Really some insightful questions from the audience too.

Yes it is! It’s a ridiculously cute game. I took my time with it and just enjoyed knocking pots off shelves and catching birds. If you’re a gamer and cat lover it’s a good buy.

It also sucks for the hiring manager who has to interview candidates they know they won’t hire just to stick to the process. It’s a waste of everyone’s time.

From the wiki article :

Perelman resigned from his research post in Steklov Institute of Mathematics and in 2006 stated that he had quit professional mathematics, owing to feeling disappointed over the ethical standards in the field. >

Anybody have any idea what the ethical standards might be that he’s referring to? Not sure if there’s a scandal or something or just an overall sense of displeasure with the field.

I agree with other replies here with one addition. People who get into grad school are generally the high achievers from their high school and undergrad programs, so they are used to being the only or one of few star students. In PhD programs everyone is a star student, so it can be a bit jarring to folks used to being head of the class when they suddenly aren’t.

It can cause a bit of jealousy and competitive thinking but most of the time students get past it and focus simply on enduring the gauntlet.

A professor I was taking a management class with gave me a fun burn on my thesis. I asked for his input on a specific point and he called it “intellectual masterbation” and proceeded to talk for 15 min or so about ideas he thought i should have studied instead (I was already preparing for my thesis defense so couldn’t change topics). Never got an answer on the actual question I’d raised.

That person went to a department that was WAY less toxic than mine was.

That said, my committee was lovely and my thesis and dissertation were relatively low-stress compared to some of the horror stories I’ve heard.

As a psychologist who was regularly taunted in school for being in a “soft science” this amuses me. Welcome to the reproducibility crisis, biologists.

Such a great movie. Haven’t watched that in years. Might have to dust that one off this weekend.

There is a great documentary about her on Netflix. It covers her love of science and her attempts to get her design to the military for the war effort.

I love Magritte, but I’ve never seen this one before. It’s pretty great. Always nice to see something new from a favorite artist.

Can’t even imagine the feeling of being a parent of a deaf one year old who gets gene therapy and within 6 months is able to say their first word, “mama”.

Got to be just overwhelming.