Britt's Blog

I now know what I want done with my remains.

I want to be made into a box of pencils. Distribute these pencils to my colleagues.

Derive away, ladies and gentlemen. Derive away.

Also, feel free to give them to your students to use when taking the Physics GRE.

The Beloit College Center for the Sciences has officially received Platinum LEED Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

The building has also won a Design Excellence Honor Award in Interior Architecture from the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

In addition, they have fixed the pressure problems so that the front doors no longer get stuck closed in cold weather, my office now maintains a habitable temperature more or less year ’round, my motion-detecting, ambient-light-sensing indirect overhead lighting has always worked like it should, and they say they’re going to fix my blinds so that I can open the screens fully, which will make it much easier to to operate my operable window.

W00T to the Kettle Chips factory in Beloit, also, for their gold certification. They didn’t get platinum certification, but our building does not produce delicious, delicious potato chips, so I think it’s clear who the real winners are.

Via Unclutter, a story from a Duke University grad student who lives in a van.

This of course recalls the story shared on Car Talk by a young woman who discovered her beau, a Stanford medical student, was also living in a van. The story had a happy ending, and the two of them piled into the van for a road trip across the continent. [Unfortunately, the links to Car Talk show summaries are for memory-jogging purposes only, because, unlike every other public radio program in existence, Car Talk not only does not have a free archive, only their "top rated" episodes are available for pay from Audible.com. Get on the stick, Tom and Ray!]

All I can say, is thank goodness I picked science as a career. Science grad students are typically supported through assistantships, don’t pay tuition, and get a large enough stipend to afford a modest apartment of some sort.

Also, I don’t think these shenanigans would have worked in northern climes. If there’s a grad student at UW Madison living in a van at the current temperature of -2°F, I’d recommend dropping out and finding gainful employment.

I disapprove of apologizing-for-not-posting posts, so suffice it to say that I remember that I owe you an entry on yeast, and let’s pretend I didn’t start off this way. :)

Today was the inauguration of Beloit College’s new president, Scott Bierman—an Ithaca, NY native, incidentally. Any day when I get to dress up in my Cornell-red PhD robes and my poofy hat is a good day. It’s very silly, but I admit that like a little of the pomp, and a skosh of the circumstance.

I also get warm fuzzies from being part of a college with such a long history. Beloit College was established in 1846, before Wisconsin was even a state. (Cornell University? Meh, it’s okay… for one of your younger institutions.) Various speeches features lots of shout-outs to Andrew Chapin, Beloit’s first president, and Beloit’s crazy early days, when classes numbered around a dozen, and the faculty consisted of two professors. Hard to imagine how they conceived of a “liberal arts education,” vs. how we think of it today.

It was a very nice ceremony, quite in keeping with the air of anticipation on campus fostered by the new administration. And, the BSFFA kiddies and me were pleased by our new president’s allusions Terry Pratchett in his literate, history-conscious, warm, funny, and touching speech. (Now you wish you’d been there, don’t you?)

If that wasn’t enough, there was also an inauguration day 2.5-mile Fun Walk/Run starting at 7 AM. I managed a 12-minute pace in my Vibram 5-Fingers. (Yes, I changed shoes before the inauguration.)

I’m going to do a few posts on productivity. If you’re not interested in the lifehack-pron, feel free to skip. Mainly this is just me thinking out loud. If you are interested, check out the previous post post on how I handle time management during the school year.

One of my strengths is that I’m actually very good at accomplishing smallish, well-defined tasks with finite deadlines. I am almost always prepared for class well in advance, my papers get graded in a more or less timely manner, and in general the basic rhythms of the school year agree with me.

In the summer time, I don’t teach, so all of those reassuringly recurring tasks go *poof* and I am left staring down a number of large, long-term projects like “Prepare for next fall’s classes” or “Write a paper” or “Reduce this dataset.”

One of my weaknesses is that I’m lousy at planning, executing, staying motivated for and persistently working on large projects. (And of course, by “lousy” I mean “probably better than 80% of the population, but less good than I am at other things.”¹)

Organizing these kinds of projects happens to be what Getting Things Done is particularly awesome at. In the GTD system, you have a list of projects with well-defined goals (which I wish I were good at writing), and you review this list weekly to be sure that you’re doing the right thing for each project, and, most importantly, to identify stalled projects and figure out why you’re stuck. Stalled projects are almost always stuck on a poorly-conceived or abstractly-worded “next action” on a context list somewhere that devours another tiny piece of your soul every time you look on it. Rewrite the offending next action, and you’re golden.

