I am going to stop blogging here

Dear Diary,

I think this will be my last entry here.

I have thought about it for a while now and decided that I will stop blogging here. The main reason is that I don’t feel I am getting much (or anything) out of it and it has started to feel more like an obligation. But no-one is forcing me to – so I’ll just stop.

Initially, my idea was to keep a log of my activities and daily life so that I can (a) reflect on it and (b) look back at it. However, I feel that the most valuable reflections I engage in happen in conversations with people close to me. And I haven’t looked back at any of the stuff I wrote. The only thing I do check again occasionally is what I wrote about books that I remember fondly and want to recommend to someone. I might keep writing short book reviews of books I like a lot but I made an account over at Goodreads.com for that.

Most of the updates here were related to my work. I set up a Twitter account not too long ago and have been thinking about whether I should use it for short, work-related updates. But I am not sure anyone really cares. I hope to invest a bit more time in the future to write short, informative things about data analyses I do. Stuff that is interesting but in itself not enough to be published. So the place to check for work-related updates would be my professional website. I’ll set it up in a way that my Twitter feed appears on the site as well. Or follow me on Twitter.

Other than that – all the sports updates are not interesting to anyone but me. And the more personal stuff is something that I don’t feel like I need an additional outlet for at the moment.

So all in all, I think this is good bye. I have tried to keep everything on here semi-anonymous (even though it’d be trivial to figure out who I am) and will keep it that way here. There are no links to any of my accounts or my professional website. If you know me in person, you know how to find them (or who to ask). If you don’t know me, I don’t understand why you are/were reading this to begin with. :D

If you want updates regarding my non-professional life, feel free to send me an e-mail. Take care!

Sports!

Dear Diary,

after I got back from Sweden, I was glad to start with the sporting again. That’s one of the things i missed during that trip (that, and music).

I decided to quit yoga for a while. Instead, I signed up for a gym around the corner. Two of my friends are going quite a bit. I am not really planning to join them because they have their own program and stuff figured out. I mainly just want to use the rowing machine every now and then and do a couple of basic bodyweight strength exercises to supplement my climbing.

Speaking of climbing, I have been going about twice a week. As you would expect, my progress has slowed down considerably. But I’ve been able to complete a bunch of 6a’s and also 6a+’s and there are some 6a+’s I am still working on. There’s also on 6b that I tried a couple of times. There is just one move in that one that I can’t do. I started working on another 6b last week. I did two sessions in it so far and have all the moves figured out. Which is great: I know I can do all the moves. The hardest move is the second to last. So the tricky thing will just be to link them all together.

They also just built a series of new routes in the 6a/b range on the highest, overhanging wall. I think that’s a sign that I need to start working on my endurance more and spend time on that wall!

As for squash: I have been playing but I haven’t felt very consistent in the last weeks. After the very intense coaching I had together with BS, I have been trying to adjust some of the finer points of my technique. And it works well when I play weaker players and can focus on the adjustments. If I play people on my level, however, it breaks down. I’ll need some time to make the new behavior automatic and until then, my performance will take a bit of a dip.

Throughout the next week, there’ll be qualification games for the end-of-the-season club championships. If I manage to finish in the top 16, I will be able to play in the final on Saturday. Which I wouldn’t want to do because my friend GP will be visiting from London and I’d rather hang out with him. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyways, I’ll pack my stuff now and head off to the squash courts. I had a busy day and am looking forward to chasing a small rubber ball for two hours…

Ham on Rye [stopped]

Dear Diary,

the other day, I started reading another Charles Bukowski novel: Ham on Rye. I read Post Office last month and was not too impressed. I read 21% of the book and decided to stop. It’s just a narrative of a boy and how he’s abused by his father and gets in fights with kids at school. I am not very interested and I am not expecting it to offer any profound insights. Might as well read something else instead.

