taking a break from the sabbatical…

Heading into the city on the train today. Enough stuff piled up that needs to be taken care of in-person to justify the twenty-some-dollar train ticket. Plus there is a big faculty meeting today, and I figured I could earn some brownie points for showing up. Comes to meetings while on sabbatical!! So dedicated!!

I guess it's been a while since I've posted an update about the writing process. Things are going ok. I'm not smashing my daily word counts like I had been at the beginning - lately I've been just as likely to put in a 750 word day or an 825 word day as the 1100 - 1200 words I was knocking out in January. But I think that's ok, because I've been spending more of my mornings tweaking things that are already written, and thinking about the bigger picture stuff - including how the book is going to fit into the actual class it's being written for. So I've added some things like discussion questions for the chapters which hadn't been part of the original plan, and which take more thought than just writing.

I did take some time off from the book, but it was mostly intentional - a week to go to a conference, then a few days when the wife's Mom was visiting. It took a while to get back into the rhythm of working, but I'm still pretty happy with the progress overall. I passed the 40,000 word mark last night, and the book (as currently formatted anyway - paperback novel sized) is around 165 pages. Enough chapters are finished that I'm starting to drake the final touches - things like graphics and display-equations and whatnot - formatting stuff I've been putting off. My guess is, I'll start working seriously on those things in April.

In non-book-related news, I started back running the other day. It was 50º, so I suited up and did two ½ miles with a little 1-minute walk break in between. It was a little huffy-puffy, but not as bad as it could have been considering I've been away from it for 3 months or so. As my karmic reward for exercising, I came down with the flu less than 12 hours later. The universe can fucking suck it.

no wonder my students score so poorly on exams!

I was excited by the news that YouTube was automatically captioning its videos using Google's speech recognition technology, until I went and downloaded the resulting caption file for one of my physics lectures.

A representative excerpt...

"that's a lot satisfactory right not
trying to construct the theory of physics
based on physical on actions
the situation is this a little interest in that
in fact the equation the same collectors of
of are animated charge
the attraction between and as evil the subcontinent
and the charges one chart are square
needs a lot reputation
and love electricity
the little traction
are identical in four
it's the non-stop but did not stop doesn't square
it's like a new mechanism
for wind interesting affected
there's no mechanism explain why the reluctantly
it was simply up and your goal
um
equation figured out how much force
so as a attempts
to give some reality of wars
people cannot yet is the field
the way it works is
instead of saying the earth
nationally tax them
which is
or miles away
the ceiling or does is create
the gravitational field
the gravitational field
exas and the states it's leader
you go out going to represent the people
um
but for rose
but it
and he played of mass in a gravitational hill
that message cases acceleration"

I'm pretty sure it puts the "um..."s in the right place. That's about it. So much for free transcripts of my lectures, I guess.

it seems impolite...

...not to buy a laptop desk from Ikea when they NAMED IT AFTER YOU!!!

i can relate pretty well, actually...

Wife: (reading paper) Did you hear about the U of Alabama shooting?

Me: Only vaguely

Wife: (reading)...It was a professor who was denied tenure.

Me: (pause) ...Yeah, I can see that.

the value of a sabbatical, discovered...

Simply put - It's easy to get things accomplished when you aren't constantly recovering from doing all the shit you don't want to do.

last paragraphs of the book...

(I was so pleased with this section, I thought I'd post it. It feels awesome to write the last sentence of a book, even if you still have 30,000 words of the middle left to fill in.)

The full implications of quantum mechanics are beyond the scope of this book and this course. Next semester, I teach a course called “The Quantum Universe” that explores the history and the development of these ideas in great detail. For now it is enough to know this: If you are troubled by the idea that you are trapped in a deterministic, Newtonian cosmos with no control over your actions or your future, quantum mechanics may be just the thing to rescue you from this oppressive sense of inevitability.

Or perhaps not. Einstein was notoriously opposed to the seeming randomness of quantum theory, famously uttering the dismissive ”I do not believe that God plays dice with the universe”. Of course, we know from Einstein’s other writings that he was not speaking of a traditional, anthropomorphic, personal, Judeo-Christian God when he made remarks like this. The God of Einstein was more like a metaphor for the sum total of the laws of nature. And Einstein did not feel that the laws of nature should allow for randomness and uncertainty.

