Obligatory note re: standing desk ergonomics: http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html
The lesson seems to be to mostly sit, but stand and walk around every 30-45 minutes or so.
I think that the main difference between people who do and don't excel at SC2 isn't that experts don't follow algorithms, it's that their algorithms are more advanced/more complicated.
For example, Day[9]'s build order focused shows are mostly about filling in the details of the decision tree/algorithm to follow for a specific "build". Or, if you listen to professional players talking about how they react to beginners asking for detailed build orders the response isn't "just follow your intuition" it's "this is the order you build things in, spend your money as fast as possible, react in these ways to these situations", which certainly looks like an algorithm to me.
Edit: One other thing regarding practice: We occasionally talk about 10,000 hours and so on, but a key part of that is 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice", which is distinguished from just screwing around as being the sort of practice that lets you generate explicit algorithms.
I actually see a connection between the two: One of the points in the article is to buy experiences rather than things, and Alicorn's post seems to be (possibly among other things) a set of ways to turn things into experiences.
Yes, that is exactly what they are saying. It happens to be the case that this thing works for you. That is only very weak evidence that it works for anyone else at all. All humans are not the same.
We recommend getting over being insulted and frustrated when things that work for you specifically turn out to be flukes, it's not a surprising thing and sufficiently internalizing how many actual studies turn out to be flukes would make it the obvious result. Reality shouldn't be strange or surprising or insulting!
I'm not sure about the rest of the app, but the bookmarklet seems like a ridiculously good idea. The 'trivial inconvenience' of actually making cards for things is really brutal, anything that helps seems like a big deal.
Is there a good book/resource in general for trying to learn the meta-model you mention?
Of course, this is a straightforward problem to fix in the mechanism design: Just make responses to downvoted comments start at -5 karma, instead of having a direct penalty, as suggested elsewhere. I think that suggestion was for unrelated reasons, but it also fixes this little loophole.
it doesn't give many actual current details, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_lithography implies that as of 2006 designing the photomask for a given chip required ~100 CPU years of processing, and presumably that has only gone up.
Etching a 22nm line with 193nm light is a hard problem, and a lot of the techniques used certainly appear to require huge amounts of processing. It's close to impossible to say how much of a bottle neck this particular step in the process is, but based on how much really knowing what is going on in even just simple mechanical design requires lots of simulation I would actually expect that every step in chip design has similar types of simulation requirements.
also generates free time! generally just trying to walk between classes as fast as possible is probably good, if sprinting seems too scary.
My first idea is to use something based on cryptography. For example, using the parity of the pre-image of a particular output from a hash function.
That is, the parity of x in this equation:
f(x) = n, where n is your index variable and f is some hash function assumed to be hard to invert.
This does require assuming that the hash function is actually hard, but that both seems reasonable and is at least something that actual humans can't provide a counter example for. It's also relatively very fast to go from x to n, so this scheme is easy to verify.