AcademicalNerd @academicalnerd@qoto.org
People are more important than wires.
Joined Jan 2021
2021-06-15 #blog
The exam never happened. Professor decided to grade our work during the semester. Ones that disagree go to the exam, but I am fine with 5 (out of five). A can of dry Strongbow for celebration and tomorrow preparation for the next one starts. This time - solid state physics, interesting but complicated.
2021-06-14 #blog
The exam is tomorrow. It will happen online because Moscow went into a five days long quarantine. This helps, but not that much; at least I won’t have to commute to University.
I am more or less on track with my recovery plan, except for limiting sugar consumption. Carbohydrates are addictive and kickstart brain activity fairly well, despite the price one pays later.
2021-06-12 #blog
I give up; I choose to protect my mental stability, exchanging it for worse performance on the exam. Because the exam is a one-time occasion and my brain should last as long as possible.
2021-06-12 #blog
I am walking on a thin line between mental breakdown and full on apathy. Successfully, for now.
2021-06-11 #blog
Yesterday I passed another exam. The one on continuous medium mechanics; I got an “A”. The next one is on the 15th of June, on crystal chemistry. That one is a lot harder and I am studying a lot.
The recovery plan is going fine for the most part. I still tend to consume too much carbs. It should be easier to cope with now, since I have a 4 days break between stressful exams. I even got back to writing on a somewhat regular basis, that’s something.
20211-06-10_2 #blog
At the moment I have cut excess coffee (3 days ago) and all alcohol (5 days). This solved the majority of immideate problems, but I still operate on like 70% of my average capacity. Today is the first day of fixing sleep schedule, woke up at 7 am. This is reasonable by my standards. Hopefully I’ll stop waking up in the middle of the night once the cyrcadian rhythm stabilizes.
2021-06-10 #blog
The premise I wrote yesterday but lost due to unfortunate circumstances.
I sometimes have to give up healthy habits and rituals in order to get work done for a tight deadline. I did it a few weeks ago to deal with intense finals. Now the annoying ones are done and I can’t afford this lifestyle any longer. Excess of caffeine, carbohydrates and disrupted sleep schedule are taking a toll on my body, along with high levels of anxiety.
To offset a consequence of unhealthy behaviour one generally needs at least as much time as was spent engaging in an unhealthy behaviour, or longer. I estimate a month long recovery after roughly two weeks of questionable choices.
Of course I have a plan. It includes:
- limiting coffee by one cup a day
- having a break on Saturdays
- moderate physical activity (I tend to exercise more during stressful periods, and it’s not always healthy)
- decent food with high protein/carbs ratio
- no alcohol (which is default for me)
- fixing a sleep schedule
- writing rituals
This is more or less default “get back on track” sequence I have to do every once in a while.
2021-06-09 #blog
A wandering mind always comes up with ideas. And if you have a good idea and don’t start working on it within the first 24 hours - it’s unlikely that you ever going to do it.
So whenever a good idea comes to your wandering mind - hold tight onto it and start working, even if the time is annoyingly unsuitable for it.
So I’m now in a weird position where there is a lot to do for all the finals and not much resources left to actually make progress. I’ll post here on how it’s going.
Currently it’s 13:30, Tuesday, I’m more or less done with lab work and starting exam prep, there is a bunch of stuff I need to read and take notes on for tensor analysis and mechanics exam.
I’m a polymath, in a bad way. There are a lot of things I know and some things I’m decent at, but there is nothing I’m obsessed with and nothing I could say I’m a specialist in, and this upsets me. Because choosing something to focus long-term on becomes a pain in the ass, and staying focused is even harder.
Fluency in math
Fluency in language is relatively easy to measure: you can give a talk, keep up in a coversation and write jarry, more or less gramatically coherent texts. Math is trickier: most people struggle with it, some people seem to be better at it naturally. I have no idea why is that the case, but there is an interesting observation.
Math is language we describe universe with, because words aren’t suited well for this purpose. There are a few major concepts that are tough to describe in plain language, like limits in calculus and tensors in algebra. And math is a weird language, mistakes are punished way more than ever, infact, one wrong symbol renders the entire “text” meaningless. This breeds frustration.
Fluency in math, in a particular parts of it, consists of two things. Firstly, the ability to derive new relations and transform existing ones effortlessly and without mistakes. No, there is no “I know this, I’m just so inattentive” when you skipped a minus sign. Mistakes show gaps in either knowledge or skill, they are a signal for you to get some more practice.
Secondly, the internalization of concepts. It boils down to the Feynman rule: you only understand it if you can explain it. The only way to internalize a concept is to link it to existing knowledge: think of the knowledge as a map, and your competence grows in a tree-like shape all over it, creating nodes and lines. As long as there are enough nodes near something new, you can learn it. If you struggle - roll back and explore the area around, maybe go slightly sideways or practice what you already know.
