What a scientist should be able to do

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

I was thinking about what are the skills a scientist should have. What do you think a grad student should know at the end, after they finish their PhD?

1. Technical skills - mathematics, programming/numerics, lab techniques, etc
2. Writing - ability to write good scientific papers that are clear, concise, and well-motivated
3. Presentations - ability to write good presentations and deliver them well, this is closely related to writing
4. Comprehension - ability to distill the important ideas from a paper or presentation, ability to tell the difference between crappy research and good research
5. Process - (advanced) ability to come up with concrete ways/experiments to answer questions, ability to overcome deadends in research, ability to stay organized, keep good records, and manage other people
6. Community - talking to people including those outside your field, attending seminars/conferences, convincing people your research is important, building a network of trusted friends who you can turn to for feedback and support
7. Creativity - ability to understand the difference between good and bad ideas/questions, (advanced) ability to come up with interesting questions that are soluble
8. Resilience - ability to stay positive and motivated even when the research isn't going very well

I am by no means an expert on this subject.

Quote of the day: "Amateurs copy, professionals steal"

Amateurs copy, professionals steal. I've heard this idea before, but I was reminded of it when I watched the American Theatre Wing: Working in the Theatre video podcast, where they did a panel discussion with four Tony Award winning actresses from musical theater -- Laura Benanti, Beth Leavel, Bebe Neuwirth and Alice Ripley.

At 8:12, Alice Ripley brings up this idea:

And then, if you're going to play Evita. You would just have to steal everything from Patti LuPone or from Elaine Page. ... Because if you don't do that, you're a fool. You know, and then once you look at it that way, when you do it then, if you're recreating something, then it's still different because it's you and you're so different from everybody else. But like it's like you have to copy as much as you can. Actually, what is it, "amateurs copy and pros steal?" ... So steal it...

At 18:00, Bebe Neuwirth responds to Ripley's earlier comment:

I did an understudy with [director] once. After rehearsal, he said "do it if they're doing it and it works, do it." And I think the distinction that you have to make is, as you [Ripley] said before, is interesting when you said "amateurs copy, professionals steal." ... To copy something means ... there's something on the surface. But if you steal it, you're actually making it your own, and you are investing in that. Then there's something within it that ... becomes you.

The new thing I learned is that not only do you want to "steal" without shame, but you also want to make it your own. It's a good plan to copy people you admire until you can do things by yourself, but you don't want to get stuck doing a pale imitation of them. You want to make it part of you, with the full weight of your confidence and personality behind it.

Quote of the day: Arnold Schwarzenegger on achieving goals unapologetically

During the last week, I got hooked on the TV show Homeland, a psychological thriller starring Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin. The acting on the show is outstanding and in particular, I feel a strong personal reaction to Danes's work. Poking around on the New York Times website [1], I found a profile on Ms. Danes and I liked the following quote:

My line about Arnold is that he doesn't get in his own way. He is not apologetic about achieving his goals. And when you have that attitude, it's amazing what one can accomplish. He wanted to give me relationship advice. I was having trouble with a female friend, and he said, be really forthright and do not accommodate her needs excessively. I took his advice [pause] and we're not friends anymore. So there you go.

[1] I've learned that you can only find interesting material on celebrities if you go to serious journalistic websites like the New York Times. Talk show appearances by celebrities are the worst. It's a bunch of air-headed, flirtatious talk.

Quote of the day: "No man is an island"

An extremely famous quote by English poet John Donne from Meditations XVII:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

I wish I could say that I came across this quote from a literature class. Actually, I only knew of it because it is the trigger phrase for an assassin in the TV show Alias. It's ironic that the passage is about how every person's life diminishes mankind; yet it is used to command an assassin to kill.

A River Runs Through It

I recently read Norman Maclean's novella A River Runs Through It. The story is famous for its detailed and beautiful descriptions of fly fishing. Yet, the fly fishing in itself is not the main message. I think the story is about how difficult it is to understand and help people, even your own family. The fly fishing is a metaphor for this theme.

Norman is the narrator. His brother Paul gambles and gets into fights, but happens to be an outstanding fisherman -- way better than Norman. The two brothers were taught fishing by their minister father. Paul is not the only young man in constant trouble. Norman's brother-in-law Neal drinks and whores. Norman and his father don't know how to help Paul. Norman's wife's family don't know how to help Neal.

Norman and his father worry about Paul's troubled nature.

"You are too young to help anybody and I am too old," he said. "By help I don't mean a courtesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money.

"Help," he said, "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.

"So it is," he said, using an old homiletic transition, "that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, ' Sorry, we are just out of that part' "

I told him, "You make it too tough. Help doesn't have to be anything that big."

