Negative Matter: Fundamentals

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Fundamentals

I returned to fundamentals. I started to follow computer science (CS) courses at MIT.

MIT has a great program called MIT OpenCourseWare and it is free. Lecture videos are available from uTunes. uTunes is embedded iTunes portal which makes it easier to collate course material in one place.

The following snapshot shows a portion of my desktop.

I have course video at the top, a Python script edited with iMac’s Pico editor in the middle, and the output screen at the bottom. I also have course presentation in pdf document form and browser windows in other areas of my screen.

It is great fun, probably more fun than sitting in a classroom. I can pause the video and do a bit of programming or research on the web then get back to course.

It is also a fantastic activity to return to fundamentals of algorithms. Being a seasoned programmer allows me to focus purely on mathematics and analysis of algorithms.

My long therm objective is to study evolutionary algorithms and perhaps write a program to simulate evolutionary systems.

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In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. - Albert Camus

The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.

- Socrates, as quoted by Diogenes Laertius.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. ― Elie Wiesel

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well, and over us to supervise this is installed a celestial dictatorship. A kind of divine North Korea. - Christopher Hitchens

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us. - Franz Kafka

Developing love and compassion and reducing anger and spite is a universal activity which requires no faith in any religion whatsoever- Dalai Lama

No victory is irreversible, no defeat is definitive. That is what makes life worth living. – Leszek Kolakowski

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.-Stephen Hawking

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We find beauty in something done well.- Denis Dutton

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. -Richard Dawkins

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.- Peter Ustinov

“To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”
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“I can live with doubt and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.”
- Richard Feynman

"Best things in life aren't things."
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"Physicists spend a large part of their lives in a state of confusion. It's an occupational hazard. To excel in physics is to embrace doubt while walking the winding road to clarity."
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The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning."
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"A defining property of living systems is that they self-assemble against nature's tendency toward disorder, or entropy"
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