mountainFrugal Journal

[mountainFrugal]

Seriously though, I'm surprised there hasn't been any subversive FIRE or ERE merch(*) yet. Maybe there has and I just haven't noticed.

You just haven't noticed...

[guitarplayer]

Hehe this reminds me of experimenting with cutting out a piece of old bed sheet, sticking it onto a piece of paper, running the paper with the fabric stuck on it through my dad's printer and printing logos of various rock bands and such, then stitching it on my backpack or clothes. It was ingenious. Until it rained.

[jacob]

You just haven't noticed...

No matter how hard I look at my irontuffs, I still don't see the fnords.

[mountainFrugal]

If you can't see the fnord it can't eat you.

add- fnord context: http://web.mit.edu/41w/www/old/1999/humour/fnord.html

[mountainFrugal]

# WINS
Right before Late DW passed away, she was enamored by the intelligence and grit of one of the Ethiopian researchers she was working with (call her S). I raised a large amount of money in my wife's name to honor one of her greatest passions; mentoring women in science. The project grew quickly and much larger then I was initially expecting. We leveraged the fund to get even more money through grant writing and matching . The funds were split between three major projects and now have helped fund small research projects to 50+ women scientist/mentors across three institutions.

Through this project I brought S (along with other Ethiopian women scientists) to the US for a bioinformatics internships at the top agricultural school. I gifted S Late DW's nearly brand new Mac Book Pro and off she went. S got into another agricultural PhD program focusing on bioinformatics. I just found out S is defending next month and already has a job lined up at a biotech company. I was deeply stoked by this news and even shed a few joyful tears. Fuck yeah! Go S!

My business partner is patient with me as I learn construction skills that are up to his level of signing off. I have redone a number of things after he double checks my work, but I am learning a ton. It helps that I have built stuff before and know how to use powertools safely. I get razed for using terms like "volume" on the job site when the best catchall word is "shit" always understood in the context of the immediate task. Ha!

# IMPROVEMENTS
The Practicing Stoic has a collection of quotes organized across many topics. One can get an entire Stoic education from this single volume.

I have made great overall progress on vision refinement, goal setting, and sketchnoting ideas. From the art side of things, if I am not looking back a few years and kind-of cringing a little, I am likely not pushing myself enough.

# NEW DIRECTIONS
Scrapping many layers of vinyl glue off of 1500 sq/ft of our gallery/classroom space was not how I was expecting to be spending nearly all of my free time this month, but it is what it is. Suffering for my art? .

After reading, rereading, thinking, rereading @Jin&Guice's needs series: viewtopic.php?p=276764#p276764
I am working through some of my insecurities around purchasing books, art books in particular. More on this in an upcoming post.

# DRAWING
31/31 full page days. I might just not report on this any longer as it is basically habit at this point.

I made it skimming through all three comic making books for the skillathon. I marked pages that I wanted to come back to, read them in depth, and sketchnoted all three books. This systematic way of moving through my art book library was the inspiration for the DIY Masters in the various art degrees. One of the exercises sparked a fun idea for the 4 page comic for the first issue of Montology - Fire Runner due back from the printer in April. I started on the thumbnails.

I started a new infographic commission and am in talks about a small booklet/zine for kids put out by a local environmental non-profit.

# OUTDOOR ADVENTURE
Various stats plus incorporating strength work consistently 3/4 weeks. I am deep in the training red after doing a deep workout week and then starting on the floor scrapping. It is hard physical work. I put in 65 hours of weekend construction, wood-chopping and snow shoveling this month.

# WORK
Our research paper is finally published.

The gallery business is now an LLC, we are banked, and have insurance. Personal art business is also LLC and I started on the website.

My project management skills are completely maxed out with this remodel on top of everything else. "It won't always be this bad he tells himself." ha!

# SOCIAL
One of my best friends stopped by for a few days. We immediately went into co-creation mode while catching up. He is an architect professor and gave us some great suggestions for the gallery remodel and build out.

I met the new director of the nearest community college art program at drink and draw. She was excited for our gallery space and that we would be offering a different array of classes.

Two of our friends in town are deep in the kid game. In December we started bringing over a main and side dish for a shared meal with them. It is way easier for them to be in their space then to come to our place. This is highly recommended for folks who do not want to have children of their own, but want to stay in touch with friends that have new families.

I also hosted an impromptu artist dinner. I got great feedback on my test print zine. The best piece of feedback was to make sure the digital illustrations were done in the same aspect ratio as the printed zines. This allows more of the printed page to be an illustration. Round 1 of that feedback implemented with the sketchnote above.

[J_]

I love your: "not wanting something is the same as having it" = instant wealth!
Thanks for this very direct and clear thinking.

[mountainFrugal]

I love your: "not wanting something is the same as having it" = instant wealth!
Thanks for this very direct and clear thinking.

It is very clear thinking... mostly by Seneca, but also stoics as part of the "Wealth" chapter in The Practicing Stoic by Ward Farnsworth. There are many clear thinking nuggets in this book organizing stoic teachings on various topics.

