They've both got a lot of long (1-3 hours) live sets available for download. Energetic beats, but the progressions are gradual enough that they're not at all distracting.
(At risk of hijacking this thread) I'm a first-year physics grad student (so ~5 years to go, for a PhD), and I'm pretty sure what I want to do is software engineering, SV-type stuff, and I've been seriously considering quitting the physics thing for most of the past year.
Compared to business school in the post:
* I've got about 5 more years of school,
* school isn't costing me anything (I get a ~$20k/yr stipend; no tuition),
* I'm not enjoying myself at all (lots of hard core classes, required to pass preliminary tests in a limited number of sittings, boring city, boring people, boring school, no friends),
* the payoff is slim-to-none. I can't find evidence that a physics PhD is worth much in, say, software engineering. An MIT PhD student just told me he's heard ~$120k typical-ish starting salary in software engineering with a physics PhD (and he was trying to talk me into staying). That doesn't sound worth it at all! "Starting" salary!--if you don't count the 5-7 years of school (basically work).
I could go on, but I'm interested if anyone's got an opinion or some advice. It's a bit similar to the MBA decision.
I'm a practicing physicist, so I'll give a bit of advice. The only reason to go into physics is because you love doing it--but--you have to go into with your eyes open. The job market is extremely competitive these days for faculty and national lab positions. Depending on your subfield, there may or may not be industry jobs. If you're not having fun and you finish, then what are your options:
1) Medical Physics
2) Wall Street (though I hear that it's getting harder to go directly from physics phD to wall street and more people are getting a masters in financial engineering first)
3) Software
4) Management Consulting
5) Science Policy
6) Etc.
While the salary for all of these can be good, you have to look at the opportunity cost--you're looking at ~6 years for grad. school. Someone else might be able to tell you if it's worth sticking around to pick up either your masters in physics (or to take some graduate courses in CS)--but if you don't love it, my advice is to get out and do something that you're passionate about--What do you mean by SV type stuff?
Now, with all that having been said--one thing you might want to consider is that the first year of a typical physics grad. student is fairly hard with coursework and such and you might want to try to pass quals. and try research for a year before making your final decision--are you interested in theory or experiment? Did you do research in undergrad.?
Life in a lab can be rather different from coursework--also, even course work tends to be more interested in advanced courses such as GR, Quantum Field Theory, etc. than in the typical Jackson courses....
I was being purposefully vague--I just meant the Silicon Valley scene. I have a college friend who just got a cool job there, and some family friends, too. It sounds like a fun place from the culture side, but also from the technology side--specifically, I'm amazed by what a small team can do in a 48-hour hackathon with today's technology. The one that comes to mind is that "Infinite Scrabble MMO" from about 18 months ago. 150 man-hours can produce that? Wow.
I did research in undergrad (mostly over the summers, but a bit during the year). I had a lot of fun, and it was motivating work. But it was programming work! I wrote a bunch of data analysis code and did a little bit of GEANT simulation stuff, and it all felt more like programming than physics. And the "physics research" (experimentalists) that I have seen looks more like engineering (designing/building some apparatus, then fixing all of the problems...).
It just seems so slow-moving compared to the software industry. There's a lot less room for individualism, and it feels like you've got a lot of really smart people doing a lot of menial, commodity tasks (I'm thinking of every PhD candidate and postdoc I've ever known).
I'll have to give theory a closer look. It's hard to see myself in it any time soon, because there's more material I'd need to learn first.
(I think I'm rambling to myself now.) All this, I think, is to say that I'm pretty sure the physics charm has worn off. Unless there's something really exciting around the corner, I think I'm over it.
I seem to have written this comment as if there's some point I'm trying to prove. Habit. Sorry about that! Thanks for the advice and encouragement, and I'll keep my eyes open!
