(Lisa is bowled over by a college girl.)
LISA (awed): “Are you reading `Gravity’s Rainbow’?”
COLLEGE GIRL (snidely): “Well, rereading.”
Purified Bodily Fluids
Today is supposed to be a “day of purity” which I’m told is a supposed to be a day to promote abstinence. But don’t worry. Tomorrow is valentines day where you can root as much as you want.
Weight Loss
Well, I’m almost to my goal! Over the past few months I have lost a small child’s worth of weight. The key? 1hour exercise every morning, low low caloric intake, and if I feel stressed I go to the gym and take it out on the machines there.
Pondering physics as an art business
If physics is an artform, then what would be in a physicist’s studio? How can we sell physics like artists sell their works of art? What is the business of physics as art. Most of a theorist’s art is knowledge. Maybe physics is more like poetry. So does that mean we have to write books? Is that our art?
Why WIT?
Today
Happy Ronald Reagan Day!
Now go shop at Walmart and oppress some poor people.
Koan of the Day
Tozan said to his monks, “You monks should know there is an even higher understanding than Buddhism.” A monk stepped forward and asked, “What is the higher Buddishm?” Tozan answered, “It is not Buddha.”
The Block
If writers get writer’s block, what do scientists get? Scientist’s block? Research stagnation? Creative Blockage? Perhaps the greatest parallel between doing theory and being a writer is not that they are both creative endeavors (because artistic creativity is very different from scientific creativity. two cultures? no! but different skills, most definitely!) but that practitioners of both can sufer from stagnating periods of unproductivity. In scientific academia, because there is a structured “road to tenureship,” this stagnation mostly leads (quickly!) to “alternative careers for scientists.” For writers it must similarly lead to putting their dreams of writing aside.
The past few years I’ve found myself confronting a severe case of whatever it is you call the scientist’s version of writer’s block. Why? Well part of it was a conscious decision. I wanted to make sure that the work that I did was not just good work, but was excellent work. Or at least that is the convenient myth I tell myself for my lack of productivity. Now, applying for jobs, where my lack of productivity is clearly a liabity, I often wonder if I would have done things differently. Of course this is a silly question (the past exists only as recorded in the present), and my answer is the equally unuseful “yes and no.” No, I don’t think I would have been happy with myself if I had decided to work on the easy problems which would lead to easy publications. It’s some silly integrity issue rooted deep in my psyche (I’m reminded of a line from pink floyd: “to martyr yourself to caution is not going to help at all”) Would I spend more times on some research and less on others? Probably. Would it have been smarter to try both the easy and the hard problems? Economically? yes. Spiritually? maybe not.
Radio Free Psychic
The radio station we are listening to is playing some strange bass background with lots of strange echoed voices over the top. The voices say something like “Howard is coming,” and “Howard will bring the music.”
My mom asks, “This radio is bizarre. What is this? Is this some sort of psychic radio station?”
“Are you thinking about Howard?”
“No.”
“Well then I guess it isn’t a psychic radio station.”
A New Slogan
As seen on an advertisement in the Denver airport:
Carve diem!