Last week, from 9th to 13th of November, was conference week, I have attended the annual meeting of Japanese society of neutron scattering (JSNS2020) and ANBUG and AINSE neutron scattering symposium (AANSS2020). Both are online, so I could attend both meetings. I enjoyed attending while I missed the feeling of attending the conference. For this kind of conference, I just joined talks or sessions which I was interested in while working at my office. Like I am listening online seminar but I didn’t feel attending a conference at the same place, communicating people, exchange opinions. When I went to the conference, we usually don’t have anything else to do, we can focus on learning new finding from colleagues and we all feel we are part of the conference. But this time, I did not feel that way. Usually, we have an opening ceremony and ending ceremony, that gives me the sense of attending the conference. This time, I miss some of them, so it is like just a bunch of seminar started.
Reading: after “Go by Kazuki Kaneshiro”, now I am reading “How dogs love us” by Gregory Berns. I am not familiar with this kind of scientific experiment but it turns out not much has been done in this field. In addition to the contents of scientific results, the author also showed readers how difficult to set up the experiment on a dog. Firstly, administrative job, University want to minimise the risk of an experiment, and this kind of experiment is rare so experimentalist has to prepare a lot. I did not know dogs are not allowed in University campus. Even after the administrative jobs, the next challenge is how to scan the brain of moving dogs on fMRI, which is expensive to experiment with limited research funding. Authors finally got an excellent result, that shows dogs have a mental map as humans do. I am still reading the book but the understanding of feeling or thinking of dogs is quite interesting. Dogs have social intelligence and dogs communicate with humans better than apes. The book is about just 2 years of rearch of dogs, but I feel they should come more in the future in many groups around the world.
My stomach has not been good for a long time. I refuse to take any medicine for some of my stupid belief that medicine is not good to my body. Finally, I took some this week and I am feeling better than before. My quality of life is much better. So, now my feeling is back. My enthusiasm is back. I am convinced how the health is important throughout our life.
What am I building in my life? As a physicist, I have worked on creating knowledge by publishing a paper. I would like to challenge many of the scientific fields. I am experimentalist so I will perform the experiment and data analysis. Creating data is one of important work and adding value by analysing it. Publishing data could be my making product and selling them by making a presentation or sharing it publicly. As a runner, my goal is staying healthy and motivated. I think now I need to give a bit harder training to run faster. Hopefully, I can join some race next year. As a reader or English learner, I am doing pretty well. But why am I doing this? That is right, that is to improve the writing skills especially on publication. So what I need to do is reading and writing more by writing. Publishing paper, writing grants, writing blogs, writing emails. Writing is creating things. We need practice but never give up writing good ones by writing a lot.
Other things could be building financial stability. While earning some money by working, I am constantly investing shares in Australia. I don’t know the future of this country or the world but I can try to believe in capitalism to some extent….. Instead of making money solely from working, I would like to build financial stability to do what I want to do in my life. As long as I am doing these reasonable ways, I am convinced it takes a while even I can luckily find a nice company to invest in. Just keep learning business and investing. Maybe after 5 to 10 years, I can build something. Learning is always good. I am making a decision every month to invest in form salary. Less spend money now and invest more for the future. This year, it hit hard because of COVID-19, but I would think in long term.