In general, there's a certain amount of tedium in any endeavor. During my PhD, I did some work on synthesis--it was fun to try to figure out how to realize some properties in a new material--to try to figure out synthesis challenges--the actual sitting down and grinding with a mortar and pestle was meditative, but tedious. The same thing happens with coding--there are parts that are exciting, but there's (at least to me) a certain tedium that comes with testing, engineering, etc (if I want to write code that other people use, instead of one-off pieces for my own use). Even on the analysis side, there are exciting bits where I try to see if I understand why a material has a given set of properties, but there's a certain tedium in writing portions of the analysis code--the question is whether or not the exciting bits outweigh the tedious ones...One of my students (undergrad) was a double major between physics and computer engineering and has decided that he wants to go on to do robotics in grad. school--physics wasn't fun for him--another one went on to grad. school in physics--you just have to see what you have fun with--not just with classes, but in the actual doing. If you decide to stick it out and pass prelims/first year courses and get your masters and are still not happy, then definitely get out--opportunity costs will outweigh your sunk costs ;> At your university, do the theorists give trial projects? In terms of just variety and fun, have you looked at any of Nigel Goldenfeld's work?
http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/
If you do decide to leave (and it seems like that's the direction you're going), then I suggest that you get an offer somewhere, spend some time working on your own project, or taking some CS courses before leaving...
> there's a certain amount of tedium in any endeavor.
Yes, I'm cherry picking a bit here :)
I think I was a bit too hard on physics in my previous comment. I've definitely loved it before, and I still do occasionally. I think the frustration I feel is partly due to school's tendency to suck the fun out of any subject (computers, too--I never really liked any of the programming/algorithms classes I took, but I enjoy learning a new language or algorithm on my own time). And once I'm done with my problem sets and things, I can't think of my physics books as being "leisure" reading (like I do with programming books). It would be just my luck, if I switch careers, to fall out of love with computers and end up courting Jackson on the sly!
I think I'm most dissatisfied, right now, with the school/city/people. There's nothing interesting within a 6 hour drive, and I haven't made any friends--I've met a lot of people, so it's not for a huge lack of trying, but I don't really like any of them as much as I liked my friends in undergrad. I've thought about switching schools, but with all the hassle of re-applying and somehow explaining "I don't like anything about this place--would you write me a letter of recommendation?" coupled with my other reservations, I feel more inclined toward a career switch.
It sounds like we have, at least, narrowed it down to a decision of personal preference. Which puts a lot of pressure on me! But still, progress.
You should do what you love and thereby love what you do. If you don't, take a step back as you may need to recalibrate a bit (or a lot). It's a healthy and productive exercise, if only to reaffirm your current direction.
EDIT: I don't mean to get all meta, but it's not about the ideal of others but rather what makes you happy as an individual. Anyway, that's the way I rationalize it all.
I only did a master's degree, but the consensus among grad student friends is that graduate degrees are not worth it for money (maybe it's different if you go somewhere like MIT or Stanford -- I am talking about second tier schools). Grad school can make sense if you want to do research or some specific kinds of technical work (e.g. physics simulation for movies). It also makes sense if you enjoy it. I had a great time socially in grad school and loved working as a TA.
When you consider the "cost" of your Ph.D., you should consider the opportunity cost of the salary you could be earning, which could easily add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a six year period. It's also wrong to compare a starting salary with Ph.D. to a starting salary with undergrad because by the time you get your Ph.D. and work the undergrad will have 5-7 years of experience and, on average, a higher salary.
Agreed. I guess I'm just trying to weigh the "worth" of the degree (not just money) against the "cost" of it (not just money). Lots of intangibles in the equation.
It sounds like the consensus is not "Absolutely do X, or you'll regret it later," but "(Either one will be fine;) do what you love." So it's comforting that I probably can't screw this up too badly with either choice, but I'm going to have to do some introspection.
Year 1 is supposedly pretty different from subsequent years - you should at least stick it out until you fall in with some research group or other and see how you like it. As a bonus, you can get your Master's!
It's mostly the course work and preliminary tests (studying for them) that I'm not liking and dreading, which are supposed to take another ~2 years. At that point, the sunk cost fallacy would probably keep me in for the whole thing.
Imagine that you're not part of a company or a PhD program, and you're choosing between spending 5 years to get a Physics PhD and go into software, or going into software directly. Which sounds more appealing to you?
That's pretty much the decision I had to make a year ago, and I ended up in the PhD program.
But if I knew then what I know now (that I'd not be having a good time), I'd be leaning closer to the software job.
