Academical Nerd

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...

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...

We spend the majority of our lives in cities, as humans of the modern era. It’s nothing new or exciting, but I urge you, reader, to stop for a moment and appreciate just how bizzare things have gotten lately. Imagine a bee hive or an ant colony, the complex structure animals create to dwell in, to ensure comfort and safety. This is what we are, this is what we do. All the asphalt you are used to, all the roads and stores and houses and scyscrapers are a part of an enormous ant hill that expands underground, in the air, even to radiowave frequencies. Unlike ants or bees, we don’t have a predetermined physiological roles in our colonies and hives; any attempts to artificially create those proven to be disastrous for humankind. We do have roles, though, that’s for certain. The question to ask oneself is which role do you play? What do you consume, produce, or ignore entirely? Whom do you serve and served by? Are you happy with those answers, and if not, what would you like them to be? The...

I try to adhere to what I call “the golden rule of planning”: spend around 1% of the time planning the thing and 99% of the time doing the thing. It takes me up to ten minutes to write a day plan, an hour or so to make a weekly layout and about the same to do a monthly review. Yearly review takes up to three days, maybe four if I’m unlucky. Since the beginning of 2021 I’ve been using bullet journal for planning. And it’s almost perfect, there is only one think I dislike: the community. Google it and you’ll see the pretty calligraphy on spreads with drawings and colored pens all around the place. This clearly takes more than ten minutes a day. The bullet journal is supposed to be a tool with two purposes: plan the day, week or month and get anything that comes up into the inbox, you own ideas as well as any deadlines/appointments. I tend to throw some notes about the day in there, too. It is not a sketchbook, cookbook or a colorbook that you see on the internet. The bullet journal, or a...

There is a problem in our world, that is not widely talked about, especially on media. These are scientific journal publishers, or rather the system that they have established a long time ago and keep using (and monetizing) to this day. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for capitalism, it’s when it gets in the way of important things when I get slightly disappointed. Let’s agree on the important stuff first: the era of lonely geniuses is long time over. The science and scientific advancements in the 21st century depend on cooperation of dozens, hundreds and thousands of people throughout the centuries. Information obtained years and decades ago is used to build new knowledge upon. A student in my faculty is required to have at least 20 citations in their coursework in the end of the first year, and it’s not an issue - we usually approach 30 mentioned sources and research even more while doing the literature review. This is a bare minimum to become acquainted with the material. Scientific kno...