grad students and the aviation industry

the aviation industry owes us grad students bigtime. we make up for their lack of good in-flight entertainment and reading material and provide advisors with entertaining,
and often humorous reading and viewing material.

RITA ROCKS!!

go figure :-)

ode to spam

spam is one of these things that makes you feel important in life

if you dont receive academic spam inviting you to conferences in exotic places and
publishing in obscure journals your standing in the research community is questionable
if you dont receive credit card applications then you dont exist in the view of the
financial world
if you dont receive email spam then you dont have an online presence

today, i have finally been granted a status in the research community -- i have got my first piece of academic spam .. hooray!!

the battle between intelligence and erudition.

there are two kinds of cleverness -- the stuff that arises out of your natural
intelligence, and the stuff that arises out of knowledge/wisdom that you have gained over time.
to kickstart some form of intelligent thinking some learning is required, since it
is often necessary to learn the language/formalism and the tools of the trade
before one can apply the intelligence usefully to problems.
beyond a point however i think learning begins to stifle creativity, and hence
affects your intelligence. there can be many reasons for this, one possible
hypothesis is that the desire to learn outlasts the desire to think, since it
is easier to get engrossed in the knowledge pool out there and it is large enough that you can spend an entire lifetime trying to learn it. the other reason could be that the knowledge begins to affect the way you think -- it rewires your brain in some
subconscious way forcing you to think exactly the way that the sources of wisdom thought. the third reason could be that, too much knowledge can introduce some innate cynicism and scepticism regarding your own competence, you start to feel
that most of your "original" thoughts cease to be original since they would have been stated in some context or another, with high probability. and thus it ceases to incentivize original thinking.