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from the carbon-queen?-more-like-awesomeness-queen dept.
ArsTechnica interviewed Millie Dresselhaus, professor emeritus at MIT:
Millie Dresselhaus, Institute Professor at MIT (and the first woman ever so honored). The occasion was her receiving the IEEE Medal of Honor (again, the first female recipient), but a look at her Wikipedia biography shows that awards are nothing new for Dresselhaus. Highlights of a long list include the National Medal of Science and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and her Kavli Prize in Nanoscience was the only Kavli awarded to a single recipient, an indication of how pioneering her research has been.
She also has administrative chops. She headed the Department of Energy's Office of Science, was president of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and held the post of treasurer at the National Academies of Science.
...
Ars: Your thesis advisor didn't think that women should be doing science. Why stick with science despite that level of discouragement?Dresselhaus: Encouragement is always useful, but it's not necessarily the rate-limiting step. Luckily for me, Sputnik came along, and there was funding available for basic science research. My advisor wasn't so happy with me, but I could just work for myself. My thesis was very, very cheap. There was all this surplus equipment that was left from World War II that was lying in a bin someplace, and you could pick it up, renovate it at almost zero cost. So that was my thesis.
Ars: So you adopted the hardware to your needs?
Dresselhaus: Yeah, pretty much, and I built a few other things for myself. Which helped me learn how to build things, design something. This is valuable experience. Maybe if I had more spoon-feeding like we do today, I wouldn't have benefited as much. On the other hand, people think that they wouldn't survive if they didn't have a great deal of support. And maybe that's necessary today. Science is moving so fast, and you can't linger too much.
Very cool that she got started recycling surplus equipment for her thesis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @10:38PM
I don't remember candy bars getting to 35 cents until well into the 80's.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday August 03 2015, @08:38PM
The US Navy operated a tiny little convenience store in the basement of the converted apartment building where my sister and I went to elementary school - Joshua Barney School. That entire store wasn't a whole lot bigger than a bedroom in a typical suburban America house.
Only military personnel, civilian staff such as my schoolteachers as well as military dependents such as myself were permitted to shop there. Among my most-cherished possessions is my official Naval identification card, it looks just like my father's but I looked just like Donny Osmond when I was ten years old. Younger than that and and the Marine Corps sentries and government subsidized retail store employees are expected to recognize me by sight alone.
That is, at Concord Naval Weapons Station I could have walked through either gate without flashing my ID provided I were nine years old our younger. At ten years old I had to show government-issued Photo ID just to buy a ticket to the Saturday afternoon matinee.
I remember very well shopping for candy all by myself, for the very first time, one day after school at that Navy convenience store. I had a quarter I think I expect the Tooth Fairy left it under my pillow.
(One time I caught my father filling in for her but I didn't let on that I knew.)
"How much is this Hershey Bar?"
"Thirty-five cents."
I dig through my pockets, no only twenty five cents so I politely put the Hershey bar back.
"How much is this Snicker's bar?"
"Thirty five cents."
One by one, patiently and thoughtfully I selected each type of candy in order of what I liked most to what I liked least until I had exhausted every last one of them.
"How much are these Tic-Tacs."
"Thirty-five cents."
Polite, thoughtful, patient. He never once pointed out that they all cost thirty five cents, I had a reasonable question so he provided a correct answer.
Just a few days later I read an entire Hardy Boy's Mystery all the way through in six hours while lying on my back on the living room couch.
Later that afternoon I asked Mom if I could have an allowance. Prior to that I only had the Tooth Fairy.
I was screaming and crying, overcome with grief desperately struggling to convince my own mother to permit me to purchase a candy bar roughly every week and a half with money I'd earned myself.
Mom and Dad were always happy to use their own money to buy me candy, ice cream and soda pop but in my entire life my mother has moved Heaven and Earth to prevent me from managing my own financial affairs.
This despite that I billed $120.00 well after the Dot-Com crash hit. My salary for 2015 was $150,000.
My sister and I started going to movies together - without either parent - when I was seven. "Mom? Can I have the money to pay for our tickets?"
"No Mike. You're too young to handle money. Jean is much older than you so she knows how to handle money responsibly."
I was down with that I was only a little boy.
"Hey Mom. I just turned ten. Can I buy the tickets to the matinee today?"
"No Mike. You're too young to handle money. Jean is much older than you so she knows how to handle money responsibly."
At the age of forty-nine:
"What's that thing? Can I throw it in the trash?
"Hell No! That's my camera tripod. It set me back seventy bucks."
"WHERE DID YOU GET THAT MONEY?!!!!"
I means she was shrieking as if I'd knocked over a bank at gunpoint.
"Mike, please don't fall asleep with your electric heater running. It could burn the house down."
"No Mom, that's my Xeon box."
"Mike, your electric heater was running when I got home from dining out with Beta Sigman Phi this evening. You left it running when you walked to Starbucks."
"No Mom, that's actually my Fedora box."
Get This:
"Mike, could you tell me how to perform an orderly shutdown of your space heater?"
I AM ABSOLUTELY NOT FUCKING KIDDING! I AM TOTALLY PISSING MYSELF LAUGHING RIGHT NOW.
So I carefully walk her through logging me off then clicking the Shutdown button. Mom loves to dote of me, she really does. If I ever fall asleep on the living room couch she will cover me with her father's army blanket then turn out all the lights.
So after that if I got too tired to work on my Core Quad 16 GB FB-DIMM 2.5 TB AMCC 3ware 9690SA hardware RAID with battery backup to enable write caching, Mom would quietly step into my room, turn out all the lights, cover me gently with my grandfather's olive drab blanket then perform an orderly shutdown of my space heater.
