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2025-03 | Chloe has a half-pint of Guiness every time she goes to the pub
A month of unreasonably interesting research-related travel in which took an overnight train a record five times in 30 days. (It would have been six, but the French found an unexploded bomb from the second world war in one of the Paris rail stations.)
I went to a meeting in Edinburgh on tipping points in the climate system, and it was really nice - a fairly small, collegial group of people from ~15 countries, a set of lectures on interconnected things, and lots of time to ask people about their work during generous coffee breaks. Quite a few of the talks were about things I understood only vaguely. I’m routinely reminded that if you want to do science, or any sort of sustained question-asking, you had better get very comfortable with feeling quite confused a good amount of the time. I felt that way throughout most of my undergraduate degree, which was in pure math, quite competitive, and in which I was competent on good days, but definitely not among the best and brightest. The general atmosphere there was often an insecure and miserable one. I think in general math can be prone to that sort of thing, maybe especially in undergrad when people are very invested in their identity as Good At Math but not yet used to the general confusion that accompanies a lot of research. This conference wasn’t like that, partly because the array of topics was decently varied so there was no one person who understood everything, partly because the type of mathematicians who choose to study Hopf bifurcations in the climate system instead of making a lot of money in the stock market tend to be some combination of nice and interesting. The basis for a lot of the work discussed is this book which has 19000 citations (!). Everyone I know who has read it really likes it — a well-written natural science novel, but with equations. It presents quite complicated topics such that most interested readers can get the rough contours of what is going on. Also, for anyone looking to apply extreme value theory to their models/data, this tutorial is really great (actually, a number of tutorials on that website are really great).
I traveled far to see Laura Marling play a bare-bones set in Manchester as part of a two-night sold-out run, which was quite special. LM and I are similar ages and find ourselves at similar junctures, and I remember being 18 and being struck by this for the first time. I then sort of stopped paying attention for over a decade, so I revisited her music for the first time again this spring laying on the floor of the balcony of the Albert Hall -- somewhere between recognition and newness, two hours of perfect, sparse-but-warm melody, a rare moment of still focus. (She also writes a newsletter about creativity-music-literature-parenting that I quite like.)
I finally read the Left Hand of Darkness, recommended by many queers/mountaineers over the years (that Venn Diagram has a refreshing amount of overlap, and I guess this book fits there too), and now I also recommend it.
In a professional context, I got asked "why don't we just geoengineer the climate?". My response wasn't very articulate, in part because in my bubble of people who study the climate system, I rarely meet anyone who considers geoengineering anything other than so extremely, stupidly dangerous as to be dismissible out of hand. Nevertheless, people are studying it, so I should have an answer. Here is one of the best climate physicists in the world with his.
Waiting for some train or other, I tried to articulate the paralysis that many people I've talked to have been feeling lately. (It's probably another thinly veiled rant about feeling helpless and no one owes me an audience; you've been warned.)
Related to paralysis and decision-making, I recommend the latest interation of Kit’s diagram Should I Do The Thing?
Here is a dog we met on a bus in Edinburgh. Her name is Chloe. Her (very nice) owner claims she gets a half-pint of Guiness every time she goes to the pub. I believe it.
The music video for this song is the opposite of new, but perfect. In the words of someone on the internet: “could you imagine creating, at least once in your life, something this purely beautiful and good".