Parents need reliable childcare. A teenager or aging parents can't fill this gap reliably. I need somebody to watch the kids most days from 8 until 4. A high schooler won't be able to do this. My in-laws who live 1.5 hours away and have mobility issues (plus their own lives) can't always do that.
I agree we need strong community in close proximity, but still people need to travel to destinations a few miles from their houses sometimes. Biking is a great (this is my primary form of transportation) but even I know biking and walking cannot fill every transportation need. We need the trifecta of biking/walking/transit to ween ourselves off of cars and develop denser communities with more people to interact with in our day-to-day lives.
Except they did... for centuries ?? How can we claim that relying on community and a network of people is unreliable when it was the defacto solution for as long as we've existed?
Having grown up in deep suburbia where I couldn't do anything without an adult + a car, I always marveled at the freedom that kids seemed to have in some TV shows. Even shows that weren't overtly urban always had these underlying assumptions that kids were meeting up without adults around to make it happen.
That sort of thing was impossible for me. No sidewalks, no pedestrians, barely any bikers. It was just cars everywhere all the time. One time I decided to make the 6-mile trip to the mall on foot. It was a harrowing experience, but I was a rebellious teenager and I just wanted some independence, even if it meant spending half a day walking just to go to a mall.
I had a bike, I love riding bikes. These days, I bike everywhere all the time (I don't drive) but I also live in a bike-able place now
The roads where I grew up had no shoulder and people frequently whipped around the windy roads at 35 mph. The only bikers I ever saw were fully lycra-clad race cyclist type of people. I never saw a mother biking with her kid, for example. I was afraid to be on a bike on the streets. At least with walking I could take a step or two off the road when a fast moving car was coming.
Go with the flow! Since about 10 to 11 years of age I could do 30mph easily.
I discovered this on a crappy folding bike with 2-speed duo-matic, while being in a hurry and thus angrily overtook a slow Citroen 2CV :-)
Looking at the speedometer from the outside. Showed 50kph, so I must have been faster, or the speedometer slightly wrong.
Whatever, that experience has shown me that I could do that, and from there on
it was in my 'muscle memory', ready to be used at will.
Which then went up to 40/41 on road bikes on flat grounds with no headwinds, for about an hour sustained. But I often did 44 to 47, always trying to push the needle of my speedometer as long as possible to the right.
Downhill easily 50 to 55. Highest speed ever(downhill OFC) was 95kph, which is about 59mph. Still doing that sometimes, but less often nowadays. Need to be in the Rockies for loong descents, weather has to be good, streets mostly empty, which they aren't when weather is good, and so on.
I guarantee you that you'd never let your kids ride a bike on the streets where I grew up. I have three kids and it would be downright irresponsible to let them ride on streets designed solely for fast moving car traffic with absolutely no space anything but cars. Virtually nobody cycled and nobody walked on these streets. Even adults were too afraid to do it. There was not a single sidewalk in my town. The culture around where I grew up was that if you wanted to take a walk you DROVE YOUR CAR to a park and then walked there. Nobody and I mean NOBODY just walked on the street. Even the track team didn't run on the streets because parents were concerned about safety
This isn't an issue of limiting myself. This is just an issue of safety.
For those who don't know, this is called motivated reasoning or confirmation bias. Once you can give a name to it, it's easier to notice it all around you. I'd argue that it's one of the biases that plagues humanity more than any other, our brains seem to be hard-wired to engage in motivated reasoning
but this is not entirely academia's fault. I'm reminded of the ongoing conversation about alcohol's impact on our health. Over the decades, if you've consumed mainstream media, you've been told everything from "2 glasses of wine per day is good for you" to "no amount of alcohol is good for you" and everything in between.
What's difficult is that it's hard to communicate the nuance of what a study actually studied. How many people were involved? What were the methods used? What was the effect size? What were the confounding factors that couldn't be controlled for? None of this can be effectively communicated in a world that reads headlines and probably not much beyond that.
And of course, the media does sensationalize because they're incentivized to. You'll click a headline that says "alcohol is good for you, says science" but probably won't click a headline that tries to communicate the nuance.
I think the end result is the same. Outsiders should be highly skeptical of reporting on topics which take decades of expertise to start to understand.
People seem to feel compelled to form an opinion on every topic, and then think that whatever their take is must be informed.
It is okay to not have an opinion on a topic!
If someone is particularly interested in obtaining an armature understanding of a subject, by all means, they should jump in and form on opinion, but maintaining some humility is essential.
I don't really think so. The stuff that's covered in the first half of this article is certainly very math-y, but you can be a great musician and not know this stuff. I really think all you need to know is basic arithmetic and the absolute basics of modular arithmetic (akin to learning how 12 o'clock + 1 hour = 1 o'clock, not 13 o'clock).
Becoming a great musician is more about developing your ear, technique, repertoire, etc. It's more similar to learning a foreign language than learning math, in my opinion.
> I'd like to ask you for advice on how to make the most out of the time during my studies
Go to professor's office hours. I was always so shocked when I showed up to office hours and I was the only one there almost every time. You can literally have 1-on-1 time with an expert and nobody takes advantage of it.
Another advantage of office hours is that you don't want to look like you're unprepared, so preparing some questions to ask is actually really good practice to hone in on what your gaps in knowledge are.
As a former professor, I want to second this advice. Even asking the professor to re-explain some from class is often helpful. If you run out of things to ask, ask about their research. Building that relationship will help if you need an extension on assignment, a bump in a grade, or a letter of recommendation later.
Some professors won't care and it will be of little value. Do not get discouraged if it is not a positive experience. Find the professors that do care.
Came here to say this. Office hours serve many purposes.
I remember going to office hours for homework guidance. I've also gone and been the only person there and delved deeper into a subject than an undergrad class normally would with leading experts in the field that otherwise might not give me the time of day
If you don't have a schedule conflict, try to go to office hours as much as possible!
In a similar spirit: figure out why the faculty gave you specific homework.
Most faculty think hard about which problems to assign. It isn't busy-work. There is a person on the other side of the problem-set/exam/essay, they only get a few assignments, and they are going to have to grade it (or some future work).
Withdrawal symptoms usually last a few weeks for me. Head over to reddit.com/r/leaves if you need support for quitting.
I've struggled with this a lot over the years. I'll quit for 6 months, get rid of all my paraphernalia then find myself starting up again. I keep telling myself that I'll use it more responsibly this time, but then I end up doing it every day.
sure, but all of that is a cost which you don't have to pay with a monolith. Versioning APIs and having to constantly think about backwards compatibility with independently moving services is not trivial.
Sometimes the cost is worth it. Most of the time it's not
Oh, you absolutely have to pay that cost with a monolith, it's just less clear and obvious because you can change all of the consumers when you make a change to an interface.
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