Most contemporary scientists regard Einstein's opposition to quantum mechanics as old-fashioned and misguided. But even today, not all physicists agree on how to interpret the meaning of the new quantum laws of nature or the role of randomness in the universe. This much is fairly certain, though; whatever new theories and new discoveries await, the success of quantum mechanics makes it very unlikely that we will ever return to a worldview that is as strictly deterministic as Newton’s. For better or worse, we have made some room in the laws of nature for ourselves.

the least "rock and roll" thing i've ever seen...

I was at Barnes and Noble today and came across a magazine I've never seen before called "Guitar Aficionado". John McEnroe is on the cover holding a pricey Les Paul. One of the cover blurbs touts a story inside called "Golfing with Alex Lifeson of Rush". Being a long-time Rush fan, I flip through to find the article - past ads for expensive watches and top shelf vodkas - and when I get to the article, I find out that not only is Alex devoted to improving his golf game, but that he has a 1200 bottle wine collection in storage in Toronto. (We also learn that Geddy has a comparable cellar.)

A little more flipping revels lots of interviews with various rich people who have nothing better to do with their money than spent $35,000 on vintage Stratocasters. Not rock stars mind you - publicists and executives.

I hate this magazine. Hate hate hate hate. I also hate anyone who would buy this magazine. I hate anyone who would wear $5000 on their wrist or keep 1000 bottles of fucking spoiled fruit juice in their basement or hang a $50,000 guitar in a glass fucking case on their wall. I also hate anyone who would aspire to BE one of those people. And I would like to beat them all to death with my 1963 Sears Silvertone.

sabbatical, week two...

17,000 + words total
11,000 + words written in 8 days
avg ~1375 words/day
95 pages total

Ok, some of the pages are BLANK pages with chapter names, but the structure of the book is falling into place nicely. The tone is not quite what I was planning, but I think that's ok. It's still a draft, after all.

Oddly enough, the writing schedule is working out far better than the "personal fulfillment" schedule. After I write M-Th, I'm supposed to be devoting Fridays to things I enjoy doing, always MEAN to do, but never find the time. Working on recording projects, oil painting, stuff like that. This Friday I sat on my sofa in pajamas and watched Netflixes and DVD commentaries. Not that I don't ENJOY watching DVDs, but it's not something I always lament not having time for.

The fitness thing is lagging behind the other commitments. Still no yoga. Still no running. (Ok, there was one half-assed treadmill run.) This reinforces my realization that I am only capable of "getting serious" about one thing at a time. In the summer it was running, and I didn't do any work. In the fall it was my committee chairmanship, and my teaching kind of sucked. Now it's writing, and I can't even muster the mental energy to edit some half-finished piano compositions on a Friday afternoon. I don't know what this says about my mind, other than that it's 40 years old and I'm losing it.

sabbatical, week one...

Four days of writing - 1100 to 1300 words a day, putting me over my weekly goal by 850 words or so. On no day I have I started writing after 9:30 or so, or finished later than noon.

The exercise stuff hasn't started yet, but in terms of the work schedule... it's working. So far. The only thing that worries me is that I already kind of feel like the novelty of the whole "staying home and writing in my basement" thing is starting to wear off. Also, statistics say you are most likely to die in an accident in or near your home, and I'm home all the time now and I already almost died twice today.

sabbatical, day one...

I had an early lunch planned with my Mom, who is leaving town today, so I was worried I was going to wind up with a crappy start to my sabbatical. I only had from 9:00 until 11:00 or so to work, but I grabbed my tea and headed downstairs at 9:05 (like someone with a real job) and sat down to work.

Right off the bat - technical difficulty. Gah. Took me a half hour to straighten that issue out. So I got down to writing around 9:30.

Result? I hammered out 1200+ words in 90 minutes. That's well over the daily goal I've set, which is 1000.

So. This sabbatical stuff is gonna be a piece of cake. An hour and a half a day and I'll have a book by June.

What could go wrong?