Thanks anyway, the slides hint at the general topic of each slide at least :) Seems like a fun lecture!

You don’t like using Obsidian on mobile?

Also, are you using LibreOffice because you use it for typesetting that final product, or because you prefer to write the actual text there vs. in Obsidian?

Nice to hear it is serving you well! I will take a look at those plugins as well, but yes, I can imagine it can quickly get out of hand. Currently I am just patiently going through the Neovim Tutor whenever I have the time, and have set it up using the kickstart configuration (which comes with a handful of plugins) and will go through the init.lua file later. I will also prioritize setting it up for coding as I want to switch at work but can’t really do it before I have a somewhat functional workflow going.

Currently using LaTeX through VS Code, but having tasted the power of the vim keybindings, it keeps calling me to switch! (I know there are some vim-extensions for VS Code, but I anyway want to move away from it)

I’ve been on a “hiatus” for some time, if you can call taking time off something I hadn’t spent too much time on to begin with a hiatus. Much going on on the work front, which has pretty much drained all my energy and creative energies, and what I’ve had left have gone towards off-screen activities like music. But I’m starting to feel some motivation seeping back, and as a weird run-up to what I hope will be some writing over the holidays, I’m trying to set up Neovim on my laptop and getting used to the keybindings, and besides coding use that for writing (Markdown and LaTeX).

Speaking of, how are you all setup for writing?

I would love to see that story of our understanding of light!

I have not been doing anything other than thinking about it and longing for some free time and excess energy to start diving deep into the research phase. Since my last update there has been no progress. I initially stated that this is a passion project that I will only want to work on when I want, and that could lie dormant for some time if I don’t really feel like working on it. That is not the case now - I WANT to work on it, I’m just dead tired after work to get anything done.

I have another idea for a Solarpunk-based fiction that I half-started a long time ago, and I am wondering if I should pick that up for now instead, as I could then get straight to writing without as much research (although I would definitely want to do a lot of research for the world-building which is not complete).

TIL about the the MECE-principle–that sent me down a fun Wikipedia rabbit hole. Hearing you describe how your arraying your sections really sounds tantalizing, but you’re right in that it wouldn’t translate well to fiction–not unless that fiction were very structured haha. Kind of absurdly so… sort of… fun to puzzle over…

If you want your fiction to convey a specific, coherent message, you can of course still structure that underlying message this way so that you end up with well-argued message. The task is then to inject those arguments into the story. I guess this could be used as either a starting-point for the story (i.e. the message being the main reason you write in the first place) or something that can be developed independent of the main story (but then more as some kind of side-snacks? otherwise it could feel forced)

It’s a challenge not to internalize the guilt of hustle/thrive culture

It definitely helps not having any plans of monetization at all. I think if I had an aspiring career author inside me, it would be much more difficult to avoid that guilt. I’ve had such projects before (i.e. doctoral dissertation) that definitely brought up much more guilt when not working on it.

If nothing else, it just makes existing in the world more pleasant. :)

In line with what I wrote above, whenever an activity is for the sake of doing that activity, and not a means to an end, it tends to be much more enjoyable, at least for me :) I have many hobbies that I would love to spend more time on, but would loathe doing professionally.

What’s your approach to outlining your book? Is it like a “vision statement”, or blurb, or maybe a list of sections you want to fill in? Curious because I am also an outliner.

I started with a preface (which I had written previously), which I guess you could call some sort of vision statement. It gives me an opportunity to get my intentions of the book in writing. I then proceeded with a “How to read this book” (which in this case would be useful, as it is not necessarily meant to be read cover to cover). That forces me to think of how I would structure it so that it would make sense for a possible future reader.

What I did now was to outline a list of parts, chapters and sections. That should together be collectively exhaustive of what I want to write (even though it is obviously just a draft, and edits can be made down the line), but it should also be mutually exclusive (i.e. the MECE-principle). If it’s not mutually exclusive, I’ve done something wrong in the proposed structure and I should rethink it. In my last session, I for example realized that I had one part that had considerable overlap with another, even though it didn’t seem like it at the time I wrote it down the first time. That caused me to move the chapters from that part into the other existing parts, with minor modifications to the angle.

While writing the chapter headers, I also jotted down any immediate thoughts I had while thinking about it to serve as a starting point when I jump into it proper. In some cases that would be some phrases I thought of, other times just a list of concepts I know I should include, and in a couple of cases I wrote (parts of) the introduction paragraph for that chapter.

I would not do this for a work of fiction though - I have some ideas for solarpunk themed fiction down the line, and if/when I eventually get to that, I will likely outline the major events of the story first, then try to spread that out on some timeline. From there I would do any required world building (which in this case would be the most fun part) and then start writing. But I have actually some time back written the first chapter of this book without any of those parts in place though, so I am certainly not as structured as I might give the impression of here… :)

I’ve not had much time to spend on my untitled science book that I described some time back (essentially “a coherent scientific account of what I can see from the vantage point of my balcony”) - that’s fine, I expect it to be a long process and something I do for my own enjoyment, and it is not meant to cause me to feel guilty if I’m making no progress on it over a stretch of time. And lately there’s been a bit too much on my plate for my limited free time to go to this.

