
'05 Annual Performance Review: Albert Einstein - iamaaditya
http://www.norvig.com/performance-review.html
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roymurdock
This is a hilarious re envisioning of how a young Einstein would have been
graded by his boss...especially enjoyed these nuggets:

> You wrote that "A storm broke out in my mind" this year. Let me remind you
> that our Employee Assistance Plan (EAP) covers up to three psychiatric
> treatments, should you find them necessary.

> You seem to lack a flare for self-promotion. Lucky for us our PR department
> stepped in and changed your L/c2 equation into the much more marketable E =
> mc2."

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twtw
Something that I find very interesting is that it is probable that some of the
patent applications that Einstein evaluated were for methods of synchronizing
clocks for railways. This was a pretty big deal at that time, and Einstein was
probably in the center of it. His ideas about space and time may not have been
so far removed from his occupation as most people assume.

Peter Galison has written quite a bit about this.

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emptybits
My first reaction to what you said was "bah, the scale of space and time in
which railways operate wouldn't be impacted by Einstein's ideas about space
and time." (And they aren't, in a practical sense.)

But then I Googled up this short interview with Galison.[1]

 _Suppose, Einstein reasoned, that you wanted to know what time a train
arrived in a train station. Easy enough: you see where the hand of your watch
is at the time the engine pulls up alongside you. But what if you wanted to
know when a train was pulling into a distant station? How do you know whether
an event here is simultaneous with an event there? Einstein insisted that we
need a simultaneity - fixing procedure, a definite system of exchanging
signals between the stations that would take into account the time it took for
the signal to get from one station to another. By pursuing this insight,
Einstein discovered that two events that were simultaneous in one frame of
reference would not be simultaneous in another. Moreover, since a length
measurement involves determining the position of the front and back of an
object at the same time, the relativity of simultaneity meant that length was
relative as well. By removing the absolutes of space and time, Einstein
restructured modern physics._

OP is marginally clever parody but your comment led me to this. So thanks!

[1] [https://history.aip.org/exhibits/einstein/essay-einsteins-
ti...](https://history.aip.org/exhibits/einstein/essay-einsteins-time.htm)

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fwdpropaganda
I thought HN was for "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"?
This isn't an actual performance review, it's just parody.

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toomuchtodo
Consider that parody is part of intellectual curiosity.

