Selecting an approachable problem is also a skill that more experienced people have and often the younger people don't. Some problems are just not ready to be tackled because the field hasn't developed for it yet. It is a risk factor between choosing your own problem and floundering through the quagmire or getting help in choosing a problem you have confidence in solving in some years.
While I appreciate your brother's personal choice, to each their own after all. There is quite a lot of merit in your PhD advisor helping you in choosing a problem. That being said, good advisors provide students with an array of good problems out of which the student can choose one they are the most passionate about. This is what happened with me, I was provided with around 7 different choices to make. In the end, I chose 2 of them even though I wanted to chose 3 more but couldn't because of lack of time.
I see. Well, you have a point, but the OP did specifically ask for a plan like that Susan Fowler's blog post. And I am an applied mathematician working mostly on computational physics and I can attest to the requirements I mentioned.
But your advice has a point, just going through books mindlessly is not motivation enough/ can lead to wandering. And it is always good to have specific tasks at hand. Like, solving a particular ordinary differential equations numerically.
In short, the two fields just look similar, but are actually extremely different fields.
Physical simulations need to preserve entropy, maximum principle, energy conservation and other kinds of conservation, preservation of consistent states, convergence in case of finer mesh.
There are multiple equations which model different forms of fluid:
1. Incompressible Euler (For liquid)
2. Compressible Euler (For non-viscous gases)
3. Navier Stokes Equations (For viscous liquids)
There are multiple solver methods:
1. Finite Difference
2. Finite Element
3. Discontiguous Galerkin Finite Element
4. Finite Volume Method
There are multiple equation methods:
1. equation splitting is just one of the many methods possible.
Just because the equation is unique does not mean that the solution is unique. Single equation provably have multiple and even infinite solution for the same initial condition. Computer graphics fluid simulation does not care (with a good reason) about this and hence, often their simulations even though they look kind of nice, are often incorrect since they do not demonstrate various physical characteristics that must be preserved.
In contrast, the qualitative/quantitative constraint in physical simulations are very strict. You need to know a lot of theoretical math to even understand if you are even computing the correct solution.
Liberalism is always against an axis. As such, there are two different factors in liberalism, Social and Economic. The so-called liberals in America Liberals are socially liberal but economically conservative. While American conservatives are economically liberal but socially conservative.
In Europe, the wired broadbands are cheap and fast. In India, there is no hope for cheap and fast wired broadband due to poor planning. Hence the craze for 4G. Also, the rates are marginal. For a long time, the rates induced loss for companies.
What I've observed in Europe is that there are huge amount of small companies instead of one big one. While big and powerful companies might be important on global scale. I suspect that on a more local scale, it is the large number of small companies which are more beneficial.
I think you have already done a huge amount in the course. You should keep your mind open to the possibility that the students just found the topic of database to be dry inspite of your presentation. It is quite possible that those people would have really hated the subject if the presentation was not as good as it looks.
Point. Somehow, I have seen quotes from HP which were always much cheaper. May be it is because my employer had some sort of deal? Also, proliant servers were somehow cheaper than towers. Again I am not sure how, but yes, point taken.
If you buy a workstation from HP/Supermicro, then you get something much more powerful for the same price. So, to say, they are very close is not very correct. The problem here is that the assembled PC is a customer PC assembled for workstation performance. Even then, they were not trying very hard.
While I appreciate your brother's personal choice, to each their own after all. There is quite a lot of merit in your PhD advisor helping you in choosing a problem. That being said, good advisors provide students with an array of good problems out of which the student can choose one they are the most passionate about. This is what happened with me, I was provided with around 7 different choices to make. In the end, I chose 2 of them even though I wanted to chose 3 more but couldn't because of lack of time.