Wednesday, April 18, 2007

passed my master's defense!

yay! so today was my master's thesis defense. and it went swimmingly. a bunch of people showed up and asked some good questions, and it was great. my committee talked for a couple minutes and then it was official. now all I have to do is make a few small changes to my actual thesis and then submit that next week. and then I'll have my M.S. in physics. woo hoo!
the phd stuff will continue in the fall, only in the college of education. it will be a good change and I'm really looking forward to it.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died yesterday. He was my favorite author and a huge inspiration to me. Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five are probably two of the most interesting books I have ever read. His humanist perspective on life and sharp wit made him truly unique and unforgettable. He will be sorely missed.

"Listen: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at the stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes'." (from Slaughterhouse-Five)

As Jon Stewart said about him, "He made my life bearable." I hope that everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

So it goes.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Al Gore LIVE

yesterday I went to see Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth presentation here at ASU. I saw the movie in the theater last summer and was definitely touched by it then. but that was not even close to the same impact that seeing him give the presentation in person was. most of it was the same, but he actually added quite a bit of new slides and data and had taken out some stuff as well. it seemed more focused and his passion about the subject translated much better in the huge auditorium than it had across the movie screen. I'm really glad we had the opportunity to see that. :)

oh, and thesis status: I am submitting it tomorrow (!) for format review (ridiculous) and my defense is scheduled for april 18th. let's hope all the paperwork gets through ok so I don't have to worry about it much longer.