For the past 2.5 years, I have been helping my friend Prof. Bernhard Preim to write the new Medical Visualization textbook. A crazy number of hours of studying scientific literature (a quick count in the bbl file yields 1880 cited references!!), trying to fit everything into a coherent conceptual framework and then trying to write all of it down as a more or less readable story has finally led to more than 1000 pages of Medical Visualization reading pleasure.
Moving consists of leaving one place and going to another. This post is about the first part. It’s really not easy to write, but I would like for people to understand that the leaving part of this decision is one of the more difficult things I have ever had to do.
So after 13 beautiful years in this great little country, we are leaving the Netherlands.
Dear two people reading this blog on a good day: Spread the word, the Weekly Head Voices is making a comeback!
In the process of dealing with recent(ish) life-changing decisions, but probably more due to the preceding time of introspection, I was unable to enter the right state of mind for producing the weekly WHV episodes. However, because exciting new events have been scheduled for the coming months and I really look forward to writing about them, and because I’ve decided that, yes, I shouldn’t worry too much about the actual literary impact of this here blog (I wrote “bog” first, I hope that it wasn’t a Freudian slip; what I was actually intending to say between these parentheses is that I will continue to do my best to entertain and/or edify!), the time has come to get the WHV back on the road!
NSA, GCHQ, Prism, FISA, Project Bullrun, Sigint.
After Edward Snowden, former CIA and NSA employee, started revealing how massively, intensely and easily we are all being spied upon by the intelligence agencies of various governments, the terms above have suddenly been spending a great deal more time in the media.
Image by BLOGGING via TYPEWRITER
It turns out that government agencies are allowed to extract, at a whim, your and my data from service providers, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. There is no real legal process (unless you can call a secret judge in a secret court giving a secret order a real legal process), especially if you’re not a US citizen, and the providers that have been forced to give up your data in this way are not allowed to notify you about your digital self being violated. So even if they say that you shouldn’t worry, you can never be entirely sure.
In February of this year, I left academia (read more about my reasons in the accompanying blog post) to start a new life as an independent engineer, or simply freelancer, if you will. In this post, I would like to summarise the lessons I’ve learnt so far. Also, because of my strong nerdtastic tendencies, I will write a separate post talking about the various tools of the trade, software and hardware, that I’ve found useful.
For months I’ve been walking around with this idea in my head. I was planning to turn it into a blog post titled “On not scaling”. It was going to be about deliberately choosing focus over bandwidth in one’s activities. One is often faced with the choice between scaling up (more work, more people, more things, more turnover, more for the sake of more) on the one hand, and simply not scaling on the other, instead holding on to one’s simple and linear way of doing a few things well. The former approach seems to be the one favoured and encouraged by modern society. The latter has become my preference.
We’ve all been there.
Faced with a daunting and complicated project (thesis, book, building a house, the list goes on), or a whole bunch of projects, you start suffering from an acute sort of brain deadlock, freezing like an antelope in the headlights of the rapidly approaching deadline pick-up truck, yeehawing redneck behind the steering wheel.
Perhaps even worse than the freezing, is the procrastination. You somehow manage to start moving, except that you’re pouring all your energy into everything but the work that you actually need to do. You manage record numbers of facebook / twitter / google+ posts, and you attain mastery of coin-knuckle-rolling (marketable skill #1), but the day ends with you having made no further progress.
“Procrastination” by Viktor Hertz on flickr.
After many great years in academia, I finally decided in October of last year to resign from my position as tenured assistant professor. As of February of this year, I proudly walk the earth as an independent engineer.
It has taken me two years of thinking to reach this decision.
I started re-evaluating my life in academia two years ago after a review-for-promotion (See the “oral defence” bullet. :)) process that resulted in a “not quite yet” judgement. It took this long to make my decision, because it was actually going quite well. I had tenure, the holy grail (well, the first of a number of them) for many academics. I had built up and was heading the TU Delft Medical Visualization research group. I was fortunate to attract the best postgraduate students and Ph.D. candidates. My research proposals were successful, so I had money to explore exciting new research avenues. My h-index was (slowly) going in the right direction. Even my teaching was more than occasionally positively received. :)
Dear readers,
I will soon be starting a new life adventure. In fact, maybe even two of them. Hence, there is a significant probability that this weblog will again be updated more frequently in 2013.
Also, I have just changed the email and RSS subscription system:
I hope that you have a fabulous vacation, and a happy and healthy 2013! I look forward to seeing you then.
There are many similarities between startups, defined here as (relatively) young and agile companies with a few bright people trying to change the world by working on some cool idea(s), and academic research groups, defined here as (relatively) young and agile units within academic institutes with a few bright people trying to change the world by working on some cool idea(s). Err, yes.
Fortunately there are also many differences, so I have something to write about here. For some years now I’ve been running the TU Delft Medical Visualization research group, an experience that shall serve as the primary source of information for this piece. I’ve also had some experience of startup culture, first as one of two (and later three) engineers in a new business unit of Crusader Systems (now CSense) designing an embedded image processing product called FrothMaster, then at Stone Three as employee #1, then later at Treparel as a co-founder and architect, and more recently as scientific advisor to Clinical Graphics and co-founder of TimeScapers. In spite of this healthy dose of exposure, I’ve never actually run a startup as my main activity, so I will have to extrapolate and sometimes revert to wild guesses. I am trusting that some of the startup-involved readers will pipe up in the comments!