Comments on: Absorbed

By: Nobel Fashion Police | Cosmic Variance

Nobel Fashion Police | Cosmic Variance — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:52:40 +0000

[...] for the meager posting of late. I’m in one of those phases with papers that are justthatclose to being done, and have to concentrate on pushing them out the [...]

By: Finally, it is done! « Symmetry factor

Finally, it is done! « Symmetry factor — Sat, 26 May 2007 18:37:18 +0000

[...] or so. Indeed, this is related to the end-of-the-semester business. But mainly I was very much absorbed by writing this paper… And, finally, it was submitted to the preprint ArXiv on Thursday [...]

By: Pablo

Pablo — Thu, 17 May 2007 12:01:08 +0000

Thanks for sharing this special moment with us! I’m right now working on a paper for my PhD thesis, and even when unfortunately I’m not doing it in such a pasionate and intese way as you, I found your post very inspirational . . . actualy, I’m going back to work on my stuff

By: Middle School Science for the Future! » Blog Archive » This IS what science is like!

Mon, 07 May 2007 16:32:04 +0000

[...] I was reading the blog Cosmic Variance and came across this post called Absorbed in which the author apologizes for not posting recently due to her utter absorption in her current work.Â Below I am including a quote from the blog which I found illuminating: This IS what science is like! When you get so caught up and so excited about something, that literally everything else in life gets put on hold. I’m very excited about this paper, and want to do my best job! I have 3 collaborators, 2 on East coast time, and one in Hawaii. Two of us are in charge of the master text file â€” me and a collaborator on the East Coast. He is a morning person and works on the file from 8 EDT until mid-afternoon. That means around 10 AM PDT he ships the file to me and I start my day, working until about midnight. Comments from the other 2 collaborators are coming in at all hours at a rapid pace. This means that the collaboration is literally working round the clock! We have a system set up, so we don’t get confused and mix up the “master file” for our paper. It hasn’t failed us yet… [...]

By: Aaron Denney

Aaron Denney — Thu, 03 May 2007 16:38:12 +0000

Are there any good revision control systems specifically designed to work with LaTeX? I’ve been trying to get by with a combination of SVN and latexdiff to show changes from one version to the next, but it’s far from elegant.

Not to my knowledge. I’m not really aware of any revision-control systems tailored to a specific language. From your mention of latexdiff, I take it that you want to be able to see the differences in the compiled output, not just the source changes? I’ve never felt much need to do that, but it seems like it might be handy.

My frustration has generally been with reformatting (e.g. rewrapping a paragraph after adding a sentence) introducing a lot of “spurious diffs”, due to the granularity being lines. There are ways around this, such as storing in a canonical form that breaks on whitespace, and reformatting on checkout, but that will lose formatting which can be very important when reading.

By: Refuting nonlocal realism? « Quantum Quandaries

Refuting nonlocal realism? « Quantum Quandaries — Thu, 03 May 2007 03:03:28 +0000

[...] Refuting nonlocal realism? May 2, 2007 at 10:03 pm | In papers, Quantum, Experiment | Posting has been light of late. I would like to say this is due to the same sort of absorbtion that JoAnne has described over at Cosmic Variance, but in fact my attention span is currently too short for that and it has more to do with my attempts to work on three projects simultaneously. In any case, a report of an experiment on quantum foundations in Nature cannot possibly go ignored for too long on this blog. See here for the arXiv eprint. [...]

By: Eric

Eric — Thu, 03 May 2007 00:02:48 +0000

Look forward to seeing your paper. Any hints about the topic?

By: B

Wed, 02 May 2007 21:22:07 +0000

tomato plants? very brave – I’ve given up on plants and only have artificial ones left… it hurts far less thinking of throwing them away with the next move.

By: Kea

Kea — Wed, 02 May 2007 20:19:09 +0000

Sounds interesting! Good luck, and tell us about it soon.

By: Quasar9

Quasar9 — Wed, 02 May 2007 17:08:15 +0000

Isn’t Nature just amazing
One tomatoe seed and you get a tomatoe plant
Each tomatoe from the plant full of seeds, each a potential plant
I wonder what the universal limit on tomatoes on earth IS
I’m sure they’ll be one of the first ‘plants’ to travel space – again(?)
They’ll probably do well in a ‘greenhouse’ on the Moon and even on Mars