On my way to Holland

Hello blog, long time no see.

I'm currently sitting at the Au Bon Pain in the Philadelphia airport. I'm here because I'm headed to a workshop in Leiden. I've still got almost five hours to kill here, and what better way than this?


 First, you might be curious about exactly this workshop is that I'm attending. It's called: "Fluctuations and Response in Active Materials: From Driven Granular Systems to Swarming Bacteria." This will consist of several talks, discussions, and poster sessions by researchers working on granular materials—what I'm working on—or on active biological systems, such as swarms of bacteria—which I know little to nothing about (I should at least try to read a few abstracts before the conference starts). Evidently, these two seemingly disparate fields actually share a lot of the same ideas when you look at the collective behavior, despite the obvious microscopic differences. Hopefully I will learn a lot more about this. The organizers of the workshop sum up the goals as such: "The workshop will be considered a success if we establish strong international and interdisciplinary collaborations and linkages among research groups working in granular and active, living matter." That's what we call setting the bar low. Should be a good time.

Random superfluous tangent (this section may be omitted without loss of continuity): these two very identical twins just walked by. They looked to be in their mid-forties. To my discerning eye, they seemed to be dressed, from head to ankle, in all the same clothes as well. Same glasses, same backpacks, same blazers and relaxed fitting jeans; the only visible difference was that they had on different types of tennis-shoes. Does this seem weird to everyone else? I've known parents to dress their twins in matching outfits, and I know many twins share a much closer bond than regular siblings, but did they just never stop dressing in parallel? Was it part of a joke? They didn't seem to be joking with anyone. Why did they have on different shoes? Did one of them lose his shoes? Do they share their shoes, and have only one pair of each? Is their a metaphor in there somewhere? Why the shoes?

Back to the Netherlands. After the workshop is over I plan on bumming around in Amsterdam for a few days. I'm staying at a famous hostel in Amsterdam. I have a few ideas for what I'm going to do but if anyone has suggestions please let me know. I'll try to write a few posts while I'm over there as well. We'll see how that goes.

Still lots of time to kill.

Speaking of killing time, I was going to write a post about longreads a little while ago. Some of you probably already know about this gem. I found it about a month or two ago. I subscribed in my Google reader.

Tangential rantrave on Google reader (this section may be omitted without loss of continuity). I love Google reader. It is a great organizational, productivity tool that is slowly but surely becoming the bane of my productivity. You can subscribe to anything with an rss feed. Just click on the rss link and then choose add to Google reader. Once you've added your favorite sites to the reader you can organize them into folders by topic, location, primary color, whatever you like. You can also "like" things if you're into that, and Google will start trying to predict the things that you will like based on what you've read, liked, skipped, etc. I haven't really messed around too much with this aspect of it, but I have subscribed to a lot of blogs, news sites, podcasts, etc. EVERYTHING HAS RSS FEEDS!!! Predictably, I've oversubscribed, there's pretty much always something for me to read. The great productivity tool that brought all of the things I liked into one place has turned into a time consuming monster. So bottom line, you should also use Google reader.

Now everyday I get a few articles from longreads in my reader queue. The articles are handpicked by the longreads guy or by members. Topics range from politics to arts and culture. There are some interviews, a lot of long-form journalism, a little bit of fiction. They are funny, poignant, heartbreaking, disturbing, inspiring, fascinating, frightening, and engrossing. Basically it's "internet magazine." The one common thread among all of the articles is that they are all really well written. I started by just reading the ones that sounded interesting. Now I read most of them and at least skim the beginning of all of them. Sometimes I end up hooked on something that I didn't expect to read at all. But they are all a bit lengthy, so its best to put a little time aside to read one or two and not just pick them up whenever. The feed gives you a short excerpt from each, as well as a total word count, and estimated reading time, which tends to be accurate within 10%. I was going to try to make some recommendations from what I've read, but that would be like writing cliff notes for cliff notes, or anthologizing an anthology. So I'll just say that you should check it out, you'll probably find something you like.

A bit less time to kill now.

I think I'll try to use it being more productive, maybe.