Moving again, again
A year of violent changes.
Another job, another country
Moving to the United Kingdom, one step at a time.
Bye
What I sent to my Houston therapist before I fired him.
Arcade conferences
Airports are places of comfort.
filial piety is a load of horse shit
An unfair and unconsented contract on children.
Car
Buying a Honda Accord in the strange shortage economy of late 2021.
Reminiscence
The fun Postdoc years.
That time in Chile
Memories of sopaipillas.
Dive bars
An ode to dive bars as the airport gates of drinking.
Truck stops
A roadside meditation on the US as a developing country.
A visit to China, a story of constrained renaissance
Returning to Shanghai after two decades.
Abortion to the extreme
Rhetorical extrapolation on abortion.
Foreign faculty on-boarding to US universities
Opaque and deliberate difficulties: onboarding in the US.
Gender equality
Explicit gender-balance quotas in governing bodies.
Moving back across the pond
A life measured in transatlantic moves.
Students
Lessons learned, and mistakes made.
Reckless purchasing of a house – Part II
House purchase — repairs, regrets, and all.
Reckless purchasing of a house – Part I
How not to buy a house: from Zillow listing to closing in 34 days.
Building a lab
Retrofiting a horror-movie space.
Fairness vs justice
An engineer's point of view.
Writing
A lifelong struggle with language, in every language I have tried.
First semester
Surviving and enjoying the first semester as a new professor, memes and all.
A nightmare
Unable to find a job.
Imposter syndrome
Sitting alone in a bar with an chronic, gnawing ailment.
Thoughts on applying for a faculty position
The opaque ordeal of the faculty job market.
Returning to this
A blog abandoned for years.
American problems
Reading Amy Schumer and Trevor Noah back to back.
Charlottesville
A reckoning with the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville.
Religions
A Hitchens-inspired case against religion.
There is no free lunch
First impressions of Chris Anderson's book 'Free'.
Acrimonious attack on other’s work
Name-calling academic peer review.
Theft by finding
Re-listening to David Sedaris's diaries.
Hello darkness, my old friend
A summer trip to the States.
Waiting
Standing on a bridge and waiting.
Human Resources
Humans are not 'resources.'
On a train
From Zurich to Amsterdam, does it really work?
Being a drifter
The wry parallels.
Fully stressed and strained design
A heuristic for minimizing the mass of a lattice structure.
What music means to me
An honest and embarrassing admission.
Uncanny valley
Why almost-human replicas unsettle us.
First journal article
The bruising road to a first published paper.
Pepper people
Reflections at the midpoint of a PhD.
Zurich sunset
A set of photographs of the sun setting over Zurich.
Education
Judging teachers by standardized tests.
Effective visual presentations
What actually makes presentation slides good.
Landing
Reflecting on America's narrative of reinvention.
Difficulties with supervising
How much help should you give the students?
I don’t like reading
I hate reading academic literature — even my own papers.
Theoretical foundations or lack thereof
The nagging fear of being deficient in the fundamentals, and climbing the knowledge genealogy tree.
Academic integrity and honesty
On Feynman's call for total honesty in research.
Differing expectations
Variable-term expectations.
Living in Zurich
spotless, hyper-organized, efficient, and a little cold.
Ramblings
Clunky, unwieldy software.