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Just for the record, while pulling an all-nighter gets easier with practice and caffeine, they haven't gotten any easier with age. The worst part is learning just how much longer the recovery period takes. Still, it is amazing what a few carefully placed cups of coffee and just a few earnest cat-naps can do to pull you through to the weekend.
A little bit of homework from the good folks at DPI:
These are a pair of 'unknown' Phlaeothripids whom I need to identify and familiarize myself with. I should be thrilled - they are more than twice the size of the thrips I will be working with.
"My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known."
- attributed to the wife of the Bishop of Worcester, in reaction to the infamous debate between TH Huxley and the Bishop Wilberforce
While I do not subscribe to the "great man" theory of history, there is no question that Charles Darwin happened to be the right scientist in the right place at the right time. Spurred on to publication by Alfred Russel Wallace, the "father of biogeography", his observations from years of collected research led him to conclusions that shook the foundations of biology and the society built atop that platform. His work brought forth a mechanism by which the whole of diversity might be explained within the context of geological history. When linked to the evidence of heredity first explored by Mendel, and then confirmed at the molecular level by Watson and Crick (and Franklin!), it provided the unifying synthesis of modern biology.
As I am dedicating my life to following the science that he helped to establish, it is with some interest that I note that my own life has from time to time, accidentally fallen into Darwin's footsteps. I have touched the same armoured glyptodontids that he helped to unearth in Southern Argentina at the Museo de la Plata. I have stood in the home he kept, and looked through the study to the desk at which he wrote much of his work. Lately, I have seen the villainous vinchuca that was to bring him low in his later years with Chagas disease in a new light, and finally, I have stood atop his grave at Westminster Abbey in London.
Everyone has their heroes.
Happy Darwin Day, everybody.
It appears that my apartment complex has realized what a relative deal living here offers. They have raised the monthly rental rates by nearly a hundred dollars. Should I care to renew my lease now, only six months in, they will shave fifty dollars off of that final rate. I guess it is time to start looking for a new home, which is kind of a shame because I have come to like it here. Possibly more important to consider is the thought that my master's funding will last at most one more year - by which point I should be done and ready to move on to a doctoral program - and probably somewhere far far away from here.
I don't believe that I am entirely over this head cold I've been fighting with for the last week. I fell asleep on the floor beneath my desk for about two hours. It was oddly comfortable, as there is a considerable pile of paperwork hiding underneath there to nest in, and I had my gym bag as a pillow. Still, I need to get up and moving and more work done.
Wow, Steve Jobs essentially agrees with me about the nature of DRM. The difference being that with control over nearly seventy percent of the market for digital music and being in possession of the biggest winner in the personal electronics that will play the music for the foreseeable future... what he says may actually change things.
Keep thinking different.
