Well, it's not often these days that I get to feel proud of myself. But I recently got a nice little break from the self-loathing routine for a little while when I did something I've never done before: I derived a beautiful, elegant, concise mathematical formula from scratch, for a calculation I'd never had any experience with before. I did this without the help of any books or any other form of aid or guidance, purely by my own skill and intuition, simply by thinking and scribbling through the... read more