Major König: I’ll fix it so that he’s the one who finds me.
2015-06-25
2015-06-19
2015-06-10
“Who you are” matters much more than “whom you are affiliated with”
Birds of a feather flock together.
Our affiliation does reflect our own quality to some degree.
On the other hand, the prestige of institutions is becoming less important due to the internet and social media.
And really top people can transform a not-so-top institution into a top one.
2015-06-08
Email address etiquette
It is fine to have creative or personalized email addresses, but use your judgement, e.g. sexybaby@hotmail.com is probably not suitable for professional communications.
If you have multiple email accounts which you cannot check with sufficient frequency, just set automatic forwarding to a single (default) account. You can also setup (e.g. via SMTP) that single default account to reply on behalf of the other aliases.
If you do not intend to use a particular email account, disable or delete it so that people would not expect reply from there.
2015-05-31
Should we submit?
The deadline is approaching and we have this paper that might or might not be ready. Should we submit?
A lot can be learned only by going through actually paper review cycles. So it pays off to do our best to meet the deadline.
On the other hand, a bad submission might get its potentially good ideas scooped by the reviewers without receiving much useful feedback.
Thus, I recommend submitting only those with a reasonable chance of getting accepted but let the first author make the final call as the tie breaker.
A related post: why strong labs sometimes submit weak papers
2015-05-01
2015-04-16
Exponential ignorance
The ratio of collective over my knowledge is growing at an exponential rate. It feels like drowning.
Human evolution is too slow for and has yet to benefit from our recent technology advance. Some cybernetic or genetic intervention may save us.
2015-04-14
To my future self
Even if you are 88 years old with terminal cancer lying in the middle of the Gobi desert while being pointed at by an AK47, you can still overcome every obstacle just like we always do.
That is all you need to remember.
2015-04-10
Stop killing trees
It is the 21st century. Please, send me electronic instead of paper documents.
Meanwhile, I wonder if there is a way to automatically bounce all incoming physical mails back to the original senders.