mountainFrugal Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
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mountainFrugal
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# WINS
My partner took me to her favorite burrito spot in New Mexico. The burrito was HALF fresh roasted hatch green chili salsa. I am a burrito and taco connoisseur. This burrito was close to a religious experience. My mouth burned for an hour afterwards. I have had Southwest burritos with various sauces before, but this was next level and hot peppers and Mexican style food is one of the main goals this year.

On my way back from New Mexico I stopped by Petrified Forest NP. I did 3 back country runs to see some rarely seen things for a total of 20 km. Another perk of having a running base is watching tourists stick to paved paths in a conga line of tourism while I am down in the canyon finding petroglyphs and other cool rocks.

Staying with @AxelHeyst for a few days was really fun. There was a straight line down a vegetated mountain side that was hard to reconcile with the topography. @AH named it "The Anomaly". We did a scouting trip and used my binoculars to see if we could come with any hypotheses. Rocks? Animals? Dirtbikes? The next day we hiked over and up the steep slope gathering evidence as we went. The rockfall hypothesis was starting to gain the most evidence. When we made it to the top we pushed large boulders down. Sure enough, one of them broke up after hitting another one and followed the line almost perfectly. SCIENCE! The other cool aspect was there were lupines growing only in the large compacted parts after recent boulder falls in the past few years.


# IMPROVEMENTS /INSPIRATIONS
We have the remote work in the van dialed in and after trying the Starlink out at fort dirtbag, that is a game changer for remote work.

I ran into JB on my local trail run getting after it. She is 85, just had knee surgery, and is out hiking to get back in shape for a long ebike trip in the coming weeks. She said she needed to "get her licks in while she still could as she did not have that many more to get." A lesson for us all.

# NEW DIRECTIONS
@AH recorded the podcast. This had the unexpected personal benefit of resolving some dissonance around what I plan to share on the forum. As a specific example, I would like to share more of the bushcraft illustrations I have completed, but I was unsure whether I wanted to keep those for my other projects. Now I can just reformat and share them as research notes for those zine projects. I also feel relieved to not have to think about or have spend additional time editing for "anonymous purposes".

# DRAWING
Various stats.

I subscribe to a number of artist newsletters. One recent artist that does amazing watercolor work came to the conclusion that they wanted their business to stay really small. They had made a large plan of how to grow and grow and grow the print/book business. However, after reading through some of the Journals/interviews with Peterson Field Guide Illustrator, he deeply regretted all the time he put into doing only art that paid him (the field guide books). I will take this wisdom from both as I work on my own stuff. This cements the idea that art for it's own sake is fine enough and incidental income is the ideal.

# OUTDOOR ADVENTURE
Various stats.

I got in some excellent desert runs in New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California this month.

I ran up into the high elevation Pecos Wilderness to fly fish some of the small trout streams up there that have Native Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout subspecies. No luck as it was still spring runoff. The area I chose based on map and satellite recon was a complete bushwhack struggle through thick willows to find small fishable runs. The willows are harder to tell from the satellite images... the map is not the territory... I look forward to coming back when conditions are better. That entire area is extremely pretty.

I listened to a Climbing Gold podcast where they interviewed Bill Ramsey. He is a philosophy prof and badass climber that is still cranking hard (5.14) in his 60's. I met Bill at Red River Gorge in the mid 2000's while belaying next to him. We had a lot of time to chat as our respective partners projected these roof routes next to one another. Really smart and thoughtful guy. He has this training idea of the pain box that he describes in the podcast episode. You can either put in the training pain (left) or deal with the under-performance pain (shame, right). Either way is pain. haha. That podcast is worth a listen.

# WORK
Finishing up a press release and various associated documents. A fun thing to learn.

The graduate student that I was mentoring finished their project and graduated. We are still putting in some final tweaks to the paper (dissertation chapter) that we worked on based on committee feedback.

4/4 Blog posts highlighting the science zines. I will try to maintain a weekly post from here on out.

# SOCIAL
We went to 2 weddings to bookend the month.

I volunteered for a gravel bike race and my partner participated. The volunteer coordinator knew I was into various suffer-festing so she sent me out alone to the most remote part of the course to run one of the timing stations. When I volunteered I planned to just sketch the entire time for a few hours and get an afternoon workout in. However, that station was an all day one as the difference between top racers and struggle bus racers was like 4 hours. haha. I also brought a small jam box and cow bell. The station was at the top of a hill so I put on some Old School hip-hop and danced for 4 hours ringing the cowbell instead of running. Many of the racers seemed to appreciate it. It was great to see my partner in the top 20 ladies. :). She got extra cowbell because she had that type of fever!

