Pictures from a conference

A research future conference, to be exact. Oh, and they're verbal pictures. Here we go...

"It's all about how to survive your own future". That was 5' into the first talk, sets the pace nicely. Just like in the Old West, the signs at the entrance of towns: "Stranger, leave all hope behind". Or so it says in Lucky Luke.

"There will be no day like this again". They meant it as a positive, about how this is a unique opportunity etc, but think about it. Technically right, potentially scary.

"Multinationalism is dead". And something else has replaced it, can't remember what though. Something fancy.

"You can go in a forest, dance around naked, and good ideas and innovations just come to you. I don't think so." Seriously, I can't add anything to that.

"Trust falls with distance". A valid point, which I think the guy used to hint why Nokia in Finland/Denmark won't really hire any of the pople attending the conference.

"I have a very nice Russian book". So, a student asks the speaker if his company hire fresh PhD students, and that phrase was included in the answer. Go figure.

The last four points were made by the same speaker. Who, by the way, was very good. In a country and age of political corectness, he was a shining beacon of honesty and, erm, sarcasm.

In other news, if you have a PhD, you'll get a job anywhere you want. Especially if you also "fit in the culture of the company" that you want to fit in, and have taken a couple of courses on time-management, you can substitute any of the leading companies' executives within 3 months from finishing your PhD - which, incidentally, can be in any area you want it to be, as it's the general menatllity, way of thinking and experience that companies want; besides a deep understanding of hyperfine multiprocessing load distribution in biologically-modified supercomputer clusters.

Gotta love these conferences...

Oh, and here's Jonny. I drew him during the most boring of the presentations.