Tomorrow we are going to be giving a big demo of shared virtual reality here in Paris. So this evening I am working with colleagues here and grad students back in NY to get it all set up.
It’s one of the realities of the six hour time shift between New York and Paris that this must be done today not tomorrow. Right now, here in the early evening in Paris, it is mid-day in New York. That is a perfectly reasonable time of day for the folks back home to be working on this with us.
But tomorrow morning wouldn’t work out so well, since setting up then would require our grad students in NYC to wake up at 3AM. Our students are dedicated, but nobody should have to be that dedicated.
Here we are following a fundamental principle of computer science, which may generalize to other fields as well: Never make a grad student wake up early in the morning.
I don’t know, I remember working on many a project at 3am as a student.
True it was usually as a result of staying up late…
I think you’ve hit upon the essence of it: When you are a grad student, 3am is quite often a time to be awake late at night. But it is never a time to wake up early in the morning.