abhinav

A cursory look at Faraday's wikipedia page suggests that he started off as an assistant to Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution and succeeded him as the Director of the Royal Institution and became the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry without any teaching obligations. Faraday's accomplishments are hardly unacknowledged when he is considered as one the greatest experimentalists in the history of science. Maxwell's genius lay in unifying the disparate experimental observations of Faraday into the 'right' squiggles, predicting the existence of electromagnetic waves from his equations and in the process suggesting that visible light itself may be an electromagnetic wave; an achievement worthy of celebration in my opinion.

So, its a form of Ycombinator for academia.

One could make HN less of a time sink my making HN 'slower'. If only 5 articles appeared in a day, it would hopefully consume far less time and one way of reducing the number of articles would be to impose a 'karma' cost on each submission. If it costed 10 points to make each submission, folks might be a tad more prudent.

I intuitively like the idea of the "supposed" but atleast in the west there seems to be a way of counteracting these pressures. It seems to me that "white" children can choose from a variety of roles: nerdy, athletic, artistic etc and although there are penalties associated with each role there are rewards as well and each role is deemed valid by society. However, the article seems to suggest a homogeneous "black" identity, which leaves no room for accepted rebellion. Perhaps, some folks living in USA can confirm if my hypothesis is connected to reality.

I wonder if a smaller local revolution has happened before: formation and spread of great research universities. Govts have tried to set up great research universities by will, China is trying hard, India is making small steps, so are places like Germany. But they have not succeeded yet. Even in a small country like UK, only 3 great universities have emerged.

Within US, Stanford is today a great research university but it was not so in 1945. Great luck like the combination of cold war spending and the idea of steeples of excellence by Terman made it happen. Uni. of Florida or ASU may be today aspiring to greatness, but they are fighting the 'locality' of research universities. Maybe some random events will help them out.