Source code, materials and notebooks for the workshop @ ODSC London 2019
I hope to see you at the workshop! Follow the preparation steps to make the most of your time.
The technical preparation steps are at the bottom, after the story, please scroll down if you're in a rush:)
Richard Feynman - to many this name needs no further introduction - was a renowned scientist and physicist, one of the great minds of our time, a Nobel Prize winner and a fascinating human being. Although he died in 1988, many books and video materials remain to give a glipmse of his character and give tribute to this incredibly clear, honest, humble, playful, intuitive and immensely intelligent giant.
In a documentary interview carrying the beautiful title "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", the passionate genius professor tells a story of what sparked a chain of events that led him to work out what later became the reason for the Nobel Prize award.
Quote from the interview:
I used to enjoy physics and mathematical things and because I used to play with it.
It was never very important, but I used to do things for the fun of it. So I decided: I'm gonna do things only for the fun of it.
And only that afternoon, while I was eating lunch, some kid threw up a plate in the cafeteria, which has a blue medallion on the plate - the Cornell sign in the cafeteria. And as he threw up the plate and it came down it wobbled and the blue thing went around like this and I wondered... it seemed to me the blue thing went around faster than the wobble and I wondered what the relation was between the two.
See I was just playing; it had no importance at all.
I played around with the equations of motion of rotating things and I found out that if the wobble is small, the blue thing goes around twice as fast as the wobble goes around. And then I tried to figure out if I could see why that was directly from Newton's laws instead of through the complicated equations and I worked that out for the fun of it.
[...] And this rotation led me to a similar problem with the rotation of the spin of an electron according to Dirac's equation and that just led me to into Quantum Electrodynamics which is the problem I'd been working on and I kept continuing now to play with it in the relaxed fashion I had originally done and everything - it was like taking a cork out of a bottle - everything just poured out and by the way in a very short order I worked the things out for which I later won the Nobel Prize.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Story starts at 21m00s)
This unusual story that culminated with a phenomenal breakthrough in science is a vivid illustration of a phenomenon that is not reserved for genius scientists - in fact, most all of us can remember at least one serendipitous moment of inspiration that propelled us to great achievements.
This workshop will be about great new tools, but beyond that, it will be about creating these windows of clarity that carry over into fantastic outcomes. I invite you to get the conversation started for yourself with the help of the questions below:
- What methods do you use to capture the attention of management and effectively communicate key results of your work? How does that benefit you?
- How do you ensure that the benefits coming from your contribution are easily accessible by others on your team, and vice versa?
- Can you remember a time when you had a strong idea, brought it that one step closer to stakeholders, and it really made a difference? What did you do well?
- Can you recall a situation when it was hard to communicate important messages to your team, perhaps due to distraction, stress, urgency, or insufficient amount of quality time? How did you deal with that?
Prepare by understanding where you want to be, and this workshop will give you tools to help you get there - not just more cool libraries with interesting names.
I hope you have fun - and please share your thoughts with me, I want to hear from you!
The quick and easy way is to use the Binder button at the top of this document!
If you wish to run this locally,
git clonethis repository- please have a recent Anaconda Python installed (ideally Python 3.7)
- Please make sure you have the few packages we will be using by running
pip install -r requirements.txt
Thank you for taking the preparation steps. See you at the workshop!
Michal Mucha
https://create.ml/
@jeremimucha