“Im a scientist, once I do something, I want to do something else.”

“I'm a scientist, once I do something, I want to do something else.”

― Clifford Stoll

Recently I was trying to work out why I get bored doing the same thing twice. I.e. Once I've solved a problem that's great but I want to move onto something else. Turns out that I'm not the only one suffering from this peculiarity.   I was reminded of Clifford Stoll's quote recently by this article:

https://medium.com/the-mission/in-1995-this-astronomer-predicted-the-internets-greatest-failure-68a1c3927e46 

Stoll was famous (the last time I'd heard of him) for catching hackers, but it turns out he's also famous for astronomy and predictions about problems with "free" information in the internet - He said the internet is " a wasteland of unfiltered data". The problem was bad enough before commercial entities were allowed internet access in newsgroups but he predicted it would get worse once everyone was connected - it did.

I met him briefly after AUUG conference in Sydney in 1993 (while I was working at the UNIX "hackers" company Softway), here's the paper he gave:

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=_KgukpTFKk4C&pg=page=327#v=onepage&q&f=false 


Clifford has the wild haired "Mad scientist" look down pat at a Ted Talk! I''ll have to keep working on that...



PS I also don't won't to get stuck being a technician! At that point it should be automated (by the engineer hopefully!).

Actually in many cases some degree of repetition is useful. A quote from Goldfinger:

Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action

And my paraphrase: 

Once is luck, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern, four times is a theory, and five times is a law?!