He asked me, "Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?"

"She might," I told him. "In fact, yes, I think she does."

"Do you think you help him?" he asked me.

"I try to, " I said. "My trouble is I don't know him. In fact, one of my troubles is that I don't even know whether he needs help. I don't know, that's my trouble."

"That should have been my text," my father said. "We are willing to help, Lord, but what if anything is needed?"

"I still know how to fish," he concluded. "Tomorrow we will go fishing with him."

Part of the problem, Norman says, is that he doesn't understand his brother. His father agrees, but points out that they have fishing as a common bond. They have some level of understanding when they all fish together.

It turns out that is the last time they go fishing with their brother. Shortly thereafter, Paul gets into a fight and is killed. The father is heartbroken and struggles to find meaning in Paul's death.

For some time, though, he struggled for more to hold on to. "Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?" he asked. I said, "Everything." "It's not much, is it?" "No, I replied, "but you can love completely without complete understanding." "That I have known and preached," my father said.

Sometimes, it's just not possible to understand someone, to reach them. Norman explains that his brother was a great fisherman because he partly understood where the fish would go and how the fish would behave. After landing a fine catch, Paul says, "I'm pretty good with a rod, but I need three more years before I can think like a fish." Paul has a talent for fishing that neither his brother or father can match [1].

For a person to truly understand another -- that feat is as difficult as a fisherman trying to think like a fish.

[1] It's ironic that Norman and his father feel unable to connect with Paul, and yet Paul is an amazing fly fisherman who can "connect" with fish.

Quote of the day: "Kind of a big deal"

On his blog "The Art of Non-Conformity", Chris Guillebeau says:

When we falsely compare ourselves to others, we needlessly belittle our accomplishments. We also give weight to the wrong idea that venturing out of our comfort zone is “no big deal” or that small successes are “overrated.”

He starts the last paragraph with the line:

Never despise small beginnings, and don’t belittle your own accomplishments.

This reminds me of my literature professor in college. He told us not to put ourselves down because there are so many naysayers and people out in the world who will do plenty of putting down for us.

We might not all invent general relativity, but as a friend told me, if we look over a long enough time period, the small things we do influence a statistically significant number of people. A more eloquent way of saying this, from the last sentence in Middlemarch by George Eliot:

For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Quote of the day: Committing is funny

Today I thought of a quote I read recently. Sometimes I goof off by reading interviews with actors I like. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Reese Witherspoon said:

When I started out, I was only doing dramas. Then I segued into comedy sort of accidentally. I did this movie when I was 18 or so called Freeway. I thought I was being so sincere, playing this juvenile delinquent, and everyone was laughing at the premiere. People were like, "You're so funny in this movie!" And I was like, "Funny? I thought I was playing this serious character!" And I realized, what's funny is just committing. That's what sent me into comedy, and it's been the greatest thing that's ever happened.

I think anyone who studies comedy quickly realizes that committing is extremely important to humor. As Witherspoon says, "what's funny is just committing."

But the power of committing can be extended to all aspects of life. The people we admire... all of them have committed themselves to something. I'd like to make this a motto for myself:

I will commit myself to something big and important. I'll run with it and see what happens. Even if I'm scared, even if it's risky.

This is why parents sometimes say "it's better to do it well, or not at all." We should decide what's important to us and then commit ourselves to it.

Link of the day: Robert F. Kennedy eulogy

A recent New York Times article mentioned a lost wallet found 40 years later. Among other things, the wallet contained a clipping of Senator Edward M. Kennedy's eulogy for his brother Robert F. Kennedy. The owner of the wallet could still recite the closing words of the eulogy:

Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not.

The entire text of the eulogy is worth reading.

In these present times, we have become so jaded and pessimistic. I like reading about these brave, idealistic Americans from the 1960s and learning from the dreams of a nation past.

Last month, Robert Sargent Shriver (known better as "Sargent" Shriver) passed away. I was too young to even have heard of him. He was an activist for public service and the first director of the Peace Corps. I found the text of a banquet speech he gave at Yale in 1967. I was moved by Shriver's passion for a better world and his conviction that

Human life is too valuable to be wasted by war or by poverty or by indifference.

Quote of the day: Getting back to who you were

In the episode "False Labor" from the TV series Caprica, Daniel Graystone has a conversation with Joseph Adama.

Daniel: It's like every decision I've made since the bombing has been a wrong turn. By now I've made so many of them I'm not sure I even know how to get back.

Joseph: Get back to where?

Daniel: To who I was, or who I thought I was.

Joseph: You can't do that alone. You need somebody. You need someone who can see the man you were inside the man you've become and forgive you.

