What to make of it all?

I mentioned in perhaps the first post here that my graduate advisor and I had finally sent off a paper based on my thesis work. The reviews came back a week or so after I returned from Eritrea, but at that time, planning the wedding was foremost on my mind. Afterwards, I got in touch with him again and we started the revisions. To be fair, he did nearly all the work. In the last couple weeks, about the same time frame that I was in the midst of early conversations with the trader I'll be working with, he resubmitted the revised paper. In one of the final emails about the paper, he wrote:

I like it. In fact, the odd thing is, now that I really think I understand it, I believe it to be a really brilliant piece of work. Far more original and compelling than that done by my other students (don't tell them that). [I don't think any of them read this blog, or would really care if they did.] It's unfortunate that this work is being delivered to the planetary audience; it will be a case of pearls before swine, and they won't understand it. You should really stay in science.

What came immediately to my mind is the truism that the lover who leaves you and breaks your heart and never calls finally decides to get back in touch right when you're starting to date someone you might truly care about again, e.g., Swingers. Although the idea of staying in science is nice in some ways, I didn't really see how it could work. My original and compelling thesis used fairly basic numerical methods and would not be obviously interesting to any particular community of scientists. Besides, I'd probably have to take another post-doc, maybe two, probably outside the Bay Area.

Although the dream of being an academic scientist is almost certainly dead, it nonetheless appears that this trading gig will get me most of what I think I would have wanted: learning about a diverse field with branches into lots of others, freedom to think creatively about technical subjects, and interaction with a collaborator. It also has a stronger financial incentive than being a scientist, something which, particularly after being unemployed for a year, doesn't hurt (as long as we're successful :) ). To close, this quote from the insightful and entertaining Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb:

Particularly thoughtful are those who had to abandon scientific studies because of their inability to keep focused on a narrowly defined problem. Without excessive intellectual curiousity, it is almost impossible to complete a Ph.D. thesis these days; but without a desire to narrowly specialize, it is impossible to make a scientific career.