Cap'n Refsmmat

I'm sure there are some members here with their favorite philosophical writings. Let's make a sort of reading list, shall we? So, what kinds of philosophical books do you like?

Uh-oh. Has this thread fallen victim to a post miscount? edit: ah, that seems to have cleared it up. Page 3 wouldn't display at all for some reason.

bascule: I'm expecting to have the same happen to me. But hey, it's free. If you have any other philosophical books you might recommend I'll see if I can get them. I'm in college. I'm supposed to break my brain occasionally.

Sounds like fun. So, in a surprise turn of events involving a free gift from a credit union the recipient did not want, and thus passed on, I now have a Kindle. There are quite a few public-domain books available for free for Kindle, so I'm now building up a reading list: The Communist Manifesto, because this is college and I should be rebellious. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, because this is college and I should be engaged in deep thought. Leviathan, because this is college and I have to read it for Philosophy of Religion next semester. On the Origin of Species, because this is college and I should be well-versed in the fundamentals of many fields. Who knows if I'll actually read all that. I'll at least glance at them. Hey, it's free!

Take a look at Cryptonomicon as well. It's my favorite Stephenson, ahead of Snow Crash and Anathem (which suffered from terminal weirdness). Curiously, my reading is now the New Oxford Annotated Bible, as I picked it up for a philosophy of religion course next semester and decided to finish up the New Testament while I'm off school.

What books are you reading now? Doesn't matter what kind, what subject, whatever. It'll just be fun to see what everyone's reading. I'd certainly like to get more reading material in. I'll start: I'm currently starting The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, as I'm currently writing a report discussing evolution and I spotted it in the library while doing research.

Neat. I've found that there are some older books that are very good at showing you exactly why things work in math, although they may focus a bit too much on memorization as well. As insane_alien suggested, once you learn the method you just need to start practicing. I hope those books work out for you.

Fortunately you'll find that math with pounds and dollars is identical; now that the pound is decimal, instead of having all those goofy shillings, you don't need any separate math. So just pretend the problems use £ instead of $. I'll look around for other good websites and books and see what I can find.

Well, adding single digit numbers is usually just a matter of practice and intuition. Practice it a lot and you should start remembering things and developing a "feel" for how they should add up. You can, of course, get out some pennies and try "adding" groups together so you can see how they add up, but it's really just practice. For two-digit numbers and larger, there's a simple method which is what I learned in elementary school. Yes, it's cumbersome and it takes practice, but it's just a stepping-stone -- eventually you should be able to do without for small enough numbers. I'll try to do some more research and find guides on the rest of basic arithmetic if I can. But for now, my only advice is this: practice. In elementary school they had us do timed addition and subtraction tests, worksheets, workbooks, and pretty much any form of practice possible -- find a way to turn it into a game or a routine and you'll be able to get practice in anywhere.

Okay, first: I admire your determination. I know a lot of people who would rather say "Yeah, I suck at math" and use it as an excuse. Being a (recently graduated) high school student, I can say I probably saw that attitude every day in some form or another, and it's refreshing to see someone determined to learn what's needed. First, we need to know the extent of your current skills. You say most courses overestimated your abilities, so before we try to help, what are your abilities? What simple mathematics can you do, and what problems leave you stumped? Perhaps with that information we'll have a good idea of where to start.

No insult intended. I suppose your point is that while you have learned all these other languages, you find that the traditional stuff works best and there's no need for Haskell or any of the other "new" languages brought up by bascule? What is really called for here is a direct comparison: get some programmers expert in C/C++, some expert in Haskell or Erlang or some other similar language, and give them a task. Time how long it takes both for development and program execution and see what the tradeoffs are. (For added realism, then give them a new task that involves updating the old program to new requirements, and see how easily the code can be updated.) My suspicion is that the "new" languages make programming faster (to an extent) but program speed slower, unless you're sufficiently clever. But I'd have to try it. From what I recall, bascule works for an Internet company. But I'll let bascule speak for himself in that department. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Honestly I don't think you can pick a "wrong" language to learn. All will be useful to you in some way, and learning one language will make it infinitely easier to learn the next -- my knowledge of the workings of Java comes from the object model in PHP, for example. There are so many similar concepts across languages that learning one will help prepare you for learning more. So take a look through the languages mentioned here, look up some code in those languages, and try reading a tutorial or two from each. (Don't let the look of the code scare you. I know Lisp scared me when I first saw it, but it's actually pretty cool.) If you go into anything computational you'll end up learning several languages anyway, so it doesn't really matter which one you start with.

I think the issue between D H and bascule here is merely a difference of willingness to use what already works to its full potential vs. willingness to learn new concepts and techniques to leverage them to their potential. The former requires less initial effort on the part of the programmer (less learning curve), but may mean uglier code and other disadvantages in the long run. The latter requires more learning but can make programming and debugging faster at the expense of some execution time. Tradeoffs. What are you willing to lose?

If it requires significant speed to be useful, C is the obvious choice. C is also, in my experience, rather painful to use. If you want something relatively simple that can do the modeling (just not as quickly), try Python. It's fairly simple to learn and you can probably find pre-existing Python code that'll help you do what you want. O'Reilly's Learning Python is a good place to start.

I once posted at a rate that would give me 9000 posts in about a year... that didn't last, clearly. J'Dona, glad to see you back. Not knowing anything never stopped me

chitrangda (formerly book worm) has been banned for three days by request to prevent SFN from distracting from school work.

Welcome to SFN. I hope you enjoy the stimulating discussions we have to offer! It appears you've set your image as your profile picture rather than your avatar. The profile picture only appears when you look at your profile, rather than next to all your posts. Weird, I know, but that's vBulletin for you.

We don't really have one, but if you have questions I'd be glad to answer them for you (assuming I know the answers...).

It isn't hazmat, it's rule 2.6.

He asked about intermolecular forces, not intramolecular forces.

Well, think about it. Would hydrogen bonding work in [ce]NH4OH[/ce]? Hydrogen bonding requires a hydrogen atom and an oxygen, nitrogen, or fluorine atom...

I was a scientifically ignorant spam monkey, and look where I am now

A subatomic particle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepton You go up the scale of particles until you start into organisms and finally "scientist," based on how many posts you have.

Hi.

I don't think there'd be enough use of it.

Just stick with one or the other and don't confuse us by using both usernames