I am quite surprised. I don’t understand why Bukowski is “one of the great American authors”…

As  a result, I did a bit of research and asked around and now have 10 new books on my Kindle that I can read. They should keep me busy for a while… :)

Trip to Israel is shaping up

Dear Diary,

my trip to Israel is getting closer. I am really looking forward to it. We made a very rough plan of what to do and GS booked a rental car. We got a place to crash for the first night we arrive and will probably just kind of take it from there. Very exciting!

Making decent progress at work

Dear Diary,

I haven’t been posting much about the stuff I’ve been up to at work.

I finished an application for the CANTAB research grant. My friend BB told me about it quite a while back and I set the deadline in my agenda just in case it’d be interesting. When the deadline was approaching, I looked into it again and had an idea for a project. The grant is not really for a lot of money (either $1,500 or 650€ depending on which prize you win) but you get to use the CANTAB test suite for a year. That’d be the interesting thing about it. I sat down to write up my ideas. Once I had a decent draft, I showed it to my supervisor and told him what the grant is. He had no reason not so support it so he helped me fine-tune a couple of things and wrote a great recommendation letter for me.

This week, I spent some time working on an abstract for Psychonomics. It’s a conference that’ll be held in Boston on November. The deadline for submissions is June 1. I want to submit something and finished the abstract today. The submission process is a bit tricky and I’ll have to figure that out tomorrow.

I have also been working on the pre-registration for an experiment. Two of the other co-authors have given their final “okay” and I hope that my supervisor will give me his blessing tomorrow. Then I can pre-register that study. My RA is in Paris until Monday – should could start collecting data for the project next week Wednesday. That’d be great.

I also finalized the code and all the paperwork for yet another experiment. She will also start collecting data for that when she’s back from Paris.

Tomorrow, I’ll spend some time analyzing the data for another project that she has been collecting data for in the last three weeks. There are a couple of complications because we had to switch from participants that signed up for course credit to those that signed up for money. It’s too late in the year now and virtually everyone has all their course credit so they are not signing up for studies anymore. But that means that I first have to check that there is no differences between the two “groups” of participants. Only then can I treat them as a single group. I did some basic checks today and it looks good. I have to check in a bit more detail and discuss it with my supervisor tomorrow. Best case scenario, I can use the data as it is now. Otherwise, my RA has to collect a bit more data next week. That wouldn’t be too bad either.

Anyways. All in all, things are going well. There are huge piles of work ahead of me. I’ll have to survey all the data a little bit and then make some strategic choices in the order in which I work on them. I’ll plan that once I have a better idea of the options that the data from the different experiments give me.

Matter

Dear Diary,

last night, I finished Matter by Iain Banks. It’s a dense science fiction novel that involves effects on a truly galactic scale. There are multiple story lines that happen at different places in the universe within societies that are at different levels of technological development. It’s quite fascinating: the idea being that there are millions and millions of species in the universe that each develop at the own pace. There are certain agreements and treaties and such to make sure that technology transfer from high- to low-developed species/societies is kept in check and that each species can develop at their own pace.

At lower level of development, this usually involves a lot of suffering, illness, tyranny, and war. The main story line is set among the Sarl people, a humanoid species that just discovered projectile weapons. In parallel to the quest of justice that one Sarl prince embarks on, we learn about a possible conflict between two much more highly developed species – the core of the concept is the planet that the Sarl live on. This planet itself is pretty awesome as well: it’s an artificially created planet called a Shellworld: It’s structured a bit like an onion with different layers. There are 12 layers that are each inhibited by different species.

The book is full with a lot of cool ideas for technological developments. Every now and then there’s also a bit of a discussion regarding ethical aspects involved in the co-existence of different “intelligences” and conflicts both within and between species.

Overall, a very good read. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

Sober for a month!

Dear Diary,

I stopped drinking coke one months ago! I have gotten over the withdrawal symptoms and am feeling pretty good now. I am generally craving less sugar even though I still really, really like sugar and seek it out.

