Chad, over at [Uncertain Principles](http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2006/10/cranky_book_meme_voted_off_the.php) found an interesting meme, which I thought would be fun to take a stab at:
>What authors have you given up on for good? And why?
Darn good question, that is. I’m often fascinated by comparing an authors earliest stories/books to their later ones, to see how they changed. And there are definitely a few authors who’s work I really enjoyed at one time, but who have deteriorated to the point where I’ll never read them again. I’ll tell you about three of mine – feel free to add your own in the comments.

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This is *very* off-topic for this blog; it’s really more of a rant on a personal subject which I think it’s worth saying publicly.
I am mentally ill. I have clinical depression. CD is a thoroughly miserable illness. I’m incredibly lucky to live at a time when CD like mine is easily treated by medication. Two pills every morning, and I’m myself again.
The point of writing this isn’t to tell the world that I’ve got clinical depression, or to say “Gosh I like my drugs”. The reason that I’m writing this is gripe about how people react when they hear that I take psychiatric medication. For some reason, the fact that my *brain* has a problem that’s easy to fix using medication is somehow considered to be a huge strike against me, an inexcusable sign of personal weakness.
No other illness is treated this way.
To contrast things, I also have a dreadful stomach problem. It’s not actually something with a simple name; basically, it’s classic reflux disorder, combined with an extremely irritable stomach, which triggers extremely painful muscular spasms. Those two together are a bad combination: the spasms behave almost like a pump, spraying acid up my esophagus. (Which is exactly as much fun as it sounds.) In order to treat this, I needed surgery. And as an after-effect of the surgery, I now get *espohageal* spasms, which are excruciating; according to people who’ve experienced both, they feel very much like having a heart attack. The difference is that they are more or less *continuous* for *weeks* at a time.
To treat this, I take three different drugs. One is quite expensive; about $6/day. The other two are cheap, but both have unpleasant side effects. One even contains a small quantity of an addictive opiate.
For my stomach problems, if I didn’t take my drugs, the main thing that would happen would be that it would hurt. Not life threatening, not dangerous. It would just be painful. I *might* end up going through some withdrawal from the addictive one.
How many people have heard about my stomach problems? A *lot* of people. Partly because of the fact that I need to take drugs three times a day; and partly because of the fact that can create some peculiar symptoms that are visible to other people. Out of the dozens of people who’ve heard about my stomach problem, and know about the drugs I take for it, how many have lectured me about how I shouldn’t take those nasty drugs? Zero. No one has *ever* even made a comment about how I shouldn’t be taking medications for something that’s just uncomfortable. Even knowing that some of the stuff I take for it is *addictive*, no one, *not one single person* has ever told me that I didn’t need my medication.
But depression? It’s a very different story.
What happens if I don’t take my medication? I turn into a zombie. Everything turns flat, it seems almost as if things lose their color, like all the colors fade. I feel like my body weighs so much that I can’t even hold my shoulders up. I don’t feel *sad*; I feel *nothing*. Empty, blank, flat. Great things can happen, but they don’t make me happy. *Awful* things can happen, but they don’t make me sad.
What happens when I take my medication? I’m myself again. The medication doesn’t make me feel happy; it makes me *feel*. With the medication, my emotions come back; I can feel happy or sad. I enjoy it when things are going well; I get sad or angry when they go poorly.
But how do people react?
Somewhat over 1/2 of the people who hear that I take an antidepressant express disapproval in some way. Around 1/3 make snide comments about “happy pills” and lecture me about how only weak-willed nebbishes who can’t deal with reality need psychiatric medication.
I confess to being thoroughly mystified by this. Why is it OK for my stomach, or my heart, or my pancreas to be ill in a way that needs to be treated with medication, but it’s *not* OK for my brain? Why are illnesses that originate in this one organ so different from all others, so that so many people believe that nothing can possibly go wrong with it? That there are absolutely no problems with the brain that can possibly be treated by medication?
Why is it OK for me to take expensive, addictive drugs for a painful but non-life-threatening problem with my stomach; but totally unacceptable for me to take cheap harmless drugs for a painful but non-threatening problem with my brain?

