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Discussion point: Laugh? I almost learned something • UK Centre for Materials Education

By Professor Peter Goodhew, Director of the UK Centre for Materials Education

"Scientists and engineers are, by and large, a rather earnest mob. Most of us (and I admit to being in the club myself) believe that our chosen profession is intrinsically interesting and of huge importance to society. Small wonder that we think that others should take it seriously too. Oscar Wilde had a few words to say about the importance of being earnest, and among them are a couple of my favourite aphorisms. "Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow" and "Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness" .

Science and engineering are important - far too important to take seriously, so what is the alternative? Obviously they should be fun. Why, after all, do many academics enjoy practising their profession? Surely not because it makes them rich - it must just be fun. However our idea of fun is seen by the outside world to be limited to a separate category of activity, sometimes called, rather pompously, "The Public Understanding of Science" or "Science for Schools" as if the fun is reserved for external public consumption to counter the fact that the real thing is dry as dust. On the contrary - surely the fun should permeate every scientific or engineering activity, including education. [more....]

Professor Goodhew is a man after my own heart. There's excellent advice in this article.

Incidentally, this article was found via David Davies' MedWeb Technology Test Area : LTSN News Feed Search. Thanks David!

Gareth told me that his photos can now be found at his Odd Cobbled Together Galleries of Stuff. So far all that there is:

Gunc Dunc
Duncan Smeed the kind, if mis-guided, individual who allowed himself to get cold water poured on him on a cold March morning in 1999 for Comic Relief.

I repaired Gareth's link in my Comic Relief page too!

Eudora 5.1b18 regularly crashes on me. Fortunately it never lost any e-mail but it was annoying nevertheless. According to the 51.b20 reaease notes a number of crashing bugs have been squashed. So I'm downloading Eudora 5.1b20 right now - slowly ;-) Fingers crossed that this version will be much more stable.

"Radio, the latest Frontier(tm). These are the voyages of the starship... Optimise. It's continuing mission: to explore strange new macros, to seek out slow code, and non-optimisations, to quickly go where slow ones have gone before!" [Duncan Smeed]

Check this out. Brilliant! - humor_pong.swf

Update: The bug is fixed. Thanks Seth!. And it's fast. Seth is caption captain of the starship Optimise ;-)

The RSS feed for this site is currently broken. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

On a related note: I must investigate the use of a custom weblog view to generate RSS. Steve Ivy is already doing this.

EE Times - AMD to buy MIPS processor startup Alchemy

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plans to acquire Alchemy Semiconductor Inc. and pit that company's MIPS-based processor architecture against Intel Corp.'s Xscale processors, broadening an already fierce rivalry to the embedded front, sources said.

UserTalk: string concatenation optimisation

Executive Summary: The non-optimal version of string addition/concatenation in UserTalk - text = text + "b" + "r\n" - is exponentially slower than the optimised version for non-trivial strings. It's worth looking at your own code to see if you can make similar optimisations. The optimised version scales linearly with string length.

via HtP not surprisingly since Wes is a speaker at the Collaborative Computing in Higher Education: Peer-to-Peer and Beyond workshop.