Sorry if this blog is starting to feel like Paul Graham’s RSS feed. I just found time to read the two latest essays How to Be Silicon Valley and Why Startups Condense in America, and besides the usual high quality, they relate to a conversation I had over weekend brunch this month.

I’m glad to see that the people in control of Austria’s education system seem to know what they’re doing. For example, one of the necessary ingredients of a startup hub is a great university, which is exactly what our government is intent on building.

To spawn startups, your university has to be in a town that has attractions other than the university. It has to be a place where investors want to live, and students want to stay after they graduate.

Check[DE]! I bet that the world is full of smart and/or rich people whose dream it is to work in a disused insane asylum that doubled as a Nazi killing ground in WWII.

Shallow political ranting aside, the linked articles make rather worthwile reading, and though they don’t offer that many breathtaking insights, I think they are a pretty good summary of the conditions that help foster the comparative lack of startup culture in places like Vienna.

What good are university grades? I’ve been pondering and discussing this for some time.
My strategy back in school didn’t really have a rational background. I suppose classes somehow ended up in one of three categories. “Interesting” classes were worthy of active participation (resulting in the top grade most of the time), “don’t care” classes didn’t receive any active consideration (top grade or second best), and a number “crap” classes served as my personality quirk outlet where I’d screw up my grade by simply refusing to do assignments or participate in prescribed activities. At the end of the year, this always placed me near, but AFAIK never at, the top of my class. While I’ve nowadays come to see my old behaviour pattern as rather immature and would like to think that maybe some of my school time could have been better spent if there’d been some more advanced stuff to do for the students who were bored in the actual classes, I actually had a really good time during these five years. Since I was really fascinated with my area of specialization, I actually used a lot of my free time to improve upon my skills and learn interesting stuff, even though my schedule contained a daily afternoon nap (between the end of The Simpsons and the end of Baywatch) and a spectacular amount of drinking and other similarly important activity.

In university, the situation has changed slightly. Because I was worried that I wouldn’t make it at all, I spent semester one working really hard and seeing how well I can do. Since the results were near-perfect, I now face the same old decision: Strive for grades or have a good time? To further set up the question, here’s two contrasting quotes:

If you decide you don’t have to get A’s, you can learn an enormous amount in college.
I. I. Rabi, physics Nobel laureate

Never underestimate how big a deal your GPA is. Lots and lots of recruiters and hiring managers, myself included, go straight to the GPA when they scan a resume, and we’re not going to apologize for it. Why? Because the GPA, more than any other one number, reflects the sum of what dozens of professors over a long period of time in many different situations think about your work. SAT scores? Ha! That’s one test over a few hours. The GPA reflects hundreds of papers and midterms and classroom participations over four years.

Joel Spolsky, software entrepreneur

Of course, the first thing to note is that these people probably have different goals in mind. I don’t have context for Rabi’s quote (I came across it in the opening chapter of My Life as a Quant), but the Joel quote is from an essay aimed at CS students looking to optimize their employability. I suspect that Rabi’s quote is from a quite different background, the mystery-shrouded world of exceptional scientists. At least as far as their biographies go, these people seem to be driven by an exceptional curiosity about the world. I’m mildly curious, myself, but that’s one of the things I see suffering when I’m working on grades. Perhaps it’s a good indicator that I never once felt like doing anything physics or mathematics related that I hadn’t been assigned for my coursework since the start of this semester. When I look at my current university life, I feel like an unhappy kid in school, wishing for every lecture to end sooner rather than later and constantly worried about not keeping my test scores in the top group. The only consolation I have is looking back at the enormous amount of things I have learned in the past seven months. Still, I keep asking myself whether this is the way an education is supposed to run – I keep pushing myself to do work I grow to hate progressively more, and at the end, I miraculously discover that I’d now like to do research in that area? It feels wrong.

So, I’m currently toying with the idea of loosening the focus on grades for the second year of university. Here’s an outline of my calculation:

Gains

• Time – there’s an insane amount of work going into the difference between 70%-80% scores and 95% scores, and from then on, it gets harder. Returns seem to be diminishing.
• Peace of Mind – I’ll probably be happier in a less closely metered situation where I can actually justify spending a weekend without any work on university stuff. Maybe I’ll even have enough energy left to actually work on interesting side projects.

Risks

• Money – I hear that there’s grant money available for people who do really well. However, the sums I keep hearing about are paltry, something like two weeks’ worth of work, and competition is intense. I don’t think this one worries me much.
• Laziness – While my current work regime breeds discontent, I do seem to absorb a lot of knowledge that way. I’d like to experiment a bit more with learning on my own, but I’m not quite sure how effective this is going to be. I see this as the biggest danger to the whole plan since it’s rather easy to let my effort levels be guided by outer pressure. Dragging my tired body to every single lecture and doing every problem that I’m assigned is a lot easier than independently assessing that a) I really understand what I’m doing and b) that I’m actually doing as much work as I should. Good ideas on independently packaging large chunks of work like “all of electrodynamics”?
• Signalling – Who will care about my grades? Obviously, grades are somewhat of a signal when aiming for an academic career. The question here is how a curmudgeonly A student does against an enthusiastic B+ student with some ideas that were not picked up from the standard presentation delivered in the lecture. I have no idea. Then, what about the fun parts, like summer schools or visiting semesters abroad? The other people who might care for grades are future employers. Can anyone who graduated in Europe tell me just how important their grades were in this respect?

There’s still a lot of uncertainty left here, but at the moment I figure I just need to give it a try. Sage advice is, of course, welcome. Have you tried and failed? Become a happy slave of the grade machine? Succeeded in having a good time in unversity and still learned a lot?

Bruce Schneier on the value of privacy supplies some great stock answers to the privacy debate’s killer phrase:

“If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”

Some clever answers: “If I’m not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what’s wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these — as right as they are — is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (“Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

I had a passion for the content of physics, but I was also possessed by a hungry ambition for its earthly rewards. Both passion and hunger persisted over the years, despite the inevitable disappointments. Ten years later, as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition’s degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future Tsung-Dao Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France.

This is from My Life as a Quant. Me, I’d be content to just be another Emanuel Derman by now, and I’m still in university.

In a university conversation a few days ago, the subject of turning on your computer at a certain time of the day came up. After some lame Wake-on-LAN suggestions, I suggested the obvious for every aspiring physicist: Build a huge Rube Goldberg contraption to simply press the power button for you, triggered by good old analog clock hands!

A few links later, I was once again watching the entire Pitagora Suicchi video that made the rounds on the Intarweb some time ago. Sadly, it appears that the original Google Video of this stuff disappeared, and now you have to watch it here and manually skip over 1:30 of crap at the beginning and a rather disturbing dance scene in the middle. Pi-ta-go-ra su-i-chi!

Age is of course a fever chill

That every physicist must fear.

He’s better dead than living still

When once he’s past his thirtieth year.

- Paul Dirac

Let’s see, that leaves me with an expected productive work life of… minus one year? Gladly, Leon Lederman thinks that the observation that Dirac so eloquently versified won’t hold in the twenty-first century. The Onion reference is also funny.