Is that you, voluntarily-homeless-college student? If so, I have some bad news: a doctor commented on your present lifestyle and has a rather dire warning (you're going nuts):
While it's certainly possible that Riel is just a little quirky and enjoys a different type of routine, unfortunately the pattern of behavior described here is often seen during the first presentation of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is more common in males and classically presents in the early-to-mid 20's. It would not, early in its course, necessarily be accompanied by seriously impaired academic functioning. I would urge Riel's friends and classmates to be vigilant for signs of disorganized or paranoid thought, speech, and behavior.
So some ignoramus has mom and dad money pay for his apartment while he needlessly mooches off others because, in his own words, "I'm trying to be the change I need to see". He sounds like a dumb shithead.
Edit: to anyone who downvotes without explanation: you are a coward.
Expressing outrage at "sexists in tech" is an important signaling ritual on Hacker News, as evidenced by the 50 million other threads interchangeable with this one.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.
If the New York Times is to be believed, the crime rate has nearly halved since 1980 [1]. Obviously it needn't follow that the increase in the prison population caused this, but the author's unwillingness to even explore the idea seems awfully incurious.
The before and afters are great. I love the ones that were a scribbly mess in the drawing and end up looking nice but still reminscient of what the kid sketched.
I immediately thought that same thing. Someone else posted this link (http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/20566/prove-there-ar...) which answers the question: if Pi is a "normal number" -- a number whose expansion in base b asymptotically contains each digit 0, 1, ..., b-1 with equal frequency, for any give b -- then within that numbers expansion (in any base) you'll find every finite string composed of those digits infinitely many times. So normal numbers will not only contain any person's name, but every book ever written, every law of nature, etc.
Wikipedia says that Pi is widely believed to be normal, but that it's not been proved. It's interesting that almost every real number has this normality property (in the sense that the set of real numbers that are not normal has Lebesgue measure zero), as it sounds like a very restrictive criteria.
It would have saved me a ton of frustration and wasted effort if it were a lot less than currently. In high school I remember hating math - it was obvious some people were far better at grinding through computations than I could ever hope to be, and it made me resentful being forced to go through what seemed a pointless exercise.
In university I made a late switch to computer science, and took real analysis thinking it would be very painful, but would make up for having no calculus. I actually enjoyed so much I switched to math, and so did sort of a math crash course over a year to prepare for grad school. Some of the math was hell. Studying differential equations, complex variables (computation oriented), and bits of differential geometry, etc. would leave me with so frustrated, wondering why I was putting myself through this. On the other hand, measure theory, complex analysis, functional analysis, algebra, and galois theory were so illuminating. I could just sit there for hours working through proofs, and not burn out.
However, this would not work for everyone (or most even). It shocked me that everyone else didn't see it my way, so it was very interesting observing how others studied/thought about math. I had a friend in all my pure math classes whom I worked on assignments with. He was a computational wizard who could flawlessly plow through pages of computations. My rate of errors - flipping a sign, carelessly misapplying a rule, etc. - was so much higher than his I had to conclude our brains were just wired in a totally different way. I noticed, when trying to prove something, we'd proceed very differently. He'd take what he knew to be true, and just begin enumerating some logical consequences of that, and go in the direction which seemed to have the smallest blowup in data. I'd usually assume the statement was false, and think and think and think about why that would be so absurd. Then, when I came up with the abstract explanation in my mind, in my mind I'd shape it into something concrete enough to write down (or even describe).
I identify a lot with the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck (at least before he became a little eccentric), because he's one of the rare examples (I know of) of an outstanding mathematician who seems to have approached math the way I do, and derives value from it for similar reasons. AG was reknowned for thinking about math in an extremely abstract way: many people learn by taking specific examples and then playing around with them mechanically until they get a general 'feel' for what's going on. Instead AG would describe the phenomenon being observed in the most abstract and general way possible, sometimes building an entire new theory of which the solution to the original problem was merely a trivial consequence.
Here is a two part piece biographical essay that, regardless of your interest in math, you'll probably find very interesting. He led an extraordinary life:
EDIT: Hmm, I sort of went off on a general rant instead of making the point I intended (this tiny text field makes that so easy, haha). I wanted to point out it's a common distinction in math made between the "problem solvers" and the "theory builders" (AG, mentioned above, epitomizes the latter). Most subjects in pure math are populated by people in one field or the other, and I believe that by forcing a computational approach on people early in their development, you're completely turning people off of math who could have fallen in love with the abstract theory. How prevalent this is, I don't know.
Presumably, some shadowy figure in a trenchcoat met him at 3am on a Tuesday behind a warehouse on the docks, and handed him a cocktail napkin. l0nwlf glanced down at the napkin, saw "facebook.co.in" scrawled in coal black ink. He turned his head upward to ask what this was, but the man had vanished. (That's just what I assumed).
It sounds as if you're envisioning these people being painlessly integrated into modern society, perhaps retrained as plumbers, software developers, etc., then joining Brazil's (extremely small) middle class. This is just not realistic.
In practice, these people joining "civilization" would almost certainly mean ending up living in grinding poverty in an extremely violent "favela" (Brazil's ubiquoutous shanty towns) with drugs and guns everywhere.
While it's certainly possible that Riel is just a little quirky and enjoys a different type of routine, unfortunately the pattern of behavior described here is often seen during the first presentation of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is more common in males and classically presents in the early-to-mid 20's. It would not, early in its course, necessarily be accompanied by seriously impaired academic functioning. I would urge Riel's friends and classmates to be vigilant for signs of disorganized or paranoid thought, speech, and behavior.