Monday, April 10, 2023

E-mail Scourge

I am on sabbatical. I had not quite appreciated what all I can do while on sabbatical. A big goal was to organize. Mess and clutter, digital or otherwise are sources of stress and I wanted to remove some. 

Last week I was offline (well mostly, please clap) and I let all the email pile into the respective email boxes. Email is a terrible way to do certain tasks and yet Universities etc have decided that all communication will be over email. So having a view of what all comes in during a given week was illuminating. 

The vast majority are FYIs from automated lists. 

The majority of which I rarely actually need to read. All I do is file/archive them. Informational content is almost zero. 

Time to employ filters. This was the goal of the exercise. What emails can I safely filter? Most.

Improving my email signal-to-noise was one of the goals. Organize the folders various things go into. And I am adding relaxation to my post-vacation state. Email creep will happen again. But being offline nicely shows what can be filtered and what has actual informational or actionable value. 

Time to email collaborators ;)


Thursday, June 9, 2022

Mode of transport


I’m one of nature’s bike commuters. Of course growing up in the Netherlands this is a lot easier. There is infrastructure for that. You can pedal and think and honestly not pay that much attention to your surroundings. You know. Commute. 


I commuted by bike in Baltimore, South Africa, and to ESA and Leiden observatory. 


I haven’t commuted to work on a bike even once here in Louisville. 


I mapped it out before moving here, the university has a bike encouragement program, the bus has bike racks up front. Why not?


And that’s what I’m wondering about. First off is much less infrastructure for biking here but that did not stop me before in the US. I suspect it’s also the pressure from work as a professor. And there was a lot of that. A LOT of the work is instantly forgettable admin churn. And there is so much of it. 


I can do email triage etc on the bus so I did that a lot. And twitter of course. Gotta twitter. Otherwise I’d have a moment of mindfulness. 


But then the pandemic hit and I just took a car to work because who else was going anywhere? And the habit stuck. And then kid 2 had to be collected from school 1 while kid 1 had to be collected from school 2. And so on and so forth. But do I really need to do this? Kids can take busses to school again. And I can move back to the bus or possibly…maybe…bike there?  A colleague biked in the other day. I should try. And another colleague has started researching e-bikes. 


The second car is now old enough to qualify as a “historical vehicle”. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the bicycle for the commute. Just wish my class didn't end at 7pm. 


UPDATE: I did bike in! This was the proof-of-concept. Didn't die. Of traffic or heatstroke. But it does feel like a thing an e-bike would be very nice for. 

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Visit to STSCI

This week I got to visit STSCI, one of the most formative places for my scientific career. The idea that science is for everyone, data should be available and easily accessible, my philosophy on working with students etc etc all can be traced for a large part to my 6 years (2000-2003 and 2005-2008) I spent there.


It was a very warm welcome. It was ridiculously good to see so many science collaborators and friends. All of whom have of course not aged a bit and are still very much amazing.


I had to endure some genteel ribbing about not taking the job there 5 years ago. Fair enough. And I had to remind me that the giddy atmosphere has a lot to do with the ridiculous good performance of JWST after a flawless launch and that I was the second in-person speaker. People were happy to see me and just happy to see each other and science together. 


So I am planning a second visit where I can calibrate the emotional vibe of this one. 


I tallied up all the stuff kicked around. A dozen paper ideas (not all are going to make it because there is only so much time in the day) and half a dozen telescope proposal ideas for the coming year. Oh yes, sciencing in person is frikkin awesome!



Monday, March 28, 2022

The Deadline Game

Deadlines are a thing in astronomy. There is always one on the horizon. Telescope time, grants, more of those. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. 


A big part of becoming an effective professor is to deal with them. And I do not deal well with last minute frantic editing. The kind that much of academia seems to thrive on. I cannot proofread or edit effectively that way. And stress messes me up (small infections, poor sleep, mental health effects etc). 


So start on time. The favorite thing professors tell their students. And I did. I wrote a first draft of several Hubble proposals months ahead.  When I had the first idea. AND I decided against several. So start early and NOT do some. Only way to scope out a reasonable week before the deadline. Trick is often for me it’s not just time but also energy. I had a spring break and I got a bunch of stuff done in it and rested up. But it’s a fine line. And I was still pretty stressed. There are little tells (see above). 


