Research

Lab work has been going surprisingly smoothly. By this point in the summer, I normally hit a wall that holds me up for another three or four weeks, but my mentors helped me surmount this year’s cloning hurdles during finals week. I do experiments and they work and I go “yay!” It’s a good gig.

I wish seminars continued during the summer, when I have time to go to them.

Biking!

I made a deal with one of my friends that we would go biking every weekend (or at least, as close as possible to every weekend). We’ve managed to be pretty consistent. It’s nice to be back on two wheels for reasons other than commuting. Working up to the harder trails right now; I don’t think I’m at the same bike handling level that I was going into college. Definitely worse now.

Journal Club

As part of the local American Chemical Society student chapter, we’ve been continuing a journal club during the summer. It’s been fun learning to read literature on organometallics and synthetic chemistry, since those aren’t my specialties. I’m slowly adding to the repertoire of named reactions that I started amassing last fall. Now that I have a nice set of templates for making flashcards to remember them, it’s not nearly as intimidating.

Computer

I got a copy of iA Writer and started testing it out for daily composition. I like all of the little touches: the syntax highlighting for grammatical structures is awesome, and makes editing interesting. I’ve been leaving it off for drafts, then highlighting verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions when I start editing. I like iA more for quickly drafting something or for composing a shorter document, since creating a document doesn’t feel like as much of an investment as in Scrivener. If it could handle typst files, I would trade Sublime Text for iA too.

I played around bit more in vim for streamlining python tests. I used to debug a lot of my python scripts by opening a second terminal window to run the code, but then I learned that I could write buffers to a command via stdin. I set it up to the alias <leader>rp (mnemonic: run python), which saves me a couple minutes every day (thanks r/neovim).

vim.api.nvim_set_keymap("n", "<leader>rp", ":!uv run %<CR>")

I like having a text editor that I can customize in a couple of minutes when I need something new. I’ve tried other things for coding: VScode, Sublime Text, Nova, even bbedit. But nothing beats the terminal workflow for me. For coding only, though! I prefer reading and writing in dedicated applications, for reasons unknown to me.

Nix-darwin is working fine. Recently, I had to get my computer repaired, and that was Type III Fun that ended with the disk wiped, the computer fixed, and my OS forcibly upgraded to Tahoe (bleh). Being able to run a few shell commands and walk away with the same development environment as before was a lifesaver. I did spend half an hour this morning updating to nix 26.05 and then had to debug everything, so it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

Reading

I’m doing a really silly thing right now where I try to read four books at once by spending half an hour on them a day. Surprisingly, it works. Since I have about a forty minute bus ride twice a day, I get a luxurious amount of time to spend reading even before the evening, even on a busy day. I picked up a few older textbooks from the university library (librarians and archivists are amazing) on catastrophe theory, pattern formation, and the sociology of science. I’ve enjoyed browsing the stacks to make a list of the things that I want to read this summer. And because it’s relevant to my research, I keep a couple of books at my desk in the lab for days when the experiments don’t work.

I’m looking for more weird fiction to read. On recommendation from Anne at DIY & dragons, I picked up a copy of Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage. The world is full of a lot of outlandish things, like people with feathers and bird heads, or mobile beehives, or many-limbed alchemists entombed in walls. It’s been a fun read so far, and eight year old me would have been thrilled at the plot relevance of honey. The West Passage is strange - the only thing I can think of that it reminds me of is this other book that I half-finished three years ago from the library, about a boy in a world of mud, who gets taken as an apprentice to a wizard? I did not finish it and the title escapes me.

I caught up with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers books, and I’m eagerly awaiting the copy of Pretenders to the Throne of God at the library. I don’t know how Tchaikovsky writes so fast, but I like the hopeful nature of his stories—small people amidst the wheels of history indeed. I like the throughline that he keeps with the few characters that are in common between the books in this series.

I finished reading Hannu Rajaniemi’s Jean le Flambeau books. There were a lot of neat allusions and uses of math and physics and cryptography across the books, and I appreciated the extreme end of the “show, don’t tell” approach. Looking up names and references made reading the books a lot more interactive! I think my main criticisms were that Mieli didn’t get enough time in the spotlight, and that the plot seemed to explode in scale after the first book.