How 5 years of blogging has changed me

Last month marked the 5 year anniversary of this blog. My first post was a tribute to Walter Kauzmann. In hindsight, after almost 1500 posts, I think that was a fitting beginning. Kauzmann represented many of the themes of the blog: careful and thorough scholarship, theory closely connected to experiment, simple understanding before computation, hydrogen bonding, fruitful interaction between chemistry and physics, ….

Reflecting on this anniversary I realised that writing the blog has had a significant influence on me. Writing posts forces one to be more reflective. I think I have a greater appreciation of

• good science: solid and reproducible, influential, ...
• how important it is to good science, rather than just publishing papers
• how hard it is to do good science
• today, the practise of science is increasingly broken
• the bleak long-term job prospects on most young people in science
• the danger and limitations of metrics for measuring research productivity and impact
• the importance of simple models and physical pictures
• diabatic states as a powerful conceptual, model building, and computational tool in chemistry
• the importance of Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT)
• bad metals as a unifying concept for strongly correlated metals

I thank all my readers, and particularly those who write comments.
I greatly value the feedback.
I do want to see more comments and discussion!