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mountainFrugal
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Re: mountainFrugal Journal

Post by mountainFrugal »

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# WINS

We got hitched! She put a ring on it, y'all! We are still glowing after such a great time spent with family and friends.

We planned out an entire weekend of outdoor-centric activities for our guests. DW and I set our vision early on and then gave each other permission to make decisions on the fly as the wedding chaos monster moved us into the lower left quadrant, which we are not used to!* Fortunately, family and friends helped implement MANY of the details for shared meals and activities. This includes @AxelHeyst, @mooretrees clan, and @AnalyticalEngine. We are so lucky! Our introvert batteries were completely drained and are still not fully recharged.

Another win was having late-DW's sisters there with their families. I am still uncle mF to the kids and talk with them on a regular basis. This really meant a lot to us and to me in particular.


# IMPROVEMENTS

Shared vision led decisions with DW in completely self-imposed stressful situations. Practice for non-self-imposed situations.

My office and art studio (desk) are in our spare bedroom. We also have a desk in the living room that we moved into our bedroom while the in-laws were staying with us after our wedding. The new strategy for longer-term guests is to use our spare bedroom as our room so I can keep some of my own space, especially for art projects.

# NEW DIRECTIONS

I am applying for a science journalism fellowship this fall, but I want to apply to work on "comics journalism". This is interesting to me because it is inherently slow news, fact-gathering, and interpretation. It is not reporting on recent papers (a bulk of science journalism) but more of a discovery of things hiding in plain sight that might be of interest.

# DRAWING

Slow progress on the figures from imagination, but I have been working hard on the 2-point perspective drawings in my sketchbook while out and about.

I got to bond with my father-in-law over art. He paints in oils. I showed him some of the techniques I know using watercolor and set him up with a small kit while he was here. Sketching in the wild also appealed to him.

I had my first science zine published as part of an anthology. My art is now in print! Check out my blog or PM for a link to the free online version.

# OUTDOOR ADVENTURE

Various stats.

Both my in-laws out-fished me in my home waters AND on some new waters. True mountain people.

The dirt was near perfect for our wedding weekend. We did a large group mountain bike ride (30 people!). DW and I had helmet modifications of rainbow streamers added. At the end of a long climb, I had to be back for organizing other stuff, so I ripped down with my new uncle (see upthread for BC ski session description). He loaned me his new full suspension while riding extremely close behind the entire way down on his hardtail. I think I set a PR on the descent from his constant pushing by being RIGHT on my back wheel on this amazing steed. It was fun.

# WORK

I am working on the guts and the content of our new website. Interestingly, there is a lot of strategy involved in what information, what order, etc., items are placed on a website for an organization.

I did an informational interview about a new halftime position (that _could_ be made full-time) on developing a graduate program that blends art/design/data. This is exactly up my alley as it would allow me to come up with some course material around this theme as well as mentor grad students. Blue sky stage, which also appeals to me. I need to talk to some of the other folks involved to get a better idea of who I would be working with before I make a decision.

I said no to another halftime position because it does not align with my WOG. It felt great to say no right away as it was not on a mission, although it is a very interesting topic. #diytenure

# SOCIAL

We planned an entire weekend of outdoor adventure activities. Our friends and family got after it!

It also felt good to facilitate some WOG mingling with ERE folks and our other friends who have WOGs but would not use those terms. See @AxelHeyst's journal for further discussion. I am working on another post in this realm.

I volunteered for a race. I ran out to one of the remote aid stations to volunteer there. I got a hard run in and then had food waiting! My buddy was bantering with the runners as they came in. My favorite quip was, "Water in the red cooler, hydration drink in the yellow, snacks everywhere on the table including seafood over there in that bowl." This made one runner spit up in his mouth. The "seafood" was just Swedish Fish candies. Lol.


*I think I would start smoking if I had a Starship Troopers (the movie) gun to shoot monsters. Also, DW would have a backpack-style gun :).

**off for a run to make that km number real with another 13km. :)

7Wannabe5
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Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Congratulations! What fun you two will have!

Western Red Cedar
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Post by Western Red Cedar »

Congratulations! Sounds like a great wedding.

