Author: bryan

If you’re going to be a middling celebrity, at least you can have sense of humor about it

Apropos my bitching about academic talks is one guy’s explanation for leaving the field of graphics altogether. It would be nice to be able to explain away his complaints as the bitterness of failure, but that wouldn’t be fair–he isn’t a failure and he’s incredibly brave to post his thoughts on the field where speaking your mind on these topics is tantamount to professional suicide. I say bravo.

Most of you know that I’ve already generated enough cynicism about the high echelons of academia to last me tidily the three more years I am scheduled to remain ensconced in this ivory tower. But I’m not going to let that keep me from sharing a little bit more–this time it’s about “talks.”

I was lucky (in many ways) to end up this year with a paper in this year’s SIGGRAPH. The reward for such an achievement, besides a little ribbon that hangs from your name tag at the conference, is the chance to give a 20-minute talk presenting your paper to whomever decides to show up, possibly several hundred people. Now, everyone knows how I like to talk, and I do have a geniune affection for the act of teaching, so by all signs the talk promised to be lots of fun. I was very pumped up over the chance to share the work we did, excited about all the cute pictures I would make to explain it all. And indeed, creating the talk has been a blast. What I’m not so crazy about is the way I’ve had to change it to meet the “standards” of the academic community.

The fact of the matter is, maybe 1-5 people sitting at your talk will have already read your paper, and the majority of those people are your coauthors. The rest of the people are there because they do research in a similar field, or just want to see some pretty pictures. My thought was, “if any of these people actually want to use my stuff, they’ll go read the paper. So, let’s go heavy on the pretty pictures, and light on the ugly math.” This is, after all, what I love more than anything about graphics as opposed to other fields. The results aren’t just graphs of results or performance metrics or proofs. They’re basically shiny, pretty pictures. And pictures are something people can appreciate even if they don’t understand where they came from. So, my plan of attack was to just skip the math all together.

Wrong! You see, in academia, if you don’t confuse your audience unnecessarily, it means that you’re too stupid to manage it. The most important goal of your talk isn’t to advertise your method; it’s to advertise yourself. When some academics watch a presentation, and they follow it easily, and the don’t pull any brain muscles in the process, rather than coming to the conclusion that the presentation was a success, they think one of the following:

• There was no math! That idea must be trivial. Not even a single triple integral or partial differential equation!
• That presenter must be pretty dumb to not have managed to confuse me even once in his whole presentation! I mean, I’m not even one of the five people in the world working in his area. I should have been completely baffled.
• I’m one of the five people in the world working in his area. I can’t believe he didn’t derive each equation in his paper! It would only have taken about 15 of the 20 minutes, and I would have understood it perfectly! He’s coddling the audience.

And universally, all of these people would walk away with the impression of the speaker that:

If he were serious about making it in this world, he should have abused his audience more. Why couldn’t he be a bit more of a dick about his intelligence?

Of course, only a handful of people in the audience come to these kind of conclusions (I hope). I like to believe that the rest of the audience might be like me and appreciate the real goals of the talk. In fact, there are many brave presenters who do just exactly what I aspire to do, and despite all the praise I have for them, bad things probably get said behind their backs. I’ve heard it done. For now though, I’m an apprentice. The masters of the academy are doing their work, imparting these nuggets of wisdom. I just thought I’d share this one with you.

Io has been living up to her name, stuck running windows pretty much every night for the last week or so. It all started with Doug and George during last weekend’s 24hr-videogameathon. I brought down the new toy, we watched George play Final Fantasy VII (probably the best RPG I’ve ever played) while Doug and I tried to conquer the civilized world in Civilization IV:

The damned game is as addictive as ever–I think we played for about 6 hours straight while sitting there. We lost, tragically, outpaced in the prehistoric land-grab by wiley Abe Lincoln of the Americans (each civilization has one representative leader throughout history; I was Ghandi). We were never really able to recover, since we had sunk all our resources into building space ships instead of caravels in a world filled with islands.

The other part of my windows gaming renaissance has been Half Life 2. Unlike most games that primarily involve running around shooting people with increasingly large guns, this game entertains the heck out of me. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where some sort of aliens from another dimension have come to dominate the human race. In the future, you can tell whether someone is evil merely by the presence of a gas mask:

I also just noticed today that comments have been busted for maybe a month. Now that I’ve fixed it I expect the customary torrent of adulation to resume.

