Comments on: Saturday Shopping in Aspen

By: Saturday Shopping in Santa Monica | Cosmic Variance

Saturday Shopping in Santa Monica | Cosmic Variance — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 07:48:36 +0000

[...] Just not as good a market as my neighbourhood Hollywood one (and of course not at all fabulous), but managed to find a few things. Better colour balance than my Aspen basket, perhaps? And sure, just like in the Aspen post, share your recipes with us! [...]

By: The Walk Up Mount Wilson | Cosmic Variance

The Walk Up Mount Wilson | Cosmic Variance — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 06:37:26 +0000

[...] So I unpacked a little, did some shopping at the local Trader Joe’s (giving me an excuse to test the bike to see that it had made the return journey well – it had), gave my usual explanations about how the bike worked to a few random inquisitive locals, and came back home and went to bed. The next morning saw me rise at 5:30am and get my gear (sandwich, water, nuts, fruit -the last of the Aspen peaches- , directions, boots, more water, etc) ready to get significantly high up the mountain before the sun got too hot. As it happened, I was later leaving than I intended, but I drove over to the trailhead and bent my back into the task by 7:50am. The sun was already beginning to beat down, actually, but was not yet unpleasant. It was a wonderful hike, and I was thinking about great works of physics for most of the way, and in that frame of mind found it inspiring to be going up the Old Mount Wilson trail where lots of great physicists had tread before. [...]

By: amanda

amanda — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 08:07:09 +0000

Just a quick *thank you* to all who responded, especially CVJ and Mark! Just one observation though: I really don’t think that tenure has anything to do with this…my observations suggest that the tenured people are no more or less anxious about where their next paper is coming from. It’s a question of self-confidence and personal style I guess…anyway thanks again!

By: Clifford

Clifford — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 12:50:15 +0000

Cliff, Welcome to the blogoshpere. And thanks for your comment on that important issue raised by Amanda. I hope we have more discussion of this sort on this topic, either on this thread, or maybe a as a result of a later post. To continue your thought: I particularly like the fossil analogy in describing the finding of problems -or even good ideas- to work on. It gets better with experience. I must hasten to add that just because one can think of lots of problems and good ideas, it does not mean that they translate automatically into good physics. That’s where the hard work comes in. We earn our daily bread by trying to beat these ideas into really worthwhile physics results. This can take weeks, months, or years, depending upon all sorts of variables. The year-or-more long projects are the ones that people who are more senior tend to engage upon, for the reasons of pressure to produce that several of us have mentioned earlier. -cvj

By: Clifford

Clifford — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 12:40:40 +0000

Ha Ha! This seems to have botherd you a lot, Abbas….. Remember your advice about thick skin?! -cvj

By: Abbas Raza

Abbas Raza — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 06:50:54 +0000

Oh, and one more thing: what led me to lean toward a more negative opinion of your response to Cian, rather than the charitable and humorous one that you are urging now, was that while you thanked several people for their responses to your post, you rather pointedly left Cian out. This left me, obviously mistakenly, to assume that you only like to receive fan mail.

I am trying to be as perceptive as you rightly encourage me to be.

By: Abbas Raza

Abbas Raza — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 06:41:06 +0000

Actually, Clifford, I don’t think there is a line between sarcasm and humor, as they are overlapping sets: some sarcasm is humorous, and some humor can be sarcastic. Per your request, though, I give you the benefit of any doubts about your humorous intentions. I know that you are new to blogging, and I suspect that you will find that without the tonal and body-linguistic cues and clues of face-to-face speech, remarks are often misinterpreted on the web, despite your admirable attempts at using emoticons to accent your writing.

By: Cliff

Cliff — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 03:15:52 +0000

I must confess that I’m a blog virgin, but came to take a look since Clifford said he’d posted the pictures from today’s hike. Very interesting! I may be hooked now.

I particularly liked Amanda’s question – I remember having the same questions when I was a student. One of the drawbacks of physics compared with other subjects is that you have to study for so long before you can really see the “frontier”. (The same is not true in math, say, where one can state unsolved problems in terms which a high-school student can understand.)

And as a student you are mostly exposed to well-posed problems, and so your performance doesn’t give you a sense as to how you will perform once you have to formulate problems on your own, as in research.

The good news is that once you get to the frontier, there is no shortage of interesting problems laying around. It kind of reminds me of a time I took my kids to visit a beach on which fossils could be found. At first they seemed very hard to find, but once you found your first one all of a sudden you could see fossils everywhere.

By: So Why Come To Aspen? | Cosmic Variance

So Why Come To Aspen? | Cosmic Variance — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 00:30:20 +0000

[...] Ok, so some of the readers of my earliers posts have formed a rather negative view of Aspen. Some of this is my fault. I actually love Aspen. I don’t come here for the charming people (and there are several here) – I just ignore the ones I don’t like, (and they me), nor do I come to look at stuff like the chandelier to the right, characteristic of a lot of the decor here! (Some people do come for this sort of thing; this is precisely what you find in a lot of those aforementioned tat-shops.) [...]

By: Travis

Travis — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 22:38:42 +0000

Mark, your last paragraph is definitely something I can relate to. I have a problem with anxiety and often completely freeze up due to it. It is something I often have to struggle with so that I can continue with what has to be done. I find that the next piece of work often comes very easily once a clear that hurdle, even though my anxiety had been making it seem impossible to do.