Biocurious

/ a biophysics blog

Face Recognition

Posted 31 July 2008 by Andre under

To make sure that we don’t end up with two Molecule of the Month posts in a row (meaning no posts for a whole month!), I’ll take this opportunity to link to an interesting discussion at Female Science Professor’s blog about the academic’s insult “I’ve never of heard of you” and the related issues surrounding recognizing famous people at conferences. There are lots of great anecdotes in the comments, including my favourite:

When I was a grad student, I was once at a conference and met someone who I vaguely recognized, who obviously knew me. He wasn’t wearing a name tag. I was frantically trying to remember where I knew him from. After about 20 minutes I figured it out: He was famous Prof. W, who I had last met about 10 months prior when I interviewed with him for a postdoctoral position — and I got the position. In fact, my PhD had taken a bit longer to finish up, and I was about to start working with him in another month. Fortunately he didn’t ask me what I was working on, because I would have told him “I’m about to start a postdoc with Prof. W!”

While on the topic of humour, any physicist readers might appreciate this post at Cocktail Party Physics on Physical Theories as Men and the McSweeney’s essay that inspired it: Physical Theories as Women.

  

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