Some interesting ideas summarized as quotes

“People always ask, ‘What is your greatest failure?’ I always have the same answer – We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!” - Jim Coudal

"The key to success is to be cheerful in the face of constant failure."  - my take on failure

"Hara Hachi Bu.  (腹八分)" - a Okinwana saying which means you should eat until you are 80% full (not sure if my translation into Japanese is correct)

There is also some kind of Japanese saying that goes "made stupid by peace."  I'm not sure if this is really a Japanese saying, so correct me if I'm wrong.  The idea is that the peace and comfort we experience in first world countries makes us lazy and complacent.

Anne Lamott on the frustration and rewards of writing and other creative pursuits

Quotes by Anne Lamott from Bird by Bird

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. (pxxiii)

All I know is that the process is pretty much the same for everyone I know. The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it. It is a little like when you have something difficult to discuss with someone, and as you go to do it, you hope and pray that the right words will come if only you show up and make a stab at it. (p7-8)

What's real is that if you do your scales every day, if you slowly try harder and harder pieces, if you listen to great musicians play music you love, you'll get better. At times when you're working, you'll sit there feeling hung over and bored, and you may or may not be able to pull yourself up out of it that day. But it is fantasy to think that successful writers do not have these bored, defeated hours, these house of deep insecurity when no one feels as small and jumpy as a water bug. They do. But they also often feel a great sense of amazement that they get to write, and they know that this is what they want to do for the rest of their lives. (p14)

E. L. Doctorow once said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. (p18)

I also remember a story that I know I've told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

I tell this story again because it usually makes a dent in the tremendous sense of being overwhelmed that my students experience. Sometimes it actually gives them hope, and hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously. (p18-19)

I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds -- the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both -- to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way. (p29-30)

If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage. I doubt that you would read a close friend's early efforts and, in his or her presence, roll your eyes and snicker. I doubt that you would pantomime sticking your finger down your throat. I think you might say something along the lines of, "Good for you. WE can work out some of the problems later, but for now, full steam ahead!" (p31)

There's an old Mel Brooks routine, on the flip side of the "2,000-Year-Old Man," where the psychiatrist tells his patient, "Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it." ... It means, of course, that when you don't know what to do, when you don't know whether your chracter would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside. It will tell you what to do. The problem is that so many of us lost access to our broccoli when we were children. When we listened to our intuition when were small and then told the grown-ups what we believed to be true, we were often either corrected, ridiculed, or punished. ... So you may have gotten into the habit of doubting the voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential that you get it back.

You need your broccoli in order to write well. Otherwise you're going to sit down in the morning and have only your rational mind to guide you. Then, if you're having a bad day, you're going to crash and burn within a half hour. You'll give up, and maybe even get up, which is worse because a lot of us know that if we just sit there long enough, in whatever shape, we may end up being surprised. (p110-111)

If you are not careful, station KFKD [K-Fucked] will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one's specialness, or how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the list of all the things one doesn't do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit, that one doesn't do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on. (p116)

Here is the best true story on giving I know, and it was told by Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre. An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia, and he was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers, and if so, he could be the blood donor. They asked him if they could test his blood. He said sure. So they did and it was a good match. Then they asked if he would give his sister a pint of blood, that it could be her only chance of living. He said he would have to think about it overnight.

The next day he went to his parents and said he was willing to donate the blood. So they took him to the hospital where he was put on a gurney beside his six-year-old sister. Both of them were hooked up to IVs. A nurse withdrew a pint of blood from the boy, which was then put in the girl's IV. The boy lay on his gurney in silence while the blood dripped into his sister, until the doctor came over to see how he was doing. Then the boy opened his eyes and asked, "How soon until I start to die?"

Sometimes you have to be that innocent to be a writer. Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it's right. To be great, art has to point somewhere. So if you are no longer familiar with that place of naive conscience, it's hard to see any point in your being a writer. Almost all of my close friends are walking personality disorders, but I know innocence is in them because I can see it in their faces and in their decisions. I can almost promise that this quality is still in you, that you are capable of quiet heroism. (p205)

Lorne Michaels on life

I've been watching rented DVDs of 30 Rock from Netflix. On Disc 2 of Season 2, there is a bonus feature showing footage from a group interview of the cast and crew by Brian Williams at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. I was surprised to learn how much the cast admires their executive producer, Lorne Michaels, who also runs Saturday Night Live.

Brian Williams: Alec Baldwin, same question [of all the things you've done, where does 30 Rock fit]. After all you've accomplished in your career from, gotta throw in Tony Bennett, classic, to Glengarry Glen Ross, the favorite scene of so many people here, this [30 Rock] gives you something else entirely.

