Slashdot Mirror
Steven Hawking Considering Move To Canada
thepacketmaster learned of "...the possibility of Steven Hawking moving to Waterloo in Canada: 'A report out of Britain suggests Stephen Hawking is considering an invitation to come work at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics....But he's also being encouraged to move to Ontario by his University of Cambridge colleague Neil Turok, the mathematical physicist who will take over as Perimeter's executive director on Oct. 1. Perimeter confirmed last night that it has made a standing offer to Hawking...Turok is leaving Cambridge after failing to persuade university authorities, research councils and sponsors to spend $40 million...By comparison, Waterloo's Perimeter Institute has about $600 million in funding...The addition of Hawking to Perimeter's staff of top physicists would be a major coup for the research institute, founded in 1999 by Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion, which makes the BlackBerry.'"
all the top phycisits start leaving Germany when things started going downhill?
He's moving there to be closer to the headquarters of the Vice Presidential Action Rangers.
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
how long it will take his little chair to get him there. Does that thing have snow treads?
Canada also has better wheelchair access.
Its our national healthcare system.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Mr. Turok, mathematical physicist and dinosaur hunter, to you, pal.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Can we get the computerized voice with a Canadian accent, eh?
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Don't you get it? If you die in Canada you die in real life!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I never realized Stephen Hawking was British. He doesn't sound it....
I mean, really, the university isn't even the best in Ontario, let alone the country
For math and physics it sure is the best, especially with the perimeter institute there now. Sounds like they sent you a nice rejection letter :)
They hatin Patrolling they tryin to catch me theorizing dirty Tryin to catch me theorizing dirty
No more traffic jams on Silver Street.
Stephen Hawking changed his mind about what he wanted to eat for lunch.
"At first I thought I wanted fish," said Mr. Hawkings, "but then I decided I did not want fish. I eventually went with spaghetti."
There is much debate in science-related blogs as well as in academia about the significance of this change.
I guess you don't know where Cambridge is. Must be an American.
Hawking will have his venerable voicebox replaced by one of Canadian manufacture, based on an amalgamation of Geddy Lee and Alex Trebek's voice, which automatically interjects "eh" every 8th word.
One of the coolest things about the Perimeter Institute is that they have a public lecture series. The lecturers are a mix of eminent scientists from inside and outside the Institute. The topics are mostly drawn from the edges of physics and cosmology. Some are more accessible to lay people than other.
The Institute has most of them available for offline viewing and reading. Maybe they could get Stephen Hawking one day.
... at least the 'A' key, eh?
Anybody want a peanut?
"World's leading physicist moves to the university in the middle of nowhere"
I wonder...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Your ideas are shaped not just by your capabilities, but the ideas and interactions you came up with when you were growing up.
I believe that there is a significant percentage of population (probably around 10%) that could be just as bright as the top people in sciences, but they just took a different path. They didn't get the encouragements, or maybe they just didn't meet a friend in the 5th grade that had the same interest as them.
There is more to whom we become than some political structure. The ultimate you is shaped MUCH closer to your personal life than even the city hall.
As a Computer Science major at the University of Waterloo, I'm proud to hear that the Waterloo region and it's research and higher education institutes are attracting top minds to the area. Arguably, the university is already the top undergrad tech school in Canada and competitive with the top in the U.S. as well, but currently only on the undergraduate level. However, huge amounts of funding have been recently pouring into UW's graduate programs, and associated research institutes. Some Waterloo folks like to label the university "MIT of the north" but unfortunately, I'd argue that's currently only true on the undergraduate level. Its co-op program makes Waterloo grads among the most employable new grads in the world. With this kind of exposure I'm sure Waterloo will reach its goal of being competitive with the top U.S. tech schools in all areas within the next 5 to 10 years. Maybe they'll start making movies with references to Waterloo as well.:P Then again, most movies are made/produced in the U.S...
You laugh... but I've known people who live in Maine that couldn't find Canada on a map. I could understand from the deep south, where Canada is a mythical land of igloos and Eskimos, but Maine?!? There's parts of Canada that are further south than Maine, and there was a time when that state was part of Canada, for crying out loud....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
That appeal to statistics assumes that the population of brilliant people (both inherently brilliant and the learned) is uniformly distributed among the rest of the population of the world. This is demonstrably not the case. Some cities have higher concentrations of inventors, entrepeneurs, PhDs, etc., than other cities of equal size. Perhaps one city has a university to draw these people in, while the other one doesn't. Perhaps one area, way back when, had a guy or group of people that made some major discovery, started a new industry, which set that region on the path to continued discovery (e.g., Silicon Valley).
The same could be said for countries as a whole. One would expect to find a greater proportion of scientists in an industrialized country over an agrarian one, or over a nation that has only recently industrialized.
I am not trying to make a nationalistic or xenophobic argument against India or China, because I know for a fact that they have lots of brilliant people, I am just trying to delve deeper into the notion that a larger national population equals a larger population of [whatever else].
