First Published: 2023 June 2
As I mentioned yesterday, I gave a talk this past Saturday. It was a part of my university’s1 “Universe in the Park” series. I went to a State Wildlife Area2 and gave the first of what is currently3 scheduled to be six4 talks this summer.
My talk changed a lot from what I gave last year. Last year, I had titled my talk “Prebiotic Chemistry in the Interstellar Medium,” which is not, in retrospect, as good of a title as I had thought. With the added wisdom of almost ten additional months, I revised the slide deck almost completely. It is now titled “Searching for the Origins of Life in the Coldest Regions of Space”, a much more evocative title.5
My first talk went really well I think, all things considered. The general format of a Universe in the Park presentation is giving a short-ish lecture6, answering audience questions until they run out,7 and then using a telescope until either the park is closed or everyone is bored. Despite now being trained to use the telescope’s GPS features, I used very little of them.
Mostly, people wanted to look at the moon, which is fair. Unfortunately the viewfinder8 had gotten misaligned from the viewing scope, and I didn’t want people to have to wait for the9 five minutes it would take to align them together. Instead, everyone got to see the moon through the viewfinder, and then I coupled the two.
It was then that I learned just how quickly the moon moves through the sky. I found that I needed to adjust the sight every four or five people.10 Every time that I did, at least three mosquitoes took their chance to bite my face, leading to more than a few jerks. Thankfully, the moon is11 bright enough that I was able to quickly adjust it back by following its aura.
After everyone viewed the moon and was impressed by its many craters12, I moved the view to Venus, both to use the GPS alignment and because it’s the only other object I think is cool to look at in the sky. Switching out the optic for a more powerful one, people were able to see that Venus, like the moon,13 has shaded regions.
At that point, the number of people there was dwindling. I pointed the telescope to a few stars14, and people all filed out by ten pm or so. It still wasn’t even fully dark, not that I’m complaining.
I even got feedback from the park person.15 It’s mostly irrelevant, except for a quote which I want to exemplify more daily, “It covered the science behind space much more in depth than I thought it would, which was fine. But he also, related it well to what people would know about, including kids. He also was not thrown off by any questions that were asked”. I choose to interpret this as meaning I went in depth but still kept people engaged. What more could I hope for as a scientist communicating to the public?
(508/362)
or the state, or the astronomy department, depending on where we draw the line (or the donor who funds the talks I suppose even)↩︎
which is like a state park except focused on research not tourism↩︎
very actively debating signing up for two more↩︎
UitP (as I abbreviate it), I’m giving at least two other formal talks outside of this program↩︎
the clever amongst you may notice that the two talk titles are reducible to each other. That is somewhat intentional. (for those not in the loop, searching for the origins of life is just a less (differently?) jargoned way of saying prebiotic chemistry, and the coldest (relevant) regions of space are in the interstellar medium)↩︎
which I claimed would be forty five minutes despite knowing in my heart that it would be more like 25↩︎
favorites from this past one include “so what do you think of astrology?” (asked by a 20 something), “why do stars look blue and yellow?” (asked by a youngish schoolchild [side note, I do love that schoolchild is a great way to say “I know that they’re older than four, but that’s all I can commit to”]), and “so does space really smell like raspberries?” (asked by a father, to which I responded something along the lines of “it’s the same ester that makes rum smell, so they could have had a much more fun title with ‘space smells like rum’”)↩︎
read: weak telescope coupled to powerful telescope to allow for rough aligning↩︎
optimistically↩︎
interestingly, I’ve realized that in my writing I still naturally default to objects first, but I then immediately change it (here I initially began the sentence “every four or five people”, but changed it before finishing the sentence. I’m sure musing about how my writing has changed almost 220,000 words published over two web serials later would be interesting, but that’s probably best left to another time)↩︎
was?↩︎
I promise that sentence is not sarcastic at all. Maybe hyperbolic, but I think to at least a first order approximation everyone was↩︎
Moon? I forget how capitalization rules work with celestial bodies↩︎
spoiler, stars look the same↩︎
i forget his actual title↩︎
First Published: 2023 June 1
Oh wow, it’s been over two weeks since my last post. I have no clue where the days go. I did write around 36000 words last month, so that’s somewhat exciting, even if almost none of them were for this blog.
My goals last month broke into a few categories. If I had checked up on them, I’m sure that it would have been useful to have them in that order. Instead, I just forgot that they existed until I began writing this post.
Rather than list the list again, I’ll just go through how I did on them.
Professional:
I did not manage to get running on my instrument this past month, which I at least now know why.1
Probably because of the above item’s issues, I did not finish building the other instrument.
I did finish TAing and I even got mostly positive reviews!
