My favorite quote about irony is from a Spider Robinson story:
"If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron."
> fastest ever time from research to nobel prize, 9 years..
I think there's a much faster turnaround: Muller and Bednorz were awarded the Nobel Prize [in Physics] for room-temperature superconductors in 1987, within about a year of making the discovery.
> some of the attraction of academia is that no one will ever ask me again if I can turn a PDF into a MS Word document so they can email it.
You can't be serious. Many faculty, even ones in computer science, are quite clueless about anything beyond what they used to do their thesis, or whatever, which might have been 20 years ago.
[Your example of converting a PDF file to a Word document is especially ill-chosen because professors generate and read a helluva lot of documents, and there are lots of situations where this would be very handy, if it were theoretically possible.]
Anyways, my main point is this: as someone else wisely posted, you're not going to escape whatever people problems you had to deal with before - they'll just turn up in various other guises. I spent 10 years hacking around in the software industry before returning to pursue a PhD so I could do research and teach in CS. I totally identify with the job frustration and applaud your decision to follow your dream.. but just remember that academia, being so totally people-centric, has politics that can be even worse than job politics. By the way, 'users' can also teach us programmers about real problems as well. (Ok, the keyboard 'thingy' case may be an exception;)
Some little-known related references:
A CS student at Univ of BC, John Brzustowski, did his Master's thesis on the problem of winning at Tetris if the computer is aware of your moves and reacting to them. He apparently proved that there is a finite sequence of tetrominos, which, if the machine selects them, you must lose. His work is cited in this later paper by H. Burgiel called "How to Lose at Tetris", which proves more generally that the computer can always produce a sequence of lose-forcing tetrominos, whether or not it's aware of your moves: paper is here.
On two separate occasions, I've gotten calls from telemarketers... while riding in an elevator! This wasn't on a cell phone. It was the little elevator emergency phone.
Me: (after some looking to see where the ringing was coming from, opening the little door, and picking up) Um... Hello?
Telemarketer: Good afternoon. This is the Seattle Times we have a very special...
Me: Do you realize you've reached an elevator?
Telemarketer: (puzzled pause) Uh...Sir, let me check if we have your correct address...
Me: It's the 17th floor.. no wait.. the 18th.. no, wait.. now it's the 19th...
(And so on)
Apparently some office building are rigged so that even the elevator extensions have direct-dial...
Back when the new US$100 bills came out, a friend took some to a currency exchange booth. He'd been to this place before and was prepared for their typical anti-counterfeit song and dance. In this case, the teller looked at the unfamiliar new bills he'd handed over, and said, "What are these?". My friend said, "Oh - those are the new US $100 bills". The teller apparently shrugged and said something like, "Huh. OK.", changed them, and that was that...time to fire up CurrencyShop 2.0, I guess!
Less well known than the Geodesic Dome is Fuller's Dymaxion House, a very cool hangout in my opinion with lots of features like "O-volving" shelves built in. See the nice restoration project pages at the Henry Ford Museum for more info.
I bought an X-cam about a year ago to catch neighbors dumping garbage on our property. The camera was mounted upstairs, pointing out toward the street. Imagine my surprise when I turned on the receiver for the first time, and the image I saw was..a view of my own house from across the street! Apparently another neighbor had bought an X-cam, and was operating it pointed in our direction. (This was not entirely coincidence since I'd mentioned the garbage cam to them a few weeks back, but still.. ) This was a distance of about maybe 100 feet.
(Also, for some reason, our camera signal did not interfere with theirs.)
Slashdot Mirror
And here's the original story: God is an Iron
doh. not "room-temperature". I should have said "high-temperature".
> fastest ever time from research to nobel prize, 9 years..
I think there's a much faster turnaround: Muller and Bednorz were awarded the Nobel Prize [in Physics] for room-temperature superconductors in 1987, within about a year of making the discovery.
> some of the attraction of academia is that no one will ever ask me again if I can turn a PDF into a MS Word document so they can email it.
;)
You can't be serious. Many faculty, even ones in computer science, are quite clueless about anything beyond what they used to do their thesis, or whatever, which might have been 20 years ago.
[Your example of converting a PDF file to a Word document is especially ill-chosen because professors generate and read a helluva lot of documents, and there are lots of situations where this would be very handy, if it were theoretically possible.]
Anyways, my main point is this: as someone else wisely posted, you're not going to escape whatever people problems you had to deal with before - they'll just turn up in various other guises. I spent 10 years hacking around in the software industry before returning to pursue a PhD so I could do research and teach in CS. I totally identify with the job frustration and applaud your decision to follow your dream.. but just remember that academia, being so totally people-centric, has politics that can be even worse than job politics. By the way, 'users' can also teach us programmers about real problems as well. (Ok, the keyboard 'thingy' case may be an exception
Some little-known related references: A CS student at Univ of BC, John Brzustowski, did his Master's thesis on the problem of winning at Tetris if the computer is aware of your moves and reacting to them. He apparently proved that there is a finite sequence of tetrominos, which, if the machine selects them, you must lose. His work is cited in this later paper by H. Burgiel called "How to Lose at Tetris", which proves more generally that the computer can always produce a sequence of lose-forcing tetrominos, whether or not it's aware of your moves: paper is here.
Me: (after some looking to see where the ringing was coming from, opening the little door, and picking up) Um... Hello?
Telemarketer: Good afternoon. This is the Seattle Times we have a very special...
Me: Do you realize you've reached an elevator?
Telemarketer: (puzzled pause) Uh...Sir, let me check if we have your correct address...
Me: It's the 17th floor.. no wait.. the 18th.. no, wait.. now it's the 19th...
(And so on)
Apparently some office building are rigged so that even the elevator extensions have direct-dial...
Back when the new US$100 bills came out, a friend took some to a currency exchange booth. He'd been to this place before and was prepared for their typical anti-counterfeit song and dance. In this case, the teller looked at the unfamiliar new bills he'd handed over, and said, "What are these?". My friend said, "Oh - those are the new US $100 bills". The teller apparently shrugged and said something like, "Huh. OK.", changed them, and that was that...time to fire up CurrencyShop 2.0, I guess!
Less well known than the Geodesic Dome is Fuller's Dymaxion House, a very cool hangout in my opinion with lots of features like "O-volving" shelves built in. See the nice restoration project pages at the Henry Ford Museum for more info.
I bought an X-cam about a year ago to catch neighbors dumping garbage on our property. The camera was mounted upstairs, pointing out toward the street. Imagine my surprise when I turned on the receiver for the first time, and the image I saw was..a view of my own house from across the street! Apparently another neighbor had bought an X-cam, and was operating it pointed in our direction. (This was not entirely coincidence since I'd mentioned the garbage cam to them a few weeks back, but still.. ) This was a distance of about maybe 100 feet. (Also, for some reason, our camera signal did not interfere with theirs.)