Random tabs

After not writing for a while, I feel it's kind of crazy that other people may read this.

I'm trying to come back to this blog as if it was some kind of journal. Which it isn't. It's also a way for me to take so many random things out of my system and not feel that I read and read without producing any kind of output. “What a terrible read!”, you may say. Well, yes! You are warned.

When I start reading about stuff in the net I often end up with tons of tabs opened. At some point, typically during the late hours of the night, I leave it as it is. And next time I approach the computer I try to read, but it's a daunting task and also a nonconvergent one, since I keep on opening more tabs than the ones I close. End result? Days of slow and not-very-useful reading, big procrastination, and little doing.

I've thought of several ways to stop this vice. One is to note the links and the subjects I'm interested in at the moment in some “to read” document (which is actually two, one I have in sync everywhere, and one that is just an email to myself that I keep replying to to add more stuff). Another one is to talk about it in twitter and mastodon (by the way, I wish mastodon would be more popular than twitter, and that I would use it more effectively — in practice I don't really use it). Sometimes I comment on web pages with hypothesis. And finally another one is to talk about them in here. Guess which one I'm using right now.

Let the randomfest begin.

How to deflect an asteroid? It sounds tricky, but it's possible. Depending on its mass, momentum, how far in advance we have a warning that it's headed towards giving us a hug, there are several alternatives that are more or less promising. I was reading a bit about it on http://news.mit.edu/2020/how-deflect-asteroid-mission-0219 (the article they refer to is actually doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2019.10.042, which one can find with sci-hub for example). By the way, the original article has the word epistemic in its title, which is a big flag for me. I'm not reading this carefully.

We were discussing briefly about it a few months ago in a visit to the nice people at the Complejo Astronómico la Hita (or astrohita for short). They (wrongly) discussed the impossibility of such a thing, even if well-intentioned. Well, wikipedia knows it better, as usual.

Changing subjects/tabs. I jut removed myself from several mailing lists. I like many things, but get anxious when I get many emails, and I do get many for my taste. I still love those people/organizations, but I need my inbox to be cleaner. Instead of just making them disappear, I'm adding them to this kind of honorific list:

If you subscribe to any of those, balance will be somehow restored to the universe.

Switching topics. Today I talked to my friend Javi, from the writer's group I used to attend. A chill out, nice and interesting conversation. Among the interesting things, a possible interest in financing something I'd start if it looks interesting. Similar to what Mikami said the other day. Uhmm. By the way, he also talked about the Escuela de Escritores, and it may be a good idea for me to join some courses if I want to get some of the texts that I have in mind written.

Other stuff I've been looking at: Galaxy Cruise is a citizen science project. You train in identifying certain things related to galaxies, and then you help scientists with their work by working with their data.

How do 3Blue1Brown and Minute Physics create such amazing videos? Can I be like you when I grow up?

Reading about quantum decoherence, after a conversation on quantum effects and how we are “all connected” (which we are in many ways, like sharing the same DNA due to a common ancestor, and also having our basic atoms being cooked inside the same star core a few billion years ago, but not through entanglement!) that I had during the week with some friends from the local neighborhood group that I found in “¿Tienes sal?”.

I'm editing this entry later, but posting it so I stop procrastinating so much (and have some output already). Bye!