Fifth day of the Ritalin experiment.

Bottom line: No effect.

Research:

I spent most of yesterday and today reading up on basic pharmacokinetics. (Last year, I had a mathematician girlfriend who worked in drug discovery. She explained enough to me that I was able to get a running start researching the details.) Tomorrow, I’m going to simulate a 30 mg dose by altering the timing of when I take two 20 mg tablets.

Fourth day of the Ritalin experiment.

Read the rest of this article »

Third day of the Ritalin experiment.

Read the rest of this article »

People like making things complicated.

This is sort of obvious when you think about it. The common scolding to “keep it simple” is an attempt to directly oppose the natural urge to make things complicated. Hence the tone.

People want to make things as complicated as they can handle. The musician wants music as complex as he can possibly play, the dancer wants a dance that’s complex enough to be a challenge, the mathematician wants complex puzzles that are just at the edge of his skill, the French cook wants to make dishes that require complex techniques, the gymnast wants to learn more-complex routines, etc. The drive for complexity is just part of the drive to excel. By pushing your talents as far as they can go, you naturally create complexity.

People want other people to keep it simple.

Read the rest of this article »

Third day of the Ritalin experiment.

Read the rest of this article »

I’m going try Ritalin for two weeks, and then Adderall for two weeks. Hopefully I’ll get drug and dosage tuned before the start of the semester. I’ll post each day’s results here.

My first day taking Ritalin:

At the coffeehouse, I mostly wrote a post for a discussion list.

Read the rest of this article »

Of course grad school could be fixed. Even undergrad could be fixed. Here’s how.

• Divide semesters into two-week intervals (or something about that long). During an interval, you only work on one or two things, and you work on them all day, every day.
• Instead of classes that consist of lectures, work on projects. A little lecturing can work wonders, so lecture occasionally. And then allow time for the wonders. Those happen when the student does something real. The instructor’s main job is to provide some structure by helping define do-able projects that really teach you something, and to help you get unstuck when you get stuck.
• A good daily schedule for a semester: working session in the morning, lunch, working session in the afternoon, 90 minutes in the late afternoon for lectures and presentations. These can be given by professors, researchers, guests, and grad students.

Read the rest of this article »

People told me that grad school is hell because you have to go into depth into your subject to a degree beyond anything you could imagine. To me, that sounded like heaven. I figured grad school would be loads of fun, because I like going into something as deep as it goes—total immersion, exploring down to the most fundamental explanatory principles, seeing how they shape the subject at all levels. But that’s not how things turned out. I just did two semesters, and they were unspeakable agony.

Read the rest of this article »

The proposition:

• Programmers who master Scheme, plus some appropriate powerful, refined libraries (yet to be written), become much more productive (at least 2x) than programmers who use “those other” languages, even for regular, workaday jobs like what most programmers get paid for.

I don’t know if the proposition is true, but there it is.  If it is true, that would be wonderful.  It would provide great opportunities for haps (high-abstraction programmers, i.e. programmers who design in layers of simple semantics).  We could develop software faster and better than the faps (flat abstractionless programmers, i.e. programmers who code everything at the level of the base language), and the faps would never be able to catch up, since Scheme doesn’t fit their brains.

Read the rest of this article »

Maybe the key to “thinking in Scheme” is to see everything as a closure. And maybe the key to seeing everything as a closure is to mentally break down complexity first by distinguishing between what the algorithm knows “now” vs. what it can’t know until “later”.

Read the rest of this article »

Here are 15 ways that projects don’t get completed—everything from a homework assignment to a web site.

Read the rest of this article »