Bye
A sign-off that opens with the message he sent right before firing his therapist.
Arcade conferences
How endless conference travel turns airports into places of comfort.
filial piety is a load of horse shit
A blunt argument that filial piety imposes an unfair, unconsented contract on children.
Wednesday Night Skate (2025-02-25)
A route map for a Wednesday-night group skate.
Car
Buying a Honda Accord in the strange shortage economy of late 2021.
Reminiscence
Looking back on the postdoc years as the most fun of an academic life.
That time in Chile
Memories of a year in Chile, pulled loose by an article about sopaipillas.
Dive bars
An ode to dive bars as the airport gates of drinking.
A visit to China, a story of constrained renaissance
Returning to Shanghai after two decades to witness a constrained renaissance.
Abortion to the extreme
Using the rhetorical trick of extrapolation, and watching where it breaks down, on abortion.
Foreign faculty on-boarding to US universities
A guide to the opaque, deliberately difficult process of onboarding as foreign faculty in the US.
Gender equality
Making the case for explicit gender-balance quotas in governing bodies.
Moving back across the pond
A life measured in transatlantic moves, beginning with a 2001 flight from Shanghai.
Students
Lessons learned, and mistakes made, in hiring and managing a first cohort of students.
Reckless purchasing of a house – Part II
The aftermath of a too-fast 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
Turning a horror-movie lab space into a working research lab.
Fairness vs justice
Pitting fairness against justice from an engineer's point of view.
Writing
A lifelong struggle with writing, in every language he has ever tried.
First semester
Surviving — and quietly enjoying — a first semester as a new professor, memes and all.
A nightmare
Transcribing a disorienting nightmare about being unable to find a job.
Imposter syndrome
Sitting alone in a bar with the chronic, gnawing ailment of imposter syndrome.
Thoughts on applying for a faculty position
Personal notes on the opaque ordeal of applying for a faculty position.
Returning to this
Returning to a blog abandoned for years, and resolving to keep it going.
American problems
Reading Amy Schumer and Trevor Noah back to back, and what it reveals about America.
Charlottesville
A reckoning with the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville.
Religions
A Hitchens-inspired case against religion and the concept of a god.
There is no free lunch
First impressions of Chris Anderson's book 'Free' and its mostly self-evident economics.
Acrimonious attack on other’s work
On the cruelty of harsh, name-calling academic peer review.
Theft by finding
Re-listening to David Sedaris's diaries, and how audiobooks rob a book of full attention.
Hello darkness, my old friend
A summer trip to the States shadowed by a familiar, returning darkness.
Waiting
A quiet, meditative piece about standing on a bridge and waiting.
Human Resources
A no-holds-barred rant against HR departments and the very idea that humans are 'resources.'
On a train
Musings written on a sleeper train from Zurich to Amsterdam, on whether they really work.
Being a drifter
The wry parallels between academics and drifters.
Fully stressed and strained design
Explaining Fully Stressed Design, a heuristic for minimizing the mass of a lattice structure.
What music means to me
An honest admission of a fairly ordinary, undiscerning relationship with music.
Uncanny valley
On the uncanny valley — why almost-human replicas unsettle us.
First journal article
The bruising road to a first published paper, through two rejections.
Pepper people
Reflections at the midpoint of a PhD, with the end of the tunnel still out of sight.
Zurich sunset
A set of photographs of the sun setting over Zurich.
Education
Arguing against judging teachers by their students' standardized test scores.
Effective visual presentations
What actually makes presentation slides good, beyond merely looking pretty.
Landing
Landing in the UK to an Obama audiobook, and reflecting on America's narrative of reinvention.
Difficulties with supervising
How much help should you actually give the students you supervise?
I don’t like reading
A researcher's confession that he hates reading academic literature — even his own papers.
Theoretical foundations or lack thereof
Wrestling with 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: presenting the bad along with the good.
Differing expectations
Comparing the clear, short-term expectations of an engineering firm with the open-ended ambiguity of academic research.
Living in Zurich
An affectionate, exasperated portrait of Zurich — spotless, hyper-organized, efficient, and a little cold.
Ramblings
A gripe about how large organizations inevitably standardize on clunky, unwieldy software.