However, another facet of GTD is this notion that you don’t schedule tasks. Instead you have your lists of next actions for each project, and you tackle them according to your context, your energy level, and your priorities as determined by periodic review of the big picture. There’s an almost fetishistic emphasis placed on being flexible about what you work on.

However, as a wise colleague just pointed out to me, GTD was invented for a business context, not for academia. In business, emergencies happen, and conditions and priorities are constantly shifting. Agility is absolutely necessary. But in academia, there is no such thing as an emergency. In the best case, you know for months in advance what you need to do and when it needs to be done by, and even in the worst case, there is no deadline that cannot be negotiated. Every once in a while there is a crisis (genuine, or just in someone’s mind) and you have to drop everything and deal with it, but it’s rare.

So GTD is based on fulfilling a need for flexibility that I don’t have. Worse, one thing I’ve learned about myself is that I’m bad at making good, responsible choices on the fly. (As Steve Pavlina says in this post on getting up right away when your alarm goes off, your sleepy self when you are in bed in the morning is not your best coach for becoming an early riser. Neither is my self sitting at my desk at 2:15 in the afternoon my best coach for being productive. Web-surfing champion, perhaps, but not productivity coach.) I’m much better at following routines, building habits, and basically using inflexibility and inertia to my advantage.

I have experimented with a few ways to try to cope with my inability to make excellent priority-based decisions moment-to-moment in a GTD-esque, mind-like-water manner, and in the following post(s), you can find some of the methods I have found helpful, and lots of links to the sources that inspired them. All of these create planning and structure that is absent in GTD. This is not intended to be a how-to for achieving perfect productivity. It’s not even a description of how I’m going to organize my time. As I mentioned, I’m mostly just thinking out loud in these posts, and part of the purpose of writing them is trying to decide what I am going to do to stay focused this summer.

Am I still on the quest for the perfect system? Not so much, any more. What I do want to do this summer is experiment with different methods, not to build the perfect, stress-free life, but in order to work with (not against) my strengths and weaknesses and keep making progress on my important projects.

¹Fact: I have a Ph-freaking-D (really, the “freaking” is on my diploma²), which means I cannot suck totally at long-term projects. Fact: It took me 10 years to get it, which means I suck more at long-term projects than most other people with PhDs. Fact: 1% of Americans 25 and older have a doctorate, so even if I am the suckiest long-term-project person with a PhD, I probably don’t suck at long-term projects all that bad, even considering that not everyone who is good at long-term-projects has a PhD.

²No, not really.³

³You know who else really liked nested footnotes? David Foster Wallace. And I say “liked” rather than “likes” because he offed himself. So it’s probably not a good idea to keep this up.⁴

⁴But, anyway, the point is that completing long-term projects without having a boss telling you what to do and holding you accountable for deadlines is hard and I should stop beating myself up over not finding it easy. All the same, if you know any good resources for learning how to plan an manage a project that might be useful for a person who works alone, not managing other people, especially with an academic bent, let me know.

I’m going to do a few posts on productivity. If you’re not interested in the lifehack-pron, feel free to skip. Mainly this is just me thinking (typing?) out loud.

How should you keep track of the things you need to do? There is no one right answer. It will vary from person to person, of course, but I find that I need different ways of tracking my to-dos during the school year than during the summer. And I’ve even been using different tracking of to-dos for different aspects of my work during the school year.

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Loyal “Britt’s Blog” readers, I hope you will consider taking three minutes and fourteen seconds^* out of your busy day to watch our exciting new YouTube video, straight from the Beloit College Propaganda Bureau Office of Admissions. By the end of the video, you will want to be a student at Beloit College. *wiggles fingers hypnotically* You willlllllll coommmmme to Belooooooooyyyyytttt and briinnnnggg your tuiiiiiiition…..

But, seriously, the more people watch, the higher our YouTube rank will be, and also, it actually expresses a lot of the things that are special about Beloit to me.

^* Watching time does not include download time. No warranty is expressed or implied. Offer void in Alaska and Hawaii, the freak states.

If you’re not listening to the Moth podcast, like Dan and me, you really should be.

The Moth consists of true stories, told on stage, without notes, from famous as well as regular people.

An excellent recent episode which would be of interest to my Gentle Ithacan Readers is Alternate Ithaca Tom.

