The big ACM SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics and interaction techniques is now about a week away. I am preparing my talk, and very much looking forward seeing old friends again.
One of the oddest conversations I ever had at SIGGRAPH was many years ago — it might have been in the 1980s. This was back when SIGGRAPH research papers were all published on actual paper.
Because of that, there was a strict page limit. Your research paper submission could not be longer than 8 pages, which was a very difficult constraint.
A colleague and I were discussing how difficult it was to write a really good research paper in so few pages. At some point in the conversation, I said “Well, Chekhov once said that one should write as if standing on one foot, and then edit as if sitting in a comfortable chair.”
There was a long pause, while my colleague just stared at me. Finally he said “I don’t really watch Star Trek.”