It’s been a few days since I did a work-life balance whine, but it’s not like I’m not thinking about it. The problem for the moment is the psychology of trying to be productive in limited time. Specifically, while I know intellectually that I need to be efficient in working, and make the most of… Continue reading Balance, Productivity, and Temper
Category: Personal
Gratuitous Cute Kid Pictures
A lot of heavy blogging this week, so here’s a cute kid picture (as the featured image; click through if you’re reading via RSS). This is SteelyKid and The Pip at play this morning, when they were back and forth across the yard a dozen times to pick up rocks from our gravel path and… Continue reading Gratuitous Cute Kid Pictures
The Seven-Year Postdoc
I’m starting to think that maybe I need to add “Work-life Balance” to the tagline of this blog, given all the recent posting about such things (but then, one of the benefits of having done this blogging thing for eleven years is that I know this is just a phase, and I’ll drift on to… Continue reading The Seven-Year Postdoc
More Kids and Conferences
The kids and conferences issue, discussed here a while ago has continued to spark discussion, with a Tenure She Wrote piece on how to increase gender diversity among conference speakers and a Physics Focus blog post on a mother who wound up taking her toddler to a meeting. There are some good points in both,… Continue reading More Kids and Conferences
On Mentoring
I forget who pointed me to the Tenure She Wrote piece on mentoring, but it’s something I’ve been turning over for a couple of weeks now. Probably because I became aware of it right around the time my two summer students started work last week. It keeps colliding with other conversations as well, though, so… Continue reading On Mentoring
The Making of “Squeezed States in a Bose-Einstein Condensate”
Yesterday’s write-up of my Science paper ended with a vague promise to deal some inside information about the experiment. So, here are some anecdotes that you would need to have been at Yale in 1999-2000 to pick up. We’ll stick with the Q&A format for this, because why not? Why don’t we start with some… Continue reading The Making of “Squeezed States in a Bose-Einstein Condensate”
See You Monday
The picture above shows the new sign on SteelyKid’s door. She had to ask us how to spell the words– she’s not five for another month, yet– but she is now the proud owner of a hand-lettered “DO NOT ENTER” sign for her bedroom. About half a dozen years earlier than I was hoping for…… Continue reading See You Monday
4th of July, Niskayuna (SteelyKid and The Pip)
It’s Independence Day here in the US, so here are some patriotic kid photos for you. “Wait a minute,” you say, “That featured image doesn’t have any flags or fireworks or gilled meat products! How is that patriotic?” “Ah,” I reply,”It was taken at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC last weekend.” Game.… Continue reading 4th of July, Niskayuna (SteelyKid and The Pip)
The Department of Persecution Studies
In my darker moods, I sometimes suspect that all academics, regardless of their specialty, are engaged in the same pursuit: searching out and exposing the systematic oppression of… whatever department or program the faculty member speaking at the moment happens to belong to. No matter what field of study they work in, faculty seem to… Continue reading The Department of Persecution Studies
Graduation 2013
The other big event of the weekend was Commencement at Union. I didn’t make it in time for the academic procession and all that, but I did hear John Lewis’s speech, which was great. More importantly, though, I was there to see our students graduate, and congratulate them in person. As I told my thesis… Continue reading Graduation 2013