Today could be a day of deep focus on things just down the road a little bit. Pondering that perfect possible future is always near the edge of my thoughts, but today for some reason I’m not trying to look just past the edge of what is possible. At the moment, I’m just looking at the horizon and my focus is not just beyond it at the moment. Maybe my two shots of Nespresso have not kicked all the way in or it is going to be one of those days where questions outpace whimsy. Anyway that pretty much sums up where my thoughts are at the moment. My talks as a speaker are generally lined up for the year. I’m doing weekly research for The Lindahl Letter into machine learning and at some point I’m going to spend some time working on traditional academic papers.
One of the deeper questions about my academic trajectory has been about really focusing on churning out academic papers and putting all of my focus on that path toward journal articles or continuing down the more general road of writing. It’s a real conundrum and for the most part I have let the wind take me in the direction of my greatest interest for the last 10 years. That direction has been toward the path of doing and being closer to the pracademic side of things than the traditional academic way of muddling through. Now that my experiences are stacking up in a positive direction it might be time to work on that balance and figure out somewhere in the middle to exist. From everything I can tell right now the academic world is facing a real overwhelming supply surge in content creation that is not resulting in the type of synthesis that translates and summarizes the overall fields. Driving complexity into specializations has made the depth part of the equation so overwhelming that any attempt at pure breath in a field fails for one person to handle.