Just a Lifetime

Here are some not-entirely-serious suggestions: Sonne by Rammstein for Dalinar, in part due to some of the lyrics ("Die Sonne scheint mir aus den Augen"; "Und die Welt zählt laut bis zehn"), in part because it was originally written for Vitali Klitschko, then a 6'7" heavyweight boxer, now a 6'7" mayor of Kyiv. Defying Gravity from Wicked for Kaladin. He's through with playing by the rules of the lighteyes' game. You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid by The Offspring for Shallan/Veil. The full lyrics have some naughty words, so here are a few resonant lines: Show me how to lie, you're getting better all the time ... Nice work you did You're gonna go far, kid With a thousand lies and a good disguise Hit 'em right between the eyes And given my profile photo, I should certainly suggest some New Model Army songs. There are a couple that could fit pre-death Kelsier... The Hunt 'Cause not everybody here is scared of you Not everybody passes on the other side No police, no summons, no courts of law No proper procedure, no rules of war No mitigating circumstance No lawyers fees, no second chance And we could spend our whole lives waiting for some thunderbolt to come And we could spend our whole lives waiting for some justice to be done Unless we make our own Burn the Castle You know there's no great lord in the castle – just the courtiers and their men And we're still ploughing up their fields and wishing we could be like them And we build their fleets of armor and we guard their hordes of gold In the hope that they'll protect us but they will not protect us Burn down the castle Burn the castle down Burn the castle For that matter, The Attack could work for the whole revolution-plotting aspect of Mistborn.

I did not retake it for this thread: The evidence before the court is incontrovertible There's no need for the jury to retire In all my years of judging, I have never heard before Of someone more deserving of the full penalty of law

I figure there's a good chance some of you may find this program interesting. I don't have any connection to it, but an acquaintance asked me to share it with any high schoolers I know who are passionate about creative writing: thecommononline.org/the-common-young-writers-program/

For those who might be curious, this method is called the Pomodoro Technique, for irrelevant historical reasons. Formally, this technique incorporates an additional step that @Cash67 suggested: The idea is to choose one item on the list to focus on during the 20/25-minute work session (commonly called a 'pom'). This can have two main benefits. First, it helps avoid a common pitfall of spending the time bouncing around between various tasks without making much progress on any of them. Second, if the work has been split up into pom-sized tasks (that is, tasks that take roughly 20--25 minutes to complete), you may be able to complete a task with each pom and cross it off the list. This produces a surprisingly large psychological boost that can help promote a positive feedback loop (or 'virtuous cycle'), making you more eager to come back after the break and tackle the next task on the list --- rather than feeling like you're grinding through a big, scary, undifferentiated mass of work. In practice, it can be very hard to estimate how much time a given task will take. A third benefit of organizing your work into poms is that this can help reveal how long things really take, and help guide decisions about what are reasonable targets to set for each pom. Sorry for the rant. I've looked into a lot of productivity / time management / project management techniques over the years. While I use poms pretty frequently, I tend to do so haphazardly, not bothering to split things up into pom-sized tasks and generally skipping the break at the end. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ One related comment that I hope might also be helpful is that time management may not be the real issue, but rather a symptom of low mood. I recently listened to this podcast making this point, and suggesting that mindfulness as a method of mood management may be merited. (Sorry, I find alliteration alluring.) I hope y'all don't mind a non-teenager tossing in $0.02. Though, to be fair, I remain a teenager in base-20. (Base-20 is just like base-10, really, if you use your toes as well as your fingers.) I also created my original account here in 2009, so I'm a teenager in that sense as well.

Give the people what they [say they] want... Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago --- two years ago on Thanksgiving --- when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the restaurant Actually, it all started about seven years ago when I got a job at the University of Bern (UniBe) in Switzerland. Once I got there, I learned that immigrants to Switzerland who don't already speak French or German are officially required to demonstrate a credible effort to learn either of those languages. (This turned out not to be enforced by my local immigration authorities, but I didn't discover that until renewing my registration the following year.) I only had native English and AP-level Spanish. Bern is just barely on the Germanic side of the country, so I signed up for an evening German class through UniBe, where some of my classmates recommended Duolingo. So around Christmas 2016 I started doing German on Duolingo, and figured that I might as well also rebuild/maintain what scraps of Spanish I still had. However, I wanted language learning to feel like a fun hobby, rather than just another thing to do for work, so I added Welsh to the mix, as a thoroughly impractical language to do for fun. Completely by coincidence, following my contract in Switzerland, the next job offers I got were from the University of Liverpool and Swansea University [Prifysgol Abertawe] --- Swansea/Abertawe is in south Wales, while Liverpool is just over the border from north Wales. I ended up in Liverpool, where I have a couple of Welsh coworkers who speak a bit of Welsh. In the meantime, around the end of my time in Bern in early 2019, I was getting a bit bored with German/Spanish/Welsh on Duolingo. There have been several app redesigns since that time, but back then I had gone through the full "trees" for all three, had also done the English-from-German and English-from-Spanish "reverse trees", and was close to wrapping up the German-from-Spanish and Spanish-from-German trees. So I added Chinese since U. Liverpool has a lot of Chinese students, and also reinforced the impractical side with Esperanto. I managed to keep up all five for a little over a year, but by early 2020 (even pre-lockdown) I was getting too busy with my new job (especially my teaching duties, which I'm currently procrastinating from). And the app had been redesigned to provide a bit more to play with, so I dropped back to German/Spanish/Welsh, which I continue to this 2,268th day of my streak. So, that's what I did. You know, if one person --- just one person --- does it, they may think he's really sick

Hola / Hallo / Haia! I'm doing Spanish, German and Welsh (with Chinese and Esperanto set aside for the foreseeable future): duome.eu/daschaich I'll spare y'all the story behind the choice of lingos.

