I received an interesting e-mail this morning with the following text:
i saw your blog after finding your paper on ranking sports teams with a
markov chain. (that is a sortuh interesting topic but after 5 minutes on
your paper i decided to google elsewhere to see if there is anything a
little shorter; there are thousands of these most of which appear to be
rewrites, but then the paper on n-th excited state of the h-atom may in a
sense be a rewrite of the paper on the n-1st.). there does not appear to
be a good source on markov chains in fact (either they are for elementary
school or they immediately turn into a 'theorem/proof' stream of
consiousness). of course, googling for the answer is lazy in a sense, or a
'sociological' study. (who thinks what?)
i saw your post on the la times article, and was going to comment but
forgot my google password. i would just say that it seems to me that
situation (good or bad) is partly due to the fact that people at cal tech
spend alot of time writing papers like yours. in a sense, it may be as
lazy as buying an suv or trashing one---there may be better time allocations
(but i guess everyone is an ant following a pherenome trail). it also
suggests that 'genius' may not be all its cooked up to be.
i guess the alternative would be to say, teach calculus outside of
caltech and prison. (or markov chains). but, as opposed to laziness, that
might be too difficult a problem to solve. or, maybe one could see if your
algorithm works for ranking american idol candidates.
So, I guess the conclusion is that if we want to avoid more "ecoterrorism" incidents, people at Caltech should stop spending so much time writing esoteric scientific articles.
Any good ideas for what I should do with my life now?
4 days ago
3 comments:
I think your anonymous emailer doesn't know what he/she's talking about. There are plenty of good sources on markov chains, however if one has a short attention span, I wouldn't recommend trying to read up on scientific subjects without being willing to spend a few minutes on it.
They also fail to make a logical link between writing papers like yours (or any theoretical paper) and the SUV ecoterrorism incident. It usually requires some evidence to make a point, I don't see anything there. The minor point that there may be better time allocations compared to doing ecoterrorism doesn't address this at all, the people who feel very strongly about that situation clearly think that caring about SUV's (silly as it may be) is a better time allocation.
Also, their final line gave me a great laugh. Use the algorithm for ranking american idol candidates? That's just a different application, and in no way changes the underlying thinking/theoretical work you're interested in, which appeared to be their major complaint.
Judging from the quality of the writing in this e-mail, the person who wrote it wasn't thinking very clearly at the time. He or she might benefit from some of the rigorous study and challenging courses you and your friends worked your way through at Caltech.... I don't think I would give this person another thought (or space on my blog!)
I basically posted this comment to mock the guy (and he wanted to post to the blog anyway). Crackpottery comes in several forms.
He certainly could spend some more time on his spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, but I didn't bother responding.
Also, the e-mail had at least part of his name, so I wouldn't count it as anonymous. But, yeah, I'm not taking him seriously.
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