I'm not half as cool as to have Greek heroes and turtles, so I'll introduce Steve in their stead. He is a real person. He goes to graduate school with me. But, otherwise he is my diametrically opposite evil twin. We've had almost-heated arguments on things like public health care, US foreign policy, ethics, economics, and we always seem to take opposite sides. Maybe I exaggerate. Whatever.

Steve: May I ask you a philosophical question?

rz: Are you talking to me? Oh dear lord. Only as long as you promise me that I'll be done "answering" before tomorrow morning.

Steve: So I was tutoring this girl for one of her engineering classes, right? CS 111, I think. She was having problems implementing a list in C++ which grew in size if you stored beyond its capacity. And frankly, I wasn't really sure how to do it either because I always just use a vector and be done. Why do they teach stuff like that?

rz: Did that stop you from charging her? Wait. Don't answer that. Well, assuming you are asking me why isn't she learning more about practical, real-world, off the web-shelf, open-source library based programming, it probably has to do with the CS department's need to balance between teaching practical tools and teaching computer science in the "it is as much about computers as astronomy about telescopes" sense. It is a mighty difficult challenge because both tend to be called "computer science" for undergraduates, but both are fields in which you can do research in and they are quite separate from one another. In any event, it is probably good for her to understand how to build such a thing because a) you learn by examples and b) it is good to understand the most common tools to use them properly. By having her do it the teacher accomplishes a) and b) in one fell swoop.

Steve: Whatever. This girl is an industrial engineering major. She'll never have to program again in her life. Why should she have to deal with such mundane stuff as pointers and memory allocation to implement something that is in the standard library?

rz: First off, why is she even in the class if she is sure she won't ever need to program again? If it is required there probably is good reason for it. For example, if you are engineer you'll probably program at some point in your life. Secondly, she should learn in as much detail as possible. That's what we mean by "education". Maybe by doing that she will learn that she likes programming better than industrial engineering. Maybe to learn how to write elementary programs will save her a ton of time later in life. Maybe she should just do it for the joy of learning and broadening horizons. Which I thought was the other reason people came to college, by the way.

Steve: Whatever. I take a more practical approach: figure out what I need to know and move on.

rz: Uh... If you think like that why do you need to know anything? Why do you study physics? You could get by (and probably make a lot more money) without finding this higgs thingie you'll spend the better part of the next five years looking for. Of course, the only real proxy for what to learn in depth and what not is your interest, but for someone who is in the first couple of years of her education it seems important enough to try subjects even without having interest in them just for the sake of finding what she is actually interested in. Heck, exploring is probably good even for people at the stage we are at and even later on. I think a fundamental problem with the education system is that education is treated as if it was a mean to an end rather than a self-exploratory adventure of its own worth.

Steve: Pointers in C++ are not that deep.

rz: Sure, sure. I like practicality as much as the next guy. Well fine, maybe that's not true. Anyways... practicality has its place. I'm not suggesting that she goes to learn about functional programming when she has a multi-part project due in two days for the joy of exploring, but in general learning new things just to know them or just to try them is half the reason to go to college or pursue any type of education. Let me rephrase that. Learning new things for their own sake is one of the things we mean by education. Wait. One more time.

Learning new things for their own sake is one of the things we ought to mean by education.

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 your television.

4. You are too young to be bored. If you are bored it either means you are not pushing yourself enough or not living enough (or both). Don't let yourself be bored. Keep busy. Push yourself.

5. Make the most out of your summers. 15-week vacations will be a lot less frequent later on. A summer without learning or experiencing something significant is a wasted one.

6. Have an independent project in the back or front burner at all times. Have a book you are reading in your off-time (e.g. while riding the bus). Podcasts and books on tape make for great workout music. Finish one such book every few weeks.

7. Read the textbook from cover to cover. Do every problem in the book even if that is not required. It is a pity to pay over $100 for a book you never read. Well... there are some books that are just not worth the effort, but at least do this with the ones you know are important.

8. Be dedicated but make sure you live. You only get to turn 21 once. Make sure your friends tell you what happened. Never spend more than 3 weekends in a row without going to a social gathering and having a great time. Get hammered.

9. Travel.

10. Take your education into your own hands. Don't expect that you will learn by just following professor's, university and program prescriptions. Pursue your interests on your own in as much depth as time allows. Then pursue them some more even at the expense of some schoolwork.

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, but if you are going to be doing a fair amount of reading it is actually nice to have a reasonable quality hard copy. So, my rough sketch of a solution is to create a 'publishing' company that operates as follows.