I prepared for a talk at a state wildlife area, which is apparently distinct from a state park. It went really well, and I had 53 people come! I should absolutely blog about that, so expect a post soon.
Personal:
I deep cleaned my home to at least my own standards.
I finished the book I didn’t enjoy and managed to at least stay on the writing schedule I needed for the one I am enjoying. I kept hoping to pull ahead but haven’t managed it yet.
I am now I think good enough at bagpipes to where I won’t embarrass myself next week. There are a shocking number of interactions I have had related to playing the pipes these past weeks, which also deserve a posting of their own.
I don’t think that I played particularly more music, but I don’t know if I dislike that too much.
I spent some time working on a song but not enough to break the wall of writer’s block. I should really just get back into writing poetry.2
Growth:
I have off and on been able to make more time for prayer.
I wrote none letters, though I did see friends in person!
Oof, I did not blog daily. I blogged half as much last month as in April.
I ran I think zero times.
I mostly stopped working out.
I actually did manage to go to bed generally early! My default wake time has shifted to be nearly six am now which is nice.
Looking forward at this month, I would like to:
Accomplishments/Finite Tasks3
Play bagpipes at a friend’s wedding
Write and give a talk at a conference
Get my instrument running
Growth
This might be a better way to frame my goals. In general, there are things that I want to have accomplished, and things I want to do.6 Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up with this more!
the short version is that the box I was given to output high voltage gives it negative not positive. The long version is that plus a bunch of other corrections.↩︎
well known as the gateway to songwriting↩︎
i.e. things that I will have done by the end of the month.↩︎
I’m not ashamed of it anymore which is nice↩︎
ideas from above/that I need to discuss in general are: my talk, piping interactions, book reviews of the books I’ve read recently, do versus have done↩︎
oh, shoot, that’s actually something I should blog about. I had a whole idea going about the difference between things I want to do, things I do, and things I want to have done. adding to list↩︎
First Published: 2023 May 15
Today I updated my twenty four for twenty four goal1, which feels like as good of a reason to restart this blog as any. On an impulse, I copied an old blog post, because I was intrigued by what the title meant. Interestingly, while discussing the definitions of in my life, I didn’t discuss the diving/gymnastics centered meaning of the word.
Anyways, one experiment that I was given to rebuild as a part of my PhD progress has the goal of creating a standing plasma. Last week I successfully produced a plasma for the first time in the instrument in over half a decade, which is incredible to me. Now I need to optimize the plasma and make it usable for what we need.2
First Published: 2023 May 4
It was just yesterday that I talked about how I’d like to keep up writing even though I no longer need to. As it turns out, I am incredibly motivated by deadlines. Without the explicit need to write 2000 words to put out a chapter today, I didn’t end up writing more than 1000 total words, and almost all of those came after 5pm. I need to think of how to make myself write even when there’s not a deadline. At worst, that seems like a skill I should be able to transfer.
First Published: 2023 May 3
Twice a year, the website I’ve been self publishing my web serials on has a competition: write 55,555 words in 5 weeks. The latest one began this year on the first of April, and I set a variety of goals related to it. As I mentioned in my last writing post, I wanted to write more words each day that I wrote. That goal didn’t end up panning out, though I did end up still writing 78010 words in April.1
Another goal I had was posting a chapter for the new book every day at 2:08 PM CST until I hit the word count for the challenge. I accomplished that, though I did become far looser on my personal idiolectal usage of hyphens.2
I also had the goal of maintaining my 3/week schedule of the book I had started before Writathon. I accomplished that.
I had the goal of completing Writathon, which I tangentially answered as having done above. To be clear, i did it.
Finally, I had a goal of learning to write combat scenes. I still don’t know if I’m fantastic at it, but I think that the scenes I wrote were at least serviceable.
I certainly feel like I grew a lot as a writer, if only in terms of learning to write content I am willing to put out into the world faster. Partially that was lowering my standards, but I also think that I grew a lot as a writer in terms of thinking in a way that transfers to the page more easily. These past few days in particular, I noticed that I was restarting sentences two or three times as I saw how they wouldn’t end correctly. Historically, I would have needed to reread the entire chapter to notice that mistake.
So, while I’m still unsure if I plan to do Writathon ever again, I’m certainly glad that I took part in it. If I can maintain my average of over 27003 words every day that I write4, I think that it would remain a very doable activity.
where I only counted text that I physically wrote as content for chapters, one book review, and the occasional blog posts. I didn’t include titles, the cases where I have macros defined for words (I use tables that have “Congratulations!” in them often enough that it seemed worthwhile to define a table that says congratulations), or any other writing I needed to do for life and whatnot↩︎
read: I stopped using hyphens because brain-dead is one word but brain dead is two↩︎
holy crud that’s a lot of words (also this post technically counts towards the average. It was 2740 before posting this, and would be 2755 after↩︎
basically 6 days per week↩︎
First Published: 2023 May 02
So the last time I can find that I mused about baking, I mused about a recipe I was working on. Today is sort of the opposite.
