Saturday evening, progress and plans

You begin to recognize how much time you spend at work when you realize that your toilet at home is clean because you only use it 5-10 times per week and the rest of the time you're in the office.

In all seriousness, I'm teaching two classes this semester while preparing proposals and manuscripts, as well as taking the lead in recruiting students for my program of study. I find that I don't have time to make any progress on "research" until after 5 or later. The quotes around research are because I haven't done any lab work myself in years. My research activities mostly involve working with students and colleagues and writing/editing content. It still takes an immense amount of time and energy to make forward progress, and I like to think that my input is useful, although this seems to have a wide variance from day to day.

Tonight I've completed the manuscript, "A common language to quantitatively represent microstructures," which we plan to submit for publication tomorrow. This is my first data science paper and I'm eager to see if it is well received by the community. I'm planning to upload this paper to the arXiv and will also create a video discussing it. We have two more data science (materials informatics) focused manuscripts that we're finishing up this month.

I'm uploading a video, either later tonight or tomorrow, discussing Bessel van der Kolk's firing. What happened to him bothers me. For starters, I'm a fan of his work, and think he is someone that truly changed the world the better place. An second, it insults my understanding of justice. It's interesting to note that last week, when I first thought about making a video, I recognized that I was a little afraid, as if I were putting myself at risk discussing it. This recognition settled the decision and I made the video. I'm not only posting to DTube, but also YouTube, where I hope to get a larger audience. (Sorry DTube, but you still have some growing to do.) It bothers me that the world seems to have become increasingly menacing to those that go against the flow. Maybe I just didn't notice it before, but it seems to me that calling out a injustices, particularly those that hide behind the guise of progress, is no longer a safe activity.