I Won NaNoWriMo!

I clocked in at 50,133 words with about two hours to spare. I fell behind a bit this month, so I ended up writing 5000 words today. And look what I got!

That's the winner banner from the NaNoWriMo website's secret (or not-so-secret) winners' page.

This project is really just about personal fulfillment, so I don't "win" anything more than glory, satisfaction, and 50,000 more words of fiction than I had before. But that's something, and it was such, such fun!

Same time next year, then. Can't wait!

A Turkey-less Asian Thanksgiving

I read in the news that the President pardoned a pair of turkeys who would otherwise have landed on the White House dinner table tonight. Well, in an Asian household, we don't really eat turkey to begin with (my mom doesn't like the taste, and neither do all the other Chinese moms). Instead, this is what our Thanksgiving feast looked like:

Hotpot! It was delicious. Here's a picture of the pot itself:

The things floating in the soup are fishballs (the white ones), meatballs (the brown ones) and tofu cubes. The submerged orange things are pumpkin cubes.

I never quite appreciated being home for the holidays until I found myself eating dining hall turkey in college over Thanksgiving. It wasn't too bad, especially since I had friends whose folks lived too far away for them to celebrate Thanksgiving at home, but there's nothing quite like being home with the family. And having tasty hotpot.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Write Your Own Academic Sentence (or, the Problem with Academic Prose)

Academic writing is notorious for its opaque (sometimes unreadable) prose. This contributes greatly to the common perception that academia is irrelevant to the concerns of the general population, who don't care to puzzle through the stylistic challenges of academic papers to get at the often interesting ideas within. It's a tragedy, because our society would be so much richer if everyone -- not just specialists, not just the people with advanced degrees -- were engaged in the culture of ideas and had access to the latest developments across a variety of disciplines.

I recently found this amusing little program that parodies academic writing:

http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/write-sentence.htm

It's surprising how many of these randomly-generated declarative statements seem to make some semblance of sense. (Of course, the ones that don't are hilariously bad.) What's rather tragic is that a broad swath of society actually believes that all academic writing reads something like this -- and for the most part, they're not wrong.

Obviously, part of the opacity of any academic discipline is a product of the specialized vocabulary required to discuss said discipline -- they need words to describe concepts that might not even exist elsewhere. As the sum total of human knowledge has increased over the centuries, each discipline is now much more specialized than in the past. Newton, for example, could give public lectures about cutting-edge physics and expect to draw sizable crowds that included a diverse swath of of upper and middle class London, the vast majority without formal science training. Today, the equivalent would be a Brian Greene or Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture -- which seems to appeal to a more niche audience.

We're seeing something of a reversal of this trend with the online democratization of education (e.g. Coursera, Floating University, Crash Course, SciShow, &c.). So far, that hasn't gained much traction in the realm of written research (though who knows what academic journals will look like in a decade or two?). Given that the audience of said journals consists primarily of other academics, it's unlikely that they'll change drastically. Public outreach, on the other hand, has never looked more promising.

Written Kitten!

This one's for the intersection of "people doing NaNoWriMo" and "people who like kitten pictures." (Then again, who doesn't like kitten pictures?)

There's a website that I've started using this month which rewards you for meeting your writing quotas with pictures of kittens:

http://writtenkitten.net

I've started thinking of my daily wordcount numbers in terms of kittens -- i.e. if I set it for one kitten picture every 200 words, then 1600 words translates to eight kittens. It's actually quite helpful!

You can also set it to show you pictures of things other than kittens. For example, puppies:

http://writtenkitten.net/?search=puppy

That is all. Happy writing!

Empire State Sunset

A view from my office window at sunset:

It looks like a watercolor, doesn't it?

Carl Sagan Day

Happy Carl Sagan Day!

Carl Sagan was one of the first and most well-known American populist scientists. That is, he championed the worthy cause of bringing science (especially astronomy) to the non-scientist public. (For comparison's sake, he was a contemporary of Freeman Dyson, another such luminary, and the forefather of scientists like Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson.) Sagan is perhaps best known for his novel Contact, subsequently made into an eponymous film, and for the television series Cosmos. It's fitting that he should have his own day of celebration (he would have been 79 today), wherein people contemplate the great beyond.

In addition to popularizing science, Sagan was also one of the great advocates for SETI in his day, as well as a proponent of nuclear disarmament. He was, as were many great scientists, a profound humanist. He was the originator of the saying "We are all stardust," one of my all-time favorites. (If I were ever to get a quotation tattooed somewhere on my body, this would be a top contender. It helps that it's short.) In another life, I might have gone into astrophysics -- largely because I grew up reading books by people like him.

Addendum: the Library of Congress recently acquired Carl Sagan's papers, which include his reading lists. This is facinating stuff!

It's the Season for NaNoWriMo

It's that time of year again... NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, begins today. The challenge, in a nutshell, is to write 50,000 words of fiction -- roughly the length of a very short novel -- in one month. (It sounds mad, but this will be my sixth time doing NaNoWriMo, and hopefully my fifth time "winning.") You can track my progress via the little wordcount bar on the right.

Towards the end of November, my life might look something like this (which I consider a fine use of the Thanksgiving holiday, for the record):

So, friends (Romans, countrymen), forgive me for being a little antisocial and non-responsive for the next thirty days. I haven't fallen off a cliff, I promise.