Storytime! and the Plan

This entry is to answer the question:
What am I interested in?
I definitely need a paragraph that is sort of like an abstract for my existence. The importance of this paragraph should be obvious but I didnt notice until I used the phrase "what I'm interested in" during a meeting with an advisor and I realized he couldnt read my mind. I felt sillier when I couldnt come up with much more than some garbage that must have sounded like

"uh... well... I have been reading some about Time Asymmetry.... but I've sorta been all over the place... these papers are confusing sometimes. I guess I still need field theory".

Then I tried to mention The Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose; but couldnt remember the name of the book or Penrose! Doh. I suppose I was trying to project "GUIDE ME" but I guess helplessness and bewilderment didnt have the desired affect. Go figure.

Anyway enough with storytime.

*Pause for reading through archives*

Seems like one of the most useful things to have would be a list of articles read. They speak for your interests better than you can in a way. When I follow my nose through citation lists I'm guided by my intuition, my sense of what is interesting and/or important. Not sure how to put it quite into words yet. Maybe thats what you get a PhD for. And for learning not to end in prepositions.

The other useful thing to have would be a list of questions and/or not well understood topics of interest.

The Spring 06 Semester Plan

1. Make the list
   
• Make a big stack
• Get BiBTeX entries
• make a long .bbl file
2. Gather questions
3. Read more Zwiebach (toast?)
4. Keep eye on current articles. (eg GRB measure of Hubble flow)
   

That should occupy much of my time, but theres nothing in there about reading more new papers... Maybe thats not that important. Here I'll add a 4, I'd be doing this anyway.

These two articles took an hour and 15 minutes of my time (including time to catch up on my PhD comics). How much time should I spend per day? Lets try this much at first, I still have the whole Tornado thing to figure out.
Oh yeah, I'm doing my Oral on The Physics of Tornados unless something catastrophic happens. I'm sorry I guess thats my paper journal that knows about that. Dont worry digital journal there is still a place for you I promise.

Record Keeping

Welcome back after that awful fall semester. This semester is better, I'm getting 3 credits to fool around here!

I guess I'll just jump back in where I was back in October, how to track articles? This issue keeps nagging me. I can't shake the feeling that I'm spending most of my time in culdesacs of esoteric physics and reading many papers on the arxiv that will never even see a peer reviewer let alone the contents page of a journal.

I'll probably never get around to developing the kind of reference analysis tools I'd like to have. NASA ADS is probably one of the best online databases I could use, and there is Perl code I can get, but I dont know perl or object oriented programming to really make any use of it. Its not really clear from the ADS documentation the true extent of the database to the regions of physics I wish to hunt through with my own algorithms. How many records have all the citations recorded? Which records? My ideal database would have

• ApJ
• Physical review D
• Physical review Letters
• General Relativity and Gravitation
• Nature
• some proceedings that I dont know about
• other important journals that I dont know about

This is my ideal database, so I would want to make some discoveries like the awesomely apt conference or obscure-but-neat journal.

I think the best thing I can do right now is to build my own database of papersI have read. The easiest way I can think of to do this is to get BiBTeX entries for each reading into one file. This will make citations easier at least. I wonder if I have the patience for that.