Randy Days

I haven't written anything in a few months, but a recent news item about a long-dead Russian brought back memories of a 2014 experience. It's a short one today. I reference the article, of course: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/10/new-age-ayn-rand-conquered-trump-white-house-silicon-valley

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Before starting my PhD, I spent a summer in the somewhat cryogenic care of a Dr Ilya Kuprov, stationed in the crosshair of his all-seeing Russian sniper's eye. Mostly, I passed my time just as I do now (trying in vain to figure out how to escape), but otherwise I was working on some kind of coding thing about NMR. As it happens, he and Prof Malcolm Levitt solved the problem quite speedily themselves without any intervention at all from me, and to this day I believe my only purpose there was to demonstrate the inadequacies of "socialist" British education.

While combing lines of code that Ilya had written, I would often come across the points where he got bored by the simplicity of it all. These points he embellished with commented life advice, such as the following:

IK has compiled, over the years, a list of literature that allows one to successfully withstand the oftentimes toxic social atmosphere of academic establishments. In the approximate order of reading, the books are:
- Ayn Rand, 'Atlas Shrugged'
- Ayn Rand, 'The Fountainhead'
- Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Beyond Good and Evil'
- David DeAngelo, 'Deep Inner Game'
- Ragnar Redbeard, 'Might Is Right'

In case you, like Ilya, found four-dimensional quaternion simulations so insultingly childish that you developed a lunchtime hankering for early 20th-Century philosophy, you would be in luck, because he kept copies of each of these books on the office bookshelf alongside NMR textbooks and coding manuals.

And it occurs to me now that in another life Ilya might have served as the inspiration for the main character of 'The Fountainhead':

"It tells the story of Howard Roark, an architect dedicated to the pursuit of his own vision – a man who would rather see his buildings dynamited than compromise on the perfection of his designs. All around him are mediocrities, representing either the dead hand of the state, bureaucrats serving some notional collective good, or “second handers” – corporate parasites who profit from the work and vision of others."

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By:

The Imperial Orange,

12th April 2017