(no subject)

[pseydtonne]

This comes as an answer to "why I bugged out about Kitch & Maggie's practical joke on me" and to a running dialogue in this post about rude telemarketers and bad behavior.

When I asked Maggie why she did it, she replied "because it's so hard to pull one over on you. You are obsessive about details. If it had been something in the room, you would've figured it out in seconds." I grew up not wanting anyone to make a fool of me, so I learned to scope things. I then built the ability to be oblivious as a smokescreen for checking everything out. "Hi, I'll play dumb but I've actually figured out your plans already."

No wonder I do so well in sales, eh?

The topic of rewarding assholes has come up recently. However, we can forget that history can also edify assholes. I think of John von Neumann, the man everyone equates with inventing the computer. He wrote a "first draft" about the nature of the machine he was working on, ENIAC, that became the model for computer architecture for the next 40 years.

However, Eckert and Mauchly, the gentlemen from Philly that actually built ENIAC, were the ones that knew things beyond the theory. The book ENIAC shows angles you don't find elsewhere about how these men dealt with Johnny. He would handle the big wigs while they actually built the machine. Keep in mind they hired him, not the other way around. They needed a name to tote their project and get funding. He did the trick. So they bought a pompous smart guy so they could keep working on something all of them liked. Not enough people remember Eckert or Mauchly, but von Neumann...

I don't think I'm forming this thought well, but I need to hop in the shower and go to work so I'll close here.

-should I have started this post at all? Dante

Comments

[tkitch.livejournal.com]

what?

Did I do anything? *shrug* ;)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Err, the reason people remember von Neumann is probably because he was a mathematical genius, and the theorems he gave mathematics proved incredibly useful, from a theoreticaly standpoint, to computer science. He had the insight to move computer "science" from an engineering discipline to a theoretical discipline via the introduction of mathematical constructs to idealize computation.

Heck, I didn't even know he was involved with ENIAC (I'm not a history major; can you tell?). If you need to carry a torch for Eckert and Mauchly, that's great, but this really is the way the world works sometimes; the Matthew Effect and all that. The rich get richer, the poor stay poor, even those rich of fame. Evidently there's some guy named Arthur Burks who was involved as well, if you want to add him to your roster of the dispossessed.

Not exactly sure how this connects. You appear to be arguing that he was the rude interloper who came in and was rude and therefore successful and remembered. However, this appears to be the case of a different pattern, namely, grabbing someone famous to pin on the tail of your donkey so that your project has credibility. This is rampant in academia; always be wary of the contribution of the last name on a paper, especially if it reads "Professor, Grad Student A, Grad Student B, Grad Student C, .... And Famous Professor" or "No-name professor, no-name professor, and Famous Professor". Often it's legit, but often it's Famous Professor doing a favor to his buddy, giving the paper more visibility, just because it is related to or sucks up to work done by FP.

Either that, or it's the "get the guy who's good at schmoozing in here so we can get some damn work done". This is also a common problem. If you're smart you'll angle for that position yourself -- you have a hope of learning just enough technicalese to bridge the gap, but you have to restrain yourself from telling the workers what to do... ;-)

[michigansundog.livejournal.com]

-- you have a hope of learning just enough technicalese to bridge the gap, but you have to restrain yourself from telling the workers what to do... ;-)

Feels like the mark of a competent manager to me!

[epanastatis.livejournal.com]

always be wary of the contribution of the last name on a paper, especially if it reads "Professor, Grad Student A, Grad Student B, Grad Student C, .... And Famous Professor" or "No-name professor, no-name professor, and Famous Professor". Often it's legit, but often it's Famous Professor doing a favor to his buddy, giving the paper more visibility, just because it is related to or sucks up to work done by FP.

Or FP controls the grant money that pays for the salaries and equipment of all the other names on the paper.

(I work for FP.)