Like with any advice, the best advice I can give you about it is that you take what you feel applies to you and toss the rest. In any event, here it is...

1. Explore and get to know yourself, then establish your long-term goals as early as possible. Establish intermediate goals to get you there. Formulate the immediate plan. Execute it. Revise your goals. Redo the last three steps over and over.

2. Lead a healthy lifestyle both physically and mentally. Eat good food, exercise, go outside. Broaden your horizons. Meet people. Learn things unrelated to your field.

3. Get rid of ...

Read the full post.

Just watched yet another documentary on Iraq. The most astounding fact revealed by it was that there have been 93 journalists killed during the conflict. To give perspective, about (sources vary) 70 journalists died during Vietnam (1955-75). The refreshing bit is that the internet seems to be having an impact on this. The documentary finishes by talking about bloggers from Iraq whom by virtue of fitting in are not targeted like western journalists and manage to get first-hand accounts out via the internet. This makes me wonder about the status of internet availability, though. And even if it is available ...

Read the full post.

The lack of posts is Jackson's fault.

The overly inactive open-source revolutionary in me spoke the words 'if you ever write a textbook, please make it free' to two different professors this week. Should books be free like Linux is free? Yes, they should. Of course, printing costs are a reasonable thing to charge for and the author's time also has monetary value (which open-source software authors are usually willing to forfeit as probably would some academics). As it is there exist plenty free 'text books' online. Don't believe me? Check this out. Online books are nice ...

Read the full post.

An interesting article on obtaining a pool of 'experts' making predictions for you. See related post here. It seems that ProbabilityFootball has successfully done what I was talking about in that old post. The most remarkable thing:

Even when we average together the very worst participants -- those participants who actually scored below zero in the contest -- the resulting predictions are amazingly good.

It seems that it would be worthwhile to try something like this on the stock market. However, it would probably be a lot harder to get people making predictions about the stock market since not so many would ...

Read the full post.

After reading Smolin's book I became a interested in the Perimeter Institute. PI seems to be like one heck of a place to be at! That's not what spiked my interest, though, but rather how it was formed. In a nutshell, a rich startup CEO decided that he would like to contribute to science by starting an institute for theoretical physics, so he donated the cash and hired an executive director. Five years later we have PI.

To do experimental physics one needs a lot of things. Particularly, one needs large sums of money to buy and develop ...

Read the full post.