This is just a summary sketch/quote that I remember from reading the chapter.

"The greatest wealth is a poverty of desire" - Seneca

[2Birds1Stone]

Hey mF. Thanks for your explanations and pictures on the van, upthread!

It seems like it may be worth considering if we fall in love with that style of travel, but for the time being using what we've got as long as possible makes the most sense. If you're going to be at EREfest again this year, I can't wait to check the rig out in person and pick your brain a bit

[mountainFrugal]

@sb1s no problem. Enjoy Thailand. I am currently planning on making the EREfest Pilgrimage again this year, but that will depend a little bit on what is going on with the art gallery/studio. I look forward to chatting IRL.

[mountainFrugal]

The left image was the fucking nightmare flooring situation under a layer of carpet and vinyl. The previous builder used vinyl adhesive as floor leveler in addition to random floor leveler that made the floor more uneven. The vinyl adhesive sticks to the floor leveler preferentially so ALL of it needed to be removed. FML that sucked scrapping that shit only to reveal a layer of tar. The tar took many rounds of scrubbing with soap followed by squeegee into buckets. Once all that was done we rented a floor grinder to make it actually level and remove any final gunk (middle). You can still see the tile pattern in a few spots. The final slab looks great (right). There is a layer of dust still on there in the right image. It cleaned up nicely. 1926 slab as floor! This was an insane amount of work, but it kept our total flooring cost for 1500 sqft under $750 (renting grinder, cleaning supplies and adhesive remover).


My business partner does custom high-end carpentry for his other business. They own a portable mill that technically can be broken down to fit the back of a pickup. It was designed in Australia for milling lumber deep in the bush. Pull for one cut, flip the blade 90 degrees push to get the other cut. The mill is currently set up at his other business partner's property. The logs that they use to build with are windblown or harvested within the rural neighborhood. The sawdust is open for folks with animals to use whenever and how much they want. All the off-cuts become instant firewood that is also available to the neighbors to freely come and grab.

We milled two 8 foot (~30 inch diameter) wind blown sugar pine logs to get all the trim (top left), door framing, fake beams, and slabs for benches (top right) in the gallery. All the cuts were custom sizes. ~$2500 in lumber if you could even find these cuts somewhere. It took about 5 hours of milling and an additional hour to carefully stack inside the warehouse/studio. Look at that stack of drying wood! (bottom right). We are also utilizing two 10 ft beams my business partner cut previously (foreground, bottom right.)

Now to work on blender 101 tutorial... I promise @axelheyst!

[mountainFrugal]

DIY Tenure III

After answering some questions on the Advanced Retroadaptics Podcast last week, I had some further thoughts.

The best parts of academia are research, discovery, teaching, and mentoring. However, having seen how that works from the inside, in a startup setting, and now back to a specialist researcher position, one can replicate most of the best parts and avoid the worst parts of administrative overhead. I have a pretty good idea of what would be in store if I actually had a tenure-track job and/or tenure at an R1 (research-first) university. What is crazy to me is that multiple researchers in my cohort of postdocs +/- a few years are now at or beyond tenure. Of that cohort, none of them are completely happy with the arrangement. Even my postdoc advisor would "joke" that he wanted to trade me running his lab so he could actually do research instead of admin, teach, and sit on endless committees.

Scientific mentoring - I have mentored over 30 undergrads, grad students, and postdocs. The one thing that is consistent across all of these is just learning to ask questions to help them come to their own conclusions or to help design experiments to gather more data to move towards an answer. You can act as a pre-reviewer of their scientific work while also teaching other skills like presentations, measurement limitations, etc. One can nearly always split things in half again once a question has been answered or see how consistent the result is across different conditions. A majority of the biological world is probabilistic. Teaching this style of thinking and developing minds towards this can happen at any level. The caveat for my experience is I have not taught children below the age of 12 and am not planning to. I am confident it could be scaled in that direction, but have not tried.

Another advantage of DIY tenure is that I get to teach the classes that I want to teach. Choice in classes taught at the undergrad or graduate level is a luxury. Oftentimes, professors will negotiate not to have to teach anything. Universities are all different, but a general trend is that departments teach classes and funding from the university for the department is directly tied to the number of seats filled for those classes. How to fill seats? Teach undergrad classes that fulfill a general education requirement or a staple class for multiple degrees (STEM, e.g., organic chemistry, physics I, II, III, calculus, etc.). The problem comes in when your interests might not align with the classes that need to be taught. New prof in the department? Sorry, new prof, but you have to teach the general education intro class forever with understaffed TAs, so your weekends are now grading poor college essays. Teaching introductory classes does have an advantage. You will learn the basics really, really well. If you do not know some sub-sub-subject, you can quickly get yourself up to speed and then try to teach it to someone. This makes sure that you actually know what you are talking about. The endpoint with DIY tenure is that you can choose to teach what you want. There are now a number of class platforms where you can put your classes up for free or charge a small fee.

