I'd love to read your list. :)

1234567890 does:)

You sound like someone who has never used BitTorrent effectively!

This may or not be correlated with the actual advice but it is certainly correlated with the difficulty of the admission process, and this forms a positive feedback loop. Top universities also have on their side the fact that having rich parents very much correlates with future success, which in term helps perpetuate their prestige and ability to charge more for admissions.

I'm sure there would be correlation, but I suspect that it would be very far from perfect, possibly because of talent or inadvertently (or deliberately) discovering better and more effective ways to practice.

I'm reminded me of when I was a kid and played chess with a friend a lot. At first I could beat him and we played about the same amount but suddenly he inexplicably got far better than me. It bugged the hell out of me:)

So I think the result of Adams' "lesson" would actually be to teach people that they have strengths and weaknesses, and practice helps a lot, but it will (rather quickly) get swamped by talent in any realistic endeavor. And results might also be strongly affected by effective coaching or acquiring specific knowledge to make those hours of practice dramatically more effective.

Wouldn't panhandling itself be far more lucrative than this? Based on walking by many beggars every day in a downtown area and seeing people giving them money, I'd estimate most of them make more than minimum wage anyway.

What is undeniable is that any study where people self-count their caloric intake has a ton of potential problems which have been demonstrated over and over again. People are notoriously terrible at counting calories in what they eat.

It is true that sugars have certain metabolic effects, for example with insulin, that will make you hungrier and crave more. This makes it true that they should be avoided. Basically I think we're on the same page if you're willing to scratch the "obviously".

Another point is that the amount that doing weight training raises your metabolism is extremely overrated. I don't have the hard data in front of me but I think if you look up how many more calories you burn by gaining a pound of muscle, you will be shocked that it isn't that much. This is one of those "everybody knows" facts about fitness that everyone believes but isn't really backed up very well.

It may be "obvious", but I'm not sure if that's true!

1. The problem solving there has almost no connection to what it is like for the vast majority of uses of writing a computer problem.

2. It is in no sense a varied set of tasks. It's similar to a math contest problem set, with some basic string manipulation masquerading as numerical problems (pandigital numbers, etc.)

3. The programming and program design required to solve tasks in this narrow space is trivial, and not particularly instructive of how you'd write programs in another space.

4. Functional programming articles tend to mention and place stock in Project Euler problems to a degree which, in my opinion, is unusually much larger compared general programming articles.

That's where I'd argue. It would be like saying you're an all around gamer when you play only chess but with different openings every time.

Varied simple tasks would be doing some Euler problems, doing some basic algorithms (Dijkstra's with Heap, A* pathfinder on a 2d map, etc... TopCoder problems are great for this), write a Mandelbrot zoomer, Conway's Life app with position setup and step-through and save/load, write a Tetris clone, write a basic HTML form builder, write a blogging engine, write a multi-user chat room server, write a simple side-scrolling shooter game, write a basic Roguelike game, write a simple text adventure. Things like this can all be afternoon projects.

Every time I read someone claiming that Project Euler is for developing general-purpose programming, I roll my eyes more than a little.

Yes and a very useful one since it adds +1 trade routes per city.