess" that say my rows/columns won't be more than some arbitrarily large number, but then I likely end up wasting a lot of space. So out of curiousity how would I even do that with "real arrays"? Seems like if I ever need to resize an array, even in just as simple an example as reading in a file, then I need a pointer array, since "real" (fortran-like) arrays will not resize. Am I missing something here?
Interesting stuff. However it would be better if he had not talked about groups or cultures competing, which is ultimately incidental, and talked instead of genes and memes competing. Evolution could give a damn about the group. It cares only about genes. Similarly, cultural (memetic) evolution could give a damn about the culture (or society or whatever). It only is concerned with the meme.
Basically his thesis is that women are good at close-knit relationships, and me are good at broader networked relationships. So roughly, though women are protected and valued in society because of reproduction, men are valued in society for the culture they create with their penchant for wide social networking. Fair enough perhaps but this misses the point.
I think rather than say woman have a usefulness to the group for the creation of offspring, both in terms of having in offspring and having a higher chance of reproducing, and men have a usefulness to the group because of their cultural contributions, I think we need to look at usefulness with respect to what. The "what" is the gene and the meme.
Woman are good for the gene. If I am a selfish gene, I want to hitch a ride with a chick. Why? Because as much as 8 / 10 of women who ever lived reproduced. Only about 4 / 10 men who ever lived reproduced (according to the article). So if I want to become part of evolution's junk DNA (and 95% of our DNA is junk, true "selfish genes"), then I have a better chance hanging out in the junk DNA of a female than a male. Women are good for me as a selfish gene. Women are useful to the selfish gene. Men? Well, hell, we can always invent pathogenesis in a pinch as a certain kind of shark in a zoo has done. Men are a nice to have to broaden the genome which enhances fitness, but we can ultimately do without them if we need to ("we" referring to the genes).
On the other hand, if I am a selfish meme, if the author is right about men preferring wider social networks (like politics or religion) than I have a better shot infecting the brain of a man than a woman. Why? Because the dude I infect will know more dudes, and can pass me along to them before he gets eaten by a saber tooth cat.
So do the author's conclusions make sense? I think so. But he needs to understand what "usefulness" means. Usefulness with respect to WHOM.
If I am a selfish gene, women are more useful to me.
If I am a selfish meme, men are more useful to me.
However I would say though it is hard to put numbers on this, that the higher advantage chicks give the selfish gene versus dudes is greater than the higher advantage endowed by dudes to the memes versus the chicks. This is a guess, but it is my gut feeling. I think that tho genes find chicks more important and memes find dudes more important, a gene can live without the dudes more facily than a meme can live without the chicks. Since whereas women might not network quite with the same alacrity as men, still they network. Anyway. So I like this article. But better clarity could be had in my opinion by looking at the men vs. women thing from the perspective of genes and memes, which again, is all biological and cultural evolution respectively care about.
So yes, if you are a meme, you like men. But you kind of can go both ways. If you are a gene, you really prefer women, and are less inclined to go both ways. :-)
If I am a selfish gene, I want to hitch a ride with a chick. Why? Because as much as 8 / 10 of women who ever lived reproduced. Only about 4 / 10 men who ever lived reproduced (according to the article).
This argument is wrong.
The discrepancy you point out is offset by the fact that the men who did reproduce had more offspring each than the women who did reproduce. On average, males and females produce the exact same expected number of children, because each child has a father and a mother. This explains the near 50/50 ratio of males to females in many species: if females substantially outnumber males, a selfish gene would find it beneficial to twist the mother's physiology to make a male child more probable. So it balances out.
Needless to say, memes have absolutely nothing to do with the whole discussion.
Be wary of reductionism for reductionism's sake, young Padawan. Just because you can frame something in particular terms doesn't necessarily mean you should, especially when context (something all too unappreciated in casual discussion of genetics/memetics) is discarded in the process.
Interesting theory, but wrong. In fact, the right answer is well known, and does not involve memes at all.
The reason why it's equally good for the genes to produce a male or a female, and why there's an equal number of males and females in almost all animal species, is that the expected number of offspring for a male and a female is equal. It has to be that way, because everybody has exactly one father and one mother.
While it might be true that 8/10 of females and 4/10 of males of a given species reproduce, the males reproduce more when they do. A smaller probability of a higher number will give you the same expected value.
I think this argument (among many others) is nicely explained in the Selfish Gene by Dawkins.
When groups fail individuals within that group tend to fail. You might have 20 kids but if they are killed off by the invading army then you fail.
Over the last 100,000+ years I think women tend to maintain genetic information within a group, but it's the highly successful men in highly successful groups tend to spread it.
There's something in your observation that echoes old mythologies and models of the world: men represent Spirit, women represent Matter. I always thought there was some kernel of truth to that metaphor, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. I think you did.
Actually, I think if one looks across most old mythologies and religions, particularly many pre-dating Jeudeo-Christian, one would find quite the opposite.
It's not just the religions of the Book which use that metaphor. The whole Buddhism, the whole Hinduism (to the extent that such a thing does exist) - they all say: man = spirit, woman = matter.
Yeah, well I guess it's a hard thing to really pin down, but I have always interpreted the less male dominated religions as seeing the female as the spiritual or guiding or creative force and the male as being the force which works to bring that creative energy into solid form.