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mountainFrugal
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Post by mountainFrugal »

Thanks @7w5 and @WRC! We had a great time. Many of our friends and family made new connections that we hope will lead to hanging out of folks from different parts/special interest groups in our lives.

ertyu
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Post by ertyu »

You got hitched! Congratulations, wishing you a good life together :)

ffj
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Post by ffj »

The fact that your first wife's family was at your wedding was moving. That says a lot.

Congratulations on tying the knot. You guys are doing it right.

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mountainFrugal
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Thank you @etryu and @ffj! We are doing it right. :)

Scott 2
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Post by Scott 2 »

Congrats on the wedding! That's a huge group ride. I'm impressed you could bring together that many of your friends and family, who were physically up for it.

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mountainFrugal
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Post by mountainFrugal »

Thanks @Scott 2! It was a huge critical mass style ride. We took up part of the county road on the way up to the trail heads. haha.

----------------

DIY Tenure -

I had a really good visit with my friend and grad school mentor (he was a few years older). We went on a hike and talked about life. We hadn't seen each other in person for quite some time, so it was good to catch up. We dropped right into science mode, which was really fun. However, when discussing how things were going as a whole, it turned rather grim. He submitted his tenure package at a top program and will most likely get it next month (based on letter writers), but he thought that it was not worth the sacrifice. The science and ideas were worth it, but that was only a small fraction of what he actually spent his time doing. The rest was administrative work, politics, teaching unchosen classes, and so on. It was such a letdown that he and his partner have decided to move to another country to become professors there. Kind of insane!

I was telling him how I saved a lot of money by essentially always living like a grad student and now I have DIY tenure. A lightbulb went off in his head. Although he actually has tenure, my version was much more appealing to him. No more pointless committee meetings, no more unnecessary administrative tasks, no more dealing with flooded labs or experiments ruined by janitorial staff, etc. I suggested paring back the research to focus more on theory, computation, small-scale field projects, or exploring entirely new fields. The research output may be slower, but potentially deeper (remains to be seen). He seemed very convinced that my path was a better approach.

So... if you are reading this, dear friend... join us! You would have a lot to contribute over here.

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mountainFrugal
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DIY Tenure II -

After my post yesterday, @Gin+Juice and @AxelHeyst separately encouraged me to expand on the idea. @AH and I briefly touched on it in the podcast episode, but here is a summarized version with some additional thoughts.

Tenure in an academic setting essentially involves overcoming an independent research hurdle to demonstrate to the university that you have what it takes to conduct research, publish papers, secure grant funding, mentor students, teach, and more. Once you achieve tenure, you essentially have a job for life. However, that doesn't mean you stop working. It means you have more freedom to explore other ideas, potentially outside your immediate field of study, if you have the time or can secure the necessary grant funding. However, it is becoming increasingly challenging to pursue whatever you want once you have tenure due to the additional responsibilities involved (as mentioned in my previous post).

"DIY Tenure" is a way of re-framing what this forum is all about, emphasizing the "freedom-to" pursue one's own direction from the beginning, and potentially addressing some of the baggage associated with the "retirement" label. This way of thinking encapsulates what @jacob and others have already been doing and continue to do, as well as what I am attempting to do.

To generalize, it involves working in a specialized career, saving enough to then pursue other ideas by moving laterally. The key is that you are always "working." For @jacob, this meant transitioning to personal finance, blogging, and testing his mettle against other traders. Currently, he integrates woodworking with electronics skills to create flight controllers, among other things. I use @jacob as an example because he is the Poobah, but many others are also engaged in similar lateral work and integration here on the forum— and also people I know who are not part of these forums. For me, it meant leaving academia to found a company and prove that my ideas worked, then returning to academia in a much broader field by applying my technical skills to a different problem. Currently, I am taking this a step further by combining my ongoing work on art skills with my general science writing abilities, illustrations, and programming/statistics/data science to carve out a niche where I am highly competitive. Few individuals possess this unique combination of skills, defining a seldom sought-after niche.

To further generalize and illustrate this in design terms, I am becoming a "T-shaped" person. The vertical part of the "T" represents my narrow sub-specialty or focused expertise (I), while the horizontal part represents my expansion into broader domains (-). This framing may also help visualize the transition from Tier 1 (WL1-5) to Tier 2 (WL6+) in another way. You specialize (and potentially grind) vertically while applying frugality and other ERE principles, enabling you to move laterally more freely after a relatively short time frame.