Orac is refusing to surrender and acknowledge the obvious fact that he simple *is not* as much of a geek as I am. So I am obligated to point out several further facts in my attempt to make him surrender the crown of geekiness.
———-
First: compare our professsions. Orac is a cancer surgeon: a person whose professional life is dedicated to *saving peoples lives*. There are people living today who would be dead but for the efforts of Orac. It is an honorable profession, deserving of nothing but respect.
In contrast, I am a software engineering researcher; aka a professional computer geek. I spend my life designing and writing software (most of which will never be used) for other people to use to write software.
———–
Back in high school, I spent most of a year saving up money to buy a super-cool pocket calculator that was programmable in Basic. Then after I got it and used it for a while, I decided to switch. To a slide-rule.
Because it’s *faster*.
I still own a [K&E log-log duplex decitrig slide rule.][sliderule] (And know how to use *all* of the scales.) It’s a beauty. I look forward to teaching my children to use it. (Using a slide-rule gives you a tactile sense of how a lot of things fit together in simple math.) Here’s a pic I found of the same model that I have:

Mine’s a lot more beaten up than this one; it’s thoroughly yellowed up the full length; the view slide is a bit scraped up and missing the top-left screw. But it’s still in great working condition.
————–
Let us, for a moment, consider my name. Mark Chu-Carroll. Where do you suppose “Chu-Carroll” came from?
Obviously, it’s a combination of the last names of me and my wife before we got married. But why “Chu-Carroll” rather than “Carroll-Chu”? Is it for aesthetics? No. The real reason is *far* geekier than anything like mere aesthetics.
No. The real reason why we chose “Chu-Carroll” is… Bibliographies.
When we were married, my wife had more publications than I did. And so we decided to use “Chu-Carroll” so that people doing literature searches for *her* name would be more likely to find her papers, because “Jennifer Chu-Carroll” would appear immediately after “Jennifer Chu” in any bibliographic listing likely to contain her work; whereas “Jennifer Carroll-Chu” would be separated by some distance, and would be more likely to be missed.
So my last name was chosen based on how it would be alphabetized in bibliographies.
————————
Let’s take a look at genetics for a moment. My parents recently went on vacation, and brought back gifts for my children. One of the gifts was a set of pens with their names on them. Give a new pen and a stack of paper to a three year old boy, and what do you *think* that he would do?
*My* three-year-old son took the pen apart. He’d never seen a “click” pen before, and he wanted to know how it worked.
[sliderule]: http://sliderule.ozmanor.com/rules/sr-0098-ke4181-3-01.html

Draw your pocket protectors, it’s a geekout!

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While I was away on vacation, my family made a stop in Corning NY to see the Corning Glass Museum. I had to snap this photo for PZ. Alas, all I had was the camera in my cellphone, so the resolution leaves something to be desired, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

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About 10 days ago, I wrote about [Grigory Perelman and his proof of the Poincare conjecture][poincare]. This is a quick followup. There’s a more detailed story over on [Seed][seed].
The Fields medal was supposed to be presented this past week, and they planned on presenting it to Perelman.
He turned it down. He refused to come to the conference where the award was presented; refused to accept the award in absentia. He wants nothing to do with it. Even a personal visit from the head of the Fields committee to his mothers apartment in St. Petersburg wasn’t enough to convince him to come out of isolation and accept the prize.
He’s also refusing the $1 million Clay award; a bounty put forward to be collected by whoever eventually either proved or disproved the Poincare conjecture.
[seed]: http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/08/not_feeling_the_fields.php
[poincare]: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/08/the_poincar_conjecture.php

