From Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson:
“But how do you know that the Observatory is on that peak especially?” asked Sniff, craning his neck to see the top, but without success as it was hidden in the clouds.
“Well,” answered Snufkin, “you only have to look at the ground just here. It’s covered with cigarette ends which have obviously been thrown out of the windows by those absent-minded scientists up there.”
A few quotes from a fascinating new book, Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research (Wiley, 2011):
Even within an institution — which should be legally, strategically, and financially incented for alignment, and for maximizing the opportunities for internal collaboration — barriers still exist. The subunits of the institution: its departments, its divisions, its components produce collaboration “walls” of varying substantiality. Organizational lore and personal relationships add another layer of “not-invented here” (NIH) culture, and allegiances to local agendas, even to the point of disadvantaging the larger institutional unit. In fact, if we wish to pursue the elimination of collaboration barriers we have to realize that many barriers are not institutional at all. Choices to collaborate or not collaborate are sometimes based not just on current affiliations but on past affiliations, degrees obtained, reputations, and even a less than rational bias as to just who our collaboration partners should be.
From the telephone interview with Dan Shechtman, the winner of The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011:
Q: What do you think your experience of discovering quasicrystals taught you about science?
A: Oh, it taught me... This is a very good question! You know, it taught me that a good scientist is a humble scientist, somebody who is willing to listen to news in science which are not expected. Because discoveries today are really not expected – if they were expected they would have been discovered a long time ago. So something new, that is forbidden by some laws... people have to listen to this. In most cases, the news is not really news. But in some cases, discoveries are made and should be listened to.
I have no illusions as to how many people read my blog. True, it was never meant to be read by many, but it is always nice to be reassured. Thank you Despair, Inc.! What about you?
Do I remember the August Putsch? Yes. Vividly. Early morning Monday, 19 August 1991, I heard the news on the radio. The classical music followed. On the telly, interminable Swan Lake, just like when Brezhnev (later: Andropov) died. I can’t stand Swan Lake ever since.
The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don’t). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren’t). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I’m sure the same is true for most other large institutions.
One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent.
From The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (translated by Shaun Whiteside):
He was dressed anonymously and had the posture of someone who doesn’t know how to occupy the space of his own body. The professor thought he was another of those who do well in their studies because they are unable to make much headway in life. The ones who, as soon as they find themselves outside the well-trodden paths of the university, always reveal themselves to be fit for nothing.
He looked at the scroll that he held rolled up in his hand, on which it was written in beautiful cursive script that Mattia Balossino was a graduate, a professional, an adult, that it was time for Mr Balossino, B.Sc., to face up to life, and that this meant he had reached the end of the track that he had blindly followed from the first year of primary school to his degree. He was still only half breathing, as if the air didn’t have enough momentum to accomplish the complete cycle.
What now? He wondered out loud.
From Studies in the Park by Anita Desai (Games at Twilight):
My father laid his hand on my shoulder. I knew I was not to fling it off. So I sat still, slouching, ready to spring aside if he lifted it only slightly. “You must get a first, Suno,” he said through his nose, “must get a first, or else you wont get a job. Must get a job, Suno,” he sighed and wiped his nose and went off, his patent leather pumps squealing like mice. I flung myself back in my chair and howled. Get a first, get a first, get a first — like a railway engine, it went charging over me, grinding me down, and left me dead and mangled on the tracks.
In the introduction to The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry, which appears in his book Greatest Hits: His 40 Golden Greats, Adrian Mitchell wrote:
I spent three years at Oxford studying Modern English Literature (500—1815). Allegedly. So I thought I should pass on the fruits of my enhanced brainbox to all and sundry especially the latter. Most of my audience is pretty sundry. It is meant to be spoken by a very old battered poet who has survived from the days when we had pterodactyls instead of critics.
From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) by Robert M. Pirsig:
If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.
From Faster Than the Speed of Light (2003) by João Magueijo:
Regrettably, people are often most proud of their most appalling attributes, and indeed many American scientists appear to be more appreciative of bandwagons than of their Feynman legacy. I once met a girl in New York who was thrilled to find out I was a physicist; but she became terminally disappointed upon hearing that I lived in England and harbored no ambitions to move to the United States. She simply couldn’t understand that. When I asked why, she tried to reply with an example, but she couldn’t remember the name of the physicist in point. She asked me, “Who was the physicist who was better than Einstein, but never came to the U.S. so he never made it?”
From New Rules For Writers by Anis Shivani:
Find ways to be unemployed, doing nothing, finding enough time on your hands, after you’ve met your basic needs, to wander into unknown realms of thought and imagination. You can’t do it when you’re busy working like everyone else, collecting a paycheck, keeping regular hours, depending on the goodwill and collegiality of customers, coworkers, bosses — if you choose employment in academia, it’s no different, you still have clients and bosses to please. Avoid this gentle poison by figuring out ways you can mock the system by taking from it what it needs to give you to maintain your writing, and give it nothing back in return.
