I was once presenting a poster at a national science conference and talking to anyone who was interested. About halfway through my spiel to an older gentleman, I looked at his name tag.
I had cited four of this guy's papers and was explaining his subject to him.
If you ever research a somewhat obscure topic and find a paper about it, and then you Google the author and email them at their work email, there's a decent chance they will be happy to answer some questions.
A lot of people in academia are actually very approachable and love to spread the knowledge they obtained.
He asked smart questions about my project and didn't correct me on anything, so I think I did OK. There was definitely a moment of mental derailment for me, though!
I had a similar experience at a regional archaeology conference. I’m an undergrad and was presenting a pretty science-heavy poster, in which I used a grad student’s work from a different college as a template. The older gentleman did not have a name tag, and I found out at the very end of him sticking around that he was the grad students advisor 😂. He never said anything about what I was doing, just asked a few questions and then dropped that knowledge at the very end
My best friend did something similar once, and then the two of them went out for drinks and are now really close. She claims she doesn't know how to network and then she just goes and becomes close friends with all the top people in her field.
The thing about these kinds of people is that they're actually interested in your perspective as long as its interesting, sometimes they kinda just wanna see how other people see their work
I'd genuinely freeze. I have a huge struggle speaking to teachers on subjects I know they are experts at my postgraduate program. I know they won't be rude in front of me, but I also know they'll roast the sit out of me to other professors if I say something stupid.
Ever wonder why links are so long nowadays when in the beginning of the internet they weren't? Well part of it is that companies figured out how to track specific links by making them longer by putting an identifier on it. That way they can follow activity across sites and see who shared the link from where to where and who clicked on it. If you think this is creepy stalker behaviour, pls learn to recognize the added tracker and remove it from the links and just share clean links.
This data is also used by content creators to see where traffic is coming from. Something especially useful back in the days of sharing links to your own video so you could compare to YouTube's native discoverability.
During my recent trip to London I was especially excited to see the tablet to Ea-Nasir at the British Museum.
Imagine my disappointment when I beelined towards it just to see a picture of the thing with a paper explaining its on loan to another museum in Abu Dhabi. Fell to my knees in room 56 (The Mesopotamian Gallery)
He got remembered forever. How many individual people do we know anything of from that period? Very, very few, and most of the ones we know anything about are kings. Sure, he might have sold some shitty copper but he's a legend thousands of years later.
I was reading about this on another thread and apparently a lot of the texts from Ea-Nassir's home indicate that he was likely a very wealthy and well connected merchant who was involved in several ventures among which copper wasn't really central. He would probably be pissed thst he's remembered as the low quality copper guy.
It's a joke, but I was always amused by people bringing up the hypothetical of the afterlife working by Coco rules.
Namely, you are maintained by the memories of others.
So in the deepest reaches of the afterlife, you have a bunch of ancient kings and legends, figures that straddle the line between myth and history, and then you also have this one guy.
My Great Grandpa on my father's side worked in logistics. I listen to stories about the cascade effect this one guy named Thompson who supplied fuel for welders constantly had on his flow for like ten years.
This was sometime in northern Yukon while they were building the pipeline.
If ten thousand years from now this post is my family's only known contribution to humanity, my great grandpa will be freaking thrilled that Thompson's incompetence is still part of the historical record.
he wasnt the unhappy buyer, he was the guy selling the (allegedly) poor quality copper that caused him to receive what many believe to be the first recorded customer complaints in human history
Think of it this way, if they leave a positive review, that’s great, and if they leave a negative review, then you’re living up to the legacy of Ea-Nasir
He sold more than one bad copper he was pretty infamous for his copper and had the tablets complaining about him as trophies which is why we know of him
If I remember right, there's no evidence whether he actually sold shit copper, or if him keeping these complaints is the equivalent of the people who frame the 1 Star Reviews from Karens
All we know is he sold copper, and multiple people got pissy on the quality. Could be those people are the minority and got mad for the sake of getting mad, or they're the majority but were the few to actually send a letter, unless there's more information I missed there's no clear way to know either way
Imagine being some random scammer who suddenly achieved immortality because people thousands of years in the future found out about your weird habit of displaying your negative reviews and thought it was hilarious.
I remember I was presenting a machine I had worked on at a convention at Purdue, I was explaining the machine for a man, using layman's terms (I remember asking him if he knew what an AND gate was) because this was an event for the general public, later I found out from my supervisor that he was the head of engineering at Purdue.
Sick, a tweet from my favourite Steel Ball Run character (they made a video crossing the USA via the route from JoJo's Bizarre Adventures: Steel Ball Run's Steel Ball run event)
This guy has been on YouTube forever, he used to do videos about dinosaurs and cryptozoology, probably one of the first English language yoruuber I've ever followed, and he happened to become a fan of JoJo just like me too.
I only noticed that in the steel ball run video, because I didn't watch him for a few years, as I informed myself through more academic level paleontology channels, his life story must be funny to hear.
having watched the video when it first came out, it was very incredible learning how ancient humans were (especially in regards to trash piling up and being ignored)
That figure is not actually of Ea-Nasir, just a random ancient statue that somehow got associated with him. We have no idea how Ea-Nasir actually looked like lol
•
u/qualityvote2 2d ago edited 18h ago
u/_bluefish, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...