Kindle crashed

Dear Diary,

during my vacation in Sweden, I was using my Kindle a lot. I was reading an awesome book and couldn’t wait to get back to it. I was reading in the morning and then wanted to keep reading in the evening but the Kindle wouldn’t turn on.

I was afraid it completely broke. Back home, I connected it to a computer and then to a power source and eventually I was able to turn it back on and it re-booted. It seems like it just crashed and it good to use again now.

It was annoying because I couldn’t read anymore during the last three days. But I am glad, of course, that it’s not broken.

2666

Dear Diary,

in the last weeks, I was reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. It’s a thick book, about 1,100 pages. I made it through the first ~260 pages before I stopped.

The writing is absolutely fantastic. The man has a way with words that is very impressive and fun to read. But the story just didn’t really grip me. The book is written in five parts and I thought the first one started great but got a bit boring. Then, when the second one started, I lost interest pretty quickly.

The book is too thick to finish it regardless. And there are too many other books to read to spend my time on a book I don’t fully enjoy.

The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair

Dear Diary,

I stayed up way too late last night to finish the book I was reading: The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker. I spent quite some time reading it yesterday. I read more than 200 pages and I am not really a very fast reader. The book was absolutely amazing.

It’s a mix of a crime and a love story. Harry Quebert is a famous writer and Marcus Goldman (the protagonist) was his student in college and then became his close friend and also a famous writer. Then, one day in 2008, the dead body of a girl was found in Harry’s garden. It was the body of Nola Kellergan who went missing in August 1975. It turns out that Harry (then 34) had a relationship with Nola and that they were madly in love back then. The problem is: Nola was 15 back then.

Marcus believes that Harry is innocent and didn’t kill Nola. He starts investigating what really happened in the summer of 1975 and, in the process, turns the whole town upside down. The story takes a lot of twists and turns. It’s very, very cleverly done. The whole thing starts very simple and gradually, there are more and more characters and you learn more about all the circumstances. The book picks up pace and the last third of the book (about 200 pages) is a great thriller with many new revelations around every corner.

The whole story is very well constructed and whenever you think you have a theory about what’s going on, a new detail is revealed that points you the other way. I haven’t been this absorbed by a book for a long, long time.

Easter weekend

Dear Diary,

I hope you had a great Easter weekend. Mine was pretty relaxed. The university was closed Friday and Monday so I couldn’t actually go to the office. I worked at home on Friday with some breaks for cleaning and getting groceries and doing some bodyweight exercises. Overall, it was a surprisingly productive day.

On Saturday, we met for another walk. We took the train to Winsum and did a 20.3km round-trip walk. Then took the train back. The weather was great: it was sunny and warm enough to walk without a jacket on although there were periods with pretty severe wind. The only thing that sucked was that I lost my nice Sennheiser in-ear headphones. I am not sure how it happened but it did.

When we got back I worked for about an hour and relaxed a bit and then we met at a friend’s place to have dinner together and watch some random stuff on Netflix. We watched Bill Burr’s special “I am sorry you feel that way” which is fantastic. Then we watched a so-bad-it’s-good movie called Bad Ass, followed by the pilot episode of Blue Mountain State. Very random combination that was quite entertaining.

On Sunday, I did some minor work stuff in the morning and then we met for a climbing session at around 2. I started working on a pretty hard 6a and an even harder 6a+. The first should really be a 6a+ and the second should probably be a 6b. Both of them are on pretty much straight walls so they involve some technical moves that require balance and some finger strength. It was fun.

I had a lazy day on Monday which I spent sitting at the window (in the sun) reading an interesting book. In the evening, we went to see Batman v Superman – the Dawn of Justice.

The movie was okay. It was hyped quite a bit and then the critics destroyed it. But actual movie goers seemed to enjoy it. I think it was fine. I liked that it was dark and that Batman was brutal and desperate. The plot itself was silly, though. The whole idea of a “fight” between Batman and Superman is just stupid: Batman wouldn’t stand a chance at all. And there wasn’t really a fight either.

The movie had good potential with regards to some bigger moral issues that were touched upon but then ignored in order to put more action on the screen. Which was a shame.

How we learn

Dear Diary,

in the train back from Heidelberg, I finished How We Learn by Benedict Carey. The book has the slightly annoying subtitle “Throw out the rule book and unlock your brain’s potential”. Which is pretty fucking stupid. Well.

The book itself was great, though. I thought it’d be interesting to read a pop-science book about my research field. I didn’t really learn anything new. I knew all the theories and findings that were discussed. But it was interesting to see them explained by a non-academic. Casey also talked to a lot of the big names in the field and the book was filled with their commentary on their own work and that of others and he spun a really nice story out of it.

The premise of the book is that what we are taught about learning (and, thus, what we think about learning) is almost entirely wrong. We have wrong intuitions about how to learn well. And that’s very true. People need to learn a lot and think that they have figured out the best way to do it. But the science on learning disagrees: the vast majority of people show far from optimal learning behavior.

