opaltiger

happy birthday

Happy birthday! Congrats on being older (but still not old enough).

Psssh, what's getting turned out onto the streets when it means you have the opportunity to hang with your most awesome admin buddies ever in the most happening place on earth while partaking of the hippest, most jivetastic rap musical about a semi-obscure Revolutionary War figure ever? Where is the Life you've lost in living within your means? Where are the sick rhymes you've lost in wanting to keep a roof over your head? How can you even live with yourself?

Props for not being a huge enabler, though. XD

Aww, well, August probably wouldn't have worked for me anyway, but it's always frustrating to have a near miss like that. We'll just have to convene sometime later!

So I hear you've got some "real-life responsibilities" or, like, "reasonable priorities" that are standing in the way of an admin party in NYC.

I'm so disappointed in you.

Happy birthday!

Hey, happy birthday! I hope your day goes well.

At least I still landed the next best thing.

Well that wasn't a horrifically vague response or anything! Good to hear you've got some fun Minor Life Events going on; I love those. Going to Japan sounds wonderful, of course. Do you usually go to the same place, or have you been travelling around?

I'm just inching closer to my hopefully-last year of grad school. Doing the lab thing, doing the TA thing, nothing too exciting, really. I'll be glad to be done!

You. >:| What have you been up to? It's been ages!

Happy birthday!

Well happy birthday :D I hope it is an excellent one :)

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.