Goal: Mind Like Water

One goal in my life is to be able to effortlessly switch contexts and
shift gears between projects. Current tools for achieving this:
Getting Things Done (GTD) with index cards, and I plan to get back
into the Pomodoro technique. I tried a similar technique when I was
studying for the USMLE Step 1 and it worked quite well.

I need to get my office desk both at home and at work decluttered and
the apartment back in control... A lack of storage space at the
apartment currently is kind of making it hard to keep things
organized, but hopefully this will change after 4/27 when we move into
the new place.

Now, back to work!

ref:
http://zenhabits.net/mind-like-water/
http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/faq.html

Research Talks

http://www.scripps.edu/resources/postdoctoral/career/jobsearch.html
http://www.phds.org/graduate-school-success/
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/how.2b/how.2b.html

http://chronicle.com/article/Giving-a-Job-Talk-in-the-Sc/45375/
http://career.ucsf.edu/pff/assets/Chalktalk-Tips.pdf

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/artic...

Recent Events

In light of the unfortunate shooting of the Congresswomen from
Arizona, and other recent events (exploding mail in Maryland, the
revisionist reading of the Constitution on the House floor,
'sanitized' Huck Finn), my immediate reaction is that we are a nation
of violent cowards, unable to face reality and reacting explosively
and irrationally when events start to breach the wall separating
reality from self-delusion in our national psyche.

Maybe this is unsurprising to some, but it certainly is ugly and
extremely depressing.

challenges

Challenges of what I do:

medicine vs. translational science vs. basic science
electrophysiology vs. computational vs. molecular/cellular approaches
to neuroscience
math & statistics vs. machine learning/algorithms vs. fundamental CS
CS vs. EE

phd thesis work vs. exploratory random walks (ha ha ha!)

To read/look at at a future point

Statistical physics of social dynamics
http://rmp.aps.org/abstract/RMP/v81/i2/p591_1

Dynamical principles in neuroscience
http://rmp.aps.org/abstract/RMP/v78/i4/p1213_1

Cooperative phenomena in systems far from thermal equilibrium and in
nonphysical systems
http://rmp.aps.org/abstract/RMP/v47/i1/p67_1
(includes some stuff on the Fokker-Planck eq, Langevien eq.;
continuous time markov processes)

Notes

http://matt.might.net/articles/advice-for-academic-job-hunt/
http://matt.might.net/articles/productivity-tips-hints-hacks-tricks-for-grad-...
(see last section)

Linode vs. 1and1

CYCLOCROSS

rant about Apple:
likes: nice UI/UX, stable OS, pretty solid laptops, great monitors
dislikes: GCC is a few minor revisions behind (4.2.1 in SL vs. 4.4/4.5
currently), lack of support for advanced nvidia GPUs (eg. GTX 480),
not really taken seriously for HPC (i.e. poor Matlab performance out
of the box)

another rant:

unsolicited, backdoor attempt to promote your political viewpoints to a general student-body wide e-mail list is in extremely poor taste.

occasional frustration

occasional frustration with the EE course of study I undertook in
undergrad (instead of applied math or pure math or physics) salvaged
by the infrequent pangs of appreciation of the year of
electromagnetism & EM waves courses I took and DSP & basic
communications course I took.

thoughts

Some fragments of thought:

1. preponderence of surveillance cameras in china
2. surveillance cameras in US
3. internet interception & crypto
4. food in china
5. NRSA

qualifying exam.

working on the written portion of my qual -- an R21 style grant
proposal. just cleaned my desk. 2 pages out of 7. lots of further
reading to do. less than one week left.

if I pass, I become a bona fide PhD candidate. if not, I guess I'll
quit science and move out to northern new england and be self
sufficient.

annoyance of the day: unicode-math ... I need to get this thing
installed soon so I can write some equations in my proposal.

looking forward to: baking bread, drinking beer, doing some coding,
running some experiments, crunching some data. After 9/3, hopefully.

Thoughts 6/2010

Things on my mind:
Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods
Bayesian statistical methods
decision making models & psychophysics
PhD qualifying exam

summer cocktails: Pimm's No. 1 Cup; Lillet + Gin + Peychaud's Bitters
+ Lemon peel

strawberry rhubarb

China: Beijing, Shanghai, modernization, social issues, when to visit
again (must visit again soon)
improving my chinese language skills

Oil spill: more reason to cap & trade; costs to society not built into
energy prices
congestion pricing--market (demand driven) pricing of transportation
resources in city

shoes: running shoes, orthotics for heel/arch support vs. birkenstocks
bike stuff: new wheels for the road bike, new tires

moving to new place