Satisfaction

A bar graph of "Satisfaction" for two different activities. For "Personal success", the bar is low. For "Helping others", the bar is much higher.

Maybe not for everyone, but definitely for me.

13 Dec 2023

Abstraction Tolerance

A mathematician and her physicist friend are talking. She says, "And now we can generalize--" A machine goes *Beep*! She continues, "--to higher dimensions and --" The machine goes *Beep, beep, beep!* She sighs. "Are abstraction levels even a real health concern you need to monitor?" Her friend says, "With you, yes."

My abstraction tolerance is proportional to the number of mathematician friends I have who can patiently explain concepts to me.

Hat tip to John Cook’s blog post on the topic.

06 Dec 2023

Discovery

A Venn diagram of "What you know" and "What you like". In the non-overlapping section of "What you like" is the region "Opportunity for exploration".

A reminder for myself to not get stuck in doing the same things forever.

29 Nov 2023

Drag

A person tries walking forward, but a large parachute behind slows them down due to air drag. The person asks, "Why is it so hard to move forward?" The parachute has the label, "Never-ending projects".

There’s a reason why most projects last for a finite time. (By the way, I’m inspired by Craig Mod’s pop-up newsletters.)

22 Nov 2023

Stress Decay

A graph of "How much I care about X after it happens" versus time. High stress decays to low stress very quickly, and an arrow points to the decayed curve and says, "Why was I even stressed about this!?"

It’s crazy how this describes so many of my worries.

15 Nov 2023

Hard Landing

A scientist and his friend are flying a plane called The Last Minute. The scientist says, "Brace yourself. We're going down hard!" Caption: When you realize you're rapidly approaching your presentation's time limit.

The friend: “You do realize we passed our destination about twenty minutes ago, right?”

08 Nov 2023

Comfy

A professor stands at the front of their class with a raised hand and says, "Welcome to my class. Please give the front row seats to those who will stay awake and want to see the board." (Pause) "Don't worry, I have comfy chairs in the back for those who are sleepy and came to hear my soothing voice."

The teacher evaluations are uniformly positive, even from those who fail.

01 Nov 2023

Slapped On

A researcher prepares their grant proposal, which is a cylinder on a table. On the surface of the cylinder are stickers that read, "ML", "BIG DATA", and "Quantum". The researcher shrugs and says, "Might as well slap on "AI" while I'm at it.

I mean, why not?

25 Oct 2023

Fact Line

Four bar graphs depicting where different populations draw the line between "Science Facts" and "Other". For the general public, there's a sharp line between the two. It gets fuzzier for students, and even more so for grad students. Finally, scientists are the ones who have the fewest "science facts" and instead question a bunch.

This is the ideal scenario, where scientists are ready to question their assumptions if new evidence emerges. In practice, we probably don’t question as much as we could.

19 Oct 2023

Time Hoop

Two friends are standing beside posts that say "Personal", "Work", and "Sleep". The first person hands a hoop to his friend and says, "Here's your Time Hoop. Put it around whatever you want." She asks, "But it's only big enough for two!" He says, "I didn't say life was fair."

“Maybe I can really stretch it out-?”

“And you’d be one of many that try and fail.”

11 Oct 2023

To the past To the present