Quotes

Many good things happen to you when you don't care too much about them. Many good things happen to you when you least expect them.

Last term, I had a course with a heavy course work. The competition was tough and the instructor kept mentioning that he will sort the students and mark them based on their rank. If I am not mistaken, he also mentioned that a prefixed percentage of the students will get a low mark. All of the 40 students wanted to rank among the top and earn an A/A+. I thought that being in a tense competition with your fellow classmates was a counter-productive experience. I worked hard, but I didn't overkill myself for a high mark. I got an unexpected high mark at the end. One of my buddies, who consistently kept mentioning that he wanted to "kick ass" in the class, couldn't really understand why I didn't have his competitive attitude. I do possess a competitive attitude and like to put myself under different tests constantly. I just didn't feel that this competition was productive. Anyways, my buddy told me once that perhaps my success was a result of my easy-going attitude toward the competition in that course. That could be true, because every other time that high marks have been important to me (the instances are many), I have scored unreasonably low.

This term many good (non-academic and academic) things happened to me when I expected them the least. For personal reasons, I won't go through the details over a public domain.

But I wonder: Is there a rule that asserts good things happen when you least expect them or care about them?

{quotes.AS} Win big

If you have no fear of losing, you will win big.

{favorite.quotes} 10

"There are 10 types of people in this world; those who understand binary and those who don't."

The above is from an unknown author (perhaps Jill?), I read it at the end of Jill's email today and I thought it was "neat".

{favorite.quote} do not re-invent the square wheel

I have heard that getting the Segway robot to work properly (navigation, localization, etc.) may take quite a while. There are others in the department who have spent years on Segway development. My initial reaction when I heard this was, "nice! There is no need to re-invent the wheel." I am not sure how much this could be true and how much different professors are willing to share their students time. I am just hoping that I do not re-invent a square wheel.

Ironically, today, I read an article by Henry Spencer, "How to Steal Code or Inventing the Wheel Only Once". Somewhere in the article, I found a nice quote,

If you re-invent the square wheel, you will not benefit when somebody else rounds off the corners.
--Collyer & Spencer

PS: Henry Spencer is fun to read. Have you read his "Ten Commandments for C Programmers"?

{favorite.quotes} Research

When you take stuff from one writer it's plagiarism; but when you
take it from many writers, it's research. -Wilson Mizner

It's 112 pages of taking stuff from others expressed in a uniform formalism. Would the examiners think the same? Would they be happy as they read my thesis? Would they give me a hard time? It's only a week from now. Let's wait and see.

{favorite.quotes} Education

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

-Will Durant
US historian (1885 - 1981)

{life.entertainment} Everyone's favorite lioness

The lioness has been reunited with her cub, and all is right in the jungle.

I finally got to see it. Why am I admitting here that I am a boring loser that doesn't catch the movie right when it's released? Anyways ... Unlike many that criticized vol.2 is nothing compared to vol.1, I tended to like the character cooking a lot in it. There are also lots of terrific dialogues in the script.

{quotes} Teamwork

"The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say 'I.' And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say 'I.' They don't think 'I.' They think 'we'; they think 'team.' They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but 'we' gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done."
Peter Drucker

I have attached this quote to my formal email signature after having one of those boring and stressful lab meetings a few weeks ago, where everyone was deliberately criticizing the others' capability of working in team. Typical Iranian mentality. I've done it since I believe that indirect speech works better sometimes.

{quotes} No border line

"Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality." Goethe

I so much wished this was true in the 21st century.

{quotes} Simplicity

" Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler." Albert Einstein

{quotes} Science vs. Wisdom

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life." Immanuel Kant

Mensch! Live an organized life.

Quoting from Hommer

In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics!

{quotes} Apples, Ideas, and Publications

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." George Bernard Shaw

How about this: I am writing a paper and you are writing a paper. If I put your name as the co-author, and you put mine as the co-author, we will both have two papers.

While I strongly agree with the GB Shaw to exchange ideas, I do not think that the common trend in most research institutions adds any value to academic excellence. Some categorize it as excellent team work. Equally worse, I have even heard it as a win-win situation, but I think most of time it should clearly be categorized as academic fraud.