Category Archives: just me

A creature of habit

I am a creature of habit, yet I hate habit. It is like an intoxication culling segments of you, reducing yourself to a brood of crawling things. And like a broken piano, all keys now play the same intolerable, comatose chord. I am addicted to habit: when I leave habit, I feel exhilarated and refreshed;

I got a job. As a miner.

(Part 4 of the saga of my escape from academia, see the original post that started everything, then also this and this.) So in the end, an unexpected turn of luck. I am officially employed again. Out of academia. I work, in fact, in a mine. Well, ok, not this kind of mine. Real miners

Ex academic cruising the job searching sea -no land in sight, morale still high

Two months away from research, and it looks like it’s been geological ages. Not that many things have happened (for a start: I still don’t have a job, as you may imagine) but a huge learning experience it is. And it’s fun, even if in a bit of frightening way. In the meantime the Infamous

Goodbye academia, I get a life.

One of my first memories is myself, 5 years old, going to my mother and declare to her, as serious as only children can be: “I will be a scientist.” Yesterday night I was in my office in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge packing my stuff, resolved to not go back

metadynamics

I’ve been away in Lausanne, Switzerland, to follow a course on metadynamics. Metadynamics is a so called free energy method: it is an algorithm to get the free energy landscape of a system from a computer simulation of molecules. Without going into the details, in metadynamics you push your system  away from the structures it

The Prisoner has finished

After more than a week alone at home, with incipient bronchitis, and thriving on dubious pseudofood, I am back in my office. Somehow, I am not convinced it is a good idea. Highlights of the latest forced homestaying: – Getting a 1 p.m. – 4 a.m. circadiam rythm – Understanding that kebab-laced focaccia is not