...I'm up to 181 pages now (!), but I'm still not there yet. I'm aiming for next week now!
I'm also running out of steam... slowing down... must... make it....
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In other news, I've just bought my plane ticket home for Christmas. And it's a one-way ticket this time. This feels final.
Of course, I'm immediately flooded with thoughts like, 'I don't want to leave - I like it here! I've finally figured out how to thrive in this culture! I don't want to transition to a new place again!' etc. Not helpful.
I may be coming back here briefly for graduation, if indeed I can graduate in January, but that will be on a round-trip ticket originating in the US. Not the same thing.
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And what's up with Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace prize?? The Nobel prizes in physics awarded to the nanotech guys for giant magnetoresistance I can understand. And the chemistry one going to a surface scientist is just fun! I actually understand that one! But Al Gore for Peace? And in part for a film that the UK government has just decided can be shown in schools, against the advice of many scientific advisers, due to the 'nine scientific inaccuracies' touted on the BBC news yesterday? Incredible.
OK back to my thesis.
Leave some lovin', ranting, words of encouragement, or just a good joke!
The Al Gore thing is so utterly ridiculous that I'm not even that mad about it. I mean, even if you think global warming is really happening (questionable, but I'm not positive it isn't, like I used to be), and even if you appreciate what Al Gore's doing to make people aware of it (which I suppose you could, if you agreed with the first point), and even if you think An Inconvenient Truth is scientifically accurate (let's just hope you don't), it's still a PEACE prize. PEACE, as in causing the cessation of fighting. What he's doing has nothing to do with that.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Ann, be strong, be strong. Keep your eyes on the goal, remember that the harder you work, the sooner the end will come. Do your best! Be a responsible adult who does well because it's the right thing to do, not a lame high school senior who barely finishes his project with just enough effort to pass and move on to college.
Apple is proud of Al. They've got their whole home page dedicated to him.
ReplyDeletewww.apple.com
Go baby go! We're both on the thesis run now... I'm sitting at home on a Sunday trying to get it finished and adding content (advisor says: more! give me more!). Anyway, go baby go!I say kudos to Al Gore also, though it is very questionable whether he was contributing to peace exactly. I guess if you have this hollywood view of the world where when the waters around the world rise the people turn to anarchy... well, in that sense maybe he's made a peace contribution. Anyway, you asked for a joke. Here's one from a book I have called "Absolute Zero Gravity"A group of investors decided that horse-racing could be made to pay on a scientific basis. So, they hired a team of biologists, a team of physicists, and a team of mathematicians to spend a year studying the question. At the end of the year, all three teams announced complete solutions. The investors decided to celebrate with a gala dinner where all three plans could be unveiled. The mathematicians had the thickest report, so the chief mathematician was asked to give the first talk: "Ladies and gentlemen, you have nothing to worry about. Without describing the many details of our proof, we can guarantee a solution to the problem you gave us - it turns out that every race is won by at least one horse. But we have been able to go beyond even this, and can show that the solution is unique: every race is won by no more than one horse!" The biologists, who had spent the most money, went next. They were also able to show that the investors had nothing to worry about. By using the latest technology of genetic engineering, the biologists could easily set up a breeding program to produce an unbeatable racehorse, at a cost well below a million a year, in about two hundred years. Now the investors' hopes were riding on the physicists. The chief physicist also began by assuring them that their troubles were over. "We have perfected a method for predicting with 96 percent certainty the winner of any given race. The method is based on a very few simplifying assumptions. First, let each horse be a perfect rolling sphere..."
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