It took a few weeks to come in, but now my new toy is in my hot little hands:

I named it Io mostly because I thought it was a cool word but also because Io was beautiful, but ended up looking like a cow just like me running Windows on my poor, beautiful mac. It’s been a lot of fun playing with it… I’m still not quite used to the idea of a laptop that’s this fast–a Apple laptop at that. Neat toys besides the ability to run windows include a remote-controlled movie player, a built-in camera with a silly program called Photo Booth that has so far produced such gems as these:

I’m sure it can do useful things too, I’m just not so interested in them yet.

An interesting discovery I’ve made this summer. Now, you and me both know that I’m not really unpaid. I’m wrapped in the warm blanket of beneficence that is the NSF. But, despite the fact that when I wake up in the morning it makes no difference to anyone but me whether I show up at the lab or not, I have been. Like, every day. This is a feat I can’t usually muster during the school year, so I think it’s kind of interesting. It probably has something to do with the fact that Leslie has this full-time job, and also something to do with the fact that I’m not really wired up properly to be a full-fledged slacker. Or maybe it has something to do with actually enjoying my work.

I’m sure you all know about the time I’ve spent thinking and writing about smoke. Smoke has been good to me. But I don’t know if things are going to work out, long term. In every relationship, there are compromises. I tried to convince smoke to be a bit more fun, spontaneous. Take me out dancing once in a while. But all smoke ever had to say was

Over and over, like a broken record. So, we had to part ways. It’s okay, though… I’ve got several rebound projects going already. I won’t tell you about them until there are some pretty pictures to go along with the dry, dry explanations. But they are keeping me entertained.

The verdict on paragliding: it’s fun, but damn is it not as easy as I thought it would be. I mean, I figured you just sort of run off the hill, your in the air. No… think of it more like flying a giant kite that is big enough to drag you around and to which you are inescapably harnessed. We had a blast, but it was clear that pretty much every remaining weekend of the summer would need to be devoted to the training. Also, wading through waist-high weeds and grass had the wonderful effect of turning my upper respiratory system into snot factory and swelling my eyes shut. I’m not sure what sort of associations I’d be building up in my head if i went in for that kind of abuse every weekend. I can see myself maybe giving it another shot when I’m slightly richer or it’s less of an effort/expense. Maybe in europe? We’ll see.

In other exciting (yet sad) news, my trusty old iBook is on the way out. Now, realize that I’ve been with this computer longer than I have been with Leslie. It’s been completely ripped apart and reassembled, several times, mostly with parts from the trash at apple, so much of the identity may be gone, but in my heart it’s still the same guy. The reason it’s going is that I got an absurd deal on a shiny new MacBook Pro through school. The durn thing can boot windows, so I’m mostly excited right now by the prospect of playing every worthwhile PC game that I’ve missed for the last 5 years. Civ IV anyone?

So, on that road trip that Les and I took a few weeks back, I took with me a new toy: a Nintendo DS:

This is the current incarnation of the venerable gameboy, and the first portable video game system I’ve bought since my parents used that monochrome classic to shut me and my brother up on long plane rides. Things have come a long way since then, what with touch-sensitive screens and wireless gaming. But the thing that actually got me in the store to buy it was a new super mario game. My love of the little plumber is no secret, and I was near-catatonic with pure joy at the idea of a new, 2D platformer in the classic vein:

I played through most of it on the trip, loving every minute, and just polished off every last bit of coin-collecting today, in the classic “completionist” style which I reverently bring to all mario games I touch (and cannot muster even for classics such as Final Fantasy VII). I would say that the game alone paid for the cost of the system (which is now defuct anyway, since they have the fancy new DS lite), and I have barely even touched the other two games I bought for it, Brain Age and Animal Crossing. I never saw myself as a “portable gamer,” and indeed most of the time I’ve played since we got home has been ironically reclined on our couch in front of an inert, 27-inch TV screen while squinting at the DS’s diminutive pair. Still, the machine has revived at least some of my flagging ethusiasm for video games in general, and has got me that much more excited to buy one of those inscrutably named Wiis when the time comes.