Nose to the Grindstone

I think this year will be the year of research for me. This semester is the first in grad school in which I'm taking no classes. I'm teaching part time, but other than that I can fully focus on my research. And I rejoice in this work. Finally, I'm doing what I came here to do.

I won't bore you with the details, because it take a fair amount of explaining to tell people what I do. If I'm very brief, and say, "Oh, I study how people learn physics and how to teach it better," they're all complimentary and think this is commendable subject (i.e. everyone hates physics, so certainly there's room for improvement). However, if I give them a bit more detail, their expressions change to something that says, "People get paid to do that?" It takes even more explaining before they're convinced again that there's some merit in what I do.

So, I will simply say that I had two very productive days of meetings this week, where I learned a lot and people gave me lots of feedback on my work. I'm working on two different projects this semester, which means that if something terrible happens (i.e. we get no publishable results - the worst thing that can happen in academia) I always have a backup project. However, I'm learning that adept researchers can always turn a null result into, "Look, changing this causes no effect! Wow-wee!" (Frantic pointing to distract from otherwise less-than-exciting results.)

In a blogging note, does anyone who blogs have any advice on how to post links to other blogs on the side of mine? I've been failing miserably for the past few weeks, and could use some help.