These classes can directly align with my other goals for what I actually want to learn. I have taught full undergrad classes, TA'd for grad-level classes, taught subsections of grad classes, and created a bunch of tutorials for various things I am interested in. As an example, I had applied for a job to lead a graduate program in art/design/data. I was excited to teach a class or two in addition to working with art/design students on data projects. I did not get this job, but now I can teach workshops and classes at my art studio around similar topics. It may not be teaching grad students, but people can still learn from me. I can record these and put the materials online for a small fee through Udemy or Gumroad. While this is technically not in a university setting, I am not sure there is much difference in how material or ideas are transferred anymore. The internet has fundamentally changed the landscape for self-learners. Being associated with a University does give one credibility, though.

The main advantage of DIY tenure, in my mind, though, is that I can now start completely shifting gears and work on getting really good at illustration, comics, and visual storytelling. Making a large jump like that is not really recommended in a regular tenure-track position, even if you have tenure. I am incorporating all the other components that I have learned, but turning my work into more of an art professor than a quantitative biology professor is not something that one can do with normal tenure.

Onward to die with my boots on!

[guitarplayer]

I think 'DIY tenure' is a great hook to get academia inclined people get interested with ERE1 stuff. I'd mentioned it to Mihaela van der Schaar when we were chatting last year and she seemed fascinated even though I think she had tenure already.

[mountainFrugal]

I think 'DIY tenure' is a great hook to get academia inclined people get interested with ERE1 stuff. I'd mentioned it to Mihaela van der Schaar when we were chatting last year and she seemed fascinated even though I think she had tenure already.

Interesting. I think that academic folks can easily get burnt out (even if they are leaders in cool fields like Mihaela) because of bureaucratic overhead or being surrounded by incurious strivers settled into leadership roles maintaining the status quo in fields. Any particular reasons that she mentioned being interested in the idea?

[guitarplayer]

In the talk she had given before I chatted her up she mentioned having a hard time getting along with academics in the early days because she would first write for engineering journals, then economics, then AI, and this sort of interdisciplinarity is uncommon in academia (I know it is). She then when we chatted mentioned fancying the idea of lifelong learning which I think DIY tenure is conductive too. I think perhaps had the idea occurred to her earlier on, she could have gone for it. Not sure now because, well, eventually she made it to be a leader in a cool field.

[Western Red Cedar]

Kudos on the progress with the studio. It looks like a lot of work, but it must feel great to know you are doing things right. Not just for you and your partner, but for whatever happens with the building decades down the line. It sounds like an ideal setup in terms of working with and learning from a partner who is more experienced.

Have you read Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety? It isn't my favorite work by Stegner, but academia and tenure are central themes in the novel. Stegner also explores the tension between excelling at teaching and excelling at research/publication.

[mountainFrugal]

@guitarplayer - It is even more impressive that she was able to bounce around like that and still be so successful by academic standards. I think that it can be a carrot/idea/re-framing of ERE to bring thinkers from other fields beyond STEM into the community.

Thanks @WRC. I have not read Crossing to Safety (or any Stegnar for that matter), but put it on my list. Thank you for the recommendation. What was your favorite of his?

[jacob]

Have you read Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety? It isn't my favorite work by Stegner, but academia and tenure are central themes in the novel. Stegner also explores the tension between excelling at teaching and excelling at research/publication.

For another cross-over who occasionally covers introspection and research, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Ligh ... erary_work The most interesting/productive about this kind of transdisciplinary work is how they bring a different and mature perspective to a new field. This often makes for greater insight/lucidity.

[theanimal]

Thanks @WRC. I have not read Crossing to Safety (or any Stegnar for that matter), but put it on my list. Thank you for the recommendation. What was your favorite of his?

Not @WRC, have opinion anyway. “Angle of Repose” is fantastic. “Big Rock Candy Mountain” is Mrs. Animal’s favorite book.

[Western Red Cedar]

Big Rock Candy Mountain is my favorite. It hit me like a sledgehammer and was hard to put down. It reminded me a lot of how I felt after reading Steinbeck's East of Eden or Grapes of Wrath in my teens, but I read it in my mid-30's. I'm not deeply affected by fiction as often as I was when I was younger. Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs is a collection of essays and could be a good place to start. It was my introduction to Stegner and a gift from my graduate advisor because he knew I was interested in "place", the natural environment, and development in the west. It took me down a literary path of writers in the western US who celebrate and explore that landscape in their fiction or essays.

A quote from one of the essays:

The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that is wasn't created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, have lived in it, known it, died in it--have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.

[calamityjane]

Fully agree with your thoughts re:academia and love the idea of DIY tenure. That's basically where my thoughts have been since I decided not to pursue the original PhD path. The siren song still calls from time to time - I have always worked in faculty-adjacent academia with the idea of the Lifelong Learning and funded research as a utopian ideal - but continue to eschew the admistrivia, bureaucracy, and ego-gnashing inherent to the pursuit of tenure. It was quite liberating to realize I could have the same intellectual journey by bowing out of the rat race entirely as by relying on an academic institution to subsidize it.