But once again it’s done. Managed not to think how much is riding on successful proposals (me getting paid over the summer, students actually doing Stuff) and just gushed about how fun the science will be. 

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Tenure File Mental Notes

 Ok so I am procrastinating on working on my tenure file. A little.


Here are some of the thoughts I had while I was putting this together. There is little to no clear guidance and a lot tends to change when the next Dean in charge of the process rotates in or another “system” is adopted. This is to be expected. Nothing is set in stone and if, for example, not having all your publications loaded is fine, it could be dropped. 


  1. Have a google drive or dropbox or something that is on the cloud and on your computer and organize EVERYTHING in there.
  2. It’s ok to rename things. I am liberally renaming files to more legible titles that are descriptive. Why? Because no one is reading this whole thing.


No one. Make it easy to skim.


  1. Make a little note explaining what this giant list of files is. Explain acronyms etc. I keep adding more. And this is what MNRAS stands for. 
  2. Everything goes into the cv. I did not fully appreciate that. Send it to your HoD. There is a thing that all the different levels expect. Check with those experienced with the process. 
  3. Hey do you have a summary sheet or something that HR made? Check if it has your birthday and/or social security information on there. No need for ID theft...
  4. There is going to be a time-wasting thing. Possibly linked to point 4 or 2 or 7. There is some task that feels insulting and grinds in that last exposed nerve you have left at the end of the process. There it is. Expect it. It may well be yourself who is making you do it. 
  5. Completeness is great but it’s more about box checking. You should have something in every category. It’s nice if you have everything but it’s ok if you miss that committee you were on for a week four years ago. 
  6. Use the official PDFs of your publications. I had quite a number of preprints initially because working from home but I took the effort of downloading the full in-print versions and replaced them. Looks much better but also has the DOI numbers on them. 
  7. Summarizing plots. I made a plot with h-index, number of citations, number of papers etc etc. All lines racing higher.  It’s meaningless of course but looks impressive. Pre/post improvement of undergraduate in my astro class. Pretty picture of Hubble release and one of my book. 






Doesn’t that tell you I’m solid researcher and teacher? Sure it does. 


Monday, February 28, 2022

ESA Hubble Image of the Week


 https://esahubble.org/images/potw2209a/


One of the overlapping galaxies in my STARSMOG program was selected by ESA for an "Image of the Week". Nice pick me up after last week and let's just say the *waves hand at everything*.

Minor guilt trip to follow to the missing scientific analysis that I am sure I'll be able to get out any day now. It does help that I have a graduate student working on this now. 

NGC 4496A, an old friend from thesis days when I counted the background galaxies (n>1, the obvious one you see here) in WFCP2 data. 

Friday, February 11, 2022

Online doesn't work (for us) ... or does it?

I’ve seen a bunch of people whine about how online classes and workshops etc doesn't wooooork. And inevitably they are thinking of the classes we threw online in a few days in March 2020 or now because you have <5yo kids (hey remember kids? Under 5? Not vaccinated yet?) and of butt-numbing zoom marathons of online talks that were “conferences”. 


Yes *those* didn’t work. 


The online format. Some observations.


Synchronous sucks. Different time zones, connectivity, the “you’re muted” conversation. In class, trying to keep an eye on those student on the laptop, and those in class and oh god why is it resetting? This hyflex option can go take a hike. Instructor overload and poor results for students/participants. 


Asynchronous with dedicated synchronous is awesomeballs. Record your talk. Make a second take, check the captions, make the slides available. People can watch it when it fits their schedule. The synchronous part happens for an hour or two with discussion, active participation. The interactive parts. This works pretty smoothly for classes and workshops etc. The rest of your life happens around it (since it is still sharing a space with you) but you can do it. You don't feel terrible about missing some. You didn't when it was a conference in person did you?


I feel this is the future for a lot of events. I hope it is. Even though I love going to conferences and hanging out with friends old and new.