Bruce Banner. (doctorbanner) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2015-01-06 17:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | !thread, bruce banner (mcu), freddie trumper |
Who: Bruce Banner (MCU) & Freddie Trumper
When: Monday evening.
Where: The lab.
What: Bruce has a personal vendetta project that would benefit from a chess genius.
Rating: Low. Beware the junk science.
There were no two ways about it: Dr. Kaplyner, of the editorial board of the Journal of Solid State Physics & Electrochemistry, was an asshole. Bruce had known this for some time, of course. Everyone who'd ever met the son of a bitch knew it, unless they were irredeemable brown-nosers. He'd been publicly stroking his overblown ego for years, kissing up to just enough of the right people to make sure he found himself a comfortable rooftop from which to shout his own accomplishments, take advantage of less rabidly self-promoting scholars, and smear anyone he thought unpopular enough to be worth the mud. It was the sort of thing Bruce had the luxury of ignoring, these days, settled comfortably as he was, but he still had a google alert set for Kaplyner + "survived by" - and he still had to wade through the man's publications when they were inescapably relevant. Usually it was just an exercise in judicious skimming, but this time ... This time, the editorializing he'd shoehorned into the front matter had crossed the line from vaguely inappropriate to outright offensive. His response to the prior issue's Metastable states of the Ising Hamiltonian in the creation of artificial networks (by Tialik, G, a shy, pleasant sort, and what's more a classmate who to Bruce's recollection had always been ready to do a favor back in their days in Pasadena) was snide beyond excusing, myopic and frankly wrong. It also contained a just barely plausibly deniable dig at the much-lauded recent book of one of the field's only real rising stars. It reeked of vindictive jealousy. It demanded a response. But a scathing email would only play into an already high-pitched persecution complex; telling him off directly would only feed his morbidly obese sense of self-importance. So Bruce had taken a couple of hours out of his morning to devise a more satisfying (if, admittedly, more expensive and time-consuming) plan. By lunch, he'd known what he needed; and the only item missing from his laundry list was either someone fluent in a few languages from each family, or a very talented chess player. It was true what they said: you could find anything in New York. The chess player he'd found seemed to think a machine couldn't learn that particular skill sufficient to reach human levels of accomplishment; but even if he was right (which Bruce was inclined to think he wasn't, never one to put stock in vague concepts like instinct), it didn't matter. The educational process was the key, and if Trumper was willing to sit and play until the program essentially stopped learning, Bruce would cut him a check. Surely a new arrival could use a little help getting on his feet. It was a good deed whichever way you looked at it. So he cleared out his dinner hour and one of his guest chairs, made sure the appropriate parties knew Trumper had an appointment, and made his way toward the hallway when he heard the elevator go. Better not to allow too much unsupervised wandering. "Hello," he said, extending his hand with a mild smile when he'd found his man. "Thanks for coming by. We're back this way - do you want some tea, or anything?" |