I’ve found that1 when I bake bread in the morning, I feel better about the day and I am more productive. To test that, I made bread dough last night and woke up slightly early to bake it this morning. It came out really well, which was great.
While I was making it, though, I considered what I was doing. Something that popped into my mind was a meme format I’ve seen going around a lot for the past few years. The general conceit is that someone is reflecting on how excited their ancestors would be of the quality of their living conditions.
I thought about the fact that I was actively choosing to make bread, not out of any need, but simply with the desire to feed my friends. I worked with finely ground white flour, which I was able to mix using drinkable water that is within my home. When I decided to bake it, I have an oven within my home.
It was a nice feeling, though I think the productivity was a little overstated. I didn’t end up doing as much as I wanted throughout the day, though I did get an early start, which was nice. Maybe my day wasn’t going to be productive regardless of my choices, in which case what I did was the best I could do.
In any case, I got to share fresh baked bread with friends, and that made me happy.2
First Published: 2022 May 1
So, you know, I kind of fell off writing this again. In my defense, I did write just under 80,000 words last month, so most of my mental energy was occupied elsewhere. In last year’s version of this post, I set the goals of blogging, poetry, and stretching daily. I also, humorously enough, set the goal of finishing the first draft of the book that I’m now putting out as a web novel.
My goals for the month come in a few shapes.
Professional:
Start running my first instrument. I have a conference in about a month and a half, and I really need to start collecting data.
Finish building the second instrument. More or less as above.
Finish TA’ing for the semester. There isn’t too much to this goal, since I just need to grade a few items.
Prepare for a talk at a state park. I can recycle most of my content from last year.
Personal:
Deep clean my home. It’s messier than I’d like.
Keep up with the book that I’m writing/finish the other one. One book brings me joy, the other doesn’t.
Relearn bagpipes. I’m playing at another wedding this summer, and I need to be able to do so.
Practice instruments more. I miss being musical.
Write a song. I have an idea that’s been floating around for a few days that I think I just need to make time for
Growth:1
Make more time for prayer and meditation. I felt better for the few weeks that I made the time to do this.
Write at least three letters to friends and mail them. I’ve talked to a number of friends who mentioned wanting a hand written letter. It’s fun to write them.
Blog more. I’d like to say daily, but, as I pointed out a year ago, that’s a strange level of both too high for realistic and too low for aspirations.
Run more. I like the way I feel when I can run, for all that I hate running. I suppose I could start swimming instead, but.2
An actual aspiration: It would be fantastic to hit 1000 pounds in my 1RM for the big three lifts.3 In theory I’m at about4 865 pounds, which is much closer than I thought. If I manage to actually keep up lifting 3x a week this month, it should be very doable.
Get to bed early enough that I can get up at 6 am every morning. I find that if I start my day early5 by writing or doing something else productive6 I become much happier and more productive for the rest of the day. Unfortunately, that means that I need to be smart and go to bed earlier.
Welp, that’s certainly a lot. Hopefully I manage to do at least most of these most of the time!
Generally, it looks like my professional goals are all deadline based, which makes some amount of sense. My personal goals are generally musical, which is interesting. My growth goals seem to focus on fitness and putting out writing. No real commentary there.
Anyways, hopefully see you7 tomorrow!
I see this as different than the two above in that this is aspirational and focused explicitly on future benefit↩︎
but nothing honestly, pools just have more restricted hours/require more planning.↩︎
Squat, Deadlift, Bench Press.↩︎
305+355+205 =↩︎
Yes I know that I used to be actively swimming laps at 6am, but I never really enjoyed it↩︎
i.e. baking bread↩︎
the hypothetical reader reading this before my next post↩︎
First Published: 2023 April 14
Last time I talked about my handwriting, I made the claim that the speed my handwriting changes was slowing down over time. While I think that may have been true then, a large part of that had to do with the fact that I had been working in the same journal for nearly two years.1
Unlike that journal, the journal I began around the time of my last post only lasted a few months. Also unlike before, I had no issues finding a new way to change my penmanship. It ended up being a two-fold change.
The first major change is that my handwriting has become much tighter than even before. I attribute a large part of that to the fact that I got 0.3 mm mechanical pencils for Christmas, which give a significantly smaller line, especially how I use them.2
The other major change was the deliberate change that I made. I apparently didn’t talk about this last time, but I made a goal with myself to change my handwriting in some obvious and notable way each journal.3 In my first journal, this meant writing in all caps.
