I wonder as I write this what proportion of blog entries are apologies for not writing more. It must be rather high. My excuse is that I have a hard time coming up with clever titles for what is pretty mundane material most of the time. Back when I had the luxury of being more reflective and thematic it was a different story. These days, I go to work, slave away on problems that are of no interest to hardly anyone, and read a lot of trashy (i.e. fantastic) science fiction novels on the train.

I spend about two hours on the train every day now. The Mazda Navajo, a.k.a. Tippy McSlippy, has been developing electrical problems for a while and on New Year’s Eve the alternator stopped alternating. After a month and a half of the Chicago Transit Authority I am having serious doubts about the whole project of civilization. I believe it was Vaclav Havel who said, in the West everything works and nothing matters, and in the East nothing works and everything matters. Here in the Midwest the CTA blue line slows to a 6 mile per hour crawl for almost 50% of my ride in, and the red line is even worse, from what I hear. As far as what matters, it’s mostly the Bears and the Cubs and the White Sox.

Yes, I am still capable of some mighty gross generalizations. Especially when the train isn’t running. Anyway, the dead car, the public “transit”, and the bitter winds have helped me to make up my mind that I need to move down to Hyde Park. After close to six years in Berkeley I really didn’t want to wind up in another college town (and Hyde Park is, though it may be hard to believe, even more isolated), but I have to admit they have their conveniences. Most of my Chicago friends live down here, and with the amount of time I spend in the lab it would be so nice to see more of them.

Lewis & Clark invited me back to give a talk this last Tuesday. It was strange and delightful to go back after close to 8 years. As noted many times, I am endlessly fascinated by place and memory. How deeply the physical geometry of a place embeds itself, and how much easier it is to remember who you were when you walk where you used to walk. I can only assume this is a general phenomenon, rooted in how our memories involve the hippocampus, but perhaps it’s idiosyncratic to some degree too. I know smell is a powerful mneumonic for some people, and Proust had his madeline, neither of which has ever done much for me.

But oddities of my memory aside, I had such a good time talking to my old professors. The students at LC impressed me with their engagement and curiosity, and of course I always like talking about my work. It’s easy to get bogged down in the details, and I like those a lot, but the sharing it’s what it’s all about.

(cdm | ScienceTravels)