However, I’ve recently had some time to expand on the outline for the book, so I now have a clearer view of what topics I need to write about / research. This should make it easier to just jump into one of the topics and start :)

I have been a major sinner on the backup front, but I’m now in the process of setting up automated restic encrypted backups that first copies to a different hard drive, that is then is rscynced to my Hetzner storage box (you can also swap this around - rsync to another hard drive, then use restic to dump it on the Hetzner server, but I want the backups with multiple snapshots locally as well). Primarily for Docker container configs and data for now, but I will set up similar automation for dumping stuff from my laptop on my local server and then similarly push encrypted restic repos to Hetzner. Not set up RAID or a NAS or anything like that, but I will eventually build a NAS. I am forcing myself to write the scripts in bash as well to get some more experience with it - I usually default to Python for any scripting, but in this case I would almost only use subprocess.run anyway :)

ETA: The 1TB storage box is 4 EUR a month or something like this.

Personal: Choose FOSS first, and contribute some of your time and money towards projects that align with solarpunk ideals. Get into self-hosting and eventually perhaps community-hosting for local organizations or neighborhoods or someting like that. Find your local makerspace and meet up with tinkerers there and find common community projects to work on.

Work: At my work, my small team of devs are currently trying to break out of an otherwise heavily Microsoft-based ecosystem. So far we’ve gone from a general hostility towards FOSS to being allowed to run things on bare metal Linix servers instead of Azure, and I my request for a Linux laptop is approved (though still waiting on them to learn how to install Linux or something?). As part of a research project we are trying out FOSS alternatives to Microsoft products in hopes of creating interest and success stories. We are also in that project going to open source some of our internal development. I’ve also challenged my bosses on the heavy use of products from a single major tech company.

Cheers :)

Thanks! Yeah, I honestly find that (in my experience) university courses also often tend to get bogged down in examples too far detached from the observable physical world, which can make them demotivating. In my time at the university, I especially found the mathematics courses lacking, as they would focus almost entirely on formal descriptions and rote learning, and avoid using proper examples on the applications of mathematics in the real world. I’m a trained engineer/scientist, not a mathematician. It is the universal language used to describe so much, and yet I would spend my time solving Fourier integral after Fourier integral, not really understanding what I was really doing until it showed up in a physics course later on and within 20 minutes I would have a much better intuition of what I was spending 6 months trying to learn before.

And regarding beta-reading - that could be useful in the future, but as I said, it is first and foremost a personal project for my own enjoyment. But if it turns into something that looks like it could be of value to others as well (i.e. structured, coherent, complete and factually correct enough), I might prioritize trying to get that to a publishable state.

This looks pretty cool - I will want to look into this later.

Anyone familiar with this CERN license for open source hardware?

Is your subjective position a part of the project, or just a starting point?

I have no real prior knowledge of biology, neuroscience, psychology or anything related to this, and I don’t want to include anything I would need to research from scratch. So I guess the starting point is to draw a line from my eyes to whatever I see first :) Then I will attempt to keep topics as separate as possible so they could be enjoyed on their own, and where a topic is completely dependent on some prior knowledge from another part of the book, it will come after and with references to which parts would need to be read and understood first. Or that’s the initial plan anyway

Gone are the days when I had to do science writing as part of my job, so this is entirely a pet project, and I avoid committing to releasing anything to avoid it becoming another deadline in my life. If I lose the motivation to work on it, I will take a hiatus and get back to it if and when I am ready. There are enough things in my life that are not like this, so why add to that list?

The project is essentially to write up a coherent picture of the observable, physical world (from where I am sitting and looking out the window) and their associated physical processes. So essentially everything from the fusion reactions of the Sun, to the scattering of light in the atmosphere, to the colors of things, weather phenomena such as rain, fog, lighting, the sounds moving through air and through media, the relative movements of Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the stars etc. I have a PhD in a natural science discipline, and have touched upon most of this in my studies, but have 1) forgotten a lot of it, 2) have some big holes of topics I never learnt (fluid dynamics being one of them, optics being another) and 3) have probably a bunch of misconceptions originating from a misunderstanding at the time I originally learnt it.

So it is a quest to relearn and document this stuff in a way that is for my enjoyment and not for passing an exam or getting a paper published.

Also, this is more the gearhead / process obsessive in me speaking, but I’m interested if you’re using any kind of special organizational tools or “knowledge base” in your writing.

I write in LaTeX, keep my references in Zotero and will use Obsidian for notetaking during research prior to writing it up.

I have just today started on a scientific book project I’ve been wanting to write for some time. It is a very long term project, and my main goals are 1) to have fun researching and writing and 2) document my research for my own enjoyment down the line. If this becomes a coherent work eventually, I will aim to release it under some CC-license, although this is not my main goal.

It’s off to an enjoyable start at least :)