In my second journal, it was all caps with the first letter of each word capitalized. In the third, I think I added my double letters.4 In the fourth I stopped writing every other line, shrinking the vertical space on my page.
And, as I mentioned last time, in my fifth5 journal, I made overhanging letters. I said then that I would do that with “t,i,s,c,g,j,f still unsure of b,p,r”. The list is now slightly different. I do it with B,C,E,F,G,I,J,P,R,S, and T.
Since I didn’t alphabetize it last time, the differences are as follows. I became sure of B, changed the way that I wrote my E so that it overhung better6. I became sure of P and R. All in all, not a huge difference between the first pages and the last.
In my new journal, all that remains, but now I write it with a slant. I’m still not sure what angle to my vertical strokes is ideal, but I think I tend to be somewhere in the fifteen to twenty degree range. Comments this week have included 7, “looks like a medieval scribe’s handwriting”, and “it kind of looks like Arabic.”
I like how it looks, though I do think it’s funny that I went from messy and illegible to pretty and illegible. Maybe my next journal’s handwriting change will be legibility to a broad audience.
It might be nearly three, but my journals are far away, and I don’t feel like finding one for certain right now.↩
rotating the pencil in my hand every few words so that the sharpest point is always what I write with.↩
when asked why, I often respond with my joking (but truly and legitimately held belief) statement that people should set arbitrary goals and then strive to achieve them↩
assuming that I have five. Otherwise ignore this one and treat all the numbers after it as one smaller↩
again, assuming there were five before my newest↩
i.e. made it less like an epsilon↩
looks like elvish↩
First Published: 2023 April 13
Last time that I mused about running, I talked about the Doctoral Degree Dash that I did last summer. In it, I ran further than I thought I could.1
Since then, I’ve tried running off and on. Lately I’ve been more off than on, but even when I try, I find that I can only really run around a mile in the indoor track I’m using before I lose the ability to keep going.
This week has been shockingly warm here, and it’s made me want to get outside and run. So, tonight I decided to run while praying a rosary,2 to see if that could help motivate me to run longer.
In total, I ended up running just under three miles. I think that there were likely N causes to that.3
First, I actually felt like the distance measurement was accurate. When I run on the indoor track, it claims that 6.6 laps equal a mile, but my watch seems to think it’s closer to eight.
Second, the constant variety in an outdoor run as compared to indoors. When I run on the track, I’m running in a small loop over and over, so it’s harder to want to keep going. On the other hand, when I run outside, especially in the latter half of the run, the faster I go, the sooner I get home.
Third, I actually did something with my mind to stop me from thinking about how miserable it is to run.4
I found out my watch now gives me a lot of statistics about my runs. For instance, my heart rate basically never dropped below 175 while I ran, which is an incredibly high feeling number. My pace also seems to be fairly well correlated to my stride length, which makes sense to me. When I get tired my steps certainly get shorter.
Anyways, I just thought it was interesting how different it feels to run outside than inside. I’m hoping to get in better physical shape this summer, but summer kind of starts now.
To be fair, I didn’t think that I could run 5 miles, which was (is?) apparently untrue↩︎
something I did a fair amount last summer↩︎
I’m going to try to actually write these posts without going back more going forward, and when I’m not sure how many causes or reasons or items in general lists I have, I normally either pick a number arbitrarily or put N.↩︎
So here N=3↩︎
First Published: 2022 April 12
As rapidly happens for me, I’ve run out of ideas to blog about. I’ve been drawing a lot of celtic knots again lately, though, so I suppose that’s something that I can talk about.
Something I’ve always wished and hoped for is the ability to freehand celtic knotwork. As some of my readers might have seen on my Instagram page, every one I make starts with a grid and then a grid of circles representing the holes in the design.
I don’t remember whether I started drawing them like this to practice freehand, or if the two just grew together, but I’ve started drawing celtic knots as single lines, rather than the two dimensional ribbons that I used to draw. It’s absolutely helped me with freehanding, though I’m still nowhere near as good as I would like to be.
As I tried reproducing a cross that I am particularly proud of today, I think I might have found a new solution, though. I made all of the beams going a single direction first, and only then went through and added the crossing pieces.1
It worked much better than I expected, though I was still fairly reliant on the grid of my paper. Then again, practicing on a lightly gridded piece of paper is probably my best bet for learning how to quickly find the right sizing.
if none of this makes sense, I apologize. I procrastinated my writing a little too much this week, and I’m finally paying the price.↩