eightorbit

I had his Chaotic Dynamical Systems book checked out from the library for years and carried it everywhere. I should find a copy, what a great book!

I wonder if there's a good sort of "postmortem" on what happened to NLD and Chaos. It seems like everyone said, "Ok, that's a thing and it explains a lot but we can't do anything with it."

:) That's a good one, Devaney was more my era!

That's a fair point.

Still, I feel I could take any of my students and in one month have them up to speed on what to look for and what things mean.

And I don't mean to suggest that finding challenging work is any sort of failing of my employer. I have been able to diversify the position to include doing graphics in R and some stats things and, along with some other people, I think we can sell some sexy Bayesian things.

They are very receptive of new ideas, but... it is not a growing industry (thankfully), so any sort of advance is going to be a jump to a different field. Which is possible, and I'm working on it.

My point primarily is when you read these things about people doing all sorts of wonderful exciting things, you get the impression that what you have done or are doing is crap. Perhaps it's nice to hear that a lot of people do not set the world on fire. Takes a little pressure off.

Northeast, although I do have to travel to the SE now and then.

I hear you, man. I hope that job is interesting, I would like to make that transition myself. Cheers.

Yo!

As a further aside, I do get to do some fun graphics in R and I'm pretty impressed how R has become the statistical standard and graphics too, mainly I think from one super dynamic statistician.

Now that R is entrenched I can work on moving everyone into Haskell!

I will take a look at it, thanks. I have tried some off the shelf OCR things and had little success. But what I do is really needle in the haystack kind of thing. I am looking for a "U" or and "Sr" in a particular place and happy to find one in a thousand pdf pages.

I am looking into auto-scrolling pdfs and batch loading, sequencing of pdfs to make things easier. But I will definitely check out fast.ai - thanks!

Just so you don't get the impression every physicist is having a fabulous time, here's me:

I have a bachelors in physics. I went for a phd in biology but had to bail to work to support family, plus I can't seem to come up with original ideas.

I now have a job with physicist as part of the title, but what I really do is try to read bad handwriting from records from nuclear weapons plants. It's a dull job a monkey could do but it pays the bills. For years I worked as a computer guy for an academic department and that was fun and I'm trying to get back into it but nothing yet. I teach math at a community college for fun too.

I have great kids, so all and all I'm happy about things, but I am sad the physics thing never panned out. As an undergrad I was excited about chaos and nonlinear dynamics. Still read math texts for fun and play with Haskell.