CSchonwald

where do schools like mit and caltech fit in that continuum then?

they'll appreciate if for the sheer hokeyness of it, which is a whole interesting aesthetic itself (look at many of the shows that Adult swim puts out).

Speaking as someone who vaguely knows many of the people who are involved in YEI, the yale students involved are very much in the same vein as the marketing folks who you'd see creating companies during the first web bubble, where the technology folks who actually do the design and whatnot are second tier.

There exist counter examples,but thats certainly the general trend

Thats fair, but wouldn't it be more constructive to explicitly articulate that?

I'm not sure what you mean, there are several legitimate interpretation that come to mind, but could you elaborate?

do you mean a) in the continuum of math that appears on, its deep, but not in the continuum of research mathematics?

b) calling something nifty deep math being overly simplistic?

c) something I'm missing

fair enough. On that note, http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/scp91-felleisen.ps.gz is probably the best formal treatment concision in a programming language.

by Dr Scheme in my case I mean plt scheme, which is pretty nice as schemes go

so why aren't you using Dr Scheme directly? [edit in response to pg's edit] to be specific, why don't you have arc include the various high level modularity and semantic abstractions that Dr Scheme exposes? eg 1) a powerful high level macrosystem 2) ways of specifying / enforcing module interfaces 3) everything else that i'm forgetting

maybe my sense of humor is bad, but am I correct in assuming the mars rover reference is joke?

absolutely, wandering around randomly every hour or two is also key for doing good problem solving or research. I honestly don't think I'd be able to function sitting in one location for a few hours unless its something of the magnitude of a finishing touches on a thesis project or the like. Kinda rules out a whole bunch of jobs I don't want anyways!

i actually went through their interview process too, and I do agree that the questions were a joke for anyone with a real CS background, and I really think that part of the interview process was in fact meant to filter out people with strong personalities that don't reflexively subscribe to the culture they're located within.

Hahah, let me tell you how.

When I'm explaining computer science to someone who wants a capsule explanation, I don't tell the "computer science studies the problem X Y and Z, along with their generalizations", I say:

"Computer Science studies the limits of human thought, trying to understand exactly how hard a particular idea is to think, and what sort of problems it is reasonable (for various notions corresponding to best, average, worst case complexity)to ask a person to solve".

The thing that always confuses me about these articles is how IT and computer science get equated. Its like saying doing research in applied mathematics is great training for being an accountant. Theres certainly a relationship, but theres certainly a huge difference between the two.

I guess the question is then: how does computer science pull a physics? Does there need to be some analogue of Feynman + Hawking etc, where theres both epic insight and just generally an outgoing ridiculous persona and also some reasonably good popular expositions of deep ideas?