Welcome to my blog!

To those who know me, this goes without saying, but I am quite the nerd. There have been numerous occasions where I’ve apparently provided amusement to those around me through the sheer gap between their definition of what constitutes “relaxing activity”, and my own. Apparently things like reading a physics textbook, over-engineering a coding text editor setup (go neovim!) or playing a series of rapid chess games for an unhealthy amount of time don’t make the cut for “relaxing activities” for the majority of people, but I suppose we can agree to disagree.

Recently, I’ve been itching to make my learning process a bit more active through the process of writing. I hear that the process of teaching drastically improves one’s long-term retention and comprehension¹²³⁴, and that active learning is a good thing in general. Unfortunately, it’s not possible for me to always find someone willing to be taught by me about my most recent obsession (although my girlfriend is too nice to admit it, I think she can sometimes find my impromptu ramblings about information theory a little bit boring), but perhaps the next best thing would be to write the occasional mini-essay about a topic which I find interesting, and want to consolidate in my own head. That’s why I decided to start a blog. If I am going to be writing mini-essays about cool stuff, then why not put it on my website, instead of filing them into some deep dark folder that I will inevitably misplace and forget about? With any luck, the blog posts might eventually serve as reference material for either my future self - who’s probably forgotten all about the topic - or even cooler, someone else out there who stumbles upon them!

There is one other important reason why I thought it would be worth starting a blog. As a researcher and scientist, a significant portion of my future work is probably (hopefully!) going to involve writing text. More specifically, academic, scientific, expository text. And to be honest, I still struggle with that kind of writing to this day. For some reason, when it comes to writing manuscripts, I get a bad case of writer’s block. And I think it’s a very particular, academic flavour of writer’s block that I know is also experienced by some of my research colleagues as well as myself. It’s the sort of perfectionist kind, where you say: “Ah, I have already explained X in this paragraph in a completely reasonable manner, but maybe if I spend an extra 5 minutes, I can make the sentences sound just slightly better,” or “Something’s off with figure 1A… Maybe the x-axis tick labels need to be of font size (insert ridiculously specific font size) instead of (insert a similar, also ridiculously specific font size).” Do these perfectionist compulsions eventually help make the final manuscript product better? I suppose, to some extent. But at a certain point there are diminishing returns, and it just isn’t worth the time. No manuscript is ever perfect, and a good, published manuscript is almost always better than a slightly better one that is stuck in a perfectionist writer hell loop ad infinitum. For me, this personal blog, where I can write some low-stakes mini-essays, still on academic topics, is a way to practice just writing stuff. To enjoy the process of writing, and to be happy publishing something without giving into the urge of making it perfect.

I want to conclude my first and already ramble-y post by saying that my blog posts here will always be 100% human generated (at the time of writing, it still feels incredible, both exciting and terrifying, that AI-generated writing is practically indistinguishable from human writing…). Like I’ve explained above, the reason why I’m starting the blog is for me to write little mini-essays, so generating the content using a machine would defeat the purpose. To some, whether the text is my own or proxied through an AI assistant may not matter very much, but for those other people, I thought it worth mentioning. And to any such readers out there, I hope that you enjoy the personal touch that comes from the messy, imperfect and human entropy endowed to the content here by my brain!