211–220 of 438 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's time to move to Japan, if you don't live there already. It's the closest you'll get to studying 27 hours a day, and the only sure path to fluency, given the level you're at.
I'm writing this from my tiny apartment in Saitama. :)
I suppose the most interesting goal, to me, is getting my teeth fixed. I didn't take care of them all through my twenties and it's had serious repercussions on my social and professional life as well as taking a drastic toll on my confidence. Roadblocks and/or bottlenecks are easy: finances. Dental work isn't cheap, especially when you're looking at as much work as I need done. The "fear" of the dentist was also an i…
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/related/ch1qn/ive_had_all_my_te...
Don't get killed by a bear or experience any other medical emergency during a week-long, dispersed camping trip in northern California.
Get admitted to a PhD in CS at Stanford next cycle. Bottleneck: At my age and with no formal education in CS and poor academic records, getting an admission is next to impossible by conventional wisdom. But the challenge is what makes it interesting :-). PS: If anyone has any data/anecdotes/advice on "impossible" PhD admissions, I'd be glad to hear it (either here or my email is in the profile).
as far as I understand it, it's pretty much not going to happen without a solid reference from a professor willing to work with you. it would be easier if you had research experience in other fields and slaughtered the GRE general & subject... but yeah stanford is not exactly hurting for applicants
Working on it (and on getting research exp) :-)
"slaughtered the GRE general & subject"
I have an almost perfect score on the GRE general (800/800 Verbal 790/800 Quant, 6/6 writing) . Taking the subject exams later this year. Not too worried about that either , but I heard these aren't of much value and research /recommendations are all that count. So I am working on those now.
Ah well you work with what you have :). Along with many brilliant dedicated people, I also see people with rather mediocre research and recommendations (but perfect academic scores etc) get in (and then not do anything particularly brilliant/drop out etc), so I suspect there might be a (small) chance. If every one who got in thoroughly outclassed me I would have no hope.
We'll see. :-)
Get admitted to a PhD in CS at Stanford next cycle. Bottleneck: At my age and with no formal education in CS and poor academic records, getting an admission is next to impossible by conventional wisdom. But the challenge is what makes it interesting :-). PS: If anyone has any data/anecdotes/advice on "impossible" PhD admissions, I'd be glad to hear it (either here or my email is in the profile).
I want to start a company that builds solar panels in space. Roadblocks (the ones I think are the biggest anyway): Supply Chain. Probably going to first need a way to or supplier who can mine and process materials from somewhere other than Earth. Infrastructure. Definitely going to need some sort of factory in space in which this operation can be done. Knowledge. I don't know anything about manufacturing in space. Th…
What have you done to bring this to fruition? While not insurmountable, the current situation seems to be "I want to build space-based solar panels. I don't know anything about building them, I have no way to get the materials, and no way to turn the materials into the product once I do." Can I ask, given that, what led you to want to do this in the first place? Is the idea here to beam the power back in microwave fo…
Beaming power back is certainly one application, but not the one I had in mind. I was thinking these would be used to power things in space. The vast majority of electrical power used by stuff like satellites and space stations comes from solar power. Total mass, electrical power, and fuel are the major constraints in all of these systems. If there was a readily available source of solar arrays in space, then that could effectively remove that constraint, and relax the constraints on mass and fuel (since you don't have to bring the solar panels with you).
Now, why would I want to do that? I'm one of those people that not only dreamed about going into space, but also assumed that the future of humanity was not on Earth, but out there. For that to happen, we need to be able to expand into the solar system, which just isn't going to happen if we need to move all of the materials we need out of Earth's gravity well.
Finally, what have I done? To be honest, it probably isn't going to sound like much. I'm open to suggestions. Obviously, it's going to take a lot of money. Most of what I've done has been focused on being able to make a credible case to get funding. I'm working on my PhD, which builds my credentials. I network with other students in the field because it's going to take more than one person.
In terms of actual pen to paper, I decided to work on the supply chain problem first. I'm working on calculations for what it would take to send a mission to an asteroid and bring the whole thing back as a possible scenario.
The google codejam occurs about once a year ( http://code.google.com/codejam ). If you make it past the qualification round and the first round, and you place in the top 500 of the second round, then you get a codejam tshirt. (This year, I placed around 1300, which is good, but not good enough!) Getting that tshirt is my goal - a nice, tangible way to symbolize the massive amount of algorithmic things that I'm attemp…
Quit smoking cold turkey (was a 1 pack smoker for over 7 years). I am 3 days nicotine free and that sounds very interesting to me. Roadblocks: they keep selling them... If someone else is planning the same, the tips at whyquit.com helped me.
I'm not sure that it's my most interesting, but I want to someday make robotic fireflies. I'm about to leave the East Coast to go to Stanford, and I don't want to live in a firefly-free world. I thought about trying to import them and have them breed, but apparently most species like humidity and standing water, which the Bay Area isn't too long on. I'm also not sure if they could find stuff to eat out West. So robot…