The biological imperative

Just so you know, I also have felt the biological urge to reproduce. What you see above is myself holding the newest addition to my family. It’s a boy! In the language of physics this is definitely a phase transition in my lifestyle.  And in spite of the warnings about how much work raising children [...]

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Copy and paste and oh what a waste

Right now I’m in the middle of writing a long paper. This is a rather intense and time consuming effort that I don’t find particularly gratifying. On a good day, I can write a lot. But when I get annoyed at how something is organized I usually copy/paste and end up reorganizing things and that [...]

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Zombie days and Vampire nights.

Well, this is just a short personal post about my research. I’m really excited about some of the stuff I’m doing, but the details are still not ready for public consumption. That research is waking me up at night at random times (lets say 3 or 4 in  the morning) and then I have trouble [...]

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And a mountain of paperwork later…

-Happy new year! -Wait, it’s January 23rd, – you’re going to say – aren’t you a bit late? -Sure, I’m late. So? -Erm.   Well, that’s one more imaginary conversation with the audience of this blog. You might wonder if I disappeared from the face of the earth. As you can see, I’m still alive [...]

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Holland 2, Brazil 1

Well done! Holland just eliminated Brazil from the World cup by 2-1, defeating the odds. Even though Holland played a bad first half making a huge defensive mistake to give Brazil a first goal and it looked like they were going to go down very badly, they took over in the second half and played [...]

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Worldcup distractions

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the world cup just finished the first round of games, and now its going into the elimination rounds.  Surprisingly this year only 6 of the European teams made it to the elimination rounds, and all of the South American teams (5) moved forward. last time around 10 of [...]

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Tax day

Tax day is here. This is a yearly ritual in the U.S. I think it is one of the few days where most people get intimate with what they earn, and the ensuing effort that it takes to produce a tax return. Apart from the fact that doing the work is not rewarding and that [...]

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Allegory

This is a great short that was found by my family a while ago.  If you want to be methaphysical, it describes the research careers (or projects) that don’t fly. The moral is that they should be enjoyed while they last, well, that’s one take on it. The movie scripting is phenomenal and it really [...]

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Happy holidays off the grid.

I’ll be on holidays for a while with no e-mail access and no computers. I’m hoping this will finally take away some accumulated stress. In the meantime, I hope everyone has a very happy end of the year and I wish you all good fortune in the coming year.

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Broken headphones

Today my headphones in the office are broken (the left ear headphone is not sounding music). So I need a new (inexpensive) pair of headphones for my computer to pass away the days while I work. I don’t like the ear bud versions, so don’t even suggest those. They feel like an insect crawling in [...]

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