How to become a good programmer? Updated 2025-07-16
Or: how to learn X.
This pops up on Reddit every week.
The right question is: what is the most awesome project I can do to improve the world?
Then, once you decide to try one, if that involves programming, only then learn to program to achieve that goal. And don't stop learning what's needed until you either get the thing done, or decide that it is actually not a good idea, or not possible, or that there is something else more important to be done first.
But if doesn't involve programming, then don't learn to program, and learn whatever you actually need to reach that goal instead.
Having that goal is the only way to be motivated to do something.
This is the essence of backward design.
C. S. Lewis Updated 2025-07-16
Charles Bukowski Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Something for the touts
. Source.
We have everything and we have nothing
And some men do it in churches
And some men do it by tearing butterflies in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
Laying it into butter-blondes with Cadillac souls
This stuck to Ciro's mind for some reason. His brain just keeps completing the sentence, over and over:
Ciro Santilli does it in his computers and in his labs!
Age of the universe Updated 2025-07-16
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter An Offer You Must Refuse (a play on words on The Godfather (1972)) has an interesting historical mention from the early 1950s while at Caltech:
The next day, I had the greatest luck in making a decision. God must have set it up to help me decide. I was walking to my office, and a guy came running up to me and said, "Hey, Feynman! Did you hear what happened? Baade found that there are two different populations of stars! All the measurements we had been making of the distances to the galaxies had been based on Cephid variables of one type, but there's another type, so the universe is twice, or three, or even four times as old as we thought!"
I knew the problem. In those days, the earth appeared to be older than the universe. The earth was four and a half billion, and the universe was only a couple, or three billion years old. It was a great puzzle. And this discovery resolved all that: The universe was now demonstrably older than was previously thought. And I got this information right away - the guy came running up to me to tell me all this.
Telescope Updated 2025-07-16
Virgo Supercluster Updated 2025-07-16
Composed mostly of the Virgo cluster and the Local group.
Commutator Updated 2025-07-16
Order (algebra) Updated 2025-07-16
The order of a algebraic structure is just its cardinality.
Sometimes, especially in the case of structures with an infinite number of elements, it is often more convenient to talk in terms of some parameter that characterizes the structure, and that parameter is usually called the degree.

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