The Isle of Marm
One of many awkward me-affiliated places.
Time-Dependent SemiPublic Memory Bank,
Super Secret Dumping/Proving Ground,
Displaced Miscellany Collection,
3 Hours in the Future (EST)
One of many awkward me-affiliated places.
Time-Dependent SemiPublic Memory Bank,
Super Secret Dumping/Proving Ground,
Displaced Miscellany Collection,
3 Hours in the Future (EST)
My longstanding public affection for R.N. notwithstanding, isn’t it the best when someone phrases the problem so …correctly? This frame is from yesterday and I literally had a bit of a moment at my desk as I read it.
NB: Printed out copies of the pleasure calculus strip and the party of functions strip are still epoxied onto the front of my old computational notebooks in the Archives in 94720.
I have been in a weird state of scientific paralysis, which I need to shake myself out of and right quick. It had started to simultaneously panic me about work and bum me out more generally, so I went to the exhibit to feel sort of good-ish about myself.
(Live action analytics. You don’t want to see my notes. So creepy!)
Reubenesque on Flickr.
(Or: ♫KnockKnockKnockin’ on Pee-wee’s Door♫)
LESSONS LEARNED:
“Do you think Picasso bought canvasses at 2AM on the day he was supposed to be delivering Guernica?”
“A, are you *really* wanting to make that comparison? And B, do we assume he has access to a 24 hr Walmart?”
“For the sake of argument, let’s say yes and yes.”
“Then…maybe. But I imagine he probably would have gotten coffee, maybe some adult beverages: not boxed eggs and juice.”
“I just saved us a trip to do groceries later.”
[On arty side-projects]
It makes the constant academic rejection slightly more bearable.
ME to a former denizen of the ‘view.
You know those things you don’t realize you think until you say them? (Or type them, as is perhaps unfortunately slightly more often—but also often more usefully, in my own experience—the case?)
This was one such notional thing.
“How” is a fun thing to know. […] (Natural-competence? Thanks for setting up a false dichotomy, Wikipedia.) My amassing of assorted “how” knowledge is what I need to feel secure at night.
“Why” is kind of a nice thing to stumble upon knowing too, though.
Junk-Mail-2.0 “INTRODUCING XFINITY®NATURE”
I’d forgotten how calming I find the act of “fixing” junk mail.
(1.1 left in “SIGNATURE SUPPORT” but implied questionably tasteless things about “John Hancock”.)
The spec cover art for this album was probably not the first time I heard “we’ve decided to go another direction” in my other other other professional life. It’s probably more memorable than most because the album is still on my playlist.
I just realized that, though it was almost exactly 5.5 years ago, I could totally search my email for the exchange and—seconds later—complete clarity on the fact that the song-writey guy was totally nice about it.
EH: ” I don’t know if you were serious or not about [taking a picture of it in a creek]…”
ME: “I’m almost always …mostly a kind of serious.”
Professional.
(Source: thesugaroaks.com)
I wish I could say that Curious Giorgio and the Infinite Discoteca was a result of a cold medicine or some such, but the fact of the matter is it was an idea that was soberly conceived in an airplane bathroom (the mile-high clubhouse!) last week and birthed at my desk while waiting for a crane to cease its looming over my laboratory causing safety to lock us out of the whole corridor. LOOMING!
I should think the fluid dynamics papers (or even the postcards from tattooine/papyrus stuff,) were a lock for “probably my best work this year”, but my work as a powerpoint* ranger makes a weirdly compelling last minute case for itself sometimes.
(*Technically this is Keynote based. It could have just as easily been a powerpoint file. Determination of “the best tool” is mostly based on capability and proximity. Mostly. My laptop was right here.)
Some less disorienting variation of CGatID would probably appear in the cutaway view of my “undivided attention”, c.f.:
…just so you know.
(Source: vimeo.com)
It is a raw deal for me to be *so clever* in pretty much the exact same way that I used to be *clever*. Higher standards imply I’m shrinking as a person.
I have to start making different choices.
(Source: sites.google.com)
AND, he’s the guy behind “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.
One doesn’t have to agree with his every hypothesis to be SEETHING with professional jealousy. The science isn’t so much the answers as the questions in the process. The art speaks for itself.
‘…I’m in a field, it’s a sunny day, and then something happens and: boom, I’m in a can of chili.’ Whatever that *something* is, in between, it’s..it can’t be good. And, you know, I like to eat cows. But I don’t—I wanna eat a cow that was having a nice day, and then somebody was like, “Hey, cow, come here! Hey, buddy, come here—I wanna show you something.” And then that was the last thing the cow ever saw. And then those people were like, “Oh, this cow, he gave his life for this meat, and we should cherish it. We should treat it like the sacrament that it is and put it into this hand-crafted chili, that is so sacred and delicious that the cow is proud to have been a part of this chili (in retrospect). If the cow could see…this chili, the cow would’ve been proud.
(kung fu grippe: Roderick on the Line: A Maturing Process)
About 6 minutes from the end, I found myself feeling a little melancholy because it was almost over. But then I remembered all the topics remaining to be covered, vis-à-vis “maturing process”. Which eased the anxiety a little. And then: the butchering part.
When I was 7, I watched a cow get sacrificed exactly as described. (Well, all the dialogue—the “buddy, come here” part—was in Arabic and, as it was my extended family’s farm, the “chili” eaten that night was a soup of brains. You say ‘potato’, I say ‘tomato’.) As a finicky (read: American) child, I had gum for dinner, not just because the cow and I had become friends earlier in the week (he’d seemed equally likely as anyone else there to understand English). Because the cow probably would have been cool with it. I just pretty much always pass on eating brains.
FTR: Chili Additives (YMMV)
(Mayonnaise may actually be fine. My mom used to sometimes put chopped up boiled eggs into her mexecution of chili and that didn’t strike me as terribly offensive, so perhaps if the chili is thermally hot enough to cook the idea of the raw egg out of the mayo, it would be okay, or at least not induce a visceral sort of revulsion. But some people like mayonnaise. Also, some people enjoy eating brains. I don’t judge. Maybe a little. Something something different strokes.)
Science is very difficult some days. Not because of distractions, and not because people are not competent*: just because it can be hard. And for this, sometimes there’s a soundtrack.
(* Won’t sandbag: I do the science (or whatever) at a world-class level when I get into the right head-space. The getting there? There’s the rub.)
“I have no idea what I was thinking, I don’t know why I was doing it, I think I was just—it was a cheap way to test out whether or not it felt real.”
—Jason Permenter on The Cocktail Napkin.
Once I fund the plant science arm of my proposals, the “too flowery” note (that I still get, sometimes,) will be read in a totally different way.
I like the idea of universal impulses, though universality is generally pretty hard to prove. Technically, I was filing 1099s for art-stuff before I got the cards, but I did a lot of squirrelly things as a grad student.
