11–20 of 206 posts
A while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment": as a teacher, you don't have the freedom to teach whatever you want (of course), but you're very tightly bound to a curriculum that's developed by the state government. And for CS, this curriculum was so uninteresting and uninspiring (what a surprise: 13 year old…
A title like "I wish I had enough attention to get through the boring parts of high school biology, I now find pop biology interesting" may have had less impact, though.
Computer scientists and programmers are very intelligent people who often have grossly unrealistic projections of their competency in other fields, and this is a fine example of the phenomenon.
I think one of the things I love most about biology is its uncertainty. Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and rules based. Life is wibbily wobbly, lifey-wifey. An enormous soup of changing alleles cast as probabilities over eons all creating endless interactions you can't ever comprehend. You have to become comfortable with the fact that there is uncertainy and there are parts of it you can't control. So…
Depends where in math, in things like particle physics things get all wibbly wobbly is my cat dead or alive. In things like engineering quite often what you're dealing with is probability based, but you just stack the deck so far in your favor the probability is 1.
As they say, building a bridge that doesn't fall down is easy. Building a bridge that barely doesn't fall down is much harder.
The post by James Somers that this article references at the top inspired me to buy the David Goodsell book The Machinery of Life . I would seriously recommend that to anyone who doesn't have a background in biology (like me). The phrase is a bit of a cliché, but it genuinely blew my mind, to the extent that I had to read it slowly because there's so much fascinating stuff packed into such a small book. It's obvious…
Not the only sequence model that exhibits stutters on repetitive inputs...
I think one of the things I love most about biology is its uncertainty. Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and rules based. Life is wibbily wobbly, lifey-wifey. An enormous soup of changing alleles cast as probabilities over eons all creating endless interactions you can't ever comprehend. You have to become comfortable with the fact that there is uncertainy and there are parts of it you can't control. So…
> Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and rules based Depends where in math, in things like particle physics things get all wibbly wobbly is my cat dead or alive. In things like engineering quite often what you're dealing with is probability based, but you just stack the deck so far in your favor the probability is 1. As they say, building a bridge that doesn't fall down is easy. Building a bridge that bar…
I have seen molecular biologists (jokingly) shake the voodoo "molecular biology maracas" over the PCR machine to try and replicate their result.
I took some programming courses in college. I loved computers and was very interested. However, the classes were a guy reading from a book about C. That was pretty much it. You did what the book said and hoped something stuck in your head. This was early days of the internet, the book(s) were largely the only resource. The instructors were folks who just understood coding in C naturally and had no idea how to communi…