Linguistics, Dancing, and a Few Good Books

13 June 2003

Man oh man, this is like a roller coaster. I've swung all the way back and forth between "this is the best writing I've ever done and they'll love it" and "this exposes me for the fraud I am and they'll never let me pass", about four or five times tonight. It helps that I know rationally that every PhD student on earth goes through this, but it's still a little distressing. (Not least *because* I can be so analytical about the whole thing.)

"To make grand changes in the body plan of animals, there is no need to invent new genes, just as there's no need to invent new words to write an original novel (unless your name is Joyce)." --Matt Ridley, "What makes you who you are", Time

Posted 2:51 AM [+]

12 June 2003

The blogosphere admits another member.

WELL COME.

"I'd rather live next to a wind farm than a coal plant. If ugliness were justification enough for stopping human structures from being built, there would be no Wal-marts or trailer parks or Modesto, CA." --Gel Thelen

Posted 10:37 PM [+]

Yes, that was definitely the right plan. After a week of trudging through the thesis, my blood pressure slowly rising as the task seemed ever less tractable, the floodgates have now opened. I threw out the old stuff and started from that outline, and I've been typing almost nonstop since then. At some point I suppose I'll have to sleep, but I hate to kill the flow like that.

You know, right now I'm kind of feeling like those Matrix guys---they can read the incomprehensible green matrix terminals, because they have lots of experience with it and know what to look for, but anyone else is going to need some pretty heavy-duty visualisation tools. In generating diagrams for the thesis, I'm finding myself really having to step back and try to imagine what someone would see if they hadn't been staring at this stuff for months and years. Trickier than you might imagine.

"Um, if we're gonna try and list all the famous artists, musicians, writers, actors, etc that have smoked weed, that's gonna take a REALLY LONG TIME." --Eva Schillace

Posted 5:21 AM [+]

So, you know that thesis I've been working on? I now have...

(fanfare)
...an OUTLINE!

Er, so it's not so bad as all that, actually. I originally started writing the thesis, as in, the file thesis.tex, by copying the proposal from last August, and filling in the bits that were new. I was having a hard time fitting into that framework, so I sat down, "threw out" the old version (i.e. renamed it to thesis-old.tex) and am starting from scratch with a totally different outline that will work better. Of course, most of the old text will still make its way back in, so all is not lost. :)

"I look much too dorky to be an eighteen-year-old. Although, actually I looked even dorkier when I was eighteen, but they don't know that." --Sharon Goldwater

Posted 2:06 AM [+]

10 June 2003

Just in the last week or two, I've gotten some mail from a few places that I applied for jobs---thanks but no thanks. I remember thinking, months ago, that it was strange (and a bit rude) that they had never responded, even if only to say "we're not interested"; but I wrote them off. One month passed, and I arranged interviews with the places that wanted to see me. Another month passed, and I heard back from all of them, and accepted the offer at Knox. Another month, and even the big schools with large fac searches (like Brown) had concluded their interviews and made their offers. Another month, and they'd even heard back. And still another month passed before these schools that rejected me finally sent me mail to tell me so. I'm just as happy they rejected me---further reflection after I'd sent out the applications told me that I wouldn't go those places, even as a backup plan---but it's sort of mind-boggling that they would wait so long to send a response.

"Freed from the normal constraints of truth and veracity, "journalists" such as Blair, Shalit, Barnicle, Smith and Glass shine above their counterparts. They're promoted ahead of the pack because their stories, sneakily cloaked as journalism, read better than everyone else's stories. In a profession fueled by competition, their careers are propelled along because of, rather than in spite of, their transgressions." --Terry M. Neal, Washington Post

Posted 5:37 PM [+]

09 June 2003

Currently sitting in my office is a guy who I met online---wait, it's not that sketchy---on the message boards from my high school---no, wait---and then I later met him in person at a party---hang ON!---hosted by another guy that I know chiefly through the same message board. Er. And the reason he's here is to do research in my research group, which we thought up as a possibility when we got coffee after I interviewed for a job at his college, the job at Knox that I later was offered and accepted. Wacky.

For his part, Chris seems to think the whole thing is pretty funny too. ;)

"As far as the barn-raisin', paint-strippin' part goes, Amish and Mormons are functionally identical. The Mormons will probably bring a Wagner Power Painter modified to spray mineral spirits, however." --Pete McFerrin

Posted 2:01 PM [+]