skjanes.com

Spent a white-knuckled few hours this evening attempting to move this blog to the main directory of the site. It didn’t quite work, but I managed to get things exactly back the way they were.

It just seems to make more sense to have the updated content on the landing page, and static material in a special location.

Of course, that only works if the content is regularly updated. But things have been interesting lately.

Walking to work yesterday morning, the sun was just a few degrees above the horizon, straight in front of me. It was cold and dry, and the sky was unflinchingly clear.

Everything came together in just the perfect condition for me to be able to see a steady stream of water vapour sublimating directly from the snowbanks.

Mornings like these make me wish I knew how to use a camera properly.

The past few days have been pretty unimpressive for me.

I’ve  been spending a lot of time doing things that bring me a lot of short-term happiness: reading and re-reading short fiction I’m already well familiar with, watching videos on YouTube, things like that. I know that it’s not the stuff that I need to be working on. But there’s this draw.

The problem is not because the other stuff looks so attractive to me. The problem is that the things that I’m meant to be doing are looking harder and harder.

And thus I find ways to avoid those things. It suddenly becomes very, very important to read everything that’s been posted on Boing Boing today. It would be horrible if I missed something neat, wouldn’t it?

The solution, I am trying to teach myself, is not to convince myself of how very important the things which actually are important are.[1] I know that full well. I am very good at feeling guilty and completely blithely ignoring those feelings.

The solution is to make those things that I need to do as exciting, interesting, easy, and fun, and as immediately satisfying as anything else. Bit of a challenge, yeah. I started writing this post at about 7 pm. And got distracted.

[1] Love the grammar, yeah?

Friday afternoon I attended the “Dark Energy Smackdown” colloquium at University of Toronto. I found it entertaining, interesting, and quite a refreshing conversation to be party to.

The “smackdown” was not regarding any of the science behind the study of dark energy, but rather the changing social context of astronomical research. As astronomy becomes more and more closely allied with high-energy physics, so the environments and research traditions interact and merge. Astronomy has traditionally been a field remarkably welcoming to students and new researchers, and remarkably open to openness and sharing of data; high energy physics considerably less so. So it becomes a concern that as research interests coincide, the discipline of astronomy may lose some of that which makes it special.

What was so refreshing was seeing these serious issues in the sociology of science being discussed by the scientists themselves. The problem I have with so much of the “science studies” stuff coming out of the 1990s is how “science” is treated as an utterly foreign culture, something weird for anthropologists to look in on. Results in a lot of “blah blah citations as reward system blah.” And the primary reaction of someone who works within the system is “yeah, that’s how things are, sure.” And that reaction tends to lead to a lot of defensiveness: “yeah, that’s how things are, and if you have a problem with it, you must not understand it properly.”

Thus, it’s good to see a bit of frank discussion along these lines, to see people who understand the system as well as possible talk about the things that they’d want to change. Culture, particularly one so consciously constructed, can and should be a bit fluid. And one can hope that if discussions like this are constructive in astronomy, they can also be held in other disciplines. After all, we do control what it is we do.

I’ve been considering installing a blog on my personal website for some time, but had been putting it off — largely due to worries about whether I’d be able to keep it up or not.

Now I’ve got some very good reasons to get on with it: I have conference papers to write up, I’m starting to think about writing not-for-school, and I’m probably beginning to annoy my friends by posting links and commentary on archival issues in inappropriate places.

Setting this up has also triggered a slight redesign of my website, which can’t be but good.

Suppose I’ll see where this takes me.