Brain in a Jar
greengabbro | November 4, 2008 My grandmother died early this morning after a short battle with cancer. She was 85.
This is not a proper eulogy; those are hard to write.
However. Grandma voted by absentee ballot early last week, before the morphine took over. If she managed to vote, so can all y'alls (at least, assuming I finish writing this before the polls close).
I'm registered as a permanent absentee voter, and I mailed my ballot in two weeks ago. That worked out well - I was glad not to worry about it while flying back to the craton to spend this time with family. Today, though, I'm a bit sad not to be participating…
greengabbro | April 28, 2008Tonight I'm assembling an appendix to my thesis. Plot some data; bring it into Illustrator to clean up the formatting; write a caption and add it to the LaTeX document. Rinse; lather; repeat. I'm using an egg timer - I can handle 45 minutes of this boring stuff if I get to blog when it dings.
I'm writing a Master's thesis; I wasn't originally expecting that. While I am fully capable of enumerating its many flaws in a multi-paragraph bullet-pointed high-pitched single breath, I'm still proud of what I've produced. I wasn't expecting that either.
Let me give you the soap opera summary: I burned…
greengabbro | March 25, 2008A while back, one of my labmates claimed that there are only five permissible emotions at a scientific conference: Nervous, excited, preening, jaded, and overwhelmed.
I think there are also five emotions that one can experience while writing up a thesis: Despair, frustration, irritability, relief and robot. "Robot" is the state I am aiming for most of the time. It's what I feel when I'm working effectively, a sort of detached contentment mixed in with cheerful bleeps and bloops whenever I finish a computation. Oh, but sometimes it's more a sort of detached grouchiness mixed in with…
greengabbro | February 29, 2008This post from Female Science Professor, about watching a colleague with ADD work, has been stuck in my head for the past couple of days:
So now he just lives with it and, although he hates his inability to focus, if he keeps going back to his original activity, even if he can't sustain that activity for more than a few minutes, he gets things done. In fact, he gets a lot done. He published 10 papers last year and wrote at least 2 successful grant proposals. And he is very well informed about the news and weather.
I don't have ADD, but I identify with many of the symptoms. I think this is a…