Digital nihilism
Intro
A term I have just came up with to quickly describe my idea. It is not the next logical step after “digital minimalism”, rather a diffirent approach: not limiting and controlling device usage, but using a computer strictly as a tool and not using it when there are more effective tools. Setups matter little in this context, as long as you have bare minimum of programs and shortcuts the work can be done.
There is an app for everything
Do you really need an app for that? I’ll start with the basic premise of digital minimalism. There are a lot of apps for almost everything out there, and not all of them are good or even useful, let alone optimized and functional.
Your phone and computer can do everything
They can’t. More importantly, there are a lot of things they suck at and relatively few things they are good at. Actually, let’s list some stuff.
What a PC or a laptop can do really well
- Computations and programming, any kind of it
- Typing and, more importantly, editing text and documents
- Processing and visualising formatted data
- Editing images, audio, etc.
- Storing data on drives
- Research
What a phone can do really well
- Keeping you in touch with people
- Looking stuff up
- Taking photos, videos, recording audio
Here is a new feature for tagging your tasks
So, here is my point: any computer, being a fancy physical representations of mathematical algorithm enclosed in shiny box, is terrible at processing loosely-organized data. And your life, personal notes and planning are loosely organized and won’t fit a nice layout of that app, no matter how hard you try. The entropy will take over, partly because these devices were not designed for it. If you can’t do it with spreadsheet and a barebones txt file, you are probably better off with pen and paper.
Ditch notion, todoist and whatever it is you use. The only real application for them is to organize work tasks, with well-known workflow and a need for shared access. Ditch habit-building and note-taking apps on your phone and throw a small A6 notebook in your pocket or backpack. It will nicely replace all of them and do a better job at it. You need backup? Photocopy the necessary pages and throw them into the cloud. This is faster and more convenient than all the popups, tables and pages you could neatly organize on your screen.
Only use your device when it’s the best tool for the bank. Forget about using your phone to learn or read, you will end up on tiktok or other time sink of choice anyway. People who designed this get paid to make sure you do, your “willpower” is no match for the team of engineers. Buy e-book reader or get paperback in the library. Get a mobile, lightweight laptop and use it to learn stuff on the go if you have to.
But how about all my friends on social media?
Messaging apps are great for keeping in touch. Social media are terrible at virtually everything, especially at supplying you information. Use them if you have to, but do keep in mind that what you read is an algorithm maximising the profit and not the depiction of real world.
Outro
This is, for the most part, a rant. Maybe it will prove useful for someone, who knows. The majority of it is inspired by Luke Smith and George Hotz and the linux laptop I am typing on.
Dixi.
Pink flowers were glowing against the gloomy sky. I saw the sakura tree bloom for the first time in all it’s glory, with petals gliding to meet the lawn. There were no words left, only a faint smile and a silent stare. It’s been a long time since that smile has visited this face. Five years ago in Barcelona I was in Sagrada Familia, and even before that in Norway fjords, and a gothic cathedral comewhere in Europe.
There is now an image of pink petals engraved in my head, along with a single line that I hope to carry through my life, unchanged: be worthy to live in the world where sakura blossoms. And if your heart is in the right place and your mind is clear, you’ll see it and remember, and carry it’s light within you.
Nerdy things I happen to know part one.
Thermoaccumulators, in particular - phase-changing materials. So imagine a house being heated in winter or late autumn. The temperature outside swings from hot to cold, back and forth, and it’s aither colder inside at night or the heating is more intense, thus spending more energy and money. Would it be cool to store the excess heat accumulated during the day and release it at night?
Guess what, we can do just that. A highly concentrated salt solution stores energy when it’s being molten and releases it when solidifying, thus cutting heating costs and reducing carbon emissions. A temperature at which this transition happens depends on the solution’s composition and can be tuned to suit the particular use case.
PCM usually come in a form of plastic capsules with solution inside. They are put into heat-insulators inside walls or in some cases into bricks themselves. It’s very useful technology that is already in use, but it requires a thorough research on the water-salt system properties. That just happens to be my job.
Since I’m in a good mood today and the majority of my peers skipped one of the most interesting courses.
How to learn quantum physics (the fundamentals of it, anyway)
1) Prerequisites. Integration, derivatives and partial derivatives should have been practiced ad nauseum at this point. A good grasp on linear algebra and basics of operators will also come in handy, as well as some complex analysis.
2) Classical mechanics. Yes, you have to know it, at least remember the basics, because it makes your life easier. Ideally, learn some Lagrange mechanics, since it teaches you to think in terms of energy rather than path. You’ll also need Coulomb’s law and centripetal acceleration for deriving Bohr’s atom model.
