A rare sighting of us in our natural habitat.

Hi! This is our blog. We figured we’d start off with an (obligatory) introduction and describe what our plans for this blog are. So, we'll cut right to the chase.

I’m Lindsay. I’m a PhD student in political science and typically think a lot about what most people find boring and Taylor Swift.

I'm Alan. I'm not a PhD student but at least I think about cool stuff like food and cats and programming.

We plan to co-write a lot of posts, especially those about stuff we’ve done or places we’ve been recently. We thought it would be a good idea to have a way to distinguish between our different “voices” in the posts we write together. So when you see normal font, then it’s something that either one of us could have written and will mostly be used for description. If it is in purple and italics, then it’s a comment by Lindsay. If it’s blue and bold, it’s Alan. You’ll probably be able to tell by what the comments are, but we figured we’d be safe.

The main purpose of our blog is to keep our friends and family up to date on what we’re doing on the West Coast. Turns out, we’re both terrible at keeping in touch even though we miss everyone a ton. So, there’ll be a lot of posts about our vacations, weekend trips, and one-off things we do. (I’m personally hoping it’ll inspire us to do more than sit around and watch Netflix). We’ll also be posting (hopefully somewhat regularly) about things we’ve done in the past. Think of it as a “Throwback Thursday” (#tbt) with text. We’d like to record some of our more interesting past memories while we can still remember them.

We don’t want our blog to be only about things we do (aka our boring lives) though, so we’re also going to write about things we think about. These posts will mostly be solo-authored, so you don’t have to worry about distinguishing between the different texts. We’ll let you know who's writing, but again, you’ll probably be able to tell by the topic. Lindsay will probably write about philosophy and political science, while Alan will write mostly about math and computer science. (If it’s a post about cats or just contains cat gifs, it’s probably Alan as well). There’ll also  be a lot of random stuff.

The only thing left to talk about for now is how we picked the name of our blog. It’s a reference to a lecture by Karl Popper, titled "Of Clouds and Clocks." In it, he makes a lot of good points about the philosophy of science and the problem of free will (I’ll write about this problem in a future post because it’s pretty interesting), but we’ll only talk briefly about his use of clouds and clocks here. Basically, he uses clouds and clocks to describe a spectrum of predictability. Clouds, like gases in general, are really hard to predict and are highly irregular systems, while clocks—at least those that work properly—are reliable and predictable in their behavior. We chose the title "Clouds and Clockwork" because we think this spectrum is applicable to everyday life (And because Lindsay wouldn't accept Blogzilla, Blog to the Future, or Blag). After all, what each of us does is a bit of both. Our days are both predictable and random. We’re creatures of habit, and yet, we are also fickle... 

Before we get a bit too poetic (no one needs another "artsy" blog), let us just say that we hope you will join us for all the clouds and the clockwork in our lives.

- Lindsay and Alan