Part Time September

I think I am finally settled into the groove of working part-time.

Some aspects I absolutely love. I love having more time to finally make my way through all the books I compulsively buy. I could get used to this amount of weekly reading.

I have not gotten used to half of the normal pay. There’s no way I can keep this up in the long term, but knowing that the time to do this is finite, I am trying to make the most out of it. I have my fingers crossed that whatever job I take after this will be full-time, permanent, and I will plan to stay there for several years.

As I’ve talked about before, that might be academia or industry, there’s just no use trying to plan for one or the other though given how unpredictable the “job market” is. It’s now been five years of having a different employer every year and I just can’t continue with this level of unpredictability/stress. But this isn’t one of those posts.

Working mostly in the afternoons, I have had my mornings free and have been doing a lot of reading and a lot of walking. Per my last post, I have continued reading a lot of George Saunders. I’m really enjoying the Tenth of December and in an attempt to savor it, I have only been reading one story per weekend.

I’ve also read through Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction and have nothing but good things to say about that book and the author. It’s a gold standard for what any technical book should be. Motivated, contextual, progressive, clear. I am sure I will be reading some of his other books in the near future and tweeting about them.

I’ve also finally found a group of about eight (?) other #musicscience researchers to meet regularly to work our way through Statistical Rethinking. So far it’s been a very rewarding experience. At the rate we’re going, it might be a while until we get through the whole thing, but better to go slow and steady and really understand it all than panic read for the analyses you “need” to do. By the end of it, I really think I am going to have a much better grasp on all things Bayes, regression, causal inference, and hopefully Stan. Given my remote, post-doc isolation, the regular meetings are also helping me stay sane now that I’m in my second year of work with no real physical colleagues or students to teach.

The student part will change soon though (see below).

I have also been listening to Alex Ross’s Wagerism on audiobook purely due to the fact that I heard that the study I did ages ago on Wagner and leitmotives is referenced.

Lastly, I have, for some reason or another, gotten very interested in fungi and mushrooms. I saw the paperback copy of Entangled Life was available at my local book store and have been making my way slowly through that. On my walks through Dulwich Wood I have also been trying to look around for interesting mushrooms and for the past six walks, each time I have found a new type (at least I think?) of mushroom. I’ve got some pictures of these on my instagram. I should finish this book by the end of the week and plan on ordering another mushroom related book suggested by a friend in the near future.

I even bought a grow kit from Merryhill Mushrooms a few weeks ago and grew some of my own. If anyone is looking for a rewarding, low-effort win, getting one of these kits is a great choice.

There’s a lot scheduled for next month as well. I’m now officially on the list of supervisors for the Faculty of Music at Cambridge and am getting prepared to teach some more #musicscience there in the coming weeks. Having spoke at a class at John Brown University earlier this week really reminded me how much I miss being in front of a classroom (especially of high energy music students) so I am glad this is happening soon.

I’ve also given a rejected manuscript an 80’s montage make-over that I will share soon, have a few new experiments collecting data now for the postdoc, and also had something come out in Music Perception this month!