Writer’s block
From How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia:
Academic writers cannot get writer’s block. Don’t confuse yourself with your friends teaching creative writing in the fine arts department. You’re not crafting a deep narrative or composing metaphors that expose mysteries of the human heart. The subtlety of your analysis of variance will not move readers to tears, although the tediousness of it might.
Sunday Song
The fun part of research
From How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia:
Research is oddly fun. Talking about ideas and finding ways to test your ideas is intellectually gratifying. Data collection is enjoyable, too, especially when other people do it for you. Even data analysis is fun – it’s exciting to see if a study worked. But writing about research isn’t fun: Writing is frustrating, complicated, and un-fun. “If you find that writing is hard,” wrote William Zinsser (2001), “it’s because it is hard.” To write a journal article, you need to cram complex scientific ideas, methodological details, and statistical analyses into a tight manuscript. It isn’t easy, especially when you know that anonymous reviewers will thrash that manuscript like a dusty carpet.
Choices for a new laptop
I’m getting a new laptop soon. I’ve already picked out the one I’m going to get, but I need your help with another decision. Eventually, I’d like to get a skin for my laptop. I’ve narrowed it down to three choices:
Which do you like best? Which do you think suits me best?
Sunday Song
An American romance
From The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope:
‘Miss Melmotte, you do not know the glorious west. Your past experiences have been drawn from this effete and stone-cold country in which passion is no longer allowed to sway. On those golden shores which the Pacific washes man is still true, – and woman is still tender.’
‘Perhaps I’d better wait and see, Mr. Fisker,’
But this was not Mr. Fisker’s view of the case. There might be other men desirous of being true on those golden shores.


