Academical Nerd

  On Public Speaking Credentials For an introverted nerd who does not know how to behave in social situations, public speaking is a challenging task. You come up in front of a room of people waiting to judge your presentation and grade it. It rarely goes well, to be honest. I do not claim to be good at this, but there are ways I found to suck less while not distracting myself too much from my nerdy work. The Setup I usually speak bi-yearly at the local conference which is part of my curriculum and required for getting a degree. There is usually a small audience of 20-30 people that ask questions and grade the talk. Most scientific conferences look quite similar to this and pose a significant challenge for people not experienced in presenting. There are a few ways I came up with over the past four years that improved my ability to speak in front of other people and I would like to share them. These are mostly intended for an introvert unskilled in presentation. Practice Makes Perfect Fi

Analogue Note Taking Digital Mess We all need to take notes. Short messages for git commits, ideas from podcasts, quotes from all over the Web. At some point, a question comes up: where do we store these notes? It gets even worse with regular diary entries and to-do lists. One possible solution is to use a premade program like Evernote or Notion. It will store and organize text files for you, but this also means you should trust developers and server owners, as well as the encryption protocol. For anyone who worked with programming, there is a temptation to throw notes into a git-managed folder full of plain text files. Yet managing files by yourself is also a problem: plain text markdown works wonders for a while until there are too many files to keep track of. A system of folders and subfolders will take you further, but at this point navigation and linking become troublesome. The synchronization is an issue as well, although there are good tools that solve it even on mobile and L

Literature Review Guide Definition & Goals The literature review is a process of compiling and studying existing sources of information on a given topic. Researchers conduct it to get a grasp of the existing data in the field and see what others accomplished. It is important, as doing the same work twice rarely pays off. A good literature review can be published as a separate paper and brings a lot of value to the scientific community. It gives new researchers an overview of the field and potential data sources. Working with the existing review is much easier, especially if it has been published recently. Here we will list basic steps and some tips for a researcher willing to conduct their review. The last section is focused on writing a review for a paper or as a separate project. The first three apply to anyone who has to work with many sources. Initial Understanding It is impossible to conduct a good review in the field you are unfamiliar with. So the first step is to go t

A diary entry from the 14th of March, 2021. - Look, it's so pretty! - It was, indeed, pretty. Blue domes of some church contrasted with gray clouds and rare snowflakes. I tried to hold my head still to not disturb punctures on the skin. The pain wasn't unbearable, of course, but annoying and unpleasant. It's all good as long as it helps. We went past the church and hid in the subway. I always spend a lot of time here, on long escalators and in numerous carriages taking me around the city. And whenever I have someone to hug while standing on the escalator I am happy; urban lifestyle at it's finest. We hurtled down on moving stairs and crammed ourselves into a carriage. Old stations are gorgeous: there are stained glass paintings and wall carvings all over the place, sometimes there are statues. In every station you see a plate with names of architects who built the place and dates when it was built. I usually don't stop by to admire the beauty, but I know it's th

A diary entry from 2021-03-10. This day started with symptoms of caffeine abstinence. Less torturous than the last time I tried doing this, but it still took me a while to crawl into my chair, hugging a cup of boiling hot black tea. It's dark, slightly bitter and at least warms me better than water. The work seemed harder than usual: I barely did anything at all. Soon it was time to get going. I gasped as the door opened and cold air rushed into my lungs. Twenty degrees below zero, centigrade. All the slush froze, forming awkward uneven khaki-colored lumps that are hard to walk on. An hour and half a dozen subway stops later I arrived to my hairdresser. Bold, skinny guy in his fifties, very good at his work and exceptionally picky with office placement: the most expensive and luxurious areas there are in Moscow. He greeted me with a handshake and waved at a chair.  - Any preferences? - He asked, smiling. - No, not really. Make me pretty, - I smiled back; I always do.  The next hour

A diary entry from 2021-02-28. A perfect crystal is an infinite periodic structure that consists of atoms. Or at least that's what the textbook I spent a morning with told me. Neither a charming shine of a sapphire nor a flawless rose-cut diamond, only infinities of geometrical structures and ways to describe their properties. Imageni a mab who has spent his life working in this field: can he tell more about a sapphire shining in his wife's anniversary ring or it's trigonal crystal system? I hope to always choose the former.  It was surprisingly warm outside: a delicate March was floating in the wind. The snow was melting, revealing wastages of pets and their owners alike. This year usual shoals of stubs swimming in puddles weere ajoined by face masks, largely dwelling near subway stations and in parks and alleys. We met near the subway exit, hugged - snowflakes on her hat stung me with remainders of winter cold - and went for a long walk, jumping over puddles and slush. Hu

The summer before final school year, hot, boring and worst of all lonely. I was too busy studying and pursuing different hobbies and at some point realized that everyone in school had a group to spend their time with and a bunch of friends; everyone but myself. So I kept doing what I was good at for a while - learning new things, but this was neither fulfilling nor joyful anymore. Quiet solitude I used to live in turned into sharp razors of loneliness that were shaving bits off my soul, one cut at a time. I was in Italy with my dad, partly because there were no peers to go with. He is an admirable person, I always learn a ton from him and appreciate it, but there is still a thirty year gap between the two of us. So loneliness peaked and I decided to try and do something with the situation I had gotten myself into. Even then I knew it was entirely my fault. After some tinkering the fake account on vk (Russian facebook) was created and I sent one message to a person with obviously fake a