Comment Re:huh? (Score 1) 124
Hi,
I am the subject of the article in question. (I don't know how to prove that. You can look at the Twitter account with the same name as this Slashdot account, but of course I could be spoofing that too.)
@K. S. Kyosuke: I skipped most of the math classes on my CS degree as they were too hard for me (seriously). I'd been pretty good at math in high school, but then I blinked and apparently I was meant to have mastered all this more advanced stuff. The Narrative.ly article is basically correct: I can only read a small number of the equations in the 1963 Lorenz paper.
@nomadic: From the article, you can see that I was, at the time of discovering this nonsense, a *beginning* graduate student. It was 30 years since my bachelor's in CS; I hadn't opened an academic book on any subject in the meantime. On my master's course we were *not* expected to write academic journal articles until our final assignment. (Our essays, however, were marked for academic style as well as content.) This article with Sokal and Friedman is in no way related to my coursework. Indeed, if you look at the article, you'll see that whereas Sokal and Friedman list two academic affiliations each, I have none (that's why it says "Strasbourg, France" - if the work is not related to your affiliation to a higher education institution or company, you put your city and country of residence). I actually asked the University of East London if I could put their name on the article and was given such a list of hoops to jump through (because the work was not supervised by UEL faculty) that I thought "screw it". In a way it emphasises the stupidity of the whole affair, that the lead author doesn't even have an academic "home".
@K. S. Kyosuke: I skipped most of the math classes on my CS degree as they were too hard for me (seriously). I'd been pretty good at math in high school, but then I blinked and apparently I was meant to have mastered all this more advanced stuff. The Narrative.ly article is basically correct: I can only read a small number of the equations in the 1963 Lorenz paper.
@nomadic: From the article, you can see that I was, at the time of discovering this nonsense, a *beginning* graduate student. It was 30 years since my bachelor's in CS; I hadn't opened an academic book on any subject in the meantime. On my master's course we were *not* expected to write academic journal articles until our final assignment. (Our essays, however, were marked for academic style as well as content.) This article with Sokal and Friedman is in no way related to my coursework. Indeed, if you look at the article, you'll see that whereas Sokal and Friedman list two academic affiliations each, I have none (that's why it says "Strasbourg, France" - if the work is not related to your affiliation to a higher education institution or company, you put your city and country of residence). I actually asked the University of East London if I could put their name on the article and was given such a list of hoops to jump through (because the work was not supervised by UEL faculty) that I thought "screw it". In a way it emphasises the stupidity of the whole affair, that the lead author doesn't even have an academic "home".
