VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Matt Westwood|DATE|1357767087|CONTENT|Neal Stephenson once told a tale on his blog of how he found himself at a writer&#039;s convention. He was asked by one of the literati: &quot;So what do you do?&quot; Puzzled, he replied, &quot;I&#039;m a writer.&quot; &quot;No, I mean, what&#039;s your job?&quot; &quot;I told you, I&#039;m a writer.&quot; &quot;No, what do you do to make money to support you in your writing?&quot; &quot;I don&#039;t need to do anything else. I&#039;m a writer. I support myself by sales of my work.&quot; &quot;Oh. (*sniff*) You&#039;re a hack.&quot;

Academe&#039;s like that. Utterly pointless people doing utterly pointless stuff desperately trying to convince everyone around them that what they are doing is important. And there are still young fools who go to uni to learn how to criticise literature. Such people look down on engineers. I met such a teacher myself in a queue for the Students&#039; Union bar at a summer school where I was completing an applied maths course. When I told her what I did, she looked at me and said, &quot;I suppose it&#039;s good that we academics can find something for people like *you* to do.&quot;|EMAIL|prime.mover@proofwiki.org|IP-ADDRESS|94.6.216.0|MODERATIONFLAG|