I do not the lack of coke has affected my energy levels. Which I am a bit surprised by, to be honest. I thought I’d notice a bit of a drop there.

What I have noticed, though, is that fizzy water really helps. Drinking tap water will do the trick of quenching my thirst but the “mouthfeel” is just very boring and unsatisfying.

Flights to Israel are booked

Dear Diary,

I just booked my flights to Israel. I’ll be leaving from Amsterdam on June 14 and will fly back on the 21st. I’ll be going with my buddy GS who’ll be visiting me in Groningen the week before. Really, really looking forward to exploring the country and hanging out with GS and my brother!

The return ticket was less than 300€. Cheaper than I expected!

Donations are set up

Dear Diary,

as I mentioned the other day, I read Doing Good Better during my vacation. And as I mentioned, it made me want to increase the amount of money I donate to charity. I just set up those donations. I decided to give the following every month:

• $25 to The Humane League
• $25 to Cool Earth
• 50€ to the Against Malaria Foundation
• $100 to GiveDirectly

Again: if you feel like you have a bit of money to spare per month, please consider setting up a recurring donation to an effective charity!

Also, I didn’t include this in the last post but I don’t know why: here is a great TED talk about the basic idea of effective altruism.

Saturday

Dear Diary,

on Saturday, I was with my family in Germany for some birthday celebrations. My aunt recommended a book by Ian McEwan called Saturday. I only knew McEwan’s name from his book Atonement – which is in my bookshelf but I haven’t read it yet (I did watch the movie, though, when it came out).

Anyways. Saturday is a short novel and I started reading it the same afternoon. I was hooked right away. The main character is a neurosurgeon and the entire book takes place during his free day: Saturday. But he talks and thinks quite a lot about his job so there’s quite some detail about the day-to-day activities of a neurosurgeon. Quite interesting. On his free day, he’s also meeting a friend and colleague for a squash match. He’s an interesting and very relatable character. :D

The highlight of the day is that both his daughter and his father in law are visiting for dinner. So he is running some errands to prepare dinner for that night. The book is set about 18 months after 9/11 and in the period where Britain is discussing whether it should play a role in invading Iraq. That debate is one of the central themes of the book. Another theme is the effect of global terror on everyday life and thinking in general. Both topics are presented and treated in interesting and nuanced ways.

Early on in his free day, the doctor runs into a group of guys that he has a semi-physical altercation with. The way he deals with that situation/interaction haunts him for the rest of the day and is another central theme.

Overall, the book is fantastic. The writing is great, the topics are interesting, and the story is gripping. All the characters in the book are interesting and multi-dimensional and make unique and significant contributions to the small universe created during those 250 pages.

I highlighted this section as an example of the great description/musing that happens throughout the book. The doctor is looking out his bedroom window onto a square very early on a cold February morning, seeing two nurses crossing the square:

In the lifeless cold, they pass through the night, hot little biological engines with bipedal skills suited to any terrain, endowed with innumerable branching neural networks sunk deep in a knob of bone casing, buried fibres, warm filaments with their invisible glow of consciousness – these engines devise their own tracks.

Beautiful.

Thinking about his daughter’s book recommendation, he muses about why he does not like fiction and drama:

And it interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained. The times are strange enough. Why make things up? He doesn’t seem to have the dedication to read many books all the way through. Only at work is he single-minded; at leisure, he’s too impatient.

I don’t agree with this sentiment but I still think it’s great. It’s an interesting idea and tells you a lot about what type of person you’re dealing with without actually knowing much about the person. Great stuff.

At a later point, he’s thinking about technological advances and what they mean:

But if the present dispensation is wiped out now, the future will look back on us as gods, certainly in this city [London], lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended life spans, wondrous machines. This is an age of wondrous machines.

I couldn’t agree more. We are closer to being gods than we’ve ever been. While understanding next to nothing (another point frequently made in the book in relation to neurosurgery – which he describes as basically glorified plumbing). An amazing juxtaposition.

Anyways. Awesome book!