One of my colleagues spent a lot of time working on combination anthropological/aid missions. According to him, toilets/waste disposal was usually the number one way to help people in remote or less developed areas.
This general area (epigentics) is what inspired me to take up a more serious routine of lifting. I’m not sure if it will have any particular effect, but I suppose I am significantly healthier now than in my 20s either way.
As a former employee of one of these (quite famous), the curricula are oftentimes relatively good, with an emphasis on practical skills. But it’s difficult for me to see them as a good thing given the issues marked out. Many of them take lots of government money (through GI bill etc) as well
As a kid I always thought spandex or whatever bike riders were huge dorks who got scammed into wasting their money. If you’re driving around your home area a few times a month (or even week) I doubt that you’re anywhere near good enough that your clothing matters this much.
Similar with people who suck at guitar but own a $3000 Gibson or whatever. I feel like good equipment while you’re bad just makes you look like a joke. Perhaps this is a blue collar ethic though
Really? I had one sort of similar because I took as many cross listed math electives as possible and avoided any software type courses, but even then I learned a lot less analysis, algebra, geometry than a good math student would learn
What was the Greek story (Plutarch? Idk) where some guy being hunted by some army captain crashes on some island and the local pseudo intellectual sophist says they need to kill him before the army captain comes or else they’ll be punished for either aiding him or letting him go. Then the army captain finds out they killed his target for no reason so he kills all of them for being corrupt idiots
I agree. Many view self improvement as being a jacked millionaire genius or whatever. Self improvement for me is if I managed to do some small stretching routine to keep my legs a bit more flexible that day, did a small walk, had good oral hygiene, and maybe read the newspaper a bit in the evening. I was never in the running to be a jacked millionaire genius or whatever the fantasy is.
What’s funny to me is how many incompetent “thinkers” appear in meetings. Obviously, thought (even removed from implementation entirely) often has immense value. Eg, many people spent a lot of time thinking about arithmetic, linear algebra, floating point, compilers, and now I can go run whatever cool algorithm on my computer. But I continually seem to run into these people who seem borderline incompetent at anything but spewing out whatever pops into their head. Half is nonsense, one-quarter would be actively destructive if you tried to implement it, they always seem to know everything about everything but whenever it’s something you know really well you can tell that they are very confused, etc. when I meet these people now I just think “oh, you’re one of those guys who is good at saying a lot of things” and then move on. Oh well
Idk, on the job I was in at that point I worked my specified amount and then worked on developing my skills and education outside work. I watched as my boss’ project floundered, he ran out of budget for contractors, employees who were less weak started leaving and their positions not filled. As my boss started trying to tell me I needed to fulfill more of a “leadership role” I could tell he was trying to pass off a terrible project to me so I demurred. Anyway, I got laid off, got a big severance, got to continue educating and doing things like that while collecting unemployment as I applied for jobs after, and ended up getting basically a position at more or less my dream lab.
I understand it’s different if you’re older with kids and a mortgage or lot of health bills or whatever but I haven’t really felt like my fate has ever been tied to any of my employees.
I feel like it’s just headgames for your manager to try and convince you that making him look good is essential to your career.
Edit: in case this is relevant the shitty project was actually the best project in our department as far as I was concerned before my former manager ran it into the ground by trying to look good by promising dozens of features for people who didn’t use it instead of building something that worked and was extensible
Your boss is entrusted with other people’s money, resources, employees to manage it in a way that generates value for them. How he looks and how his image impacts you feeling like you got an interesting project is irrelevant except exactly insofar as it influences this.
“Make your boss a hero” is one of the most deranged things I hear managers say. At my first job out of university, my manager told me my job was to make him look good. I instantly wrote him off as a moron. We worked for a publicly traded company. Nobody cares about how you look or your little empire. This isn’t your money. You are hired to manage it for the shareholders, not to look cool or be a little rentseeker
For one example the notion of a generalized inner product and its induced norm is important for the derivation of conjugate gradient algorithm. My smarter friends have told me that anything involving cost functions and covariance matrices (as might arise in a log likelihood thing for a multivariate normal random variable) will probably end up with weighted norms as well, but I have likely mangled this. So to mangle things further I think that this is very important to many fields eg control or statistics
Certainly you would want a more abstract follow up for many cases. Even engineering or computer science students may have to learn about e.g. inner product spaces and orthogonal polynomials for their numerics class.