I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.
--James Baldwin

I have the impression living in this House district that this primary could be quite brutal because I think we split relatively evenly in the governor primary between Sherrill, Baraka, and Fulop (I think a bit less for Fulop to my dismay). I am certain I am going to get many, many ads in the mail

Those of in scientific spaces currently struggle mightily to get compute time with how expensive computing is at the moment (lots of GPUs bought by AI companies, competition for DOE/NSF compute time is tough). If I suddenly had a lot more compute.. well I would certainly have a good time.

Also as a practical manner, we're under greater scrutiny these days. I have a professional development opportunity teaching a class at Rutgers this fall, and I am being extra strict with how I spend my time doing research on DOE grants at PPPL and taking vacation days to cover teaching time.

Honest question: is this an argument against the current shutdown strategy or are we talking about future fights over funding and appropriations? Like, there are a lot of Democratic voters who will also be hurt by premium increases, but we would also be bailing Republicans out if Rs cave

I think people are somewhat scarred from the "Trump put his name on the checks Democrats helped pass in 2020 and he nearly won" but I think the larger argument around that supports your broader thesis; people just sometimes feel demoralized about losing the messaging war even when you help people

Almost wonder if this needle thread is why (as far as I can see) relationships like Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift seem to work (or work better). Both famous in very different worlds so aware of how fame impacts relationships, but not competitive with each other or trying to use each other

Russell Kulsrud, a famous plasma physicist here at PPPL who just passed away last week, had Fermi on his thesis committee at Chicago and apparently Fermi asked Kulsrud "how many magnetic field lines are there in the universe;" quite the brain teaser, allegedly the answer is 1 by the ergodic theorem

The game changer ep where each player gets $1000, Vic buys a broken vending machine & then pivots to a fake company as a Bit, Lou buys scratchers that net him $500, and Jacob invests in Nvidia, triples his money, and donates it all to a Domestic Violence charity spurring fans to donate another $8000

I always got this and Farmers & Distillers mixed up when living near DC while doing my graduate work at UMD. But my experience was much more positive at Farmers & Distillers than Founding Farmers. But I also remember more places doing bottomless brunch back in the day and that was always fun

A more recent photo from our current abode in New Jersey. Calcifer is much fluffier now

A discussion I've had before is a speculative one in the context of civilization collapse: have their been other species out there in the universe who split the atom and accidentally destroyed their civilization because everyone nuked each other instead of having the destructive reference point

Like, if I had not already had the experience of growing up and meeting and training in a sport with people at levels I could not even fathom, I think my adjustment to "not being the smartest guy in the room anymore" would have been orders of magnitude more painful

Perhaps the biggest detriment is that lots of gifted education programs silo these kids into a bin of "look at how smart you are" without necessarily challenging them. I think my own growth leaned heavily on the fact that I knew elite Taekwondo athletes after I started meeting people smarter than me