The remaining unknown (to me) is what the degree is worth, in the end.
Really, I suppose, I'm just not looking forward to telling everyone (friends and family) that I'm quitting. It's admitting a defeat/failure/mistake, and that's hard, so I'm trying to find a good reason to stay.
Nah, you're not defeated. Just the opposite. You're empowering yourself by taking command of your life decisions. We all make mistakes along the way, but learning from those mistakes and course correcting are the biggest wins we can ask for. You should be proud and wear your decision like a badge of honor.
If you're talking about worth in terms of cash, I would run don't walk away from the PhD.
If you're talking about worth in terms of cherished personal values, I would try to figure out if I want to be a scientist or an engineer. If it is a vocation.
Through my master's program, this was on my mind while doing my thesis. I ended up deciding against choosing a narrow specialty and becoming a miner, so I headed to industry to become a maker.
It's fun to imagine large social networks of bots which are indistinguishable (from Pinterest's/Facebook's/Twitter's P.O.V.) from human social networks. Here, it could be a 1-man spamming operation, but you can imagine government-scale astroturfing.
I get that Minecraft is fun, but wouldn't it have been more practical, in the long run, to have built something equally cool in a real CAD/HDL/etc. software?
It'd be really cool if someone could build a CAD/HDL/programming "IDE" that was as "fun" to "play" as Minecraft, but still as "useful" as something used in "the real world." But I suppose this is the same desire that drives all of those "programming language for kids" projects that never really seem to catch on.
true story. when I was 16 ( way back in the early 90s), my parents enrolled me in niit.com (presently a billion USD company that was at the time a tiny 3-room outfit ). niit taught cobol. I hated everything about cobol. I thought it was a shit language and the people who taught me cobol were shit. We were supposed to build an inventory control module in cobol. I didn't know what an inventory was, so they gave me an econ book about manufacturing & inventory. I thought it was absolutely dumb to keep track of nuts & bolts & accounting & money & suchlike. So I wrote a cobol program to calculate the fourier coefficients of complex exponentials, since that's what I was studying at school. So my cobol program would painstakingly calculate the first five fourier coefficients of sawtooth waves & square waves & then using the partial sum, it would reconstruct the expansion by printing out the series on a dot matrix printer. All of this was running on some processor called intel 80286 xt and it would take 10 full minutes to just compile the code. One day I was standing by the dot matrix when the instructor walked in. He thought I was some precocious kid who had coded up a whizbang inventory module for acme corportation, so he expected nice tables with rows & columns of data on optimal number of nuts & bolts. But when he saw the printer slowly rolling out sawtooth waves and square waves of various frequencies, he completely lost it & yelled at me for wasting the precious resources of the dot matrix printer to do frivolous nonsense. I got a F on cobol.
> I hated everything about cobol. I thought it was a shit language and the people who taught me cobol were shit.
Well you probably weren't that far off on the former point.
>But when he saw the printer slowly rolling out sawtooth waves and square waves of various frequencies, he completely lost it & yelled at me for wasting the precious resources of the dot matrix printer to do frivolous nonsense. I got a F on cobol.
Maybe, but you get an A in my book. Because the image you just put into my head is magnitudes of awesome. The IBM-type manager yelling at this 16 year old hackerish kid for taking a computer joy ride. The same sort of computer joy ride that probably comprised the whole reason he had a job in the first place.
The irony is sweet (With a bitter aftertaste.), and I'm sorry you had to go through that.
> I get that Minecraft is fun, but wouldn't it have been more practical, in the long run, to have built something equally cool in a real CAD/HDL/etc. software?
I find it all the more impressive because he used an environment that was not meant to be used like this.
That's like running the marathon with a handicap and still winning.
And if he can do it in minecraft I think that he'll take like a fish to water once he gets his hands on other, more powerful tools. That's mostly a matter of access, 16 year olds are more likely to have minecraft on the machines they have access to than CAD/HDL software and the hardware to go with it.
I absolutely agree that the hackish (you know what I mean) aspect of this feat makes it impressive, but I'd really like to see him work without the handicap.
