(Untitled)

[mmoa]

Ahahaha. 'The Manifold Joys of Complex Mapping'. Oh get you. So funny.

EDIT: Actually, it's not so bad when you stop making mistakes that would make your sixteen year old self hang her head in shame.

I also recently discovered that one of my lecturers was involved in some sort of mild scuffle (I say scuffle, but this is the heady world of Cosmology

Comments

[flutterbyeaten]

I recently attended Biophysics 2010 in the US - you would be amazed at the hostility exhibited by academics during the post-talk question slots... some of them were wince-worthy!

[mmoa]

I can imagine. They're only human after all, but sometimes you want say "that's right, guys, you keep on behaving with the dignity your profession deserves as if come the next 50 years, a new paradigm won't have made all this stuff petty bordering on irrelevant..."

Ah, well. It's all good stuff.

[Extra: I wasn't really that surprised to learn about the scuffle, tbh. A few weeks ago, the School held a colloquium on Gravitational Waves which the same lecturer also attended. I can only say he didn't seem particularly impressed but what cracked me up was the way there was a whole posse of them - him included - like the bad kids in a classroom, ready to heckle and catcall at the slightest opportunity.]

[flutterbyeaten]

The worst that I saw left my jaw on the floor. It was excruciatingly embarrassing.

A Ph.D. student was standing in for another group member at short notice, and I thought he gave a rather good attempt at talking us through someone else's work. One of the old boys heads up to the microphone and proceeds to lure this boy into a trap through three questions, before interrupting his answer to the third by announcing "I see, you just think that BSA is a magical protein that will solve all your problems" and walking off. The poor student was still answering and nobody knew where to look. The guy had a point but that didn't seem the best way to make it!

And yes - naughty kids at the back is a default position for a lot of academics. My boss has even been known to give someone a metaphorical bitch slap over their research when he's chairing the session. After an overly long talk: "thank you Jason for that comprehensive review of other peoples' work, most interesting" (!) Le sigh.

[mmoa]

OUCH.

Most of the talks I've attended everyone's been pretty well behaved. Most of them were extra, sort-of advanced lectures that you were meant to go to for the experience so there were a lot of starstruck sixth-formers in the audience. The colloquium I mentioned? One of my lecturers colleagues asked a question (which wasn't particularly snarky) but my lecturer was not at all impressed (and even did the slow three-clap at the end). In fact, he was working on a presentation and paying not a bit of attention for most of the talk like the smart-asses who come into lectures with their laptops (WHY????). It was tres amusant.

Not that I blame him. The speaker glossed over a lot of the more disreputable history of the search for Gravitational Waves - even going so far as to turn what was a genuinely stupid mistake into a martyr's dying cry for better equipment (no shame whatsoever, I swear!).