busy
redbird, I would post about how when I came here at the beginning of the month, everything was bare and there was frost on the ground in the morning. And now everything is in full leaf and the spring flowers are giving way to summer flowers. There is white lilac everywhere, and purple lilac just coming out. Every open space is full of forget-me-not and cowslips and other flowers whose names I would probably know if I were really redbird. And I have seen woodpeckers, the black and white kind with red markings that look like picture-book woodpeckers, and any number of brightly coloured tits and finches, and several red squirrels, and lots of deer. A stag strode across my garden yesterday morning, the size of a large dog. He looked at me for a while, decided I was harmless, and went on.rysmiel, I would point out sarcastically to the Annoying Scientists who wrote a paper criticizing the paper that I think of as "ours" even though in fact my predecessor wrote it rather than me, that if you are going to claim a system is dynamic, it behoves you to actually show some dynamic behaviour, rather than merely showing that two completely separate experiments have different outcomes. Wishful thinking is one thing, hypothesis testing is another, and only one of them is accepted scientific method.lethargic_man, I would write a detailed account of the panel discussion I wandered into yesterday. I would give lots of useful links to ground the notes for people not familiar with the assumptions. But I came unprepared so I wasn't able to take notes. The general topic was about how to construct a Jewish identity, in a positive way, without being exclusivist or looking down on outsiders, and how we relate to the mythical, whether we reject it as scientific, rationalist types, or whether we accept that myth is part of human psyche and try to make positive use of it. So potentially quite interesting, but the way it was actually handled it was full of the kind of post-modernist stuff that annoys me.jpallan, I would write a long long list of all the things I need to do in the next couple of days and in order to get experiments set up. I would continue with angst about whether or not I can cope with this job that I've taken on, even though I do know I'm intelligent and competent. darcydodo, I would remember that I forgot to post about the party I went to on Friday, to celebrate the ten year anniversary of the founding of the bit of the institute I work for that isn't the Karolinska. There was lots of very tasty Lebanese food, and it was a chance to chat with my colleagues which I appreciated. They all decided that they should try to talk me into having children...hatam_soferet, I would recount how the rabbi approached me after the service, and told me that he had noticed I wore a tallit, and I might like to know that the community were in a process of consideration regarding egalitarianism. June, apparently, is the month set aside for Experimenting with Egalitarianism, following which there is going to be a vote on whether women should be allowed to be directly involved in the ritual. I would probably make sarcastic remarks about the concept of taking a vote on whether you need a penis to be able to read from Torah.As a side anecdote, an elderly woman said something to me in Swedish, the only bit of which I caught was that she thought I was a boy. I inwardly rolled my eyes, here we go, here comes the same old stupid argument I really don't want to have. But she repeated herself more slowly and with lots of hand gestures (so much more helpful than switching to English, thank you, old lady) and turned out that her point was that since I had been fiddling with my plait and putting it over my mouth, she had mistaken it for a moustache.
shreena, I would describe the strange incident I observed on the way home last night: the long distance train on the other platform was being emptied of both people and luggage. They were shining bright floodlights on the platform, and blocking part of it off with hazard tape. I would ask if anyone has any idea what might have been going on. I don't think it was a bomb scare because nobody seemed to be in any particular hurry.pseudomonas, I would probably not post on LJ at all, but I would phone me and have a long and involved conversation about the meaning of the phrase if I were, pedantically pointing out that if I really were any of these people, I wouldn't be in the situation I'm currently in so I wouldn't write these things at all... 