opaltiger

Yes. Isn't it wonderful?

Hi we ended up going to spoons and a tattoo parlour?? Sorry I'm not sure I'll be around for a bit yet :c when will you sleep? Whatcha doing? ^o.o^

Looking at the unanimous results thus far for your capital punishment debate thread, might it be more productive to discuss what should be done with convicted murders or would that warrant its own thread?

hi I'm at a sleepover :o I would feel weird going to my e-mail, but apparently not the forums. hi I got your text hi ^o.o^ have a good day out ^o.o^ bye ^o.o^

It's nowhere near as bad as R! I've done very little work in MATLAB overall; this particular class is the first time I've had to use it seriously. I find it to be a pretty indifferent language, but it does have a ton of functionality, even if that functionality is implemented more nicely in other, more specialized environments.

My doctoral program is in computational biology... I'll be doing mostly genetics/molecular stuff, but other people in my program work on things like primate social behavior, fish schooling, biofilm modeling, and so on. My primary proposed thesis topic is a pretty straightforward computational motif-finding project, and my riskier-but-more-fun secondary topic is on using automata to quantify genome rearrangement patterns.

Sounds pretty awesome! And that's cool, basically nobody knows what they want to do with their life, myself included. I'm hoping to take some philosophy of science classes on the sly before they eject me from school for good.

I'm in graduate school right now, mostly throwing things together for the end-of-semester crunch and looking forward to my qualifying exams at the end of January. Right this moment I'm programming my first MATLAB movie. :O

Oh yeah, totes Ken Ham.

How are you doing, btw? Are you still at Cambridge? It seems like you'd be finishing up your degree pretty soon...

Fascinating, but really creepy, to me! It honestly does sound pretty plausible, until you realize that there's no actual data there and they're just taking the Bible's world as truth and seeing how they can contort the natural world so that it conforms. It's like they're writing some kind of weird Earth-AU fanfic, but with citations.

I have a kind of morbid curiosity that makes me want to visit the Creation Museum, but I know that if I went I would probably just get the sads in a big way, and of course I never want to give them any of my money ever.

Of course! I was remiss to imply otherwise. Even more entertaining when you can see kerfuffles real-time, though... just today went to a seminar where the presenter was talking about evolution in a population he'd been studying, based on changes in the frequency of a particular allele. One of the professors in the audience was all, "Wait, how is that evolution?", to which another audience member said immediately, "How is that not evolution?" They started going back and forth about it while the presenter was kind of trying to interject and get back to his talk, while the graduate student next to me started whispering, "Fight... fight... fight..." It was hilarious.

Non-scientists have no idea how much of a schoolyard dynamic there can be in academia in particular. Sometimes it's sad, but sometimes it's just hilarious.

Ah, no that's okay. :) Thank you for offering, though.