My favorite of the projects took a problem from telephony switching, multiple pieces from computer science (a very peculiar virtual machine and a bunch of compiler theory), and some odd math to prove a couple of critical conditions actually held. I did get to publish a paper in a special topics issue of an IEEE journal. And present at a small conference, where one of the computer science demi-gods of that era stopped me and told me it was by far the most interesting paper at the conference. I never did find out why he was there.
A friend said it would take more than a minor miracle to find a school that (a) had a telephony group that would vouch for the difficulty of the problem, (b) a CS department that would accept the odd virtual machine as legitimate, and (c) math and CS departments that were on speaking terms.
By the time I did that work I had come to grips with the fact that I'd never be more than a pseudo-academic.
2025-10-30 21:44:25
Wu, as spoken in Shanghai, has five tones. Standard Mandarin has four. Cantonese has six. In each case there are dialects which differ.
I remember reading once that Vietnamese was a seven-tone language, and the reason French had been quickly adopted and hung on so long was that little kids could use that while they were figuring out Vietnamese. I have no idea if any of that's true.
2025-10-30 21:39:07
If we had more cross-disciplinary appointments and more interdisciplinary collaboration, we’d probably have better structures in place for working through these sorts of blind spots and assumptions.... Alas, that is not the model on which academia currently runs.
My last position during my technical career was a research job where everyone just assumed I must have a PhD. Occasionally this came up at lunchtime discussions. At one of those, one of the people who did have a doctorate made the observation that yes, Mike had done multiple projects that would easily qualify for a PhD in terms of originality and impact, but all cut across multiple disciplines so no department would ever accept them.
My favorite of the projects took a problem from telephony switching, multiple pieces from computer science (a very peculiar virtual machine and a bunch of compiler theory), and some odd math to prove a couple of critical conditions actually held. I did get to publish a paper in a special topics issue of an IEEE journal. And present at a small conference, where one of the computer science demi-gods of that era stopped me and told me it was by far the most interesting paper at the conference. I never did find out why he was there.
A friend said it would take more than a minor miracle to find a school that (a) had a telephony group that would vouch for the difficulty of the problem, (b) a CS department that would accept the odd virtual machine as legitimate, and (c) math and CS departments that were on speaking terms.
By the time I did that work I had come to grips with the fact that I'd never be more than a pseudo-academic.
Wu, as spoken in Shanghai, has five tones. Standard Mandarin has four. Cantonese has six. In each case there are dialects which differ.
I remember reading once that Vietnamese was a seven-tone language, and the reason French had been quickly adopted and hung on so long was that little kids could use that while they were figuring out Vietnamese. I have no idea if any of that's true.
If we had more cross-disciplinary appointments and more interdisciplinary collaboration, we’d probably have better structures in place for working through these sorts of blind spots and assumptions.... Alas, that is not the model on which academia currently runs.
My last position during my technical career was a research job where everyone just assumed I must have a PhD. Occasionally this came up at lunchtime discussions. At one of those, one of the people who did have a doctorate made the observation that yes, Mike had done multiple projects that would easily qualify for a PhD in terms of originality and impact, but all cut across multiple disciplines so no department would ever accept them.