Two Songs (+ Sabbatical Months 2–4)

REMINDER: THIS PATREON IS PAUSED UNTIL MARCH 1ST 2021, or longer, since I’m "on sabbatical", theoretically. Your hard-earned cash remains yours!

(reading time: 5 min)

First, a song!

I was part of a collaboration of 37 educators in STEM, singing a song about Gauss! It's for a charity fundraising event.

🎵 The Gauss Song (song's 4 min long, then 9 min of charity info)  🎵

And here's a much worse song I performed for the festivities:

🎵 Jingle Bells but it's Creep by Radiohead (<1 min, mercifully) 🎵

I regret nothing. Enjoy. 💖

––––––

Sorry for the radio silence during my sabbatical. Not much to report, really – just learning new stuff, and not worrying if I can turn it into “creative output” in the future. For now, I am Sponge Nicky, just soaking it in.

(Some stuff I’ve been learning: p-adic numbers, group theory, anatomy drawing. I’d love to share my drawings, but I think I’ll have to make my Patreon 18+ if I want to post even tasteful nudes... and these nudes are definitely not tasteful.)

But to be honest, I don’t feel like I’ve grown the ways I wanted to during this sabbatical. Not that I haven’t learnt “enough”, but that I haven’t pushed outside of my default interests. Like, sure, p-adics are mind-bending, but do I really need yet another math thing in my head? Wouldn’t my mental ecosystem be made more diverse & enriched if I had, say, learnt to compose music? Shoot short films? Start that adult animation Patreon full of untasteful nudes?

And although I promised myself I wouldn’t work during this sabbatical, I couldn’t help myself. Here’s a GIF of a prototype!

“Expandable Explanations”, or, “Nutshells”:

This lets the reader tailor an article to their background knowledge. Not by dumbing the article down, but smarting the reader up!

(And unlike external links, these stay short & in-essay, thus helping you focus. I think we’ve all experienced attention-scramble with too many tabs. Wikipedia now has a “preview article on hover” feature, but they don’t let you go recursive, like the GIF above)

And — here’s the killer feature — you can re-use these “Nutshells” across different articles, authors, or websites! So if, say, I wanted to talk about quantum computers, but I don’t want to explain matrices from scratch, I can embed a (CC-licensed) Nutshell on linear algebra by someone else. Then, if you want to explain Shor’s factorization algorithm, but not explain quantum computing from scratch, you can embed my Nutshells on quantum computers.

And so on!

(This was inspired by Telescopic Text + how hilariously bad Math Wikipedia is at explaining things to beginners. I swear, I once saw a circle described as “a 1-torus”)

I promised myself I wouldn’t work during this sabbatical, and take time to figure out a more needs-fulfilling way to live+work. (For example, I know that I’m a social animal with social needs, and want to do more collaboration/co-working with friends.) But here's the problem with “don’t work until I can figure out a healthier way to work": I can’t get data if I don’t try new stuff.

So, I’ll try to “do work” but not really – I’ll hire an intern! Paid, of course. And sorry, I already picked the intern. She’s Spacie, same person who made one of the most popular entries for the Explorables Jam, helped me with optimization/mobile code for Adventures With Anxiety, and a friend. Also she’s Australian so we can technically call it a “summer internship”.

Gosh, wow I’m so professional, my first time paying a summer intern... in the winter. Golly.

As for other “not high effort on my end” collaborations, I’ve been chatting with a few educational YouTubers, about doing an email interview series on the craft of edu-communication. The craft focus is so that it’s by educators, for educators.

I’ll call the series: Some People Want To Watch The World Learn.

. . .

So that’s my Zeroth World Problem.

I want to pause ”creative output” during my sabbatical so I can grow, but I can’t grow unless I do creative output. (most likely Nutshell or the interview series) I know that’s not the most pressing or sympathetic plight in the world given [gesturing around] everything this year, but it is where I’m at.

(Besides, my Patreon's paused until I'm off sabbatical, so it’s no cash off your back. :P I may extend my sabbatical, in which case this Patreon will remain paused longer. Will let you know!)

But speaking of "this past year"... it’s almost a past year, huh?

Personally, I’m (cautiously) heartened by the good news recently. Obviously, the vaccine. Holy moly I never thought it’d actually be available by end of year.

Even better, it's not "just" a Covid vaccine – it's the first success story for an entirely new bio-technology! It uses messenger RNA to get your cells to make a protein. In this case, it's to make a SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (the "crown" or "corona" in the coronavirus) so your immune system can learn to attack it. But you could use this tech to have your body make any protein you want. (And in contrast to gene therapy, it doesn't permanently change your genome!) Applications include: accelerating future vaccines, or even cancer immunotherapy.

This, combined with the other big science story of the year, DeepMind's AlphaFold basically solving protein folding prediction – one of the most notoriously hard computer problems, NP-Complete in fact! (pdf) – I think we’re at the edge of a beautiful and scary revolution in bio-engineering that we are not psychologically ready for.

(Dear Bio-technologists, all I want is a cure for dementia & cancer, and to grow catgirl ears and a tail. Is that too much to ask)

Anyway, just wanted to nerd out with you (well, at you) about some exciting new science, for this new year.

Good luck to you & your loved ones in 2021, friends.

Distant Hugs,
~ Nicky

P.S: What things in your life are you looking forward to in 2021? I won’t be able to reply to all your responses, but I’ll read ‘em all! :)