The older I get the more I realize I made the right decision to branch out. Academic Physics was too much like Church for my taste. All Ceremony and Fake Wine.
Of course, I do appreciate and enjoy study of the Physical Sciences. However, I am far more moved by what happens in the Real World: hence my employment in Defense and Finance. These pursuits are intellectual but harbor a combative element. I do not by nature pick fights, but I cannot stand when the effort made elicits no reaction.
At least in military or financial affairs you can be certain of a reaction when you pull the trigger. That beats the sometimes deafening silence of politely disengaged academic discourse. Each to their own. We are made differently after all.
I realize now I was always cut out to be a Heathen Mongol and never a High Priest.
Quiet monastic omphaloskepsis was never for me.
Rather than lead the quiet life ensconced in The Citadel I would rather: Sack It!
Hulagu’s army conducting a siege on Baghdad walls.
Lock up your Reliquaries, Pilgrims!
I am a self-confessed Heathen Mongol with a Ghenghis Kahn complex. Give me a band of Mongols and a Moonless Night. We could ride down from the Steppes, Sack the Citadel and make off with the Horses, the Gold and the Women, in that order.
It is when the World moves, that I feel Moved. When nothing happens at all, life gets very dull. What moves the mind moves the world – that is my motto.
No wonder I never fitted into the traditional academic world with that attitude!
Yep, a Hedge Fund and a private Helicopter Gun-Ship for me…
The best kind of scientific paper is like a sea-skimming Exocet missile.
It should come in low and fast, without warning, and take out the Flagship…BLAM!
Nobody, but nobody, should ever see it coming.
Then you simply Crash-Dive and lay low for a while.
Incoming…