Over the six months tåhat I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve gotten a bunch of email from people asking about what it’s like working as a researcher in industry vs working in academia. It’s a good question, one which I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. So I thought it was worth turning into a post.
Industry versus academia is ultimately a tradeoff in a couple of different dimensions. I’ll go into a bit more detail on each, but the basic tradeoffs as I see them are:
* Freedom: industrial research is much more constrained than academic; academics have more freedom that industrial folks.
* Funding: industry people do not need to spend nearly as much time on money chasing as academics.
* Time and Scale: there are types of work that you can do in industry that you couldn’t in academia because of resources and scale.
* Products: the kinds of end-product of your research are very different in academia versus industry. In academia, you have two requirements: get money, and publish papers. In industry, you’re expected to produce something of value to the company: software, hardware, patents, etc.
Freedom
———
The kind of freedom I’m talking about here is the freedom to set and pursue your own research agenda. This is something that’s usually very important to researchers.
In theory, academic researchers are free to work on whatever they want, so long as they can arrange to get grant money to support that work. The good part of academia is that freedom; the bad part of academia is that grant requirement. (But more on that later.)
In industry, you’re constrained by the needs of the company. You can’t just decide that you want to do “X”. You’re expected to work on things that are at least *potentially* beneficial to the company. It actually ends up being not *that* different than academia in this sense: the way that it ends up working is that in an industry job, you can do whatever you can get people to cough up money to pay for. The main difference from academia is *who* you get the money from. In academia, it’s generally grant programs, either from the government or from interested industry groups; in industry, it’s product teams from within the company. But that’s a big difference: industrial product development groups are generally *extremely* focused, and will not bother with things that are irrelevant to their *current* needs.
Funding
———-
In academia, you’re pretty much required to arrange all of the funding to do your work. The end effect of that is that many academics end up spending at least half of their time doing work related to getting the grants they need to do their research. (And that means that they’re not nearly as free as the general statement above about being able to do what they want would imply: academics can do what they want *provided they can get someone to pay for it*; but getting someone to pay for work is *very* hard; and getting someone to pay for something very different from what you’ve done before can be close to impossible.)
And as I said above, in industry, your funding generally comes from product development groups within the company. As an industrial researcher, you are indirectly working for the product groups. This tends to mean that you spend much less time going around and begging for money; it also means that you have a lot fewer choices about who to send an application to. If the product group for your research area isn’t interested in what you’re doing, you’re going to have
to find a new project.
Time and Scale
—————–
This one is a really interesting tradeoff. Academic researchers can set very long-term research agendas and pursue them. It’s rare to find an academic researcher who doesn’t have a rough plan for *at least* the next five years of their research. In industry, you can’t plan that far ahead: a project is usually expected to start showing *some* results within a year. The project can go on for many years (the longest project I know ended up lasting around 15 years!), but you don’t have the ability to plan for that kind of time when you start.
But on the other hand, in industry, you can do work on a scale that’s unimaginable for an academic. Spending four person-years working on infrastructure to make your system work on a really large code base would be pretty much out of the question in academia. In research, it’s not just possible, but it’s often expected.
In my field, software engineering, academics usually run their tests on what they call real systems: generally a couple of thousand lines of code. In industry, we run on hundreds of thousands to *millions* of lines of code. One of my first projects involved writing compiler analysis of templates for a C++ compiler. The code base that I got to test my analysis on was 1.5 million lines of code. And I’ve gotten to run tests on larger things than that since! Academics generally don’t get to do that, both because they rarely have the time to build code that can handle things that large; and even if they did, they rarely have access to code bases that large: companies don’t go handing the source code for their products to academics!
Products
———-
By products, I mean what your research project produces as a result.
In academia, you’re under a huge amount of pressure to publish *publish* **publish**! The main product of your research is the papers. You design your agenda around produces papers on a regular schedule, and you work insane hours (especially before you get tenure) making sure that you get enough done to write the papers you need to write, and then actually doing the writing in the breaks between applying for grants.
In industry, the common saying is that research can produce three things: products, patents, and papers (in that order). To be successful you need to produce at least two of those three; and the first two are preferred to the last one. Publishing papers is nice, and you definitely get credit for it, but it just doesn’t compare to the value of products and patents.
Why do I work in industry?
—————————-
When I started working on my PhD, I had no intention of going to work at an industry research lab. I went to get my PhD specifically because I wanted to teach.
The way I wound up in industry is a combination of strange factors – my obsessiveness about programming languages; some really *good* luck; some really *bad* luck; some coincidences, and the fact that I’m married to someone smarter than me. I originally started writing out the whole story, but it would have turned into the longest post in the history of this blog by a factor of three or four. So I’m going for the short version.
Because of my obsessiveness about programming languages, I knew about a somewhat obscure but extremely cool programming language, which I used for doing some exploratory development when I was working on my dissertation proposal. As a result of that experience, I wound up getting a summer internship at the lab where I now work.
I had a *great* time working for them that summer. Without that, I never would have considered industry; but my experience working with them for the summer helped me realize that an industry research lab was a lot more fun than I would have expected; and that there are some real advantages to being in industry instead of academia. What I learned was that industry researchers weren’t nearly as straight-laced as I’d expected; they had more freedom than I’d expected (although still not as much as in academia); and they had *access* to people and materials that would be nearly impossible for an academic person.
When graduation time came, I had a lot of solid experience in research and building systems; but I didn’t have as many publications as I would have liked. (There’s an interesting story in there about research politics, but that’s a story for another day.)
The folks I’d worked for in industry were very interested in hiring me; and I’d had a great time working with them, so I interviewed with them, and got the job.
It was a place I thought I’d enjoy working, and it was well-located, so there were plenty of places not too far away where my wife could find a job. (That was a *very* important factor; we met while working on our PhDs, and she’s a better researcher than I am. So making sure that we weren’t stranding her in order to give me an opportunity was a big deal.) And that was that.