3) The first few chapters should be taught hand-to-hand with experiment and history. If your curiculum doesn’t provide this for some reason - go to youtube or even look experiments up on wikipedia. Learning concepts is easier when they are tied to real world at least in some way. At least know that Planck’s formula basically describes an oven.
4) The more advanced stuff will feel challenging. In the first part of the curriculum the sequence is always the same: make some assumptions about the system’s structure (e.g. electron in a potential well), from them obtain a hamiltonian, use Schrodinger’s equation to build a differential equation, then solve it using some gimmicks from differential equations course. The solution’s form is usually given in advance or supposed from the equation’s type.
5) Quantum mechanics is all about approximations: the only equations you will sovle precisely are for hydrogen atom and for an electron in some electrical or magnetic field. Everything else will imply some sort of approximation; learn them first, the rest can be derived.
Random evening thoughts.
How to learn virtually any STEM subject.
1) Go through prerequisites and fundamentals, math being the most important one. You won’t be able to grasp important concepts the meaning of formulae is unclear. Speak Italian in Italy, speak math in physics class.
2) Fix you handwriting. Make sure it’s readable, increase the size if necessary. Every symbol is important and there is no point in writing if you can’t read it later on. Use A4 paper for complicated stuff to fit more on one page, especially if you went with “bigger is better” approach.
3) Don’t break the sequence. Most textbooks follow the same narration order for a reason, and skipping a topic is generally a bad idea. Every concept builds on top of the previous one, so do yourself a favor and don’t skip chapters.
4) Whenewer you don’t understand something from the first attempt - spend anywhere between twenty minutes and an hour pondering the concept. Then make a break and afterwards do it again for 20 minutes or so. If this didn’t help - open your browser, go to youtube and look the thing up. The thing you are struggling to understand is probably explained thoroughly multiple times, and different wordings usually solve the problem.
5) Don’t hesitate to go back in your or to make your notes look nasty. Cross things out, write on margins, just make sure it’s readable. Whenever it isn’t - cross it out and rewrite. Notebook is not a project, it is a tool that helps you to understand the subject.
Jagermeister turned out to be surprisingly good. Who knew.
At some point in my life I went across one of Joe Rogan’s podcasts, and overheard a great idea there. To gain a motivation boost, imagine yourself being a hero of a documentary, with an invisible camera pointing at you. Would it be interesting to watch someone binging their netflix? Or would you rather see one of these cool guys on this “screen”, the one who overcomes obstacles and strves to reach one’s goals? This is a good change of perspective, but I recently came up with even better version.
Don’t try to be a hero in this movie, rather focus on being a villian. Don’t be a dick, I don’t mean it. A good villian is a powerful, capable entity with well-defined motivation, that is usually powerful from the very beginning, contrary to the hero who has to work their way up. Trying to adopt this attitude and behaviour is a surprisingly good tool. After all, we often like villians more than heroes, and for a good reason.
Essays are wonderful, and simultaneously very difficult to write, for the same reason: one can write about anything, but not everything. There is freedom in the abscence of plot, story or characters one has to keep track of in fictitious story, but with this freedom all the distractions and decorations are stripped off as well. The essay should explore one topic or thought to the furthest extent and stay as sharp and concise as possible.
This brings me to the point: writing a good essay is very hard and takes a crystal clear understanding of the subject along with writing skills. And reading one is a delight and an intellectual challenge. If you have any good essays on your mind, ideally on the topics of science and technology, but other domains will do as well - please tag me. In return I suggest you “Cinque scritti morali”, or “Five Moral Pieces” as an entertaining read, by Umberto Eco.
It was a difficult day, but way easier than yesterday. Now I’d like to write something since there is like 15 minutes I have before the class starts.
Will caffeine become the next nicotine? Think about it carefully: it is a well-selling stimulant that has grown very fashionable and popular over the last few decades. It has mild effects, causes dependency and associates strongly with success and productivity, much like smoking cigarettes was advertised as something correlated with wealth.
From the physiological, or rather biochemical point of view, the effects of both coffee and smoking are mild. Nicotine constricts your blood vessels and brings blood pressure up a notch, while caffeine gives some sharpness and speeds the heart rate up. And they are both addictive: nicotine interferes with your breathing and emotion regulation systems, while caffeine screws up the circadian cycle. One could argue that caffeine withdrawal is generally less severe, but it doesn’t mean caffeine is not harmful in the long run.
It is not data but an anecdote, of course: I have recently stopped drinking coffee and noticed how it actually affects me. Spoiler alert, it’s very unpleasant, especially if I haven’t had any protein- or fat-rich food beforehand, and seeing coffee being so heavily marketed lead me to these thoughts.
