Blessed by the Potato

I finally have an exam date set. May 5th it is! The email was pretty funny:

Because [Examiner #3] was not available to participate as an examiner on Potato’s defense on Friday, May 5th, I contacted [New Examiner #3] yesterday to see if he was available to replace [Examiner #3]. He contacted me a few minutes ago to say yes – he is available.

So I want to proceed with a defense date for Friday, May 5th.
(This e-mail supercedes all previous conversations – by phone or e-mail – about prospective dates that I have had with all parties involved with the defense.)

The Public Lecture will be at 9 a.m. and the oral defense at 10 a.m. Room locations to be announced.

An afternoon defense is possible as well but I plan to go with the a.m. if there are no objections.

All of you ([Examiner #1, 2, and 3], and [Admin person] as Chair) have indicated that May 5th is doable. [Supervisor] and Potato are available too.

That sort of afterthought quality to the italicized part (emphasis mine, naturally) is what’s so funny. What’s funnier is that while I find it humourous, Wayfare and her mom are sitting there busting a gut at the wording choice…

It’s nice to have a date finally set. I would have preferred a Thursday, since I want to go away the weekend after and I know I’m not getting any sleep the night before. At least it’s in the morning so I can conceivably take a nap before hitting the road. The upside is that the extra day gives me more time to procrastinate on polish my public lecture!

Well, I still don’t have a firm date for my thesis defense, which means that my thesis isn’t technically due yet, but I handed it in today anyway. It brought me a brief moment of joy. Not the sort of joy that you might expect from sexual ecstacy, nor even that brought about from a passionate kiss… more like the kind of joy you experience when you fold the laundry and realize you have exactly the right number of socks.

Of course, if it turns out that I have a May defense and thus have another week before it’s due, I might just run over and take it back to fiddle and worry until the last minute…

My defense date still hasn’t been finalized, and it’s killing me here. I’ve been making changes and corrections to my thesis like crazy here — sometimes going back and undoing changes the more I look at it. It’s a difficult process, as one person who reads it will suggest a change for a certain part, and the next person who reads it will think that part is great as it is and shouldn’t change. This is a particularly difficult process for the parts that are shall we say a little more “poetic” — the flowery wording confuses some, whereas others are grateful that it doesn’t read like a phone book for that one little part. There are also different grammatical interpretations for some parts. For example, in one place in my results, I start a sentence with “25…” and one of my supervisors keeps circling that through every revision saying I can’t start a sentence with an arabic numeral. But it would be a little awkward to change it up to start another way, and we also have a rule of thumb of not spelling out most numbers (particularly not above twelve). Of all the perversions to the “standard” rules of writing scientists willfully propagate, I would think the arabic numeral one would be right at the top. I think I could keep doing revisions eternally, but at some point I do have to hand it in. Since my date hasn’t been nailed down, there’s a chance it could be as early as April 25th — which means the thesis has to go in tomorrow.

I suppose it’s true when writers say that a story is never finished, merely abandoned.

I’m trying to put a brave face on the whole thing, saying things like “oh yeah, it’s all over tomorrow: I’m gonna be hot shit now. Lasers will shoot out of a wide variety of orifices!” But truthfully I’m terrified that there are major problems that I’ve missed (and I know of a bunch of minor ones that just aren’t going to be fixed for one reason or another). I don’t know whether I’d prefer to find out tomorrow that I have a later date so I can fix it up more, or to just have to give it in once and for all so I can stop worrying about it.

