Self

The history of science can be read as a series of brusque reality checks. Once, we thought the sun revolved around the Earth, but modern astronomy relegated our real estate, incrementally, from the center of everything to a hum-drum corner of an unimportant galaxy in a handful of generations. The theory of Evolution turned us from mini-gods into just a consequence of squicky biological randomness. The decipherment of the structure of DNA and the human genome turned the spark of life into something that can be written down, stored, and analyzed by computers. Again and again, we have found our…
This past weekend, I was searching around the interwebz looking for something interesting to write about for Monday Pets. Lately, Monday Pets has been somewhat cat- and dog-heavy, so I was looking for something a bit different. I asked on twitter if there were any requests or recommendations. Friend of the blog Dave Munger responded: "What about snakes?" What about snakes indeed? There are many parallels between myself and Indiana Jones, but one big one is that we both hate snakes. Another similarity is whenever I travel by plane, I leave a series of red dashes to mark my path. We both look…
Hello from England! Last night was the award ceremony for the 2007 Gruber Prizer in Cosmology. It was good to meet up with the members of the SCP again, many of whom I haven't seen in several years. Picture below is the members of the collaboration who were present, underneath one of the many trees labelled as "Newton's Apple Tree" in the UK; this one is at Trinity college, and apparently is a descendant of the original tree from the apocryphal story about the apple falling on Newton's head. Here we are all looking for apples of our own, but evidently these apples are made of dark energy…
This post has been resurrected from my old blog's location. I've copied the 2006-03-19 post as-is, and I've added a few addenda at the bottom. I overstimulate fairly easily. This is a serious social disadvantage. I don’t know how much there is really to this, but I’m attracted to the notion of the Highly Senstiive Person (HSP). (Also see the links from that Wikipedia article, which is really just a stub.) It doesn’t completely describe me– for instance, I am quite enamored with excessively violent video games, and even many excessively violent movies. However, in almost every other way,…
I'm off on 2 weeks+ of travel. At the moment, I'm sitting in the Nashville airport, waiting to take off on a two-day flight to New York for FNORD. I come back Sunday, and Monday I leave for a 2-week trip to San Francisco to spend a couple of weeks at the main Linden Lab office (with perhaps a side-trip to the Mountain View office one day). I've been rather slow blogging the last two weeks because most of my focus and creative energy has gone into getting started up in a new job. I predict this will continue for at least two more weeks as I do all this traveling. I do have at least two…
It's been a few days. I was out in West Virginia last weekend watching my cousin get married. After driving back Monday, I started the new job with Linden Labs, and that has been occupying most of my focus. I've spoken at length before (in that and other posts) about why, despite how much I loved the science and the teaching, it was time for me to leave academia. I have asserted, however, that my new job isn't just "rebound" (i.e. me saying, ak! I'm sad! Find me something else!), but actually something that I'm really looking forward to. Why? (Before I go further, I should underscore what'…
(This post is tagged for submission to the scientiae-carnival. I am sure there is a less obtrusive way to do this tagging... suggestions?) A while back at this blog's former site, I wrote a post entitled A Career and a Life. Now that my career is on the precipice of undergoing a tremendous change, I thought it might be interesting to revisit that post. First of all, everything I said before in there I still agree with. But I want to go beyond that. As I described in that post, I willingly risked being seen as "not serious enough" by not allowing my faculty position to suck up all of my…
A couple of years ago, I went to a meeting for junior faculty at Vanderbilt about the tenure process. The ostensible goal of the meeting was to help us feel more comfortable by letting us better understand the process. The practical upshot for me, at least, was to ratchet up the tenure stress another notch or two, as well as add to the growing sense of despair I had about the whole thing. Today, Chad points to an article in Inside Higher Ed about the size of university endowments. You know, those universities that have been increasing student tuitions at rates much faster than the rate of…
This is really cool. Several years ago, the Gruber Foundation established a prize in cosmology. Last year (2006) the award went to John Mather and the COBE team; you may recall that Mather was one of the two winners of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. This year the award is being split four ways: (1) Saul Perlmutter, leader of the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP); (2) Brian Schmidt, leader of the High-Z Supernova Team (HZT); (3) the members of the SCP who were on the Perlmutter '99 paper; and (4) the members of the HZT who were on the Riess '98 paper. These two papers were the…
So that people don't feel the need to threadcrap in other threads, I open this thread here for people to make their flames, comments, insults, dismissals, expressions of support, and so forth. I have said before that I'm a Christian. I had my three-part (one, two, three) set of posts in the past about being such, about the role I see for Christianity in the modern scientific age, and why I am Christian specifically (given the wealth of religious traditions available). I repeatedly echoed what you can read on the NCSE website (at this link and in other places): that there need be no conflict…
Loved the teaching. Loved the science. Couldn't take the politics. Couldn't take the tenure stress. That about sums it up. I am sending off today a signed offer letter for employment with Linden Lab, the folks who create and run Second Life. I will be an engineer or ops/developer or something... wait, hang on. Here we go, "Productions Operations Engineer" is the title listed in the offer letter. I will write more about this in the near future, and probably a lot more in the ongoing future. Let me say, though, that I'm very excited to be going to work for Linden. A lot of the rest of…
It occurred to me this morning that recently I've been living like a college student. I don't mean that I've been going to beer-saturated frat parties, having meals made for me at a cafeteria, and futilely trying to sleep through the thump-thump-thump of stereos playing too loud in the dorm. Rather, what I mean is that I've been approaching my life something like this: This is not a great way to live. Indeed, my Freshman year of college, I didn't live that way. I remember people really being annoyed with me when I would tell them at 10PM or so that I was done with my homework and was…
In a recent post, I expressed frustration with the observation that those who sometimes question the tactics and language of some fighting for gender-equality then get lumped in with "everybody else who is clueless and oppressive," even if we care deeply about the issue. One of my complaints was irritation with the word "privilege," which generated a lot of hostility and confusion which, unfortunately, ended up obscuring my core point. I would like to thank Annie (commenter in the previous thread, who continued the conversation with me in e-mail) for her calm and reasoned and non-attacking e…
Hey, Bora got a job interview by suggesting that he was the right person for the job on his blog. I don't have the specific job in hand, but it's a public forum. Perhaps there's somebody out there looking for me, only they don't know it, and I don't know it. And, let me quote Bora again, because I've demonstrated that this quote also applies to me: "Some people like to keep secrets, but I like to air my thoughts in public (why have a blog otherwise?)...." What can I do for you? I've got skills, aptitudes, attitudes, and goals that may be perfectly matched by something out there I haven't…