Why don't you move abroad?

>Though secretly, it was to give hope to the students who were defeated by the education system and told “You can’t study Computer Science, because you didn’t know Carbon has a radioactive isotope.”

Forgive me if I'm being elitist here, but this seems like a strange example of outrageous admission requirements. I would have thought knowing about radiocarbon dating (which I'm assuming this is a reference to) is common knowledge (I believe it's in the standard curriculum for grades 7-9 in my country), so it doesn't seem like a completely unreasonable test question. If this is an example that the author uses from his or her own experience, it seems stranger still.

>Every evening, my brother and I would sit in front of an oil lamp and study, mostly maths and science.

Knowing about carbon dating is a proxy for general knowledge or nerdiness, but any proxy that becomes a measure, stops being a good proxy.

The only way physics helps with computer science, is by being a convenient source of coding challenges.

In this regard, it's like treating programming languages as "languages" and only allowing people to study them if they can also master French or Spanish.

Also:

Common knowledge is much, much less STEM-y than most commentators I've seen, seem to think.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Back 24 years ago, the final mandatory exams I had at school (UK GCSE), one of the questions in the higher level biology exam was asking me to… count ~ten dots within a rectangle and none of the dots outside.

Most people have no motivation to care what carbon dating is, or that it involves radioisotopes, even if they're smart, hence (though I think things have improved since then) The Two Cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

Instead of STEM, culture: Soap operas, Harry Potter, Pokemon, ball games, etc. — I have no idea what the "offside rule" is, as despite having heard people explain it, I have no motivation to care and therefore don't remember it.