Re: Making sure I'm not checking email (or doing other things) too often

[Emanuel Berg]

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

>>> Mathematician, engineer... Mathematicians are the
>>> engineers of abstraction (/me runs for cover)
>>
>> What is that joke? [...] And if it blows up, it
>> is chemistry!
>
> That's why I was running for cover. I *knew* it
> would end blowing up. It always does ;-P

Math is sort of cool especially if you have several
huge whiteboards and can spend hours drawing figures
perfectly and write down even the most basic
connection without having to erase anything until you
are done.

Problem is pretty soon I think you will reach a level
where only a few people can take an interest in what
you do. Because it is advanced, yes, but also because
of the nature of it.

Compare this to programming. If you do something
really advanced, like Quake or the F/A-18 Hornet
simulator, despite the 'advancedness', thousands of
people, from kid to professor can understand and
enjoy and even learn from it.

On the other hand, even tho you consider yourself an
advanced programmer, you can do something trivial like
what I just did in the other thread:

    (defun info-lookup-elisp-symbol (symbol)
      (interactive "Ssymbol: ")
      (info-lookup-symbol symbol 'emacs-lisp-mode))

It is trivial, but like I said, if you do it every
day, an advanced person can benefit from the advanced
programmer's trivial code, because he/she (not the
programmer) can then not have to focus on that but put
his/her mind to whatever is advanced!

On the third hand, because programming isn't really
difficult, perhaps we *should* encourage people to
take up math. I mean, they can do programming in their
spare time :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573