I can confirm the general profile of undergraduate students at UC Irvine. I graduated in 2004 as a first-generation high school/college graduate and went on for an advanced degree. A substantial number of my classmates were also the same. I believe in the UC because, for the most part, it maintains its mission of providing Californians access to higher education if you want it.
I recall the rule (not sure if it's still the same) that if you are within the top 10% of your high school class, you will be admitted to a UC campus so long as you meet a minimum SAT score.
> I recall the rule (not sure if it's still the same) that if you are within the top 10% of your high school class, you will be admitted to a UC campus so long as you meet a minimum SAT score.
If you are in the top 9% of all California graduates, and you are not accepted at any of the campuses you applied to, you will be offered a space at some other UC campus, if there is space available. [0]
If you are in the top 9% of your California high school class, that's a competitive factor in admissions but not a guarantee of admission. [1]
This is true except for Berkeley and UCLA. They require you to submit separate applications (at the very least at some high schools, it could be that the elite high schools in California are allowed admittance into any UC).
The fact that they've grammatically classified the noun "blockchain" correctly makes me agree. There is more than one blockchain! I don't know why the copy editors as news orgs believe otherwise. Someone smarter than, please let me know if I'm wrong!
> It’s a phenomenon that Richard Socher, the dishevelled 30-something (or 20-something?) lecturer who just sold his company for several hundred millions yet still biked to campus, mentioned in his class: “Companies keep asking my students to drop out to work for them.”
Why would anyone not continually bike for commuting purposes once they are wealthy? Biking is such a joy whether you're 7 or 70, rich, or poor.
> Companies keep asking my students to drop out to work for them.
I've been told Berklee College of Music makes it very easy for students to leave and later come back, even years later, exactly to enable students to grab transient professional opportunities without sacrificing their education. I wonder how engineering schools stack up in comparison.
Several studies have shown that the net health benefit of bicycling to/from work is large even when you account for accidents. Not hard to believe when you hear it halves the risk of cardiovascular disease, which is the most common cause of death in the US.
E.g. these authors find the health improvement statistically increases your life expectancy by up to 14 months, while traffic accidents statistically reduce it by up to 9 days. That's a ratio of 47 to 1.
I don't think people think in terms of life expectancy. Do you? Is a 1% chance of dying on your next ride and otherwise living 100 years equivalent to not riding your bike and living 99 years to you?
Edit regarding your comment: Oh, I see why you're confused. I didn't need to do the math because I was talking about a 1-time bike ride as an example to just get the point across -- it's already scary for 1 ride. But if you want the actual math for a lifetime, there's a ~1/5000 lifetime odds of dying in 1 year of biking. That's still pretty damn high. I don't know about you but I'd rather just give up on the 78th expected year of my life and lose the 0.1% chance of dying in the next 5 years.
I'm assuming you didn't do the math there - in your hypothetical scenario I'd likely be dead within a year if I rode a bike every day. Then I obviously wouldn't do it.
But the point of bringing up the statistic is to check "is this risk worth worrying about, to the extent that I'm not gonna do thing X"? That's what a rational person does in all situations - is the risk of flying so high that I shouldn't go on holiday? No. Is the risk of falling if I climb that cellphone tower so high that it's not worth it for the view? Yes.
It sounds like we're agreeing? I was also saying, just like you, that the choice is not based on the statistics. The parent one is the one that used the statistic to justify the choice of biking.
Lift heavy; do Jiu Jitsu - deter the manager from ever attempting to verbally abuse you lest risking discordance. Relish in your newfound mental clarity.
I think you are saying the author should be a bit more alpha-male and partly I agree. Though not particularly alpha-male myself, I would have handled the first situtation better by instinctively out-arseholeing the arsehole.
But I would not handle all such social situations so quickly or confidently. And sometimes the moments I miss are opportunities to be nice. The point being that moving along a personality dimension can't replace a missing skill, though it can partially amelirate the effects.
Having gone through a process similar to what the author of the article did, the problem is that it's more complicated than "merely" being a bit more alpha-male.
The problem is getting past freezing up. It's hard because it was my brain's innate reaction all through my young adult years, so I had to put a lot of time and energy into rewiring it to not freeze up first.
Once I could get past freezing up, I could practice ways to stay rational in emotionally charged situations, which in turn allowed me to learn how to defuse situations better. With more practice, I was able to manage the same situations with a strong sense of principle. That in turn let me say "no" in a way where people consistently respected my answer.
But that was a 5 year journey filled with unpleasant moments.
First response to a coworker storming in to cuss you should be to stand up to your full height and look them straight in the eye. You're not the one who set this belligerent tone, they are.
We're talking about a guy who was so paralyzed by the fact that the woman he was having sex with whispered sweet nothings into his ear that he dedicated three paragraphs to unpacking the discomfort it caused...
Sounds like that's the case to me as well. Having safe stock phrases is explicitly a strategy used by autistic individuals to cope with unexpected situations. Like, one common issue that teachers often run into with more severely autistic students is that they'll say "no" to requests because they need to give a safe response of some sort, and the teacher interprets that as being willfully defiant rather than simply overwhelmed by the current situation and trying to do something safe.
He says exactly that in the post: "Why couldn’t I think of the snappy response? Because I can’t do verbal processing and emotional processing at the same time!!!"
There are certainly things you can do right away to get things right on track. What is your workout schedule like? Are you lifting weights? Check out 5x5 or Stronglifts.