I hit the Costco here shortly after Potatomas, when I got a membership as a gift. Most of the candy I got disappeared within a few weeks, despite the big boxes. However, I still can’t even see the bottom of my box of Lotsa Fizz candy, so I think after I drop off my thesis tomorrow morning, I’ll head out to Costco and get more of that. Of course, that’s partly because each mediocre hard candy piece is secretly smuggling an explosive cargo of fizzy sugar waiting to terrorize my teeth and intestines alike, and the reason they’re still around is not due to great value, but rather to a very real fear of death in the case of overconsumption. So maybe I shouldn’t get any more…

Speaking of abusing your body, I heard of a “fun” new drinking game today. I don’t drink, but do have some appreciation for some of the drinking games out there. There are the geeky ones, such as when you (“you” being loosely applied in this case, and only applies to engineers) sit in a circle and go around counting up from person to person, but you must remember to not say any multiple of seven, clapping instead. Anyone who screws up the pattern has to take a drink. Or the cool TV-related ones, such as taking a sip every time Picard adjusts his uniform on ST:TNG, and taking a shot every time a commercial comes on promising us that next episode, yes the very next episode, they will finally kill Janeway off Voyager. On second thought, that’s pretty geeky, too. Anyhow, the point is that they can be kind of fun even when you’re sober and they can also teach you things, such as your seven times tables, or to watch TV closely, looking for subtle events. As I was saying, I heard of a new drinking game today: what you do is you eat a few handfuls of Captain Crunch cereal so that you cut up the roof of your mouth a bit lot, and then just go shot-for-shot until someone starts to tear up from the pain.

Baum had this to say when I pitched the idea to him “but why?” True, it’s not as educational as some of the other drinking games out there. It may not be as much fun, either. But man would it make for a great story later. I mean, if you’re gonna get smashed and do stupid things, you might as well go in with a plan for your nonsense, right? Most importantly, this would be hilarious for the sober person in the room to watch, and would conveniently provide plenty of Captain Crunch to go around for everyone.

Rogue waves are something of a nautical legend: recent recordings and sattelite imaging have shown that though rare, they do exist. For a long time, their existence was not quite as assured, although their possibility remained a very serious threat to ships. They could form at random, a towering wall of water slamming into a ship on an otherwise calm day. If the ship avoided sinking entirely, then there was still a good possibility that unprepared sailors on deck would have been washed overboard.

There are a number of theories as to how they might form, including focusing effects of various shorelines and underwater ridges, as well as simple non-linear interactions between waves, leading to occasional “spikes” — a summation of the energy of a number of adjacent waves into one large one before separating again. While large in magnitude, they are rare and tend to be very short-lived (which is why few of them manage to break on the shore where most observers are most of the time).

While not anywhere near as large as those seen on the ocean, we did run into a rogue wave once on the lake by the cottage. On a reasonably calm afternoon, the lake rocking by maybe 20 cm, we were out in our old boat, a ~14′, 4-person jetboat. All of a sudden, we hit a wave that was more like 2 m (6 ‘) high. Fortunately, nobody was thrown overboard, but it did kill the engine and had us really shaken for a while. We believe that one was caused by the wake of a lake freighter that had passed some time ago; it’s hard to say how long those wakes propagate.

On another occasion, while on the scuba trip to Jamaica in high school, we were on the boat returning from our night dive. Suddenly, we hit something and the boat tilted 45° or more, and came almost instantly to a stop. We didn’t lose any students (who managed to hold on to their seats), but one of the crewmembers who was standing got thrown overboard, as did most of the creatures we had collected to study (which were residing in buckets in the centre of the deck). We never quite figured out exactly what caused the mishap, but it was immortalized on the shirts we had printed afterwards. My theory is that the pilot missed the channel back into the lagoon and we hit the reef at full speed; many others hold that it was a rogue wave.

Today, as things are finally starting to settle back to some semblance of normalacy in my life (though to be honest, I doubt I’d recognize normal if I saw it now), I was hit with a rogue wave. After months of delays, I have finally completed my thesis (though it still isn’t perfected, the last few change requests have been more about formatting than content), and the graduate office is busy contacting examiners to find an exam date for me. I took some time to get some other much-procrastinated work done (my OGSST application, plus some software installation for the new imaging analysis box), when out of no where the other member of my committee walks in and says we have to meet tomorrow: there are major problems with my thesis that we need to talk about.

