On Jan 2, 2008 11:17 PM, John H. Robinson, IV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Bob La Quey wrote: > > > > I gotta say though I will _not_ employ any programmer who considers > > these issues religious. If you really cannot read indented Python > > code then I suppose there are other places, like the university?, > > where you can push your biases upon the unwitting. > > You really have a big problem with Academia, don't you? > > -john
Actually yes I do. I spent a decade in academia and left with a real frustration over the degree to which egos ran rampant and bureaucracies were growing like wild fire. This was almost thirty years ago. About all I see that has changed is, well nothing. The bureaucracies are simply larger. I could have stayed there indefinitely and made a small academic industry of just that one equation, the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky Equation. All I had to do was from 1973 on to publish perhaps one paper each year dealing with this equation, which I had derived as a description of nonlinear ion acoustic modes of oscillation of a Tokamak class plasma, Ta Da! And yes one could be paid a reasonable professional income to do this. ... The equation did not receive its name until 1976 by which time I had not thought about it for a couple of years. The paper which gave Kuramoto the name was published as Y. Kuramoto and T. Tsuzuki, Persistent propagation of concentration waves in dissipative media far from thermal equilibrium, Prog. Theor. Phys. 55 (1976) I do believe that the equation is properly named after the two physicists who decided to spend their entire lives exploring this equation though I do claim to have derived the equation two years earlier and developed some solutions to it. I was _not_ cut out to spend my life that way in an academic environment. I do _not_ lose any sleep over having missed a big academic opportunity. The KS equation is a great example of a nonlinear partial differential equation that exhibits a lot of interesting behavior, e.g. solitons and chaotic behavior. So it supports a few dozen academic experts. Google "kuramoto sivashinsky equation" provides 16,500 hits. For better or worse academics continue to write papers and presumably find new and useful things to say about it ... See for instance http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0951-7715/17/4/012/ matisse.ucsd.edu/~hwa/pub/ks2d.pdf I do believe that there is a real place for academia and for those personalities that fit such an environment. I am not one. I enjoyed hanging out around a university for about a decade but ultimately I decided I would rather free lance and seek a freer less constrained (by discipline, ego and bureaucracy) environment. I have never regretted the decision. So I worked there long enough to see the sausage made and to come to the conclusion that I was neither a maker nor a teacher of sausage making. So it goes, BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