The book does a good job of giving an overview of what we’ve learned about human memory in the last 15o years. It’s less than you’d think but it’s still enough to give some good suggestions of how to adjust our learning behavior and which “myths” to dispel.

I think this is a great book that many students could benefit from.

Home Alone

Dear Diary,

last weekend was the first time in a long time that I was home alone. BB went to Berlin to visit a friend and NB was in Oldenburg to see a football game with his brother and dad.

As usual, we went out for drinks on Friday after work. One of the girls got a paper published which needed to be celebrated, of course.

I spent Saturday chilling in the living room and reading for work. On Sunday, I went climbing and later met with some friends. Overall, it was a very relaxed weekend.

Very relaxed weekend with moderate amounts of productivity

Dear Diary,

overall, this was a very nice weekend. On Friday, we had the usual drinks after work and hang out with the usual crew until about 3am. Very relaxed, as always.

Yesterday, I slept in and then spent most of the day reading. My old friend MK is doing is PhD in geology and is currently in New Zealand for a semester. They are working on a paper that they want to submit to a high-impact journal which is always very tricky. He asked me to take a look at his manuscript and asked for feedback and comments.

I understood none of it, of course. :D It was something about the chemical composition of one type of mineral in a certain type of clay. Depending on how that mineral is formed, it has different shapes which in turn determine how “sticky” it is. Under certain conditions, this goes wrong and then the chances of landslides are very high. There have been a couple of very devastating ones in that particular area and these people have developed a new method to assess how dangerous a clay deposit is based on some X-ray technology.

I think.

Either way, I was still able to give some feedback on the structure and language and some high-level comments. He’ll look at them tomorrow, he said. I am curious how helpful they were.

Anyways, that’s what I spent about four hours on yesterday. Then I read my supervisor’s rejected paper to figure out what he wrote and how I can use it for my own purposes. That was also very productive.

I also ordered some stuff off of Amazon which arrived on Saturday. The first was a book about How We Learn (by Benedict Carey). I thought it’d be interesting to read a pop-science book about my specialty and see how a well-educated journalist approaches a topic that I study a small part of. I read the first 50 or so pages on Saturday and am enjoying it a lot so far. No new information for me yet but very enjoyable and good work on his part so far. Curious to read the rest of the book.

The other thing I ordered were over-ear bluetooth headphones. I listen to music pretty much the whole day at work but the cable kind of annoys me. I also don’t find it that comfortable to have in-ear headphones on the whole day. So I thought I’d spend some money on over-ear bluetooth headphones. BB bought really nice ones about half a year ago and is super happy with them. I ended up ordering these because they were cheaper, had lots of reviews, and the reviews were very good. I tried them yesterday and today but am not too happy with them. The sound is pretty great but the material isn’t. It’s this weird fake-leather stuff and my ears got very uncomfortably warm after about half an hour. I’ll send them back tomorrow and have ordered these ones instead. They are a bit more expensive but if I’m wearing them 6-8 hours every day, I don’t mind spending a bit more money if they are comfortable. We’ll see.

Then, NB and I went to the city today to enjoy the sunshine a bit and go to a bookstore. While we were cleaning up for the party the other week, I found a voucher. I won the prize for the best poster presentation at a symposium last year and the prize was a 50€ voucher for a book store. I never used it and I decided that I should. NB knows quite a bit about literature and I just kind of wanted to get a couple of interesting books to read in the next couple of months (I still have a couple and NB also has a bunch that I still want to read). I ended up buying these:

• What If? by Randall Munroe: Randall is the guy behind the absolutely brilliant xkcd webcomic and started a blog in which he answers ridiculous “what if… ?” questions. The book is a collection of the best stories (and some more stuff).
• The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker: I know nothing about this book but NB recommended it highly.
• Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond. The subtitle is “a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years” – I have heard great things about this book.
• The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster: I know Auster by name but that’s it. Another NB recommendation.

These four came out at 53.25€. Pretty nice. :)

Also, in the last couple of weeks, I was thinking that it might be nice to get a watch. I’ve been wearing the Fitbit Charge HR for about a year now. The battery is getting weaker and weaker and I was looking at the latest generation of smartwatches and trackers etc. but I don’t really like any of them (style-wise). I do like having an accessory on my wrist, though – both in terms of functionality and do make my wrist look less “naked” (if that makes any sense). So, I thought, it might be nice to get a watch. I looked on Amazon and ended up ordering two, together with the headphones. I wanted to keep it simple and ordered this one and this one. I’ll see how I like them and whether I’ll keep them once I have them.

So, yeah – spent some money this weekend on a couple of random and vaguely useful things. Mainly for my own comfort/entertainment, though. I tried to stay away from a work a bit and was quite successful – I got some reading done but didn’t really spend much time at the computer.