Back in the day I would listen to 4 A.M. by The Levellers at 4AM. The suggestions above should be plenty to fill the two hours 'til then...

Quite a bit, I think. The best examples of this sort of thing that immediately come to my mind don't introduce new particles but instead organize existing particles (electrons, protons, neutrons) in new ways. I'm thinking of ice-nine in Cat's Cradle and newmatter in Anathem --- though the latter didn't work for me, since it involved different objects in the same room being subject to different laws of physics I'm sure this sort of thing has come up on Writing Excuses, probably many times. A quick Google search gave me season 3 episode 2 with the recommendation, "don't try to explain the black boxes".

The short answer here is: If we can easily interact with them, then we've already accounted for them among the elements we currently have. Things become more interesting if we can interact with them, but not easily. This is the case for the dark matter that @offer brought up... I research dark matter (among other things) for a living, and can confirm that this is correct. In particular, what you describe is sometimes called "the nightmare scenario" for dark matter --- particles that interact only gravitationally with the known particles. Since gravitational interactions are so weak, this makes it practically impossible to gain any detailed knowledge about dark matter. For example, we can gravitationally estimate the total mass of the dark matter in a galaxy, but couldn't figure out how many particles there are, or how much mass each of them contributes to this total. It's actually possible for dark matter to interact with known particles via electromagnetism, the weak & strong nuclear forces, or the Higgs field, so long as these interactions are rare enough not to have been observed in many huge experiments that have been looking for them since the 1980s. (Such interactions also have to be [mostly] dissipationless, but that may be getting a bit too technical for this forum.) In particular, massive particles that interact via the weak nuclear force (called weakly interacting massive particles) are among the most studied possibilities. My own research (for example arXiv:2006.16429) focuses on dark matter that is actually formed from electrically charged particles --- to avoid easy detection, we hypothesize that these are confined into electrically neutral dark matter, the same way electrically charged quarks are confined to form electrically neutral neutrons. While photons can interact with the confined 'dark quarks', such interactions are far more rare than they would be if the electrically charged particles were not confined, making this possibility consistent with experimental observations. Finally, I'll add that the generic statements above hold for both fermions and bosons. Both bosonic and fermionic dark (or blue) particles can interact with known particles, though the particular forms of the possible interactions are different. Finally finally, here's a shameless plug for me talking about dark matter on teh YouTubes.

I am a lapsed cellist. I played recreationally for roughly 15 years, but couldn't keep it up once I started moving around a lot for work. If I had to choose a single favorite cellist, I'd go with Jacqueline du Pré, but that's partly because I am drawn to the late-romantic concertos she did so well. That said, three others came to mind while I was considering the question: János Starker does a great Kodály sonata, and I also have (somewhere) his Road to Cello Playing CD that has some liner notes I find hilarious. To paraphrase: "If you're intimidated by how well I play these etudes, you're probably not cut out to be a professional musician." I am fond of Pablo Casals's recording of the Bach suites. My favorite Yo-Yo Ma recordings are the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack and the stuff he's done with the Silk Road Ensemble.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson is one that hasn't yet been mentioned here. If you've not yet read anything by Stephenson this probably isn't the best place to start. (I personally started with Snow Crash.) But Anathem explores so many ideas (along with plot and characters I enjoyed, of course) that I still remember it fondly nearly ten years after reading it. Come to think of it, I have similarly fond memories of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, though I found that one harder going.

Just a Lifetime is a song by The Legendary Pink Dots (LPD), from their 1990 album The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse. Dragons walked the earth again, and paraffin was free A fire-eater went insane, and torched the final tree And one fine day the planet crumbled, just 'cause someone sneezed For this, for this... We waited just a lifetime I like that it also works at a more meta level, since I am just a lifetime. My 'Member Title' is a line from a different LPD song, The Ocean Cried 'Blue Murder'. For the potentially curious, I'll mention that Amanda Palmer (whom some on this site may know best as Neil Gaiman's wife) has compiled a Spotify playlist of her favorite LPD songs. I also see that their 2022 North American tour kicks off next week in Salt Lake City.

Walking down the street this afternoon, I did a double take, thinking: Is that Brandon Sanderson? A quick check confirmed that he and I are both in NYC this weekend, by complete coincidence. So that was fun.

That one is still getting some cycles---along with the follow-up singles Semicolon and Mitosis---and I figured I should mention here that I just backed the band's Kickstarter to fund a full second album including the five singles they put out over the course of this year.