[vomjom]

I'll link to your TrueSkill post for those who haven't read it (it's excellent): http://www.moserware.com/2010/03/computing-your-skill.html

Although I already knew and understood TrueSkill before your post, it helped solidify my understanding. I hope you write more articles like that in the future :)

[moserware]

Thanks for the kind words! I try to write posts that would have helped me understand a topic. I've found that I can get to a hand-wavy understanding of a topic in a reasonable amount of time and then an actual understanding that I can communicate to others in an unreasonable amount of time :)

Sometimes it takes a month, but the TrueSkill one took about six months.

I've learned that deeply understanding a topic (especially one that has non-trivial math involved) doesn't cause a net loss in the amount of "math fog" in my head, it just moves it to a different place (often one that I never new existed before).

As a schoolboy, it was tempting to think that one day I'd "arrive" in math. I just don't think that's realistic. At best, I've just learned to be comfortable wandering around in the perpetual fog.