Given his/her choice of tools, most people would probably be more expressive with Photoshop/GIMP than MS Paint, or AutoCAD/Blender/Poser/HDL/etc./etc. than Minecraft.
Programmers debate the expressivity of programming languages all the time. We're impressed when some genius kid re-implements Doom in TI-BASIC, but at the same time, I want to see that genius applied with the full leverage of the most expressive tools available.
Minecraft doesn't quite pass the Arc challenge. :)
I don't think this is quite true. I see minecraft as a good stepping stone into more advanced things.
When I was his age, I was using the Lego Mindstorms heavily. At first I started with the built in GUI language, which was extremely limiting. After that I moved to progressively more advanced languages and IDEs until I was using Not-Quite-C, a version of C compiled for the Mindstorms.
These things tend to work as stepping stones. Had the kid started on something like CAD, he may have gotten stuck at an impasse that was too difficult for him, lost motivation and went back to playing Call of Duty.
Perhaps his next project will be in a "real" application, instead of Minecraft, because he has the motivation and knowledge to move forward.
>To put the numbers so far in this chapter in perspective, the average adult on planet Earth earns $8,200 a year (U.S. dollars). The average American makes about $45,000. Since you see your paycheck, you know exactly where you stand.
Bit of a tangential nitpick: I don't like that he used the averages here--I think he should have used the medians. Which, for Earth, is about $850 [0] and, for U.S.A., is about $30k-50k [0,1]. Even so, a single number doesn't give you a very good picture of the actual wealth distribution, but the median is better than the average (for chrissake!) in this case.
Edit: And, overall, I found the excerpt to be rather fluffy, feel-goody, and sparse on content. Maybe I'm cheating here, but it seems like the kind of text that would make a fine talk, but a vacuous essay.
In the US, the backscatter x-ray machines are two giant ugly blue boxes that you stand between. The mm wave machines are more futuristic-looking, white cylinders that you stand inside of. (photos here http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/practical-travel-safety-issue...)
The technology deployment is airport-specific, so you will only find one or the other at any given airport, e.g. O'Hare uses Backscatter, Midway uses mm wave.
La Guardia is the one airport serving a major US city that does not have any of the new scanners, which can be nice if you typically opt-out.
Even if there is, I'm guessing it would be hard to tell at a glance whether the machine was calibrated by someone with a physics degree or someone who'd be delivering pizzas if it weren't for the growth of the security industry.
I can in no way substantiate this, but the xray ones are usually two large (maybe always blue?) mostly rectangular blocks that you stand in between. The millimeter machines are usually rounder and have clear bits. The illustrations here might help: http://www.jaunted.com/story/2010/1/5/163631/3181/travel/Ful...
edit: never mind, the flyer talk pics are much better.
Some common themes with an essay[0] I read yesterday.
Social media is to the Read/Write Web what sprawl is to the metropolis of modernity: a homogenous, cancerous, rhizomatic junkspace that expands exponentially outward on a sludgy wave of strip malls and sponsored links, greed and induced demand. This ruthless modernization produces miles of “junkspace” — a term coined by the architect Rem Koolhaas, who wrote that “more and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction… Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends … Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal hollowness, a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of building, possibly forever.” Koolhaas was referring to the airport and the strip-mall and the single-zone sprawl, but he could have been talking about Facebook.
I have one of the Philips wake-up lights[0] which gradually brightens its lamp over 30 minutes before playing some optional bird-chirping.
The gradual light-up feature gives it an edge over the sharp turn-on of a lamp plugged into a timer, but I'm often lying on my side with my back to the lamp, in which case the bird-chirping wakes me instead of the light.
I'm thinking of running a cord from the Philips's bulb socket to the bulb in a floor lamp which I can position above my head (instead of to one side, like the Philips).
I've recently connected my bedside lights (on each side of my bed) to a dimmable X10 socket. Using the programmable controller, they gradually brighten over 20 mins when all lights in the room turn on and my alarm goes off.
Felt it was more fun, less intrusive, and as cheap (ish) to roll my own solution.
It's a long way from the old days of a radio on full-volume static or alarm clock thrown under the middle of my bed!
Hitting jk in insert mode for escape is wonderful.