Author: Zane Selvans

A former space explorer, now marooned on a beautiful, dying world.

Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2010-07-04

  • The sound of mingling laughter should never make one cry. #
  • I hesitate to say it, but I think I'm completely packed and ready to go. #
  • By some miracle of SoCal public transportation, I can easily walk + train all the way to the place this other guy is moving from in Tarzana. #
  • Truck half packed with only minor injuries… #
  • Truck and trailer seem gigantic compared to my bike and trailer… Heading out from SoCal, aiming for Green River, UT tonight. #
  • 12 hours of driving is just about the edge of reason. Thankfully tomorrow is more like 6. #
  • Time for part 2: the National District Attorney's Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. #
  • I am 80302! Unpacked into garage, ate a burrito on bustling Pearl, live music and beer garden on a Wed. night, kids squealing in fountains. #
  • Heading for the hills with some freaks and geeks for the weekend. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2010-06-27

  • Good lord. And the winner is in Korea. What were they thinking? http://bit.ly/cUQ88Z #
  • How did it get to be 4:30am? Ah, those kiwis. #
  • I think it might be nap time. #
  • Holy crap. Ever wonder what a SCOTUS nominee's inbox looks like? http://bit.ly/ddAMqv #
  • What oh what order does the To Do list impose on my transient existence today? #
  • This whole graduation thing makes me feel kind of like I'm putting all my relationships in the recycling bin. #
  • What's wrong with graduate school? Where do I even begin! http://bit.ly/aS0bgK #
  • An enthusiastic young guy from the Internet, and his groggy friend w/ a truck are removing our compost and dirt and tires. Sweet! #
  • The main difference between postdocs and migrant agricultural laborers is that the Ph.D.s don’t pick fruit: http://bit.ly/cY9LlG #
Categories
journal

What’s (socially) wrong with graduate school?

My Final Report Card

I say to you that we are full of chemicals which require us to belong to folk societies, or failing that, to feel lousy all the time. We are chemically engineered to live in folk societies, just as fish are chemically engineered to live in clean water—and there aren’t any folk societies for us anymore. (Kurt Vonnegut)

Wolfgang Pauli apparently once said of a student’s work: “This isn’t right.  This isn’t even wrong.”, to deride it for being unfalsifiable.  Grad school isn’t quite that bad.  We’re all running the experiment together every day.  We can tell whether or not it’s working, at least in theory.  But only if we’re willing to look.  I’m looking; I say it’s not working, at least not for graduate students, not on average (mean or median, pick your poison).

Continue reading “What’s (socially) wrong with graduate school?”
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2010-06-20

  • There's a special kind of irritation that comes from realizing you've been following rules you only thought existed. #
  • Everything is possible, but nothing of interest is easy. Some boring things aren't easy either. Just re-opened my NSR/TPW paper draft. #
  • This would be the ideal way to go about selling homebrew to children: http://bit.ly/bTgVLm #
  • Things I don't have enough time for: ordering anything from Steve. Using a liter of olive oil or 5lbs of sugar. 10 day eBay auctions. #
  • Another victory for the Internet! I'm giving my 700c touring wheel to a French family touring in China: http://bit.ly/ceoPtA #
  • Please don't do peer review or editorial work for journals that don't support open access. It just encourages them: http://bit.ly/arieQ4 #
  • I hate trying to sleep with a mosquito hovering around somewhere within earshot. #
Categories
journal

No peer review without open access

I was recently asked to do peer review of a paper in the Elsevier journal Icarus.  Here’s what I said.  I encourage you to say something in the same vein:

Thank you for your invitation to participate in the peer review process which is so vital to the progress of scientific knowledge.  However, I unwilling to contribute any review or editorial work to publications which do not satisfy very liberal Open Access criteria as set out by, for example, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing from 2003, or the Creative Commons Attribution license used by the Public Library of Science Journals.  I look forward to a day hopefully not too far off when Elsevier decides to support free access to scientific knowledge (PDF) for all, and especially for scientific knowledge which was gained in part through publicly funded research.

Peer review is only one necessary ingredient for science to work.  Open access and systemic transparency are others.  All of them need work.

Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2010-06-13

  • I had forgotten just how comprehensively sandy one can get in a night. #
  • A.S. Neill's Summerhill School needs science teachers. Just how hard is it to get a UK work permit? http://bit.ly/cUNKfB #
  • A Softer World, why does it feel like you are stalking me sometimes? http://bit.ly/cHWTfu #
  • I can count my remaining SoCal days on my fingers and toes. Yikes! #
  • Anybody know of good long-distance rideshare coordination site? E.g. to find someone to share a moving truck, LA to CO at the end of June? #
  • Dude with a mattock dug a hole next door, right into a gas line. Now we're just chillin' with the cops and firemen. They said no BBQs today. #
  • Is there such a thing as too much tahini? Would a pound a week qualify? Because that's where I'm at. That's 3000 calories of tahini. #
  • Come to the Parkwood Graduation party Saturday from BBQ-o-clock until late! It's gonna be bankrolled by JBL: http://bit.ly/cUQ88Z #
  • Well hooray for the interwebs. I found someone else moving from here to Boulder on the same day, that already has a truck rented! #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2010-06-06

  • Some pictures from my rainy Monrovia Canyon/Rincon Red Box/Mount Wilson loop: http://bit.ly/c2RcYR #
  • The piece of clothing I've held on to the longest: a summer kimono from my host family in Japan, 20 years ago. Finally going to Goodwill. #
  • Thurs. AM 1/22/87: Zane hit Chris Kessloff in the eye after Chris pulled on his jacket. Zane may return to school on Tues. 1/27/87. #
  • Relationships are stories we tell about ourselves and other people http://bit.ly/dbOVBH #
  • Picked my green bike up from @pasadenacyclery using my black bike and walked home feeling like I had a beautiful woman on each arm. #
  • What it is about Zilchbrau that makes it so reliably bring out the crazy? #
  • Headed to the dunes for some warm stargazing. #
Categories
journal

Experimental vs. Experiential Truth

Science is a strange kind of reality worship.  We want to know what really is, out there in the physical world, independent of the vagaries of our internal experience.  We try to find what’s true for everyone, all the time.  It’s easy for me to forget that there are some contexts in which what is actually happening, in a measurable sense, is not what matters most.  Sometimes, it hardly seems to matter at all.  Corporate PR hacks, religious proselytizers and other propagandists understand this intuitively.  If you tell people a story they want to believe, often they will go ahead and believe it, regardless of any countervailing evidence.  They will thank Big Brother for increasing the chocolate ration from 30 grams to 20 grams per week.  But this kind of disconnection of external from internal reality isn’t always sinister.  Sometimes it isn’t even a disconnection so much as it is an orthogonality.  Disconnection suggests that the two were once connected, or are intended to be one, but our internal experience is just not the same thing as external reality.  They are related, but separated, by warm vitreous pools of light and hairy waveguides.  There is some part of us which is intrinsic, or such a distant and distorted echo of the outside world as to be unrecognizable.

Continue reading “Experimental vs. Experiential Truth”
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2010-05-29

  • Someone finally called the cops on us dumpster diving. Thankfully I'd be happy to explain this criminal activity to a future employer. #
  • There's nothing like looking at housing in San Francisco to make Boulder (and just about anywhere else) look cheap cheap cheap! #
  • I took my head to Boulder last night, and it felt great. #
  • To acquire something is to one day discard something. Thank goodness for Craigslist, compost, and eBay. Oh minimalism how I've missed you. #
  • Am I moving back to Boulder? http://bit.ly/b0h5pR Am I wandering, or lost? http://bit.ly/91NLr9 #
  • Continuing my Rincon Red Box reconnaissance. Hopefully the road isn't washed out in the burn area! #
  • Spent 11 hours in the clouds. They're colder and wetter in person than in the movies. Need warm shower. Foods. #
  • Staging a Boulder comeback, to recover from my 2nd Pasadena comeback. I feel like I have an abusive relationship with Caltech sometimes. #
  • The scent of love lost yields instant tears. Why are olfactory memories so strong? #
Categories
journal

Waking up lost

I feel the way I did that morning in the hostel in Juneau, when Becky and I were starting our kayaking trip in Alaska in May of the year 2000, almost exactly 10 years ago.  I feel that way, but on a different time scale.  I woke up in the bunk, and didn’t know where I was.  I’m sure that feeling has a name, but I don’t know what it is.  I was temporarily misplaced.  The most recent bits of history, which had gotten me there, were lost in my mind somewhere.  An episode of micro-amnesia.  Where am I?  And then in a wrenching mental gyration, it all comes back.  Like looking at a map and a compass, and suddenly realizing you’ve gotten turned around.  It’s not that peak, it’s this one.  That means we’re here, not there.  And fuck, we’re out of water too.  Now what?

Continue reading “Waking up lost”