I forgot about the 10th anniversary of this blog!

I realised yesterday that this blog has been active (well, active by my standards) for over 10 years now. I started posting in July 2011. I'm not entirely sure why but that made me happy. Very happy. There have been ups and downs and I don't post regularly. I don't know what I was on in 2015 but I posted 113 times that year, the most in an year so far and this year was by far the worst, with only 5 posts. What can I say, there are times when I feel like I have a lot to say and times when I don't.

I've changed how this blog looks a number of times and I decided to use the Wayback Machine to look at how this blog has looked over the past decade.

Here's how it looked in April of 2013. I was, and still am, a big fan of Batman and the background image is by Yale Stewart who created the JL8 comic strip. The "title" or name of the blog has also changed over the decade and I guess I called it "The Nameless Journal" in 2013, for whatever reason. Notice the g+ icon. I completely forgot about Google Plus.

I don't know if anyone has discovered the problem with the above screenshot. Look closely and you will find a 2019 picture of me in a blogpost from 2013. Must be a bug in the Wayback Machine.

Here's how things looked mid 2014. By this point I changed the title to "An Eternal Student" and removed the background image I guess. This also made me remember my other blog - beatsnmore.blogspot.com. That blog doesn't exist anymore and the link points to a snapshot on the Wayback Machine from 2016. For reasons that are not obvious to me at the moment, I felt the strong urge to share everything I favorited on YouTube so I setup an automated blog using IFTTT. I eventually deleted the blog, maybe because of broken integrations between IFTTT and YouTube, if I recall correctly.

The title changed again in early 2015 but the look of the blog mostly stayed the same. It looks like I had invited a few of my friends to be become co-authors of this blog and I got them to write posts about their specific fields of interest. I think Ritwika wrote about Computational Biology and Shruti Patel wrote about Particle Physics. Shruti defended her PhD in Particle Physics and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow last time I chatted with her. I think Ritwika is still pursuing her PhD. I haven't talked to either of them in a long time.

And finally, we jump ahead to late 2016. I had graduated from college by this point, which is why the tag line had changed to "...(ex-)science ...". It looks like I got a few more of my friends to write posts on this blog - Venugopal also on Particle Physics and Preeti on Ecology (whom I finally married in May of this year). I stay in touch with Venugopal from time to time. He too defended his PhD in Particle Physics and is a Post-Doctoral Fellow.

I need to make a note to regularly save the state of this blog (and my personal website) on the Wayback Machine. I'm going to go now, catch up on JL8. Until next time ...

Popular posts from this blog

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage ...
Read more

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these...
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)...
Read more