Books are made available online for free or for minimal cost (to break even in terms of hosting). People can then order printed copies of the books for an additional cost to cover printing expenses. This is all organized through a web-site... duh, it is me coming up with it, right?

This has its logistical fallacies: it is probably a lot cheaper to print several thousand copies of a book than printing them 'on demand'. But with reasonable popularity measures and printing practices the logistic problems could perhaps be made into manageable ones. EDIT: Doing about 10 minutes worth of research into publishing costs revealed to me that one can expect to get a paperback quality book published for $5-20 per copy depending on the number of copies. This definitely makes the idea plausible.

Now we can take this to a whole new level. Imagine web-book 2.0. Users can register and have reviews, rankings and recommendations for books. Perhaps one can allow users to upload materials and have the system keep track of what items are related in one way or another. As the number of books and users grow the costs would probably do so as well, but I think that a non-for-profit spirit plus some creativity in ways to earn revenue could make ends meet. For instance, printed books could be sold at a price slightly higher than cost as to cover the other expenses of the site. Or perhaps users could pay a yearly membership fee.

Now a bit of due credit. Zack had a variation of this idea several years ago and it has been in the back of my head since then.

The main problem with all this is that for whatever reason the books that are available for free online are rarely as good as the overpriced published ones. I can think of several possible reasons why this is so, but whatever. In any event, my generation might have just gotten fed up enough with new editions that merely shuffle problems around and price tags over $100 to start producing reasonably good content that can be made available in a non-profit manner. I say it is the duty of our generation to start by writing a better e&m; book.

Viva la Linux revolucion!

After a little bit of a silence blogging is back in style in Rigoland.

While reading Smolin's book I stumbled upon the passage in which he talks about how physics students are discouraged by the lack of interesting subjects early on and how at his school they had quantum physics as a freshman class. Smolin makes a good point that most of what is taught in our freshman classes is usually what students have seen in high school and it seems very boring. It is boring on two accounts: The subjects are never "cool" ones such as black holes, quantum physics, cosmology, etc. Secondly, the subjects are never too technical. For example, a rigorous treatment of Newtonian mechanics could be done at a freshman level (not boring), but students are made to solve inclined-plane problems instead (boring).

One thing that I think that is crucial to the overdue scientific revolution Smolin talks about in his book is a revision of how we teach physics at the undergraduate level. Not only in what we teach but in how we do it. In my experience, and I think that this is true for most of my peers trained in US institutions, the way we were taught was as if we weren't ready to learn. The overall attitude being we'll tell you in grad school. This has been doubly frustrating now after encountering the attitude of you should have learned all this in undergrad. I can understand where this comes from: physics requires quite a bit of math. However, me and I think my peers also wish more math had been taught math by the physicists.

Smolin's book never talks about the possible inadequacies of undergrad education (perhaps for good reason), which was a bit disappointing for me. Maybe it will get me to finish the essay I've been writing about this subject some day...

I don't know how is it that I didn't find Cosmic Variance earlier. It is one gem of a blog. No, it is not just geeky science stuff, though it is run by five theoretical physicists so, you know...

Anyways, today I found this. It does bring about a very good point: for some reason people seem to think that learning basic science and math is relatively unimportant but that everyone -- or at least everyone who we call educated -- must know basic history, literature and other humanities. Our appreciation of math and science needs to be elevated to the same status as the other subjects.

Let me clarify what I mean by basic science and math. I don't mean what people typically learn in high school or even in college "math" and "science" classes for non-majors. The math taught in high school is to math what learning to read and write is to literature and something similar can be said about science. I mean that people should have some basic understanding of the important theories and ideas of science. For example, understand what the "big bang" is and how do we "know" that things most likely worked out that way. For another, people should have a basic understanding of a chemical reaction and the second law of thermodynamics (someone once said this is roughly equivalent to having read Hamlet). They should know that their computer is not a magical thing that understands them but just a machine which can be in a lot of states which are meaningful to the person looking at it and that the complexity of this machine is quite astounding. Some may say that this is all possible without math. I disagree. Mathematics is the language in which all this is expressed and therefore people should understand basic math. No, not just how to multiply fractions, mathematicians don't just sit around multiplying really big numbers. Quite a bit, huh? And those are just some examples.

But hey, Shakespeare takes a bit of work to read and so does Virginia Woolf and there is quite a bit to be gained by understanding all that is packed into their works. Much like there is something to be gained in learning 20th century history or what Freud thought about the way we think and those also take a bit of work. I find that many scientists feel this way about the subjects they don't specialize in, but it seems that only scientists care about science. It is utterly unacceptable that an academic doesn't know the difference between friction and impact. I do agree, though, that string theorists may not be the best choice when it comes to teaching freshman physics!