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Stephen Hawking Looking for Assistant
An anonymous reader writes "Wanted: Bright graduate student to assist world-famous scientist. International travel, developing computer systems and dealing with the press required.
Renowned astrophysicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking has announced he is looking for a graduate student to work for him for one to two years. Dust off those CVs, kids!"
Just like a lightbulb he could die at any moment, but if you model his predicted time of death with an exponential distribution, the fact that he survived 45 years supports the hypothesis that he has a large exponential distribution half-life, not a small one.
Don't be dissin da MC/a.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Alas I am too old and creaky and the wrong discipline, computer science, myself to qualify for job. But what a chance! To actually live, rather than read, those books and concepts that Hawkings ponders. What a way to expand one's imagination. Then the quotidian tasks for a person of this intellectual stature would seem light.
My sincere and most envious congratulations to whomever gets this position,
Jim
Actually, it shouldn't be too hard to identify the illness, even from an armchair, for exactly the reasons I outlined. The number of neurologically degenerative diseases that actually spontaneously go into remission is not exactly high. That alone should eliminate the vast majority of ALS-like diseases to something much more manageable. We also have video footage from different stages. Horison did a documentary on Professor Hawking prior to him losing his speech to the trachea operation. We certainly have video footage of him since. Again, that should allow you to exclude certain possibilities. Finally, although a lot of his body has no motor control worth speaking of, his hands most evidently do as that is how he controls the chair and the voice synthesizer, although he's not exactly a speed demon on typing with it. His face also does - he doesn't lack the ability to show emotions.
Oh, that made me think of something else. Those are the same muscles he pushed the hardest from shortly before being diagnosed until he became a total invalid. He would swing on trees extensively, according to his mother in one documentary. It's suspected his heavy physical exercise regimen may have contributed to the disease slowing down and stopping later on in his life, but I believe it to be highly significant that the muscles he pushed the most suffered the least. Again, that can't possibly be characteristic of too many conditions.
From these well-documented and well-established facts, it should be easy to go through those conditions which Professor Hawking might have and discard those that simply don't behave in the way observed. (Or, to pull a Sherlock Holmes, reject the impossible and whatever is left - however improbable - must be correct. This doesn't work in practice for most things, but in this one case, there will be few enough possibilities that eliminating the impossible should be very doable indeed.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well if you're going for a sort of academic career, then the next "level" I would think would be this sort of apprenticeship. Which would be pretty cool considering there are many people capable of getting a doctorate, but only one such opportunity to work for Stephen Hawking. I imagine that if you could land that job then your resume would only need one sentence. "Stephen Hawking picked ME to work for him".
Chuckle, ten years in graduate school? One wag friend of mine once made the comment that he was a professional student sincve he was laying around for 2 years taking time filler classes until his future wife could graduate. It seemed to fit in that case, does it here?
Don't take me too serious, I could be jealous, of the people who do have that luxury, usually with daddy paying the bills. Me? I had a health problem that ran me out of school back in '48 or so, and I've been chaseing electrons and making them do usefull/entertaining/educational work since. And frankly, if I could replay it, there is only one thing I'd consider changing, and thats that my first wife had a stroke and died at age 34. She was a good woman...
I've had the pleasure of pure serendipity helping me out, having been at the right place, at the right time, to help do some interesting things, like being a bench tech at a smallish so-cal company that was building what was then the smallest tv camera around. So I had fingerprints on the innards of the tv cameras that were on the Trieste when it went down into the mohole back in the 60's. No cameras were there before, and no cameras have been there since, 37,000+ feet deep in the pacific, the deepest place in the worlds oceans. Was it fun? Damned betcha. Can others claim to have been there? Yes, about 10 people at that company, and an unknown number of sailors who were responsible for seeing to it the gondola of the Treiste didn't implode when the exterior pressure against that cast iron ball was up to around 18,000 psi. Since there were two small sailors in it at the time, it was probably sustained by all the praying.
There is more to this story, but its been related here at least twice already so I won't bore the old hands by repeating myself tonight.
--
Cheers, Gene
Breakfast served all day!
Circumcision is child abuse.
some of the greatest and most disparate minds and egos on the planet.
And that's the real rub - his ego can be a bit, shall we say awkward. I'd expect you'd need a very thick skin to deal with him on a day to day basis, unless he's mellowed a LOT over time.