Small things

How small things change the way a day goes.
You wake up right, there is a good/funny email and the rest of the day seems to just go by nicely. Or your paper was rejected and that's the first thing your sleep-addled brain sees and the rest of the day you're kinda out of sync with the world.

And welcome to my morning. Working on this beast of a paper. I've been working on it too long and without much editorial help and that usually means I keep adding to it until nobody can make heads nor tails of it.

These are considered skills that are not important for scientists, sometimes by scientists. If one of us can write, present, lecture or otherwise communicate well, it's considered a bonus. Certainly an anomaly. But when you actually get to do science, these happen to be key skills. People assume you're smart enough to be there, everyone in the room's got a phd. That is nothing special. But if you can communicate your idea well (and with humor) then that's something extremely useful. It's what struck me when I read papers by great scientists like Edwin Hubble and Albert Einstein. They were extremely well written. That's kinda intimidating. Not only do you need to have a bright idea, you need to write it up well as well and present it unflinchingly to an audience. I bet you need to dress the part too.

It makes sense but certainly no one told me in undergrad...

cheers

Benne

Obligatory first post...

Right.

So this is this blog-thing that everyone is talking about. Alright. I rant so much that my girlfriend has a name for it (``lecture mode'', I assume it's when I go on about something and most people tune out...)

So here I can vent, safely to be ignored by all. great.

Subjects should be astronomy, books, politics and enviromental issues. Let's see if I make it beyond a single post.

cheers

Benne