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Now for the less-lame readership, on my return trip from Athens I was sitting in my hotel lobby when a grad student mentioned that he was flying back to Atlanta (approx 100 miles) instead of taking the shuttle, because it was cheaper (45$ for the shuttle bus, 41$ for the plane). Thrifty being my middle name, I canceled my shuttle reservation and joined him on the plane - a Cessna Caravan 208B.
There were a number of interesting aspects of this trip. To begin, the airport was tiny, with no security what-so-ever. The plane seated 9 people in four rows (3 + 2 +2 +2), crazy small, and is a common model used in skydiving trips. My seat was 3a (second to last row). The cockpit was contiguous with the cabin, and we could talk to the pilot and copilot while flying. As a result, we could see the flight from the pilot's perspective. This included the landing, which was rollercoasteresque. Below is a still from our descent.
This picture doesn't near do justice to the experience. As the plane descends, you watch the runway coming toward you. The horizon sweeps through a much larger set of angles than seems even moderately safe, and if the pilots weren't so calm I would certainly have needed to change pants after the landing. I guess what I am saying is it was a rush. Since I found the experience very enjoyable I will plug this fledgling airline - see their website. The only caveat to my ringing endorsement is that, much like the commuter flight from Madison to Chicago, they are delayed/canceled whenever there is weather in Atlanta. I guess the reason the bus is more expensive is because it is more reliable - not like those pikey's. I f'ing hate pikey's.
4 comments:
Regarding the list of things not to do in a talk, Nick and I had a disagreement Sat night about my advisor's talk. He claims that my advisor put up a formula that was unnecessary. I claimed, actually knowing the field some, that the formula was actually necessary because there were several similar energy functionals out there in the literature, all doing very similar things, and it was necessary to know which one in particular he was working with.
We, of course, also often run into this dilemma in the other direction. Experts in the field know certain definitions and formulas by heart, and non-experts do not. Including such formulas is unnecessary for the experts but nontrivial for the non-experts.
For your argument with Nick, I recommend using a very loose definition of necessary. If the formula is referenced at all by the speaker, I am willing to call it necessary.
for your list about 'how to make your talk not suck' please don't forget 'talking too fast.' In my field we read our talks straight from papers, and it is ridiculous how fast some people read, especially given that they don't always give much thought as to how a text that you present orally should be structured differently from a text that someone is going to read on their own.
also, i flew in a plane that small once, and it was awesome and scary at the same time.
People reading paragraphs from slides always kills me. I went to back-to-back talks from two researchers I know who are great to have a conversation with but gave absolutely terrible boring talks - one of the worst violations of the "Don't read parapgraphs from the screen" rule. If I gave a talk like that I would fall asleep in the middle of presenting it.
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