Coincidentally, the tenure clock for academic positions are usually set to ~5-7 years so we are also talking similar time frames.

Thoughts?

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Ego
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Post by Ego »

Renaissance artists had patrons or mecenates who supported them financially. The artist received artistic freedom and the patron got status by proximity to the artist. Self-patronage may have some overlaps with DIY Tenure?

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mountainFrugal
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Yes. I had not put that together in this context before, but you still might be beholden to the patrons in some way...so if you could self-fund it, it would be even better.

This is also why I think a lot about artists that make most of their living using modern platforms like patreon, instagram etc. I think there are very few of them that are actually making whatever they want and not putting in ALOT of thought about how what they make might be perceived by their followers. Or, if they develop a following for a particular type/style and then want to go in a different direction, it is less likely that the entire "audience" would follow them.

Some artists I follow are already realizing the limits of not being completely self-directed:
mountainFrugal wrote:
Wed May 31, 2023 3:34 pm
I subscribe to a number of artist newsletters. One recent artist that does amazing watercolor work came to the conclusion that they wanted their business to stay really small. They had made a large plan of how to grow and grow and grow the print/book business. However, after reading through some of the Journals/interviews with Peterson Field Guide Illustrator, he deeply regretted all the time he put into doing only art that paid him (the field guide books). I will take this wisdom from both as I work on my own stuff. This cements the idea that art for it's own sake is fine enough and incidental income is the ideal.

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mountainFrugal
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# Live Player
https://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-ver ... 24f6e9eae2

I often come back to this article after reading it on here at some point. It's really interesting to me because I think it gets at the heart of what we discuss on the philosophy side of the forum (at least to my eyes). In some of my current vision work for the next 5 years, I have "Live Player" written in stylized letters at the top of the digital canvas. I also have the subtitle definition - "new and unexpected." This keeps me in a good frame of mind to imagine beyond what I already know I am capable of when making plans and defining fuzzy future directions. As long as you have good feedback systems built into sailing into uncharted waters, then those waters could be *all yours* to explore. Sharing a big ocean is fine, but it can quickly turn into a "Red Ocean"* race to the bottom if there are concentrated and fertile resources there to exploit. I define resources broadly here, including physical ones, ways to make money, intellectual ideas, etc.

Finding the "Blue Ocean" of resources requires thinking differently and being willing to combine different ideas to discover unique combinations of raw resources in an area that allow you to concentrate them and create something novel. This is what I am currently working on, and it has been extremely enjoyable to think in these terms. I am not looking for a gold vein. I am seeking the combination of overlapping resources that make a gold vein appear exclusively to me (or to the very small handful of people who possess the same overlapping skills). The fertile gold veins are hidden in plain sight and inaccessible to most.

* This idea comes from the Blue Ocean business strategy book, which discusses the race to the bottom in the disk drive industry as a Red Ocean. Engaging in a Red Ocean game means constantly fighting for survival against attacks from all sides. There is blood in the water, attracting sharks and others, hence the term "Red Ocean."

Western Red Cedar
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Re: mountainFrugal Journal

Post by Western Red Cedar »

mountainFrugal wrote:
Tue Jul 18, 2023 1:45 pm
Thoughts?
I think a career pivot, in which one leverages a skill set or expertise from their previous career, is a nice way to approach DIY Tenure. For those interested in the renaissance ideal, there is a temptation to dive into something unrelated and the learning curve there is huge. It may take years to break beyond the skillset of an amateur. Figuring out a way to integrate a new skill, as you've done with art, into something you've already mastered means you don't necessarily have to start at the bottom.

This relates to the discussion on transdisciplinary transitions: viewtopic.php?t=12873&sid=c6d8f19e9f9b9 ... cc4a143b73

It allows one to avoid reschooling and working one's way up from the bottom, though I think avoiding conforming is particularly challenging.

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Post by Smashter »

I love the framing of DIY Tenure.

MF, I think you would enjoy this article by a popular science writer on Substack which encourages people from all walks of life to start doing more science.

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mountainFrugal
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Western Red Cedar wrote:
Thu Jul 20, 2023 11:06 am
It allows one to avoid reschooling and working one's way up from the bottom, though I think avoiding conforming is particularly challenging.
I agree that it might be hard to avoid conforming to some degree, but it might just be that you conform only within that new context to work with people within that field. My guess is that if they are willing to work with an "outsider", they are open-minded enough to realize that you are in-fact going to do things differently. Ideally they would just accept you as is and not expect you to conform.

