Update 1

So to start, the CS Course started off as  a rolling train wreck that eventually found its way back onto the tracks. Waking early was an issue, but after a night of < 4 hours sleep, it looks like I forced my circadian clock back into alignment and I'm up at 7 now. I want to get that to 5 or 6, and try to finish my morning workout before sunrise.

I finished the 10th week hw set for 3.032.3x, the Material Mechanics course. It was about dislocations propagating at the atomic scale and I had to calculate how much individual atoms of a precipitate would slow disloc propagation in metal alloys. It was actually a lot easier than I thought. I'll have to copy solutions & important problems to my notes, and there'll be about a week until week 11's work is due. That was mostly day 1, 1 December.

2 December I finished the 2nd problem set for Calc I (18.01sc) and exam 1. I need to learn and get through this fast, and I always seem to 'just' almost get it, so I did the exam by checking my answers w/ the solutions right after I finished a problem. The idea is from Scott H. Young (who did his own "MIT Challenge"), and it's tightening the feedback loop. It works. There're a lot of 'oh that's why' 'oh shit, that's how it's done' I find I learn faster when I treat it like a physical skill.

Finally I got down to actual CS work. It was really kind of nothing, but ehh, a start. One of my courses is SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I read online that a solid way to start CS is to go through the book and do all the examples. Now, I'm selfish, and I want the best, so I'm doing SICP two ways in parallel: MIT & Berkeley. I'm doing CS61A, watching Brian Harvey's Spring 2011 lectures, with reading assignments from his syllabus, and supplementing that with reading assignments in Composing Programs from John DeNero's CS61A syllabus. I don't have access to university resources and recitations/labs, and I haven't figured out yet how I'm going to do assignments and check them, so the more thorough I am the better, I'm guessing.

At the same time I'm watching the original MIT SICP lectures given to Hewlett Packard engineers and doing those readings, though it largely overlaps w/ Harvey's. For a Scheme interpreter, right now I'm using repl.it. Yesterday I read Ch 1.1 & 1.2 (they even have handy videos on the site; it's an online book) of Composing Programs, I'm already up to 1.1.6 (p22) of the SICP book, and for the great introductory tome of electrical engineering, Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits (A. Agarwal & J. Lang), I'm on p130 (Node Method).

My goal is to get the 5 major courses on my main-line list done every day, and not have to spread them across 2 or more days. I'll update as it goes.

So that's about it, a lot of SICP work today, some Calculus administrativa  and a lecture, CS106A (Prgm Methd), 6.002x (Circ & Elctrncs), and a lab in Python and Java.

I also started reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, after hearing about it for the 100th time, this time on the Hello Internet podcast. Love it. I'm on p60-something, I'll write my thoughts on the AI idea later. Хjинца: болх.