"That's not actually a space heater Mom. It's just that it generate a lot of heat because it is a very, very powereful computer. I built it from components that I carefully selected myself. It cost me $4,500.00"
"WHERE DID YOU GET THAT MONEY?!!!"
"At my job, Mom. I'm a computer programmer."
While Mom is happy to lend me three or four dollars each day so I can walk to Starbucks pay for my table and WiFi by purchasing a Grande Drip, she will not permit me to pay for a Comcast cable modem with my own money. At a bare minimum my coffees are ninety dollars per month but there are other expenses such as bus far, sometimes I have to pay for my lunch and so on. Mom is always completely cool to fund my high-tech startup for just one day because she knows that fast Internet is important to me.
"Mom, I left most of the tools of my trade in storage in San Jose. I could go there, rent a U-Haul Truck then drive it back here for $1,600.00. I'd have a good client in a heartbeat, I could pay you back in a week or two then move out of your guest room into my own house in Portland in a month. Once I had my own house I could make quite a lot more money than that."
"No Mike. It's too expensive."
"But Mom! My computers!"
Mom knows very well that "My computers" are the products of my own mental illness because I have my MacBook Pro with me here in Salmon Creek.
"My file cabinet! All my business records! My cables".
I even have a mother fucking BeBox. I Am Not Fucking Kidding: dual 133 MHz 603, I don't recall how much memory or hard disk.
Mom once wrote a check to lend me a few bucks but I forget to deposit it before I returned to California to fetch just my Fedora box. I got it all the way back to Portland on the Santa Cruz and San Jose busses, and Amtrack. All together the train and bus fare came to about ninety dollars.
"Mom, could you find that check that you wrote? The one I'm going to pay you back for?"
"Please deposit it in my bank over by Burgerville. If you can't find the check please write a new one. You or I will eventually find your first check. I'll void it then return it to you."
"If you don't, my account will be overdrawn then closed so I won't be able to pay my wills."
"I would lose everything I have ever worked for since 1984" when three Caltech security guards beat the living crap out of me, hurled me bodily down a flight of stairs then all three sat on top of me until the Pasadena Police arrived, told them to get the Hell off me then shouted "If you don't leave Mike alone I'm going to throw you in jail."
I was later expelled from Caltech because I slept just one night in the same Ricketts House hallway as the room where I lived when those goons attacked me. Chris Brennan told me not too, see.
And yes I really did lose absolutely EVERYTHING I have ever worked for since 1984.
But it's coming quite rapidly back. Consider that Henry Ford lost his shirt a whole bunch of times and that Mark Twain was fired by the San Francisco Chronicle because he was a very, very poor writer.
I Am Going To Crush Bill Gates Like A Bug:
A while back someone put the arm on my Early 2006 MacBook Pro. When I pointed out to a Portland cop that the theft of commercial trade secrets was quite a serious Oregon State and United States Federal Offense he howled with laughter then told me to look for my filesystem image on "All your hacker boards".
Actually I was more concerned that the thief would FedEx my hard drive to Moscow then pitch the rest of my MacBook Pro in the Willamette.
The FBI gave me a stern lecture on information security but I pointed out that "Agent Tom, Cybercrime Specialist" know quite a lot less about information security than I. He wasn't real happy about that because he really does I made that plain.
Then he told me the FBI only takes referrals from local agencies, the Portland Police Bureau in this case.
The Portland Police Bureau told me to use my computer to file a stolen property report on their website.
"But Officer, I don't have a computer. That's why I want you to take my stolen property report myself."
He wouldn't budge.
The reason why Police Cadets are Cadets and not Sworn Officers:
"It's simply not possible to recover deleted files from a hard drive. It's intractibly complex."
"Are you familiar with the CRU Wiebetech Forensic Storage Adapters?"
"No, why."
"Because that's what the Portland Police Bureau as well as the occasional CIA Black Bag Job" -- Usama ben Laden -- "uses to recover deleted documents from hard drives."
(Wiebetech Forensic storage images are admissible prosecution evidence because it can be shown it is not possible to alter the data in the copy or on the original drive.)
"I invented them as a consultant to Wiebetech in 2002."
James Wiebe sold his company to his major competitor, paid off his mortgage, paid off all his debts, retired from the computer industry to start an aircraft manufacturing company.
I got paid a grand total of $4,500.00 for inventing Forensic Storage Adapters.
Don't Even Get Me Fucking Started. Just Don't.
Mom still does not permit me to handle money because Jeannie is three years older than I. My sister is fifty-four.
Lately I've clued into buying only a Tall at Starbucks, playing The Grinch That Stole Christmas with the tip jar then saving up enough money to buy a back of Trojan Magnums so I can get a blowjob through a Glory Hole at Fat Cobra Video in Portland.
The key to financial prosperity is to save up absolutely as much money as one possibly can then purchase the very finest product or service that money can buy. Not expensive items such as the Monster Power Surge Protector than Mom blew a metric fuckton of money on so she could plug her TV set's Surge Protector into a Monster Power Surge Protector.
After some quiet contemplation I realized I was better off with a large bottle of Wett Platinum Silicon Lube and some torrents rather than a transit day pass and the price of the video both at Fat Cobra.
Soon though.
Maybe if I save up enough I can purchase a roll in the hay with a Portland Hooker. Many of them offer "Early Bird Specials": order before three in the afternoon and I can get a fuck and a headjob for a mere sixty clams.
However I can purchase all the same Penthouse Magazines from the days of my misspent use for three bucks a copy at a collectible magazine shop in Oldtown Portland. While not the finest money can buy, dead tree Magazines of ill Repute are of far greater lasting value.