@Smashter - Thank you for the link. The author has similar views so I mostly agree with him especially about normalization of fields that indirectly (directly?) removes most renegades. haha.

A few minor disagreements. I never really had a problem with the term citizen science. As a top of mind example, a lot of what we know about bird migrations comes from aggregating citizen science data. In other words, people who are curious about birds and formalize how they record observations of them. We should be generally encouraging people towards scientific thinking and exploring curiosity and making observations about the world (see Ecology MMG as example). However, there is a certain level of rigor that academic science attempts to build in as part of the culture. Additionally, built into the culture is the ability to try to see many points of view and be willing and able to admit when you are wrong given new evidence. These are by no means unique to academia, but there is a much higher prevalence of these styles of thinking in academia. There are problems in academia of course, but how to expand this thinking toolkit to citizen scientists? That would be a great project (not for me). I am glad other people are writing about those types of ideas.

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Post by guitarplayer »

I also like 'DIY Tenure' and think it's good it's picking up as a brand (whether by design or serendipity)! It has a potential to bring together an interesting tribe, the one you also talk about when you talk about the audience of your art.

In some ways it's a wrapper like 'Early Retirement Extreme', in fact could be thought of as a green carrot vector for ERE2.

Well done. Also, happy for your wedding, lots of effort put into it I hope people will remember it dearly. "Swedish Fish candies" - you mean the liquorice ones?

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Post by Jin+Guice »

I think DIY patronage is interesting as well. One does lose access to certain resources and opportunities. One also loses some of the external feedback factors, although one can also get those from the general marketplace.

How does one maintain the external feedback from the peer review process? From my experience this process is mostly broken with publication and citation chasing and p-hacking at the lower levels... but it seems to still be functioning at top levels?

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mountainFrugal
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Post by mountainFrugal »

guitarplayer wrote:
Sat Jul 22, 2023 1:44 am
In some ways it's a wrapper like 'Early Retirement Extreme', in fact could be thought of as a green carrot vector for ERE2.
Interesting. I had not thought about that, but I think this is more along the lines of "Green" imagined by @7w5 in the Green Carrot Thread:
7Wannabe5 wrote:
Thu Dec 09, 2021 12:14 pm
I think I may just be muddling the discussion, because I think of Green as being more Artsy/Intellectual than Community Oriented. And Artists (4s on enneagram) are just as introverted as Scientists (5s on enneagram.) My brief Libertarian phase caused me to spend two years at an engineering college in the U.P., and when I went back to the liberal university town where my family resided, it was like all the warmth and color returned to the world, because there were other females, and the Arts, and conversation!
I am not sure if this version of "Green" is fully captured in Slevin's (the artist formally known as Blackjack) wonderful Green Carrot chart:
viewtopic.php?p=251979#p251979
It seems we are now coming back to this discussion now that there is more general understanding on the forum about SD et al. so we can continue that discussion in that thread. :)
Jin+Guice wrote:
Mon Jul 24, 2023 11:03 am
How does one maintain the external feedback from the peer review process? From my experience this process is mostly broken with publication and citation chasing and p-hacking at the lower levels... but it seems to still be functioning at top levels?
If I am interpreting your question correctly, you will still work within the system of peer review for specific academic ideas that are testable with a smaller capital outlay. While peer review is in-perfect, it still is pretty good at getting to truth eventually through many experiments. I think that "p-hacking" is an issue, but I think that the sub-issue that is even more important is not being incentivized to publish negative results. So freeing oneself up from that incentive structure *could* make human knowledge advance more rapidly by just reporting what happened or that the idea only worked in a small confined set of conditions. There are movements to work on all of these of course (see online discussion around eLife's experimental peer-review system as an example), but the general incentive structure does not create p-hacking, just that it might be tempting to do so for "positive results". Science and ideas should be subject to change given new evidence. If ideas or results only work in certain narrow circumstances, then we should be able to know which ones.

Also, ideas do not have to be fully "testable" to still be useful and/or predictive. See recent discussions on MTBI. It may be that within those fields someone clever enough has not come along to design an experiment, find enough participants of each type, etc. to ask fully nuanced questions with the data. I remain open to these ideas.

Add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Fish

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