Alec Baldwin: I learned from Lorne, that is to say, this is the greatest day of my life, right now, today, here, with all of you, now. This is the greatest day of my life, I'm so happy to be here with all of you, thank you... [cracks up] ... No ... [Alec Baldwin goes on to speak more seriously]

Brian Williams: ... Tina, that brings us circling back to you. I saw that the character, that Alec plays, is absolutely intended to be a mirror image of Lorne. Explain.

Tina Fey: It's not, it's certainly not...

Brian Williams: Misquoted?

Tina Fey: Yeah, of course. It's not entirely Lorne. But there is an element to it that is truncated, you don't get the full sense of it, that is, there is certainly a friendship between the two characters [Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy] that I would like to believe reflects my friendship with Lorne. And there's, I think, a little bit of a worldview that Jack Donaghy has with like "you should have a great life." "And you should have a great house and you should rise above what you think you can be." And that actually is the part that, I feel, comes from Lorne. And then the more corporate aspects are all from sort of corporate biographies that we've tried to read and fallen asleep.

Brian Williams: Lorne, have you in fact urged people you've worked with to have a "great house"?

Lorne Michaels: Yes, I do.

Brian Williams: It's one of your bedrock principles.

Lorne Michaels: Exactly. I always say get an apartment so when you come home at night, you go "who lives here?.. Someone great must live here. Oh, it's I live here." [Tina Fey is mouthing the words and practically beaming while Lorne Michaels is saying this.] Because you work really really hard.

I like the idea: "today is the greatest day of my life." It's a variation on John Wooden's motto, "Make every day your masterpiece."

Here is my take on Lorne Michael's statements (which should not be attributed to Lorne Michaels since I don't know him at all). You deserve to live a great life, you are a great person, and everything you do should be a reflection of that. Today is the greatest day of your life because it's full of opportunity. You have the entire day to make yourself great and even better. And if you've done things right, you've made your life great and you should enjoy it.

Quote of the day: Buffy Summers on pain

In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Earshot," Buffy accidentally obtains the power of telepathy. That seems really cool until Buffy starts hearing the thoughts of her classmates constantly -- all their worries, desires, thoughts. It's too much, the burden of knowing everyone's feelings.

She hears a voice in the school cafeteria threatening to kill everyone. Buffy is convinced that a student is planning mass murder. She sees Jonathan in a tower with a gun and confronts him. Buffy points out that he has all this pain and feelings and he's being ignored. Jonathan doesn't think Buffy would understand since she's beautiful and athletic. Then Buffy responds with the following speech:

You are an idiot. My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it. Sometimes more than I can handle. And it's not just mine. Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their own... The beautiful ones. The popular ones. The guys that pick on you. Everyone... If you could hear what they were feeling. The loneliness. The confusion. It looks quiet down there. It's not. It's deafening.

Quote of the day: Forgiveness in Spiderman 3

Spiderman 3 wasn't the greatest movie, but it had a decent quote that resonated with me. Peter Parker (alter ego of Spiderman) begins to realize what a jerk he's been: seeking vengeance against his uncle's murderer, retaliating against a workplace rival, harassing his girlfriend. His Aunt May comes to visit him and Peter tells her that he's hurt people and he doesn't know what to do. May tells him:

Well, you start by doing the hardest thing: You forgive yourself. I believe in you, Peter. You're a good person. And I know you'll find a way to put it right.

I think it's harder to forgive yourself than anyone else. And you need to find people in your life who believe in you, believe that you are inherently a good person, no matter what you've done in your past.

Quote of the day: Dr. Cox of "Scrubs" on being a good doctor

In the 21st episode of Season Two in Scrubs ("My Drama Queen"), Dr. Cox is forced to teach a class on doctor-patient relations. At first, he screws around, but finally he buckles down and makes a speech.

You wanna know the real skinny? If you want to be good doctors and nurses, you damn-sure better get ready to get in trouble -- a lot. Because patients are stupid, and they are really scared. And some of them need you to hold their hands, and you should. Others need you to kick their asses, and you absolutely should do that, too. But, it really all just comes down to whether or not you got the guts to say just exactly what you know in your heart of hearts you really should say.

I think the same philosophy applies to being a good parent, coach, teacher or friend. Hold their hand when necessary and kick their behind when necessary.

Quote of the day: Backgammon vs chess

This quote comes from a Dr. Dobb's interview with computer science professor Christos Papadimitriou.

Frankly, I think backgammon is a much more interesting game [than chess], much harder to learn... In chess, when you play like an idiot, you always lose, so you learn. In backgammon, you can play 10 games, not play well, and win. So you think you are great but you have made a great number of mistakes. Tragically, life is closer to backgammon, because you can play a perfect game and lose!

