A Contemporary Middle Eastern History Project

Month: August 2018

Game Theory: The Rules of the Game in Academia

chessLooking back on the stages if my education that I’ve gone through so far — from kindergarten to my current PhD position — it feels like the average hours I studied/worked per day peaked somewhere around the second year of high school.

I was about 16 at the time.

Somehow that made me wonder. Isn’t it supposed to intensify as you grow older?

Why did I spend most time at a desk during my teenage years, when I probably should have been working on my social skills?

Make no mistakes, the output of my working time increased since and I still encounter intensive long hour working days over an extended time period (usually deadline related).

But it has noticeably decreased.

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The 21st Century Bottleneck

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Atomic Fission and Fusion: A built-in mechanism to filter intelligent life?

Where is everybody?

Enrico Fermi, 1950

Enrico Fermi famously asked this question in 1950, addressing the paradox of basically indefinite possibilities for intelligent life in our universe and yet so far zero encounters with alien life-forms.

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