I figured it was time I did the latest random thing to be wandering its way around Scienceblogs. [Janet has introduced the “random quotes” meme.][janet], in which we’re supposed to go wandering through the [quotes here][quotes], and pick the first five that reflect “who you are or what you believe”.
1. “Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.”, Laurens Van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958). Could any quote possibly be more true?
2. “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”, Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809). Given recent events in this country, this is particularly apropos.
3. “We are here to change the world with small acts of thoughtfulness done daily rather than with one great breakthrough.”, Rabbi Harold Kushner. I’ve actually taken a class with Rabbi Kushner, and it was wonderful; this quote to me sums up a big part of how I try to live my life.
4. “Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.”, Henri Poincare (1854 – 1912). I couldn’t possibly pick quotes for this blog without quoting a mathematician. Considering what I do on this blog, this one is quote appropriate for me. So many of the creationist screeds that I criticize are based on collections of actual facts put together in stupid ways that turn them in garbage instead of science.
5. “The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure.”, Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592). Yes, I’m a foodie. Maybe someday I’ll post a recipe or two. I used to have a website with the recipes from my Y2K New Years Eve party, but it got lost when I switched ISPs and forgot to copy it.
[janet]: http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2006/08/random_quotations_meme.php
[quotes]: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

Over at fellow SBer {Worlds Fair][worldsfair}, they’ve put up an unofficial “Ask a ScienceBlogger” question, about childrens books:

Are there any children’s books that are dear to you, either as a child or a parent, and especially ones that perhaps strike a chord with those from a science sensibility? Just curious really. And it doesn’t have to be a picture book, doesn’t even have to be a children’s book – just a book that, for whatever reason, worked for you.

I’ve got two kids, a girl who’s almost six, and a boy who’s three. And they’re both showing serious signs of being pre-geeks. Whenever we go to a new place, the first thing they do is head for the bookshelves to see if there are any books they haven’t seen yet. My daughter’s school had a book fair last year, and we ended up spending a little over $100 on books for a kindergartener, and another $30 or so for the (then) 2yo. So obviously, I end up spending a lot of time reading childrens books!
There are a few books that really stand out in my mind as being *special*:
1. “Giraffes Can’t Dance”, by Giles Andreae, illustrated by Guy Parker-Rees. This isn’t a science book at all, but it’s simply one of the most wonderful children’s book I’ve seen. The story is wonderful, the rhythm and the rhyme structure are fantastic, and the art is bright and beautiful in a cartoonish sort of way.
2. “Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story”, by Lisa Westberg Peters, illustrated by Lauren Stringer. We bought this one for my daughter last december, after PZ recommended it on his blog. It’s a beautiful book – great art, and it’s actually really *compelling* for a child. Most kids science books have a kind of dull style to the writing; my daughter will generally want to read them once or twice, but once she understands what’s in them, she doesn’t want to read them again. But this one, she’s either read it or had it read to her at least fifty different times.
3. “Rumble in the Jungle, Commotion in the Ocean, et al”, by Giles Andreae, illustrated by David Wojtowycz. We started getting this series when my daughter was threeish, because it’s by the same author as “Giraffes”, and liked it so much that we have continued to get it for my son. Each book is about some environment and the animals that live in it. Each animal gets a little rhyme and a picture. The art is bright and colorful, and the rhymes are clever and very amusing to the kids.
UPDATE: I realized that I forgot one of *my* favorite books from my childhood: “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss. In general, I’m not actually a huge Dr. Seuss fan: so many of his books are just rhyming nonsense. But the Lorax was one of my favorite books as a child; it turned me into a mini-environmentalist at the age of four. My son doesn’t quite get the book yet; my daughter definitely does. No list of science-ish kids books would be complete without it.
[worldsfair]: http://scienceblogs.com/worldsfair/2006/07/childrens_book_roundup_and_a_q.php