Summer hockey league team names

Today, I'm playing hockey. Our summer league hockey games are on Thursday nights. It's hard to believe, but I've been playing in this league for the past four summers!

I remember a funny conversation I had with a woman last year (who plays on my women's team during the regular season). Whoever managed our summer hockey league that summer decided to give the teams, let's say, "interesting" names. The woman complained:

How can I tell my kids that I play on Team Psycho??!! Well, at least, I don't play on Team Plumber's Crack. That would be even worse.

Mark Bell, troubled Maple Leaf

Since I'm a San Jose Sharks fan, I have followed the case of Mark Bell, a former San Jose Sharks player who was traded from Chicago to San Jose in 2006 before he was consequently traded to Toronto in 2007. Shortly before he was scheduled to report to training camp in San Jose, he was arrest for a drunk driving accident and for fleeing the scene of the crime. Consequently, Bell was suspended for 15 games from the 2007-2008 NHL season and sentenced to six months in prison. Ironically, Ron Wilson (Sharks head coach from 2002 to 2008) was just fired by the Sharks and hired a few weeks ago by the Maple Leafs. Here's what he said about Mark Bell:

Do I think Mark Bell can help? That is hard to say, Mark has gone through a ton in the last couple of years. Obviously he ran into problems before we ever really got to know him in San Jose. It made that year difficult. That is hard to say. That is something we have to sit down with Mark Bell and see where he is. I have coached a lot of guys, and Mark has paid the price and shown remorse, paying his debt to society if you will. He has been a true professional. At some point, I may be able to finish moving from out in San Jose, be able to sit down with Mark and have a long talk with him to see where he is at in his life and his career. He has to worry about his life first, not Mark Bell the hockey player.

I think the key point is that Bell has to worry about his life first, not his career. If he can fix his personal life, the career will come.

Link of the day: "The Ultimate Code Kata"

At Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood writes about "The Ultimate Code Kata." To quote a quote from his post:

Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn't qualify as real practice. Going to meetings isn't practicing your people skills, and replying to mail isn't practicing your typing. You have to set aside some time once in a while and do focused practice in order to get better at something.

I know a lot of great engineers -- that's one of the best perks of working at Amazon -- and if you watch them closely, you'll see that they practice constantly. As good as they are, they still practice. They have all sorts of ways of doing it, and this essay will cover a few of them.

The great engineers I know are as good as they are because they practice all the time. People in great physical shape only get that way by working out regularly, and they need to keep it up, or they get out of shape. The same goes for programming and engineering.

The way I interpret this idea is that quality of practice matters over quantity. As Atwood says, you have to be focused (you are telling your mind "I'm practicing this skill right now") and you have to find ways to challenge yourself. Frequently, physicists will think of small problems and try to work them out. I talked to one of my fellow grad students once and he said that when he was tired of research, he would practice programming in Mathematica. For example, he would try to have Mathematica compute the prime numbers between 500 and 1000.

Off and on, I practice hockey shooting by shooting off a board into a lacrosse net. I realized that I didn't want to keep shooting from the same position, so I tried various challenges like moving the board, shooting off balance, shooting from an extended reach, shooting from a squeezed reach, trying to shoot as high as possible, picking a corner to shoot at, etc. I think this is an example of "kata."

Grad Hacker

I found a new productivity blog (yes, I know, yet another one). It's called "Grad Hacker" and written by a graduate student in the natural sciences. I like his view on productivity:

Let me start of by declaring this outright: my goal in personal productivity is not to minimize the amount of time I spend “goofing-off” it’s to maximize the amount of time I spend in the focused, imaginative, stress-free “flow state”. I spent some time walking the first path and it just made me tired, bitter, and sick. But, now, changing the way I view productivity has made life absolutely splendid.

Here are some posts that caught my attention:

• "My views on productivity" - the above quote comes from this very post
  
• "Getting up early: Week 1" - logging and reporting on his experiment to get up early. As he says and also in my own experience, it's really hard to keep it up because one day you stay up late and screw up the next morning.
  
• "Simple GTD: Do you really need need contexts?" - an interesting opinion, that graduate students don't need GTD-style contexts. I agree. I always end up organizing my todo list by project (that is, when I was using my todo list).
  
• "Reading natural science papers: A method I swear by" - I suck at reading papers. Maybe I'll try his advice.
  
• "Notecard for the week" - Yup, I love the one-notecard, one-pen in pocket method. I have three posts just on that very topic.

Overall, a great blog! I look forward to more thoughts from Grad Hacker.