Still, I feel I could take any of my students and in one month have them up to speed on what to look for and what things mean.
And I don't mean to suggest that finding challenging work is any sort of failing of my employer. I have been able to diversify the position to include doing graphics in R and some stats things and, along with some other people, I think we can sell some sexy Bayesian things.
They are very receptive of new ideas, but... it is not a growing industry (thankfully), so any sort of advance is going to be a jump to a different field. Which is possible, and I'm working on it.
My point primarily is when you read these things about people doing all sorts of wonderful exciting things, you get the impression that what you have done or are doing is crap. Perhaps it's nice to hear that a lot of people do not set the world on fire. Takes a little pressure off.
Is there anything even tangentially related to your dayjob that you could mine for ideas? Or maybe take some time to come up with some research direction?
A places like Oak Ridge could have something interesting available.
Pick up a copy of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.
I, too, read the Strogatz book :^).
We used this textbook by Devaney: https://www.amazon.com/First-Course-Chaotic-Dynamical-System...
Was absolutely fascinated by the class. One of my favorites from undergrad.
I wonder if there's a good sort of "postmortem" on what happened to NLD and Chaos. It seems like everyone said, "Ok, that's a thing and it explains a lot but we can't do anything with it."
As a further aside, I do get to do some fun graphics in R and I'm pretty impressed how R has become the statistical standard and graphics too, mainly I think from one super dynamic statistician.
Now that R is entrenched I can work on moving everyone into Haskell!
So pure and innocent. I've found that programmers are not too fond of having even a simple IO operation lead to discussions of category theory. Good luck in your noble lambda crusade :-). The future is functional! Hack the type systems!
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"""For years I worked as a computer guy for an academic department and that was fun and I'm trying to get back into it"""
Sounds like you could enjoy automating your work. Learn a bit of Python and some Machine Learning/Deep Learning and digitize the handwriting and build a little program that reads the stuff for you. The default example for reading handwritten digits is called MNIST if you want to read further. I'd suggest fast.ai and watching the first couple of lessons. That should get you started to play around with this. You don't have to tell anyone that you do this (I probably wouldn't) but hey at least it might be a nice way to do a little less boring stuff and ease into a bit of programmin/data science?
First of all, you definitely don't want any chance of incorrect recognition of handwriting coming from a nuclear weapons plant.
Secondly, who knows what policies he might violate by using some unauthorized, untested software (whether OP is the author or not) with potentially sensitive information.
First of all, you definitely don't want any chance of incorrect recognition of handwriting coming from a nuclear weapons plant.
On paper it saved a lot of man hours but it was never fully rolled out. The project didn't have a long lifespan and we had enough people sitting around doing nothing to just manually do all the work. But I got a nice award for it LOL.
Then deciding on his own on the advice of HN that he should try a car for that task instead, the car breaking down, and the guy getting fired because his employer never approved of this whole "car" thing and he shouldn't have introduced that into his job workflow without having talked to his employer about it.
I am looking into auto-scrolling pdfs and batch loading, sequencing of pdfs to make things easier. But I will definitely check out fast.ai - thanks!
I have a bachelors in physics. I went for a phd in biology but had to bail to work to support family, plus I can't seem to come up with original ideas.
I now have a job with physicist as part of the title, but what I really do is try to read bad handwriting from records from nuclear weapons plants. It's a dull job a monkey could do but it pays the bills. For years I worked as a computer guy for an academic department and that was fun and I'm trying to get back into it but nothing yet. I teach math at a community college for fun too.
I have great kids, so all and all I'm happy about things, but I am sad the physics thing never panned out. As an undergrad I was excited about chaos and nonlinear dynamics. Still read math texts for fun and play with Haskell.