Recently in Science Category

Random discovery of the week: fresh-ground peanut butter will catch fire and burn in a microwave.

Bonus points to the first person who can actually explain why. (Seriously, I'd like to know!)

Hey look! The weather station is back online!

No local link yet for pictures or archives, but it is once again sending data to the Weather Underground... and now with exciting improvements like updates every ten seconds and using only 4% of the electricity it formerly used to for the task!

As the neighbor who drove past as I was installing the station on the back fence asked, "What are you, some sort of scientist?"

The big public display might have been last Monday at the oral defense, but today marked the official end of my schooling.  At 1:30 pm Pacific Standard Time, I submitted my final and complete dissertation to the UW Graduate School office, with all necessary approvals and signatures.  After a few moments of checking margins, fonts and other technical details, the woman behind the counter handed me a receipt and said "Congratulations Doctor Voght, you're done."

I'm told that in about a month I'll actually come to appreciate this concept of 'done' and stop waking up in the middle of the night panicking about figure legends and referencing, but until then, if anyone comes across the hours and hours of sleep I seem to have been missing for the past two months, could you point it in my general direction?  I'll be the motionless lump atop the mattress.

It takes a long time to print 114 pages in triplicate, and then swap in several color inserts.

The dissertation defense is finally scheduled.

Anyone in town on Monday, December 3rd at 2:00 pm is cordially invited to room S-060 in the William H. Foege Building on the UW Campus to watch me give my approximately one hour presentation on what I've spent the past six-plus years working on.

That's right -- through the amazing power of science we've managed to compress roughly 12,000 work hours into a single hour.

As of 5 pm PDT today the first submission of the thesis is officially DONE. The entire thing has been converted into a massive 103 page, 29 MB PDF document, ready to be distributed to my committee tomorrow.

Final tally: approximately 22,000 words, eighteen figures, 163 references, 78 cups of coffee, 60 cups of tea, and one rhinovirus.

So now that my warm-up is out of the way, who's up for NaNoWriMo next week?

Um, yeah.

Oh, and it's apparently going to be sunny and nearly 75 today.