How to put this delicately? When, a while back, we were discussing the plusses and minuses of a life in academia, a casual reader might have gotten the impression that there were two classes represented: those who departed academia after having been bitten hard by venal prima donnas or self-serving incompetents (or both), and those who enjoy immunity from those hard knocks (and who may fall under suspicion of themselves being among those venal self-serving biters). Inhabitants of academia might be unsuited for or incapable of other employment; emigrants from academia, under this schema, are well-adjusted people who recognized a malign institution and departed from it rather than adjusting to its abusive-family cycle of psychic violence.
As I say, “a casual reader” might have come up with such an interpretation. Our friends in Blogaria maintained a more nuanced discussion than that; I’m deliberately superficializing.
And this afternoon, I’m noting for the record that some people wind up on the receiving end of unwelcome bites, who decline either to relinquish the opportunity that their positions in educational institutions offer for actually helping students to understand weighty and intricate matters (on one hand) or to become abusers (on the other).
It is all quite complicated — as most important topics turn out to be.
Posted by AKMA at April 25, 2003 05:35 PM | TrackBackAnybody who calls *me* "well-adjusted" is asking for gales of laughter. Not just from me, either.
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at April 25, 2003 09:18 PMI have no recollection of your post on academia, however this post is so very fitting to my present situation that you are beginning to scare me.
I have bitten hard by a self-serving type.
Posted by: Ryan at April 25, 2003 10:22 PMUgh. Hope the unwelcome biter bites his or her own tail, soon.
Posted by: Liz Lawley at April 28, 2003 07:47 AM*chuckle* I do love the style of discourse where one becomes more polite the more vehemently one disagrees with one's opponents. That said, I appreciate your point -- made much more clearly than I've been able to -- and wish you lots of figurative Bactine. ;)
Posted by: Naomi Chana at April 28, 2003 09:12 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Brian at January 13, 2004 11:01 AMA variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Susanna at January 13, 2004 11:02 AMWhen compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.
Posted by: Magdalen at January 13, 2004 11:02 AM