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So, this week's 
Thursday_Prompt involved the word 'margin', and the requirement to add a totally made-up dictionary definition of the word to the start of the story.
As somebody with a fair bit of a math background (I used to do math contests for fun back in high school) my brain jumped to Fermat's Last Theorem, which was indeed mentioned by Fermat in the margin of a book he was annotating, with a comment that he had a proof of the conjecture in the book, but it was too big to fit in the margin. From there I jumped to the idea that it could easily be an academic slang term to refer to any theory which may or may not exist but which definitely hasn't been formally documented, and things just kind of rolled out from there.
I do have some ideas on where to go from here. I also note this isn't the first story I wrote involving a pair of grad students dealing with a professor who was doing things behind their backs on them...
Thursday_Prompt involved the word 'margin', and the requirement to add a totally made-up dictionary definition of the word to the start of the story.As somebody with a fair bit of a math background (I used to do math contests for fun back in high school) my brain jumped to Fermat's Last Theorem, which was indeed mentioned by Fermat in the margin of a book he was annotating, with a comment that he had a proof of the conjecture in the book, but it was too big to fit in the margin. From there I jumped to the idea that it could easily be an academic slang term to refer to any theory which may or may not exist but which definitely hasn't been formally documented, and things just kind of rolled out from there.
I do have some ideas on where to go from here. I also note this isn't the first story I wrote involving a pair of grad students dealing with a professor who was doing things behind their backs on them...
Category Story / General Furry Art
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 50 x 50px
File Size 11 kB
Listed in Folders
Heh. While I only went as far as a Masters degree myself (in Electrical Engineering), I did have to do a thesis for that, and I've known a few Ph.D.s and have heard enough people complain about the whole grant process to at least have some idea of where I'm faking it.
And when I said I did math contests for fun, I wasn't joking. (Okay, I did actually end up going to the International Mathematics Olympiad one year, which was a truly humbling experience to somebody who'd spent much of life as the smartest person in class.)
And when I said I did math contests for fun, I wasn't joking. (Okay, I did actually end up going to the International Mathematics Olympiad one year, which was a truly humbling experience to somebody who'd spent much of life as the smartest person in class.)
BTW, if you think this would help, feel free to use it as a thumbnail:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/879896/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/879896/
Bwahaha.
You familiar with Randall Monroe, the creator of the webcomic xkcd?
I actually got to listen to him speak once when he was on a book tour, and he was talking about when he did contract work for NASA on robotics. He'd been working on an 'exploration' algorithm, and once he got the robot prepped, he looked at this over-engineered mil-spec robot, and wondered if it would be able to pull his weight; so he got an office chair and a length of ethernet cable and basically got the robot to tow him along while it was on its exploraiton run. Even after it discovered that the door was open and started taking him down the hallways.
He finished telling that anecdote with 'The next year, my contract did not get renewed...'
You familiar with Randall Monroe, the creator of the webcomic xkcd?
I actually got to listen to him speak once when he was on a book tour, and he was talking about when he did contract work for NASA on robotics. He'd been working on an 'exploration' algorithm, and once he got the robot prepped, he looked at this over-engineered mil-spec robot, and wondered if it would be able to pull his weight; so he got an office chair and a length of ethernet cable and basically got the robot to tow him along while it was on its exploraiton run. Even after it discovered that the door was open and started taking him down the hallways.
He finished telling that anecdote with 'The next year, my contract did not get renewed...'
Back when I was at Drexel, I had a Mercedes carb on my desk. A visitor came in. "Hi, Mitch! What's that?"
"Hi, Alan! Mercedes carburetor I just overhauled!"
"Wow! I'm impressed! Never could do that myself!"
And with that, Professor Alan MacDiarmid, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, went in to see my boss...
Can't say I've ever met a Nobel Prize winner. Have met a Fields Prize winner (though that was before he'd won the prize) and did end up talking about my work with a cosmonaut once (Georgy Grechko; Canada and Russia were collaborating on a space-based VLBI radio astronomy project at the time, what would later launch as Spektr-R).
Heh. Works that he's a little 'old-fashioned', then.
And yes, Majorana particles are actually a thing, and there really is currently a debate over whether or not neutrinos are in that category.
And yes, Majorana particles are actually a thing, and there really is currently a debate over whether or not neutrinos are in that category.
Yeah this does remind me of a saying my mother taught me while she navigated public school board meetings...
"I'd rather be influential than powerful, because power only lasts as long as you can hold onto it. Influence is a lot more fragile, but if you're careful it can outlast whatever position you had. And a little bit of influence in the right place at the right time can trump any amount of power. In short, don't ignore the 'little people'. They might not technically run things, but they're the reason things stay running."
"I'd rather be influential than powerful, because power only lasts as long as you can hold onto it. Influence is a lot more fragile, but if you're careful it can outlast whatever position you had. And a little bit of influence in the right place at the right time can trump any amount of power. In short, don't ignore the 'little people'. They might not technically run things, but they're the reason things stay running."
My mother and my grandfather (her father-in-law, not her father) were both teachers. One of my friends used to comment that the person you never wanted to piss off in a big company was whoever was running the mail room. 'Administrative Assistants' are the people who know where the grease and glue are to keep things running so everybody else can focus on their own jobs. And I've commented a few times that I know so many of the con-runners around here (despite not having been directly involved in running a con for almost thirty years) that if I really wanted to completely crater a con I probably could. Of course, nobody would ever trust me again after that, which is yet another reason not to do it...
In short, fully agreed.
In short, fully agreed.
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