thesis zoom

I just finished the first complete line-by-line editing pass of the thesis! Which is, as of a couple of hours ago, sitting pretty at the magic number of 60 pages long. (Not that there is actually a threshold, but it's good to hit a target.) Lots of polishing left to do, but I need to start focusing on prep for the presentation soon. We'll see what Jim says in our meeting tomorrow.

In honor of this accomplishment, here is a pointless graph I made when procrastination masqueraded as random curiosity. It's a histogram of the years of publication of all 50 citations in my bibliography. (This excludes the website citations, obviously.) Why? Why not. Making graphs in MATLAB is starting to feel very... calming.

bellowmania

The normal Friday night activities last night turned into a slightly more organized party. We had a fire going in the fireplace, but it's more decorative than anything and it never got going very well. We all agreed that some bellows would help. Later in the evening I ended up feeling a bit manic, so I dived into the recycling pile with my leatherman and some ducttape and tried to put together a box-bellow out of a large juice bottle and a mixing spoon. It... did't work very well. The bottle had ridges, so the seal was never very good despite the ducttape gasket I made. Later Ben got into the act and made a more traditional (in the west, anyway) accordion bellow. It worked slightly better than mine, so we declared him the winner and shook on an excellent competition.

If I was going to do it again, I'd just grab a garbage bag and go totally old-school (like, chalcolithic age old-school) with a bag-bellow system. At the time I didn't think I could make one work without some kind of tubing, but, well, I was drunk. I'm sure I could rig something up now, and the volume of air would be much, much better.

Later we made cornbread! And I got to introduce several people to the wonderful concoction known as "honey-butter". Mmmmmm. It was a good evening.



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