[eddtests]

There’s a fun anecdote about Bell Labs where an electrical engineer, Nyquist, was found to be one of the connecting points for patent output in the company. Having lunch with him seems to have outputted greater numbers of patents. I know there’s going to be so many other factors but I know I’ve learnt a lot from hanging with colleagues over lunch or at the pub, what’s the replacement to that?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nyquist

[milesvp]

I know a guy like this. He was once employed to wander around talking with other engineers of different specialties. He has a habit of looking at things from first principles. And talking to him would invariably get you unstuck on some problem, often by sidestepping it completely. At the very least they’d end up with interesting directions to spend effort on.

He’s an absolutely fascinating person to talk to.