I wonder if any previous Nobel prize recipients also were neighbors?
They live on Stanford's land. I imagine that when Universities have land where faculty can have houses this has happened before.
When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
91–100 of 243 posts
Re: When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yeah, try that and I'm dropping any business relationship with you that I have the next morning. Or if I don't, then I'll pay a visit to the local office of our Office of Competition and Customer Protection.
Ah - you're in Europe. In the US that's a very common spam call to receive. It may come from a different number every time and the FCC and FTC (the relevant authorities) can't or won't stop it. I've had it in the middle of the night a couple of times, though I think that's not as common. It's the reason my phone is always on Do Not Disturb now.
Europe is not that serene as you may think. I get plenty of spam calls from entities I'm in a relationship with - like my mobile operator or my bank[0]. It's one of the reasons my phone is on silent during the day[1]. The problem with those is the usual fake "market choice": every mobile operator and bank is pulling this crap, so I don't abandon mine, because alternatives are no better.
Then there are occasional random scams calling in - most common recently is "your number has been randomly selected as a winner and you're eligible for ${insert useless reward that's just a bait for scam here}". But none of them, ever, tried to call late at night. If they did, I'd file a complaint.
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[0] - The most annoying spam call from a bank was an upsell that happened last year. I was doing the usual checkup on my account balances via their web page, and out of curiosity decided to check out what they have on the "offers" tab. I clicked to the tab, skimmed the list of loan and investment offers, and got back to managing my money. The next day, a marketer calls, trying to upsell me some credit. When pressed, he straight up admitted that I got flagged in the system because I clicked on the "offers" tab and didn't buy anything. As you can imagine, the next time the bank called to take a "quality of service" survey, I said a lot of words about what I don't like about their service.
[1] - I have a smartwatch that vibrates when I get a call, giving me an unobtrusive way to look at the number and reject it without taking the phone out.
Re: When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somebody always comes up with this thinking that nobody else knows it. The Nobel price in economics has much more prestige than two of the 'real' prices (Peace price and Literature price). Unlike committees for those prices, Riksbank pretty much always selects someone deserving the price.
Really? In my mind the Peace Prize gets the top billing. If I knew someone had a Nobel prize in economics, I would think they were really smart, and really deep into economics. If I knew someone had a Nobel Peace prize, it's almost certain that they did something of extreme first hand importance to the lives of many.
Publicity is different from prestige and reputation. The Peace prize has received publicity from controversies.
Peace prize has been given people who don't deserve it. President Obama was nominated less than two weeks in office and received it after less than nine months in the office. The prize was seen more as criticism of Bush administration than awarding Obama.
Re: When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very interesting article and I think it points to the main reason its so important to reach the winners: > If, like Saul Perlmutter (Physics, 2011), you live in California and the call comes, unanswered, in the middle of the night, then it could be the television news vans outside your house that alert you of your prize.
> If you don’t pick up the phone, the ceremony continues without you. The public announcement comes at noon. Why don't the Nobel people just wait until you've been successfully informed before telling anyone else? Where does this self-imposed deadline come from?
Because normally they have hundreds of journalists and scientists onsite a ceremony and don't want to make them wait.
Re: When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have absolutely gotten very late night calls in Europe when I've been traveling, mostly SPAM, some wrong numbers, but also idiot people at my company which could have been dealt with using a text or email. (Haven't actually gotten the latter for a while; people don't randomly call someone outside of specific circumstances at this point.) My contacts go through, there's the call twice workaround, and honestly I'm fr…
> I'm from a period when you just couldn't always reach someone immediately Sure, me too, but that's exactly where I'm coming from when I ask. It's the same set of sensibilities that says that if there's going to be a call in the middle of the night, it's probably for a good reason. I would think we'd have to fast forward from there to reach the place that views regularly taking the phone off the hook as the natural…
I'd definitely be open to an argument that it may be reasonable to DND my phone when I'm traveling to Europe/Asia but not otherwise especially given that I no longer have a landline. In fact, given that isn't happening anytime soon maybe I'll turn it off. (I have very few notifications on anyway.)
Re: When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you don’t pick up the phone, the ceremony continues without you. The public announcement comes at noon. Why don't the Nobel people just wait until you've been successfully informed before telling anyone else? Where does this self-imposed deadline come from?
Because normally they have hundreds of journalists and scientists onsite a ceremony and don't want to make them wait.
> they have hundreds of journalists and scientists onsite a ceremony
Maybe they shouldn't have done that before checking if the person was ok with being awarded the prize?
Re: When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
#97Berkeley gives you a parking space if you work there and win a Nobel. They even have signs "Reserved for Nobel Laureate". As far as I know, Stanford does not. Doesn't Google had the leaders in auction theory now? Would someone please devise a way to run a stock market as a repeated clocked auction, so that prices change, say, once every 5 minutes and high frequency trading doesn't work.
> They even have signs "Reserved for Nobel Laureate". Assuming they work in the same building, now is Stanford's chance. The bigger flex is to have two or more adjacent parking spaces with signage that says "Reserved for Nobel Laureates" (plural).
Berkeley has a lot more laureates than Stanford. It would be a weak flex. :)
Berkeley already has rows of NL parking.
Re: When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe a custom format for twitter (and even github: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com )
Yeah, it seems like this is a feature that was added for a few domains this week including Medium, GitHub and Twitter.
IMO it would be pretty useful for Reddit too: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=reddit.com
Re: When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somebody always comes up with this thinking that nobody else knows it. The Nobel price in economics has much more prestige than two of the 'real' prices (Peace price and Literature price). Unlike committees for those prices, Riksbank pretty much always selects someone deserving the price.
Really? In my mind the Peace Prize gets the top billing. If I knew someone had a Nobel prize in economics, I would think they were really smart, and really deep into economics. If I knew someone had a Nobel Peace prize, it's almost certain that they did something of extreme first hand importance to the lives of many.
Re: When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
#100The thread says: The #NobelPrize committee couldn't reach Paul Milgrom to share the news that he won, so his fellow winner and neighbor Robert Wilson knocked on his door in the middle of the night. When Robert Wilson rang Paul Milgrom's doorbell at 2:15 this morning, Milgrom's wife, who's in Stockholm, received a security-camera notification on her phone. She got to watch live as Wilson told Milgrom he'd won the #Nob…
I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I found this funny, just like the submission. There's sometimes an awful lot of po-faced folks on HN, even when the post is funny and heartwarming.
Some (quite misguided) people on Hacker News think the site shouldn't accept humor in any form.