Do More, Talk Less

As Ramadhan 1446 approaches, I'm minimizing my interactions with FB, shying away from the public. So my apologies for not responding to any tags, friend requests or messages there. Need some time off to deal with my own worries.

In a previous post, I consider myself as an average scientist, trying to better myself, even after retirement. Indeed, I should do more and talk less. There is just too much noise in the social media and not much that really helps one there. So, one of the things I wanted to do now, is to write more on my blogs. As an average scientist, perhaps there would be some good values and experiences in my writing that others can learn from. Having said this, I'm weary about useless or unnecessary content that has appeared in social media and I would not want to be pressured unnecessarily to put out content (which easily can degrade to 'artificial content'. I will try to write when there is something really meaningful for me to say.

I have resurrected my Equatorial Frequencies blog with a post on Real Numbers and Continuum. Previously I use this blog to dump links of articles on the arXiv that I find interesting. At some point (see this post), the arXiv administrators limit the period of catch-up and later even restrict the amount of download (possibly triggering automated download prohibitive measures). Due to restriction, I froze this blog for some time until the said post. I have another wordpress blog that I have kept. They are both technical blogs due to their LaTeX rendering capabilities. So in a way, I could just keep one blog and close the other. But I decided to keep them both. Equatorial Frequencies will deal with topics that are related to my (current) research. Ketchup Spills will be on everything else (random topics) that is a distant away from my research. Obviously, such division will not be sharp and will be time-dependent. I have just posted Infinitesimals and Nonstandard Analysis over in Ketchup Spills, which I know very little about. The post was however related to the earlier Equatorial Frequencies post, coming from my extraneous readings.

Will I have enough materials to post in both blogs? Well, what I can say is that over the years, I have accumulated much reading materials that I thought I want to go through but I did not have the time. As a retiree, I suppose I can do these readings now, modulo my part-time duties (if I get the job). How frequent will these be updated? I do not know but I hope at least monthly, I can write something meaningful. Certainly going through technical materials is a tough thing to do. Even for the historical stuff for the two updates mentioned above, seems to be a difficult read. It was my mistake to start reading John Bell's 90-page article (150+ page here); I was terribly slow in reading this. Articles discussing history also is harder for me to make notes on since much of them dwells on textual analysis with plenty of quotes. For mathematical ones, it is probably easier to make notes but it will be harder to digest the technical materials. Another thing that I have noticed is that articles on history at times seem like bashing someone rather personally - I try to distant myself away from such articles, if I can. Perhaps more on these in a different post, together with problems of academia and ego.

I do have another blog Acu Frekuensi which is in Malay. This is to cater more on topics of probably more local interest. As for this blog, it will be main personal stuff. So, this is how I will write more. Hopefully out of them, will grow more serious pieces of writing.

PS. We will be fasting on Sunday, March 2nd 2025.