The biggest heart

I'm grateful that my parents took me to so many museums when I was growing up. We'd go to the Franklin Institute maybe once or twice a year until I was a bit too old to really get anything out of it. Even traveling into Philly for the day was exciting: it was like the infinite highway would suddenly drop us into a noisy, smoky City. I live in a fairly dense metropolitan area now but I still don't consider it a capital-C City. Then on to the FI, and the following attractions:

• The giant heart, of course. 
• A Rube Goldberg-esque mechanical sculpture which moved some kind of wooden balls around ad infinitum.
• Video demonstrations about antibodies.
• The Omnimax, which I guess is called IMAX Dome now

I'm really not doing these memories justice. There's a particular childlike joy only found in memories of science museums. I remember visiting the FI again sometime in the early undergraduate years and finding it underwhelming. I was older, certainly, but the exhibits also seemed to gloss over most scientific explanations for phenomena in favor of snappy little demonstrations without much rationale behind them. It was less of "this is why things happen like they do" and more of "hey look at this happening! That's because of Science!" Plus, a good quarter of the exhibits were broken or damaged from use.

I'd still take kids to museums now. There must be ways to cultivate wonder and the search for meaning concurrently.  

Home taping is killing home taping

This is a post-audio-scarcity world and I am grateful for it.

It's not too difficult to remember a time when music had to be purchased and lectures only happened once. Recording was trivial to begin but laborious to maintain. Don't forget to turn those tapes over so you can use the other side, as space is precious! The same was true of buying music: with the right resources, you could certainly have bought every album in existence, but who wants to deal with all those discrete physical objects sitting around?

So now the audio is everywhere. Yes, internet connectivity is a limiting factor. Yes, the DRM can be both obtrusive and intrusive. I don't care anymore. I can download all the podcasts* I could ever want without having to walk through the door of some specialty store. I can turn the music on and never hear the same track more than once. The biggest limiting factor is now time. That, and a willingness to be advertised to.


*Isn't there a better term for these yet? The whole pod- prefix should have gone the way of cyber-, though I suppose that my-**, e-, and i- are enjoying pleasant undead lives in the vernacular.  

**Would you believe that mySimon is still online?

3 reasons this pile of kittens will make you believe in ghosts

It's helpful to be aware of the day's minor irritants. We're at least partially aware of them when they occur, so why not anticipate them appearing again the next day? For me, three of these irritants are as follows.

1. Online news and literature. It's not just the overwhelming nature of having to realize how I will never and should never read every bit of content I could be interested in. It's not even just because I will never have access to every piece of potentially amusing or interesting information. (Feedly handles much of that issue for me, while the more academic material is deftly provided by Mendeley, Google Scholar, and PubMed). The stressful part is the signal to noise ratio. There is just so much noise inherent to any one content source that it's a strain to determine if there's any signal at all. Much of the noise is certainly content I'm not interested in at all, but increasingly there's also rehashed blandness masquerading as content, whether it's linkbait headlines or poorly-written journal abstracts. I find all this irritating because I really don't like having to multitask, but I also don't want to get stuck in an information bubble. There has to be a balance between being open-minded and focused.
2. Stacks. They're acceptable for data typing but not for physical objects. If I look around my house or lab and see a pile of anything, I find it incrementally more difficult to focus on anything else. I can't remember where I read it, but someone with a similar problem explained the issue as less of a direct response to the current disorganization and more of a response to the memory of a recent period in life when order had to become a lesser priority. That's a fairly satisfying explanation as I don't tend to find it stressful to deal with others' clutter unless I could have had a chance to prevent it from becoming that way.
3. A lack of integration with my department. The whole "introvert vs. extrovert" dichotomy is an oversimplification. I don't feel uncomfortable being around people at all. Being in grad school actually makes me feel very outgoing on occasions when my colleagues are playing the "let's see how many times I can check my email during this meeting" game. Even so, I pass people in the hallways all the time who I really should get to know better, if only because they're my neighbors and I may need their help (and vice-versa, of course). That's the issue, though: I'm quite poor at building and maintaining relationships. Or, maybe I'm about as unskilled in it as everyone else is. There's a great potential for confirmation bias as I compare all the people I should communicate with more often with those who I even see regularly. It might just come down to networking, but that term has always evoked the image of a Dark-Suited Business-Person yelling into an early Motorola cell about a need to "touch base" or some other baseball metaphor.

What I'm saying is that I wish I was distracted by other people as much as I was distracted by content and clutter. People are much more useful and interesting. 

I will have more mail tomorrow.

Ah, the sublime lightness of Inbox Zero. A task as trivial as sorting electronic mail really shouldn't feel so satisfying to complete. Perhaps it's simply symbolic of a romanticized Luddite-like existence, just like how people love zombie movies because the undead don't care if you follow them on Twitter.  Or, perhaps it's more like the inverse of First World Problems; we have these First World Joys because we can't imagine being elated by anything other than every detail coming together at the right time.

following on

My favorite word today is "tractable", meaning obedient, flexible, pliable, easily molded, or in some cases, just useful or optimal. Here's an example from a recent Nature piece about science during WWII:

Elegant derivations from first principles — which often proved tractable only when applied to idealized situations — were of little value to the many colleagues who needed to fine-tune electronics components for maximum efficiency.

 It translates to German as "folgsam". A related adjective is "folgend" which is an adjective meaning "following" or "according to" as in "according to plan" (or, in German, "dem Plan folgend").

I also mention here the the German word "Entwickler", or "developer" in English. I only mention it because it's fun to say.