Dragonbox looks very nice.

Maths are not only for technical jobs. It’s about logical mind.

Constructing mental frameworks that can give you insight and intuition in areas you would not otherwise, in all areas of life.

Reusable analogies, parallel constructs.

@cedric have you read about complexity at all? calculus was/is an amazing tool, sadly it’s not useful/able for many many interesting problems, hence stochastic systems and complexity theory.. (transhistorical perspective also shows us that the cool calculus problems have or can be solved now, whereas simple non-calculus problems are nowhere near being solved.. which is the harder problem, putting a person on the moon or unscrambling an egg?)

@gaetan: and yet logic also pervades the parts of learning that have been completely devalued, like rhetoric, which has produced the calamity of modern science being disastrously wrong so often: the science guys run in and say half the psychology experiments are wrong, setup with preposterous conditions that cannot be reproduced and yielding results that were completely misinterpreted, but then the same is true of a massive amount of scientific work.. the #1 killer of human beings in the US is cardiovascular events and the mountains of research dollars that it ate up in the 1980s went into the belief that cholesterol consumed in food clogged arteries, the whole model was wrong and is gone now, hundreds of millions of dollars and decades later, oh and tons of people who might have been helped had the correct model been found sooner….

I think there’s a lot of value to the old-school “math and philosophy” approach to education as a means of teaching people how to think.

@dalexander: how many math/science people do you think could pass a basic quiz on philo?

How many maths/science people need to pass a quiz on basic philosophy

the vast majority would fail, no idea who even guys like Whitehead were let alone Wittgenstein..

@jkbbwr: my answer would be a lot, because clearly how to think about problems is not just learning how to differentiate a quadratic equation

Well they are two different ways of thinking, one is more discrete and one is more abstract.

right and with nothign but discretitions, you end up with the catastrophes I mentioned….

There are more than just two ways, last time I looked

I didn’t say they were the only ways. Also I would be among the failing depending on the contents of the test =p

Science people should at least know meta science philosophers like Popper and Hegel.

@codeslubber: I don’t have a lot of good things to say about philosophy, so I’ll refrain from commenting about that 🙂

philosophers are all dumb? ok, gotcha.. you didn’t think complexity was philosophers though right? the Santa Fe Project was a bunch of science guys, including Murray Gell-Mann, etc.. ?

Uh what?

Who said philosophers are dumb?

you said you have nothing good to say about them, you have another reason to paint them all with the nothing good brush? they are immoral? unethical? they talk to much? you tell me… ?

Java is relevant in 2016...? 🧌

JVM sure is ;)

Sadly, yes, due to enterprise slowness and the tendency of individuals to hold individual languages as the ultimate, highest barrier.

but seriously, Java has massive momentum and the fact that Oracle is the worst is not going to change that. I couldn't care less whether Oracle is going to go under any time soon. We have the OpenJDK. If anything, Oracle going away would mean that someone else could come along and be a better steward for the language

though Java 8 is fairly pleasant, I'll give them that

It's more pleasant than Java 7, but still has enormous problems due to half-baked implementations and backwards compatibility.

Hence why we have languages like Kotlin to fill in those gaps. 😉

The JVM is an amazing bit of architecture and software for the most part.

Java is a dead syntax that should stop god damn trying and just die.