CCL: And now something completely different!

 Sent to CCL by: Mihaly Mezei [Mihaly.Mezei]_[mssm.edu]
 > While I liked your movie, I dont believe that this is a good  impression to
 > convey to new or prospective students. It only sets them up for
 > inevitable disappointment when they find out that doing and learning
 > science is not really fun, but tedious, hard and often boring work (no one
 who ever
 > debugged parallel code could disagree...) I don't want to depreciate my
 > own profession, because obviously the results of doing research are
 > worth every bit of effort. As an analogy, the Golden Gate Bridge
 > surely is impressive, but I don't think it was fun to build.
 I agree with Dr. Steinbrecher.
 Also, I would like to point out that the "fun" we are having when
 doing science (and we do) is very different from the "fun" of, say,
 attending a rock concert. To me, the "fun" is when after a tedious
 derivation, the pesky higher order terms cancel and I end up with a closed form
 result. Or, when after weeks of coding, debugging and testing, an idea I had
 turns out to be correct. Or, after half an hour of head scratching, I manage to
 solve a Sudoku labeled 'hard'.  Maybe the closest analogy would be a strenuous
 hike to a spot with spectacular view. I think that this is the idea of fun that
 we have to convey to the future generation.
 Mihaly Mezei
 Department of Structural and Chemical Biology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine,
 NYU
 Voice:  (212) 659-5475   Fax: (212) 849-2456
 WWW (MSSM home): http://www.mountsinai.org/Find%20A%20Faculty/profile.do?id=0000072500001497192632
 WWW (Lab home - software, publications): http://inka.mssm.edu/~mezei
 WWW (Department): http://atlas.physbio.mssm.edu