Is anyone else irked by the apparent misspelling? Steven != Stephen
Intelligent Design encompasses all religions except atheism.
I am a grad student in physics at waterloo (phd) and my female counterparts do not get paid anymore than me from the uni. Where the heck did you hear this?
Are you sure that you aren't just talking about 3rd party scholarships that are only available to women? The amount from you get from the actual university is the same for men and women.
To be fair, we have a Cambridge on this side of the pond, in Massachusetts, and it's home to a rather prestigious institution of higher learning. If one were unfamiliar with the work or background Stephen Hawking, it would be an innocent mistake to confuse our Cambridge (town) with your Cambridge (university).
And his synthesized voice tool should really be outfitted with an English accent :)
Technically you get paid more, but I heard that the extra incentive for females really offsets the sausage-fest that is astronomy grad work.
This is what entropy is for.
"Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby"
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I gues tis shoves uz tat te dhing too doe iz zhoot gramaar nazii's on te spoot.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The funny thing is there is a Cambridge Ontario which just happens to border on Kitchener-Waterloo which is where Perimeter is. Wouldn't it be funny if he ends up moving from Cambridge to Cambridge? :)
Historically, Muslim regimes have been very favorable to the science. That's no so much the case today, but blaming current Muslim regimes on the Koran is like blaming the industrial revolution on Christianity. It's a stretch, at best.
Not collecting stamps gives you time for a real hobby, just like atheism gives you time to do real science.
Now, I don't say you can't be religious as a scientist. Actually I know quite a few very good scientists that believe in God. Usually, though, they take the Bible as a guideline for being a "good person", not a book telling you how the scientific parts of the world work. They understand the Bible as a guideline to live a good life, and quite frankly, it is a good book as such. Don't kill, don't steal, take a day off per week so you don't run into a burnout, and generally don't do what you wouldn't want others to do to you. That's a pretty good guideline to work with, if you ask me.
Frankly, I wonder how many of those that want to take the Bible all literally and insist in it being the all encompassing truth really want to use it to live a better life (for themselves, but even more for those around them), and how many just want to use it as a tool to wield power over others. It's been used for that purpose far too often. I'd say, more often than for the "better person" goals...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Society seems to have no tolerance for philatelists.
Only if you ignore the parts that say you should stone people, and eradicate whole villages if one of the members doesn't believe in the Bible's god, retain slaves, and that giving up your virgin daughter to a rape gang is preferable to turning over a foreign man to them. Those are just a few examples...
Question everything
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/16/hawking-perimeter.html
The University of Cambridge has poured cold water on reports its most famous physicist might be coming to Canada to work, saying Wednesday Stephen Hawking "has no plans" to leave.
A report in the Daily Telegraph in the U.K. said Hawking was contemplating joining his colleague Neil Turok at Waterloo, Ont.'s Perimeter Institute. The South African-born cosmologist Turok, 49, is leaving Cambridge to take over the role of executive director at the institute, which was founded in 2000 by Research in Motion co-founder Mike Lazaridis and is devoted to the study of theoretical physics.
Cambridge's statement called the report "unfounded speculation."
It is possible to synthesize British accents. Hawking has had many opportunities to upgrade his speech software. He chooses to continue to use DECtalk even though it is outdated because it is "his voice" now.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
"People who live in Maine"... thats your problem. Very different from people *from* Maine. A lot of Maine is populated by New Yorkers that couldnt afford Long Island waterfront. They cant find Massachusetts on a map even though they drove through it to get to Maine, and they hit a few Starbucks there on the way.
Real Mainiacs can be identified by their large feet evolved for crossing snow drifts, know where they are relative to Canada just by sniffing the air, and can find the nearest unguarded border crossings using a mutated recessive gene. A Real Maniac, most importantly though, will pretend to look at the map you shove at them and give you a fiendishly crafted answer with the sole intended result of making you go back to New York and never returning. An answer like "What's Canada?" for instance...
Which begs the question: if you can determine which parts of the Bible to follow (i.e. golden rule), and which parts to ignore (i.e. slavery, rape, stoning), where does the ability to "sift" come from? It certainly can't come from the book that you have to be critical about. It's clearly something innate in (most) people that is a product of genetics and culture. More than that, some truths are universal, they go without saying, and do not require a book as a guideline. As for the grandparent, if these people NEED the book to live a good life, you need to look for more competent friends. I say anyone who reads the Bible as anything more than an interesting work of fiction is a fool.
I think I counted once, there are 12 states with territory of a higher latitude than the southernmost point in Canada. The strange part is that Vancouver has much milder winters than Pelee Island, despite having a more northern latitude by over 650mi.
And actually the southernmost territory in Canada is Middle Island, just south of Pelee Island (home to some nice wineries), which is south of Point Pelee, the southernmost point of the Canadian mainland.
And there are far more Canadians with residences in southern US than in Maine, aka Snowbirds.
I was worried about getting modded OT but the Cannuck posts are scoring better than the Hawking ones!
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
If someone mentions any American town I could probably name the state it is in.
Springfield. :)