>strange sort of liminal person
exhibits the sort of behavior I'd imagine Bell Labs would have wanted to encourage.
(It also gets me upset when in comparison charlatans manage to get onto the HN frontpage.. there's a deep strong vs weak link problem here that I need to calm down and think about)
I recall, now, with some guilt and regret, the times I've been approached by students, janitors with interesting technical hobbies, and profs while anchored to liminal spaces
--And I didn't seize the opportunities to collab (ok, the prof was Ginsparg lol, who used to be the most liminal tenured sort of person I could think of )
Maybe the problem here is that you somehow don't look interesting enough, or, more likely, the only liminal spaces next to where you work are shared labspace behind closed doors or next to a giant meteorite :)
Not advice: undergrads tend to be more excited at what they work on (I had a random grad student show me the NMR setup in the chem dept but I think I was more inspired than he was-- you need to listen between the lines for the unassigned problems which still stir some residual emotions in the grad student; that one was into quantum error correction.)