I absolutely agree that The Monk and the Philosopher is one of the best book. A frank discussion between a father and son who both have PhD. Every interesting book.
I love this Wolfram Alpha website. I think it's amazing. I would love to use their API to integration with our product but the price is crazy. If they open their API to a more accessible terms then the innovation around their products would be amazing.
I looked at the Clojure code and I find it's so ugly compared to Python, Java, or C#. I don't know why would anyone considered that a contender for writing code in the long run. I know the three languages mentioned above and I find Python is the most easy to read and code. Code readability is one of the most important criteria for me.
Some part of the country, i.e. the red states are still having this problem but overall, we are much better then we were. The bottom line, we are a working progress.
Most countries that have limited interaction with outsiders are often very racist. We are very lucky to live in an open society and in addition we are a country of immigrants that is why we don't see too much of that. In fact, we are the exception and not the norm.
Most people are forgetting that the communist party is above the constitution. It's very weird but that is the way it works in China, Vietnam, and other communist countries. You can have free speech all you want but if you are violating certain contradictory decree then you go to jail. period.
This is the most ridiculous stuff I have ever heard. We Asian loves the west, especially American. I have never heard anyone hates the west like you've mentioned. Bottom line, China wants to be the center of the universe. They would do anything to score a point. They don't have systematically governance. That is why I call them a gang instead.
If they go to great length just to censure some minor stuff, what do you think they would not do?
Are you kidding me? Take a look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_gSasJPs1Y. Chinese Plain-Clothes Officials Block CNN Cameras With Umbrellas In Tienanmen Square. How low can the Chinese government goes? They operated like a gang, no less.
I disagreed with this statement because there are plenty of successful sites that has other dots besides .com. It's all depend on your application. If your application is useful, then people will come. For example, when I registered my website, http://www.mathmaster.org, the .dot com and everything else were taken but now I am still doing ok in term of visitor counts. Majority of my users come from either bookmarked or search engine anyway.
I have been looking at sage (sagemath.org) and sympy to see if I can use open source math packages to do something like this for http://www.mathmaster.org but I don't have any successes so far. Have you seen something like this besides commercial software? They have a nice API but looking at the licensing cost make me read no further.
I agree with you with regarding the poor state of math education in the US. I think our kids need more practice at home and in the class room. That is why I do something about it. Please check out this site http://www.mathmaster.org.
Nothing you do will make you happy so changing job (or wife or anything else you name it) doesn't help that much. Everyone suffered the same feeling as you do at one point or another. The question is are those thoughts real? How can you handle it when they arise?