What's happening now? Well, on Dec 14, 2009 I started a postdoc at a nearby (but different) university. Though I'm a postdoc at a new place, I still basically feel like a student, except that I now have a lot more meetings to attend. My new work is more hydrologic, and at least in the short term, less scientific. That is, I'm effectively working on a policy study for the state government. It's glorified technician work. The appeal for me is that it is a project that will affect water management and pollution in my backyard (speaking somewhat figuratively). I mean, it will literally affect my backyard, but only as a little piece of an entire watershed. The project integrates economic theory, watershed modeling and behavioral psychology to figure out how to most efficiently (and effectively) reduce nitrogen loads in local drinking water reservoirs. So, there's the draw: it's immanently practical. The drawback is pretty much the same point. There's very little science in the sense of figuring out something new about how the world works. We are, instead, applying what we know (in theory) to a particular place.
I've also been reading again. Recently I've read a large pile of papers about rivers and ecology, started Bill Cronon's book Changes in the Land, and Silence by Shusaku Endo. This morning I read an essay by Donald Worster called "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History". It's an earlier environmental history article (~1990) that outlines some of the ways the free market and land use have interacted for better or worse on the way to making a case for viewing history with an "agroecological" lens because "whatever terrain the environmental historian chooses to investigate, he has to address the age-old problem of how humankind can feed itself without degrading the primal source of life."
In addition I am a hundred pages or so into Steven Shapin's The Scientific Life which is a sociological investigation of the vocation/occupation of scientist over the course of the 20th century. So far, it's fascinating. Perhaps I'll post a review when I'm done. I also just finished a biography of St. Francis by Julienne Green entitled God's Fool, one of the better bios in my opinion.
On the list for the near future: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle which looks very promising but I haven't gotten to it yet, The Path Between the Seas a big book about the construction of the Panama Canal by David McCullough, and The Brothers Karamazov. That's the short list of readings that are coming up. But there's a far longer list behind those.
Right now, though, it's back to work. I'm taking the new job as an opportunity to be more diligent about keeping up with the state of research in scientific disciplines related to my work (which means reading a one or two dozen papers a month) as well as learning to program in C++, navigating Linux, and extending my Mathematica and Matlab skills.
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