Now I am looking forward to the next week: there’s a bunch of things I want to get done and that will happen next week – should be fun. Work is pretty awesome at the moment. :)

A very social week

Dear Diary,

this week was pretty great. I got a lot of work done in the hours that I worked. But I didn’t work that much. Well, I guess I just worked normal hours (about 7-8 a day). The rest of my time was spent with friends and it was very nice.

It was BB’s birthday on Wednesday. NB and I got him a board game because we thought that’d be fun. We went of a classic: the Settlers of Catan. On Wednesday, we got up before BB and made breakfast. NB even got a little cake. :D We had a relaxed start to the day. In the evening, we went to have all you can eat sushi. We sat there for about three hours and had decent food and really good conversations. (I’ll talk about this in a separate post.)

Later that night, a friend arrived from Berlin. He’s in Groningen every year for the Eurosonic. Which happened again this week. It was good to see him again and we hang out for a while that night but I didn’t want to make it too late. On Thursday, I had another good day at work with a very effective meeting about the new project and I am starting to get really excited about it. The RA will collect pilot data from five people next week to make sure the whole procedure works. We’ll have another meeting next week Wednesday to discuss whether anything needs to be adjusted and then the real data collection will start the week after. Exciting!

On Thursday, I went to play squash in the evening to move a bit. On Friday, BB and I went to the second lecture in the advanced stats course. It was good for me but BB was a bit bored. He knows quite a bit about linear mixed-effects modeling and has a lot of experience with it. I don’t so it was good. That night, we hang out with friends at our place for a while, playing Settlers of Catan and we ordered food. Later that night we met other friends in the city center to see a couple of live bands. The goal was to see a friend and colleague who was playing at 1 am. We ended up at his gig being nicely drunk and in a great mood. His show as fucking fantastic. Really cool electronic music that is build up from different layers. The crowd was in a great mood and we all had a great time.

From there, we went to an “after show party”. Half of us didn’t have tickets but we got smuggled in which worked out brilliantly. We had a good time there, drinking a bit more and listening to more bands. NB and I went home around 5:30.

The next day, our guest from Berlin left and we just had an awesomely lazy day. We played video games, Settlers, and watched a movie. I spent about 15 minutes answering work-related e-mails that day but that was it. Super relaxed.

Today, we kind of did the same. I got up around 10:00 and we had a late breakfast around 13:00. I did about two hours of work to prepare for a meeting tomorrow morning and help out my supervisor with a little issue. NB and I went to get groceries. It was cold out (there was quite a bit of snow in the last two days) but the sun was shining very aggressively. Our living room heated up to 28C. o_O I sat in the sun reading a book for about two hours. I went to play squash for about 90 minutes and then the evening was spent playing Settlers again.

So, yeah, it was a fantastic week! Looking forward to the next one!

The Magician’s Land

Dear Diary,

on my way back in Leiden, I spent some time in the train finishing the last book in the Magician trilogy: The Magician’s Land.

Again, the book started a bit slow. There was a whole story line about a heist that was planned that took fucking forever to unfold. And it was clear from the beginning that the heist was just a way to get some of the characters to find something that’d put them back in touch with a bunch of other characters. So when that eventually happened, it wasn’t really a surprise of shocking turn of events.

As trilogies/series go, though, this one certainly had a pretty satisfying ending. Towards the end, some of the stuff got a bit too weird and there were endless descriptions of strange and fantastic beasts and events and such that I kind of only skimmed because they didn’t actually contribute to the plot. There were some really interesting ideas and conversations about what it means to be human. What it means to grow up and change as a person. How that affects our relationship with people we know (who might also change) and with ourselves. How maybe we have to forget a little bit who were once were to become who we are now but how you want to avoid to forget too much of who you used to be or you’ll be lost in the now. There were also some interesting ideas about having power, sharing power, and giving power to other people. And about the idea that the world is a dark and awful and unpredictably chaotic place and that there’s nothing you can do about it. (Even if you know magic.) You just have to learn to accept your helplessness and dependence and embrace the fact that that is part of what defines you as a human being – along with your weakness, imperfections, and the potential you change and become less of an asshole if you try.

In short, there were a lot of interesting ideas in these books. Sometimes you had to keep reading through some less interesting bits to uncover them and sometimes the author somehow decided to focus on things that were a lot less interesting (in my opinion) than what he built up to. Still very enjoyable, though.

The Magician King

Dear Diary,

I just realized that I never posted about finishing the second book in The Magician Trilogy: The Magician King.

The start of the book was a bit slow but it picked up eventually. The world that the author sketches is fascinating and rich but I sometimes felt that the focus of the story line was a bit off. There were a couple of things that were just mentioned in passing that I’d have loved to know more about but instead the plot focused on some annoying aspect of some person’s personality or something trivial.

The book is kind of easy reading and takes you to a strange and fantastic world that is worth exploring. There are occasional bursts of violence in the book that come out of no-where. Some of the things that happen towards the end of the book are truly gruesome and were quite shocking. Certainly no book for children.