Just got back from working in Sacramento for a friend. Ate nothing but sushi for 2 days straight (he owns several sushi restaurants). Time to get back to work on bio though, my work was all programming.

Changing the mathematical models behind how you think almost always changes your life. It at least changes how you view your surroundings. One book which changed my life was A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. He has just open sourced the entire book. Please, if you haven't seen his work, I highly recommend it. Two principles changed how I think:

1) Complexity can spontaneously emerge from simple input and simple algorithms.

2) Computational Equivalence means that certain biological, physical, chemical or any other natural process cannot be reduced mathematically to a shortcut equation. The amount of computation that is required to get the answer will remain constant, which means that there are no shortcuts, you simply have to perform the computation to get the answer.

A link to his book is here.
- posted by Aargau @ 10:48 AM