Category Archives: Research and Academia

Start something new in 2019: schedule time with yourself!

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The cemeteries are filled with people who thought the world couldn’t get along without them

— Multiple sources, original author unclear

As you start the new year, please take a moment to remind yourself that whatever you do and how good you are at it, your employer (and society as a whole) will continue to function with or without you. This means that you should never be ashamed or feel anxious about taking “off” time, and by that I mean all of the time allowed by your employer every year. Not only will you get more productive overall, your friends and family will thank you for it. I certainly expect all of my students and postdocs to take time off.

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Another year is over…

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I started this blog in April 2012, almost 7 years ago. During that time there were almost 214 000 views from visitors coming from 196 countries (including the European Union and Vatican City as countries). These numbers might appear modest in the bigger scheme of things, but it certainly has exceeded my initial expectation.

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Christmas Gift – The Perfect Backpack

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About 2.5 years ago, I decided in was time to part ways with my humongous, generic black computer/gear backpack for something a little more professional, something  that while confortable enough to bring with me anywhere, would have no trouble to be in a meeting with CEOs and other meetings of the sort. At some points, many peoples in professional jobs consider buying a nice leather briefcase or attaché. 

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Do boring speakers talk longer?

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According to this Nature blog post (Do boring speakers really talk for longer?), yes! It seems that having rhythm, a clear structure and sticking to it as well as practice your talk should be obvious practice but not always applied by the research community.

Please add to your names to the scientific community Statement denouncing Strumia’s discriminatory talk at CERN

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“In this talk he argued that the primary explanation for the discrepancies between men and women in theoretical physics is that women are inherently less capable.“

— Statement introduction

Follow the link to the Community Statement, read it (and the associated materials in the REFERENCES and LINKS at the top if you do not know of that talk yet) and if. like myself and many others, feel the discriminatory and unethical aspects that was convey during the talk, please sign by selecting ADD YOUR NAME at the top right corner of the page.

Minor update to Kanban View for Cultured Code Things 3

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First, Kansan-View scripts and css are now available on GitHub. 

Second, many thanks to Alexander Willner from Berlin, Germany for making the script fully compatible with both the stock 2.7 (coming with any recent macOS version) and 3.6 version of python. Furthermore, he introduce dynamic home folder as well as default output in the same directory as the script path. This removes the need of previous version to edit the script to change the unix user name in the file path. As such, the new version is extremely easy to run . Better, follow the instruction (method 2) given here and make it a system service, assign a keyboard shortcut and never, ever run python directly yourself!