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Friday, August 22, 2008

unstable

I have this funny feeling of sitting at the top of a bowling ball. Certainly it must have something to do with the amount of effort (useless perhaps?) I've been putting into thinking about how to approach the dynamic aperture problem. Find the separatrices and beyond that is unstable.

But its also a feeling from reading Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong blog for awhile, and considering the turn on of the LHC and the turn-off of so much US particle physics. I've never know quite enough about particle physics to be really excited about finding the Higgs boson. I never really got past renormalization and feel like there's something not so good about it, or that the lesson it is teaching needs to go all the way back to the beginning.

And with the Bush administration having already done its damage, google mostly taken over people's brains, I just really don't know where things will go next. What I usually do in times like this is just wait. I try to be quiet, to not make any decisions, and to let things play themselves out. Then I get swept in whatever direction. I don't like this feeling of complete uncertainty. Its familiar, but its reached a deeper level now. I know myself enough to know that I probably still have agendas, but at the moment they all seem dangerous and wrong. There is nothing to do but wait.

Friday, August 08, 2008

move slowly

Action items:
* brother changed name
* wedding to attend (not my own)
* books being neglected
* more time for self not involving tossing keystrokes into big mouth of lattice optimization and evaluation and politics of avoiding blame