2023 Wrap-up | S7 Episode 3

Upcoming academic talk alert: In just over a month, I will present at the DSABNS Conference in Lisbon. The registration deadline is the 12th of January.

At this time of the year, it feels like I should be doing a 2023 review. I won’t write a proper yearly review, mainly because I have already done it in chunks throughout the year already. Instead, I will touch on a few themes from my life this year. (No PhD update today: it doesn’t fit the ‘personal’ spirit of this post, but check instead my Fall update.)

Sport: Through the first half of 2023, I did a lot of rowing. It taught me some things beyond actually rowing (that I hope to write about another day). It was fun most of the time, although stressful at times. I’m now doing more running (and already talked about it at length here). It has led to a nerdy interest in watching elite races.

Travel: I have been travelling much since I moved to the UK in 2017. This year, it has reached new levels (see map above). I went to five new countries, and re-visited a few others. Sometimes for work and sometimes to visit family (they moved across an ocean this year!). That wasn’t enough, so I also travelled for leisure. Of course, I’m really grateful that my job and financial situation allow me to travel this much, because I love it. (Unsurprisingly, I’m now addicted to Jet Lag: The Game)

Books: All that travel also gives you time for a lot of reading on trains and planes. However, roads in Costa Rica aren’t good enough to allow for safe reading while on a bus. I had to innovate, and I don’t follow that many podcasts. So after many years of resisting it, I tried audiobooks. They get a pass from me. Despite Audible, I didn’t get close to reading as many books as last year. In 2022, I read 53 books. Reading 52 books in a year had been a goal of mine for a long time, but I never reflected on them here. So I thought it’d be interesting to check if the best books I read pass the test of time. In 2022, I gave five stars to five books, and I think I’d still highly recommend them:

• What We Owe the Future, by William MacAskill. About longtermism, it discusses ideas that have had a significant influence on me for years.
• The Code Breaker, by Walter Isaacson. About Jennifer Doudna (one of the creators of gene editing; I attended a lecture by her last term!)
• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by Yuval Noah Harari. I liked it more than Sapiens and Homo Deus.
• How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by Bill Gates. It was very clearly written (and makes me feel less guilty about all my travel carbon emissions).
• Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. This is the best book I read in 2022, and one of the best I’ve ever read. I’d recommend it to everyone who cares about the world we live in.

By chance, I also have given five stars to exactly five books in 2023, so maybe I’ll review those next year. In case I forget it, I want to mention one of those books: The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Arik Kershenbaum (a Cambridge academic). I was expecting, at best, some astrobiology (I’m not a fan of zoology)…but I got a whole book about evolutionary biology. That’s kind of what I do now, so I quite enjoyed it.

Blog and social media: I quit social media (except Facebook for messages, and the blog) in 2019…I had a brief period in (academic) Twitter at the start of my PhD. Although when Musk bought it, I tried switching to Mastodon (like many scientists), but it didn’t feel natural for me. Hence in 2023, I’ve been essentially free from social media. It’s nice to not be mindlessly scrolling, especially through filtered photos and unnatural videos (it’s crazy how much worse social media seems to have become over only a few years). Although I’d be lying if I said I don’t use any social media at all. It sometimes feels nice to post on Strava and get external validation (‘kudos’). Ocasionally, I feel I’m wasting potential “good content”: Cambridge landscapes, PhD days-in-the-life, and travel vlogs. But then I remember that’s not what I care about, want to be good at, or spend my energy on. Thus, the blog continues alive. I’m unsure how often I’ll write here in 2024, but let’s make it a great year.