...or perish.

[greatblondelf]

Hey everyone, looks like my paper:

Characteristics of multiprocessing MCNP5 on small Personal Computer clusters, is going to be puublished in the next issue of the Journal of Instrumentation (JINST) - http://jinst.sissa.it/jinst/help/helpLoader.jsp?pgType=about ( Read more... )

Comments

[erinthewanderer]

i think i'll just go up a few more ranks in baiting, hopefully someday i'll be a master.

[greatblondelf]

I trust that you go "fly fishing" plenty often.... ;)

[clipdude]

That's really cool!

[greatblondelf]

Thanks! I really need to get several more things out this year, both to get them off of my plate and to get them into my CV...

[guenievre]

Congratulations; becoming published seems to be one of those monumental accomplishments that reinforces one's status as a *real scientist*. Or something. At any rate, it's one of those things that I wish for, aspire to, and far too often suspect is leagues above my capabilities. But when people I actually know achieve such, it revives my hope of similarly drawing down the moon

[greatblondelf]

*blushes red* I certainly wouldn't say "beyond your capabilities," for a second. Honestly, a lot of the time I'd cite sheer endurance, rather than raw intelligence or even overwhelming knowledge, as the most necessary component for bringing knowledge into the world this way. Then again, there is the ubiquitous component of credentials, but even that can be achieved, with time.

Actually, on that note, I was going to ask if you were interested in the next set of parapsychology experiments I was hoping to run. Thus far, I haven't actually published any of them, though a lot of my efforts have been in calibration of the methodology and gaining an understanding of the psychological elements at work.

Anyway, it's one of those things that isn't really endorsed by my employer, and thus, one of the many things that I only get to indulge in within my "outside of work" life. You seemed to have a lot of interesting ideas in the vein, so I was hoping you'd sit down with me sometime and work them out, if you're interested.

[guenievre]

Endurance is an underrated element in genius, I believe. I'm remembering a recent conversation that contrasted the "American dream" with the Japanese work ethic. The way I understand it, the American dream assigns a great deal of importance to the "big break": some showy, impressive feat of brilliance with immediate payoffs. Conversely, the Japanese philosophy seems more interested in changing the small, more mundane components of life, and reaching goals through time. I hadn't realized just how much I carried the American perspective within my own approach to life, but I think that such a view isn't conducive to scientific discovery. Or, as despair.com so eloquently put it, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad. (physicists, fortunately, seem disposed to direct a bit of that effort toward showering

[greatblondelf]

Honestly, I hadn't considered that aspect of the "american dream" so completely before. Perhaps foolishly, I had thought the "dream" revolved around a strong work ethic, and the gradual accumulation of resources and strength, because of an ever-increasing set of skills and abilities. Now that I think about it, I realize that that's closer to my image of what "everyone should want," than what they actually do. That aside, there is a great deal of failure (or, as I like to think of it, "becoming familiar with what is wrong") involved in science, to the point that many strong students who are mostly used to doing homework problems (and doing them correctly) end up an emotional shambles when dealing with all the myriad wrong turns that can be made in the process of actual investigation. Even so, the necessary endurance does pay some major dividends, in the end. So often, in the course of learning, people who "need to always be right" end up becoming people who "quit as soon as they're wrong." Although this sounds totally counter-