4 ms·
So the joke is that the physicists have the hubris to think that French Literature isn't hard, right? It would be an incredible feat for anyone to learn French
by decode 17y ago
So the joke is that the physicists have the hubris to think that French Literature isn't hard, right?
It would be an incredible feat for anyone to learn French in a year (well enough to critique its great literature) and also become expert in the existing body of knowledge of literary criticism. Much less a physicist, who probably dreads writing a 10-page conference paper because there's too much prose in it.
- Retric 17y agoMost adults can learn a new language in ~6 months; the real test is how much substance is in each topic. Anyway the real joke about Phd's in Literature has to do with the perception that it's total BS. The great example of this is so-called ‘postmodern generator’ written by Andrew C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. Using this software (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo) NYU Physics Professor Alan Sokal’s generated a brilliantly meaningless article which was accepted by a cultural criticism publication, Social Text Vol. 46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). (Sokal, A., 2007, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/, accessed May 13, 2007) PS: However, the same could be said for CS depending on your standards for quality (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/).
- pushingbits 17y agoI'm not sure where you're quoting from, but that's not really what happened. Sokal wrote the text himself as a parody (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/li...).