> First of all, why just one heartbeat? I think it's a sort of academic machismo. "Look what we can do - isn't it amazing?" I saw the same thing in Robotics r

> First of all, why just one heartbeat? I think it's a sort of academic machismo. "Look what we can do - isn't it amazing?" I saw the same thing in Robotics recently. An academic came to give a talk on localisation using computer vision: they cross-referenced shop signs that were seen by a robotic camera with the shop's location on a map to get a rough estimate of where the robot was. My first question was "what is the incremental benefit of this approach when it was combined with GPS?". It turned out that the researchers just hadn't used GPS at all - almost like they considered it to be "cheating". I feel like many academic disciplines have unwritten 'rules' that you need to follow if you want to be included in the conversation. Not all of those rules are sensible.