alek blogs

Note to myself: check your dream job before you start learning it ...

This looked pretty insightful to me (from How Vienna Escaped the Cubicle) :

(...)I had also spent some time shadowing doctors. I went to Stanford Hospital and followed doctors around on their shifts. For the most part, their work consisted of a lot of bureaucracy. The everyday life consisted of filling out forms, and then filling out other forms, and then dictating forms to other people.

I know that everybody probably gets disillusioned with their career at some point, but I got disillusioned with mine before it even started.(...)

created Wed 18 June 2003 5:10 PM EST [2003/6/18 17:10 EST] permalink

Heart of Science (And Fiction)?

From interview with Michael Swanwick [cached]:

(...)Scientists often start from an intuition or an emotional preference and work outward from there. Logic is only a tool, like a chisel or a gas chromatograph, that they use in their work. Far more central to the enterprise is intellectual honesty, the ability to admit that they may possibly be wrong or, even better, that the guy with the opposing viewpoint may be making a valid contribution. I saw an auditorium full of people give John Ostrom a standing ovation after he made the introductory statement at a symposium on the early evolution of birds. It was a powerful, emotional thing to witness, and afterwards the guy next to me leaned over and said, "Did you notice who was the first one on his feet?" And he named a man whose theories were in direct conflict with Ostrom's. But he could still applaud the integrity of Ostrom's work. That was extraordinary.(...)

on appeal of dinosaurs:

(...) That's an easy one. It's because dinosaurs are (a) monsters, (b) real and (c) safely extinct. It's an unbeatable combination! My paleontologist friends hate it when I use the M-word, but let's be honest here, that's the appeal. There's a story that Kenneth Carpenter saw a Godzilla movie when he was a boy and immediately decided that he was going to devote his life to studying such creatures. Then, when his parents gently broke it to him that Godzilla was imaginary, he switched his loyalties over to dinosaurs, as the next best thing. Decades later he discovered a new species of theropod and named it Gojirasaurus. Thus keeping a better faith with his younger self than most adults do. (...)

and on advantage of science fiction:

(...)But in science fiction you've got a readership that's willing to let you sprawl. So long as you're entertaining them, they don't mind if it takes you a few extra pages to reach the end. This is why so much literary mainstream short fiction feels so much tighter than SF does. The advantage here is to SF. You can take that slack the reader has given you, those extra pages, and use them to cut a few figures, try a few things out, maybe invent something new. That's a priceless gift for the writer.(...)

all together very interesting author and writes short books so well worth checking out!

created Mon June 23, 2003 7:55 PM EST [2003/6/23 19:55 EST] permalink

Future so bright I need sunglasses?

Future so bright i need sunglasses? And it is not that summer is getting hotter but I feel that there are so many possibilities and paths to follow and so much to improve that it is so mind boggling that I need sunglasses to look into future ... as if nothing since 1998 changed :-)

created Tue June 24, 2003 3:48 PM EST [2003/6/24 15:48 EST] permalink

Myth of US Vacations?

Russell Beattie takes a good look on vacation in US and Europe:

(...) Now, the opposite of this concept is true as well - imagine how harsh it is for someone to go from Europe to the U.S. My wife doesn't really understand yet what a 24/7 society like the U.S. is like. She talks about future vacations when we're living in the U.S. and I shake my head softly. "I doubt we'll have much," I say. Even if we do have vacations, they'll never coincide. And undoubtedly something "important" will be happening at work and we'll have to spend half our vacation calling back to voicemail or checking emails. The fact is that vacations are always just short breaks, not true downtime. By the time you're just forgetting about work, it's time to go back.(...)

It seems that the only loophole may be when you stay at university and have three months of vacation (not counting Christmas). The rumor has it that it is even better in Australia ...

created Sat June 28, 2003 2:10 PM EST [2003/6/28 14:10 EST] permalink

On writing scientific theses ...

It is interesting idea to just put all elements of typical scientific paper as shown in this good spoof of scientific theses [local copy]

Results can be quite intriguing - for example let take a look on related works section:

"Many researchers have attempted to solve such philosophical debates but have been proven unsuccessful. An attempt to determine why the chicken crossed the road showed inconclusive data and resulted in the loss of all test subjects due to traffic fatalities (Hoyman 2001, Larsen 1987)."

Now only if all scientific papers were that short (and funny!) ...

created Mon June 30, 2003 5:13 PM EST [2003/6/30 17:13 EST] permalink

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