Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write–always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a “consumer experience architect” in the Digital Home – User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the “reasonable” range. And then you find out the title of his talks is “Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design” and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a group of about forty of us said upon hearing about this seminar, and is exactly why we showed up to hear the talk!
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Humor as a Guide to Research
Over at the optimizer’s blog, quantum computing’s younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2 and H2+ (which was rather challenging considering I’d only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave talks about their work. I was last to go. In my talk, I drew (transparencies, you know) a cartoon of “photon man” (wavy line stick figure) who explained the difference between two photon absorption and absorbing two photons. No one reacted to these cartoons during the talk. But at the end of the talk, one of the other interns, trying to be cute asked me “So, what does photon man think about all of this?” I paused. Thought for a second. And replied “He was very enlightened by the whole thing!” The simultaneous groan emitted by the audience (who had sat through 8 straight talks) was, I must say, awesome. I have a vivid memory of my adviser in the back of the room giving a hearty actual laugh! And I have been hooked on trying to insert at least one bad joke in every talk I have given ever since.
Since I enjoy humor in talks, lately I’ve been wondering if there isn’t an easier way to make funnier talks. The optimizers list is a good start, but I’m lazy. Which led me to the idea: maybe I can make funnier talks by simply basing my research on things that are inherently funny? I mean, you try taking How a Clebsch-Gordan Transform Helps to Solve the Heisenberg Hidden Subgroup Problem and making a funny talk! On the other hand it is, without a question, nearly impossible to give a talk about Time Travel without (purposefully or not) uttering really awesome (and well timed) jokes.
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State of the ?
Amusing line from a New York Times article this morning:
“Are you aware under what conditions I worked in 1996?” he said by telephone from Mexico. “It’s only because of my lawsuit that you or anybody else can pick up a tape. In those days, I could not leave the archives with that material. I used state-of-the-lost-art equipment. I brought in a team of court reporters to help me with the first drafts.
State-of-the-lost-art? He used a telephonoscope?
Brains, Brains, Brains, Brains
Like many an arrogant kid before me, when I graduate from high school in my podunk hometown (no, it wasn’t marshy, and I say podunk with all the warm feelings of a idyllic childhood), I was filled with confidence that I was one of the smartest people I knew. Oh, I’d never say it, and yes I knew I was good mostly at only one small thing, mathematics, but I’m pretty certain looking back that I was a pretty confident ass. As you can well imagine, then, transitioning from my high school to Caltech, an institution filled with near-perfect-SAT-scoring students, Nobel laureate faculty members, and a wide range of just frickin’ brilliant people, resulted in a large dislocation in my perspective concerning my own capabilities. But over time, I began to realize that, while I wasn’t the sharpest cookie in the cookie jar, every once in a very rare while I could do something worthy of interest to my fellow genii in grooming (mostly jokes, mad rantings, or random acts of bizarreness, if you must know.) Thus I came to the perspective that there was no such thing as a universal genius, that possibly, just possibly, there are people who are good at differing things—little genii of their own domains. It’s often disheartening to sit in a room with a large number of brilliant people, until I remind myself of this fact. And Monday, while doing exactly this form of sitting, I began to ponder the different ways in which these people have their own styles of brilliance. Or, in short, I made a list.
A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction
So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book Outliers: The Story of Success
To balance things out, I’ve also included some thoughts from the improv part of my brain: the part that takes ideas at more than face value and tries to run with them.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!
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Computer Science "Futures"
Ed Lazowska has penned an article over at the CCC blog about the state of computer science enrollments which is well worth reading.
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Word of the Day
A word I accidentally mumbled in class: “crudimentary.” I think it means both rudimentary and crude. Anyway, I like it, and am going to try to start weaseling it into as many talks as I possibly can. Speaking of which, here are slides for a guest lecture I gave to the local alternative models of computing class at UW.