Saturday, August 04, 2007

A minor correction

In a previous message regarding "Dr." Michael Savage extolling gold as an investment, I implied that he didn't really have a doctorate degree. Uhm, I gotta post a correction there. He does. Under his real name, Michael Allan Weiner (sounds like "whiner"), he has a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in Nutrition, and wrote a number of books in the 1970's and 1980's about various dietary supplement regimes (the most famous of which is his book "Getting Off Cocaine", where he advises an herbal regime for kicking the coke habit). If I were planning a series of meals to meet the dietary needs of a diverse population, I'd definitely consider Dr. Weiner to be someone whose expertise, if offered, would be valuable. Financial advice... uhm, no.

- Badtux the Correction Penguin

3 comments:

  1. Cook books, accounting books - what's the difference? Golden delicious, gold - it's all the same, right?

    It's amazing how some people who gained a certain level of credibility in one field, think it qualifies them as experts in all fields.

    Having seen the programming of Nobel prize winners [Scripps Institute], I have to say - some skills just don't translate.

    You would think someone who understands DNA would be able to deal with RS-232, but you would be wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  2. DNA, RS-232... yeah, I've had the pleasure of having to try to manage a guy with a Ph.D. in Physics. Talk about guys who are legends in their own minds. I especially loved when he blasted holes in one of our algorithms because it wasn't theoretically strong enough, and proposed implementing a different algorithm that was theoretically correct. Uhm, yeah. Except that other algorithm was too damned slow on the hardware available at the time, which was why we hadn't used it. Duh. But it just blew his mind that we'd actually ship software that we knew was not theoretically "perfect". The notion of "good enough" software just didn't compute with him. Dude might have been brilliant in his field, but it completely eluded him that those of us who'd been working in the commercial software field for years and knew how to, like, actually deliver working usable software that thousands of real customers used, might actually know more than him (who had never written any software beyond physics codes) about how to, like, actually deliver working usable software to actual paying customers. Just as, apparently, Dr. Weiner believes that a knowledge of nutrition is all you need to give investment advice, heh!

    - Badtux the Software Penguin

    ReplyDelete
  3. Did you not know? A college education allows one to do anything. A PHD makes you a God!

    ReplyDelete

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