Deric’s MindBlog Spends Time in the Past...in the Future?

The past:  I’ve been spending the past two weeks in a former life. I was in Seattle last week to attend the annual meeting of ARVO (Assoc. for Research in Vision and Opthalmology), at which my last postdoc, Vadim Arshavsky, was awarded the Proctor Prize.   The graphic in this post is from a lecture I just gave on Tuesday to the final seminar this term of the McPherson Eye Research Institute here at U.W., describing the contributions of my laboratory (from 1968 to 1998) to understanding how light changes into a nerve signal in our eyes. (The talk is posted here.)

The future:  I’m scratching my head about how (maybe whether?) to continue MindBlog.  It has had a good run since Feb. of 2006, and I'm kind of wondering if I should withdraw - as I did from the vision field - while I’m ahead, or at least cut back to less frequent, more thoughtful, posts…. I’m a bit dissatisfied that many of the posts are essentially expanded tweets, passing on the link and abstract of an article I find interesting.  I think this is lazy, but I do get ‘thank you’ emails for pointing out something that reader X is interested in.  A downside is that the time I take scanning journals and chaining myself to the daily post regime makes it difficult for me to settle into deeper development of a few topics.  It also competes with the increasing amount of time I am spending on classical piano performance. I will be curious to see whether these rambling comments elicit any responses from the current 2,500 subscribers to MindBlog’s RSS feed or ~1,100 twitter followers.