Quotes

Misc

• Too much money spent on looking good, not enough on looking to do good.

• None of us is as smart as all of us.

• When an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.

• A Pure Land is something that appears. Its not something that is constructed.
  Tsang-Yang Gyamtso

• Buddhists would say its OK to have one ignorance, which is thinking there is a result.
  Dzondzar Khentse

• This sentence does not exist in some absolute sense, also the author does not exist as they appear and neither do you really exist.

• I'm accustomed to my dentures
  To my deafness I am resigned
  I can cope with my bi-focals
  But - God - I miss my mind!

So You Want To Do A PhD?

From a usenet newsgroup in the 1990s...

> A friend of mine wants to get her PhD in Computer Science,
> specializing in the Machine Learning aspect of Artificial
> Intelligence. She has been in the library and collected a list
> of the likely schools, but the list is too long for her to
> apply to all the schools on it. Accordingly, she asked me if I
> would ask the net for suggestions. If you wanted to study
> machine learning, where would you go and why?

I believe that the procedure of evaluating a SCHOOL is onlycsuitable when the undergraduate education is being considered. For a graduate student, especially a PhD candidate, the first step to prove his or her scientific maturity is to identify the area of his/her OWN interest. Myself, I am expecting a PhD student to come with a reasonable degree of aggression and violence to prove that:

1. I don't understand anything in my own area of expertise;

2. It really does not matter, since my area is doomed in any case;

3. The applicant has a marvelous idea which will save both me and mankind from the obsolete approach (not that it will happen at the end of the exercise, but that is a different story).

Would anything less do? On a practical note I advise her to do the following:

1. Find a couple of good reviews in the library that deal with the subject (machine learning?)

2. Loosely identify 2-3 sub-areas if interest.

3. Find fresh publications in these areas. Based on them, define which circle of problems/methods really appeal to her. Just  intuition will do.

4. Based on the same publications identify major players in these areas whose works sound exciting.

5. Contact these INDIVIDUALS and ask their advise (who is the best PERSON to give responses, rather than what you will get "at random". Yes, they may not speak about dormitories or the "perceived importance" of the college, but does it really matter where the good researcher is located? What if it is in the USA, Japan or the UK? For a PhD student it should not be a major obstacle.

6. Come to the person selected and convince him/her that without you (see a-c above...). Propose a couple of research subjects. At the end, settle for the subject HE gives to you. It is less likely that she'll have a major disappointment at the end of this long exercise.

Sorry for the basic stuff. It's just that I've seen so many PhDs who would be far happier if they were insurance agents... If only someone would explain the basic facts of scientific life to them beforehand...

Nahum Goldmann

One can meet a person like this... articulate, but a poor communicator...

For Arthwait could not speak with becoming unintelligibility; to knot a sentence up properly it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introduced; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.

This is not to be achieved in a moment; it is not enough to write disconnected nonsense; it must be possible for anyone acquainted with the tortuosities of the author's mind to resolve the sentence into its elements, and reproduce -- not the meaning, for there is none, but the same mental fog from which he was originally suffering. An illustration is appended. 

Pneumaticals                                   Omnient

(spirits)                                               (all)

Tabernacular                                  Subinfractically

(dwelling)                                          (Below)

Homotopic                                     hermeneutical

 (this)                                                (magic)

Ru-volvolimperipunct,                    suprorientalize,

 (circle)                                              (arise)

factote                                    kinematodrastically,

 (move)                                             (soon)

overplus                                     phenomenize!

 (and)                                              (appear)

from the novel Moon Child by A. Crowley... allegedly as a comment on the writing style of real life Arthur Edward Waite...