Tom ruminates about mid-life crisis and wonders about what might have been, specifically if he had studied Animal Behavior at Cornell University. He conflates Ithaca’s town and gown community and seems a little unclear on academic life in general, but nonetheless it’s a lovely piece about Ithaca and mid-life crises in general.

I felt an eerie sense of resonance as I listened.

One reason is that I am doing the typical holy-crap-I’m-on-the-tenure-track-do-I-really-want-to-do-this-for-the-rest-of-my-life thing. (This probably doesn’t qualify as a mid-life crisis, unless, heavens forfend, I die at the age of 66.)

The other reason is that I’ve often thought about the fact that according to the Many-Worlds Interpretation (which Tom explains quite well) there is a universe (many of them, in fact) where I went to Caltech, the other grad school I was accepted to.

In our Universe, I visited campus, got a somewhat creepy desperate vibe off the grad students, and decided I would probably be really, really unhappy living in southern California. But of course one still wonders.

Unlike Alternate Ithaca Tom, who springs, it seems, fully realized into Tom Weiser’s mind, Alternate Pasadena Britt is a mystery to me. I bumbled into planetary astronomy more or less by accident, so what does Alternate Pasadena Britt study? Did she end up doing planetary anyway, or follow Unbranched Undergraduate Britt’s passion for space and plasma physics, or does she do solar physics, or is she a radio astronomer, or what? Did Alternate Pasadena Jason marry her? Was she academically successful, or did she burn out and punt on grad school? Did she realize that she liked teaching and wanted to do that, or did she go on to do research postdocs instead?

How many million weird little things happened to me in Ithaca, things that would be impossible in Pasadena, to make me the person I am today? How many snowfalls and long, gray, Ithacating days, how many moments of stunning beauty looking over Lake Cayuga or lingering in a gorge, how many chance encounters at Wegmans, how many idle thoughts while waiting for the TCAT or for the elevator in Space Sciences… let alone the friendships made, the mentors met, the students taught, the miles and miles on the Stairmaster at the Ithaca College faculty gym…

How many versions of us had the courage that we lacked to do the brave thing at a critical juncture, or the wisdom and foresight to make the non-obvious lateral move that makes all the difference?

How many versions of us out there died in car crashes, got cancer, ruined their careers with bad decisions, went broke from poor financial management, or suffered all the other fates we worry about?

Is it at all comforting to think that there is a person out there who zigged where you zagged?

In case you were wondering, “Is it in fact true that xkcd is made of awesome and plated in gold?” I offer this stunning evidence in the affirmative: The Universe on a Logarithmic Scale.

This is not a totally new idea. The original logarithmic map of the Universe was published by Gott, Juric and others in the Astrophysical Journal¹ and the images are available online. (Beloiters may recognize this as the map, as I had it posted next to my office in Chamberlin.)

But note how much more intuitive and understandable xkcd has made the logarithmic scale by including human- and earth-scale objects, such as airliners, mountains, building, people, and, yes, grass.

The xkcd map is also nerdified by the inclusion of science fiction references, which cannot be considered a bad thing. I heartily approve of any merging of science fiction and real science!

I think analyzing this map will be an excellent end-of-the-semester activity for my astronomy class!

¹ Gott et al., 2005, ApJ, 624, 463

I’ve be wrestling with this for a while, and I think I’ve finally come to some kind of a provisional understanding—or maybe my sense of crisis has just faded to a tolerable background uneasiness.

I freaked out at the beginning of this summer when I realized that I was attacking all the things about my life that I am unhappy about by developing systems and strategies, but holy crap, what am I going to do when things don’t work? I mean that on the individual level: what if I try five different strategies for getting my grading done in a timely manner, and none of them work? What then? HUH? And I also mean that on a collective level: I have improved several things about myself and my life by being disciplined and systematic. I have taken up exercise, and I feel healthier. I have lost weight, and my blood pressure is lower. I have become more organized, and I spend less time panicking because I can’t find things. I manage my time better and don’t flake and accidentally blow off meetings or important tasks as often. All good things. But what floored me is that I am improving my life in many small, practical ways… but I am really growing in a larger sense?

There was a panicky moment there when I wondered if I was going to have to Get Religion or sell all of my possessions and buy a goat farm or maybe just run away and hitchhike though South America. (Luckily, no rash decisions were made.)

Having pondered for a while, I think the real question I’m grappling with is: What do I want or expect to be the ultimate outcome of all these strategies and systems?

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