obstinate.org

I recently went to a party with people I mostly didn’t know. I started talking with this guy who was working on his thesis at Cal Tech. He was a computer science major and specialized in optics. He worked on grants that funded his work on the DARPA grand challenge.

So this dude is talking this party up on his work, how the funding process works and the type of work they do. The kind of work he was doing, was very un-spectacular to say the least. The types of things he was working on was very ‘middle of the road’ in terms of complexity. Furthermore – he went on to boast that all he had to do to get this big funding was to get ‘a few papers published’ so that he could report something back to the government grant comitee a the end of the year.  I was disgusted.  I left the party.

This sort of attitude would never cut it in the corporate world – where results are what pay the bills.  Must be nice to live in a world where you are judged on just ’showing up’ – reminds me when I was 8.

I have to wonder if the government pays into these sort of research programs with no hope of any sort of meaningful return? This reminds me of a grand parents that pays their kid to do chores around the house – it’s sort of an excuse to give them money, because in the long run you know that they will have some sort of benefit from it.