neworder

I second that. Crpgaddict's work ethic is beyond legendary, at times bordering on insanity. Honestly, I find Chet's blog to be one of the best and most valuable places on the internet these days (and I mean this literally). A modern day's monk, really.

Just for the record, "horses against tanks" is well known to be propaganda bullshit.

There is a fundraising effort to fund the translation of Grothendieck's biography, written by Winfried Scharlau: http://www.gofundme.com/7ldiwo

I've read the 1st volume of the biography and fully recommend it, so if you find AG's life interesting, you can consider donating a few bucks.

> Further, it shocks me at how bad the graphics are at some of these games after looking at them again after decades.

I played MI 1 and 2 in the early 1990s and after revisiting them after 15 years or so, my impression was exactly the opposite: "Look how well the graphics has aged!". Yes, pixels are there, but the aesthetic value of locations, landscapes etc. is relatively unaffected, it's still pleasing to watch (esp. in MI2). I think this says something about the quality of graphic design in those games.

Just a side note - you're probably conflating Perimeter Institute (www.perimeterinstitute.ca) and Institute for Quantum Computing (http://iqc.uwaterloo.ca/). Both are in Waterloo, but it's the latter that is involved in developing quantum computing implementations.

Maybe the article itself is a honeypot.

"The Wire" is not "some TV cops and robbers show", but a complex narrative that depicts exactly the kind of situtations we're talking about (yes, it's styled as police drama, but it's much more than that).

>I would refuse to work anywhere that I was expected to stand aside and ignore fraud, or where I was punished for doing what everyone would agree is the right thing (...)

You don't always have that much choice, do you?

>I would rail against it every day and try to change the system by doing the right thing and calling out other faculty for not doing so, publicly.

Yeah.

You will not simply fail, you'll get screwed by the system at the first opportunity. If you really want to "buck the system", cool down and watch some episodes of "The Wire". This series portays exactly and reallisticaly the inner workings of corrupt institutions and what happens to "lone wolves" trying to beat or change the system (spoiler - they get screwed by superiors and peers alike and achieve absolutely nothing).

I'm not saying it's impossible to transform the system from within. But trying to do it single-handedly is fighting a losing battle that is doomed to alienate your coworkers.

The thing that has always puzzled me is if one's opinion on "talent vs hard work" is actually correlated to one's amount of talent. You can often hear very gifted people say things like "it's hard work that actually matters". At the same time, underperformers' claims that it's the talent that does the thing maybe treated as rationalizations ("I'm lazy, so, yeah, let's blame that on lack of talent, not work"). I don't see any easy way of studying this, though looking for such correlations might prove interesting.

I absolutely love the ending:

"After this, they decided to pass me, though they said that my harmonic analysis was far from satisfactory. :("

especially when compared to the Fields Medal citation, where Tao is awarded the medal "for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory".

Seems he did learn a bit of harmonic analysis in the meantime.

There is an important factor discouraging publishing source code - fear that there indeed are bugs and they will be exposed. This is blatantly "security through obscurity", but I fear it's a common attitude. If there are bugs and code is secret, even if someone else later points out that the results contradict their own findings, it's (presumably) not difficult to sweep the thing under the rug and cool it down. On the other hand, if the paper is published, code is public and someone spot serious bugs, it's instantly a big shame... (code review as a part of peer review would help, but it's very unrealistic - already, reviewing is very time consuming).

In addition, there are really no structural/institutional incentives to produce and share good quality scientific code. Maintaining good code costs much effort and, currently, gives few short-term benefits. It's often easier to produce crappy code, get the results, publish and move ahead.