Someone throw me a line, I think I’m drowning.

So one of my professors is talking openly of retiring in a few years, and about how I’m going to be one of his last students (yeesh, he’ll never retire if he waits for me to finish my doctorate!). Recently, he was looking at his pension plan, the money he put away for himself on his own, etc., and ran the math.

He says that if you go through school and get your PhD, then go into academia, get a pension and retire, you’d be worse off than if you simply dropped out and got a decent paying job, and put the money away. Even though by the time you were of retirement age you would have a pension and be making more (by his calculations) it just didn’t make up for that 6-10 year head start at such a huge lead. Of course, his calculation assumed that if you did go get a good job, you’d continue to live like a grad student “and no one would willingly live like that. Once you have the money, you’ll go out and spend it, you won’t save it for the long term.” He also didn’t mention that he left out how very lucky you’d have to be in the academic path to only spend a year or two in post-doc, and to pick up a decent paying, pensioned position in your 30’s.

This is all stuff I knew, but hadn’t been hit over the head with it from people who did make that choice.

My dad talked about some of that this weekend too. My sister’s having a little bit of trouble in school, so we’ve been talking about how important it is to stick with it, and how vital education is… and then after she was gone, we talked about how very little it’s worth, and how perverse it is that after your master’s degree, the longer you spend in school, the less valuable you become.

Reminds me of the great Simpsons episode when Bart was playing with the pony tail he cut off a grad student in the theatre.

Bart: “Hey, look at me, I’m a grad student. I’m 30 years old and made six-hundered dollars last year.
Marge: “Don’t make fun of grad students, they just made a terrible life choice.”

I’m not quite 30, but I’m close enough that I’m starting to question just what exactly it is I’ve gotten into. At the beginning, I’d hoped to breeze through and be done and ready to start one of those family things when I was 30. At the time I was stupid and arrogant, thinking that I was smart and hard working, and actually thought I could finish my degree a term early (that is, I started in January, a bit of an off-term, and hoped to finish at the same time as the people who started in September that year). Now I’m 26, I noticed in the mirror this morning that my grey hairs are no longer a small pocket of unrest on my brow with some scattered dissidents in the fringes, I’ve got riots and organizations forming on both sides of the globe. I feel old, and it’s strange how it sort of hits you like a sledgehammer at times. I’m only a day older than yesterday, but today all of a sudden, I feel it.

I’ve gone off talking about my hair, and I don’t mean to be too vain about it. I know that I am being a little vain about it, although I honestly don’t think other people can really tell. Aside from the one prominent group on my forehead, all the others seem to be behind other hairs, so they really only show when my hair is sitting a little funny. Plus, my normal hairs are a little shiny, so it’s hard to say for sure whether that’s white hair you’re seeing, or just a particular reflection sheening off a youthful black one. (And the less said about the very obvious problem with my aging hair, around back, the better).

I was so busy with my thesis when I turned 25 that I just never really had time to get into a good quarter-life-crisis funk. I don’t really have the time now, but I guess this sort of thing won’t wait forever.

My goals in life were never very lofty. Scratch that — I did have some lofty goals, but at the same time realized how improbable they were, and they lived side-by-side with more realistic ones. For example, I wanted to be an astronaut and a science fiction writer, but knew those were pretty much impossible. I did, however, think that even if I could never live off being a writer, I might have at least written a novella or two to print off and chuck at my friends for want of something less valuable to throw. And I figured I might have had a freelance article or short story published in a magazine, so I could at least be a serious hobbiest. I am fairly pleased with how the website has developed, especially since I went to the all-out blog format: it’s a lot easier to put up a ton of unreadable garbage when you don’t feel any compulsion to make it fit into any overriding heirarchy, or to have individual articles/rants stand on their own in any sort of timeless fashion. Getting people to call me doctor figured in there to some degree, but I reasoned I would be done by 29, or 30 at the latest (4 years left on that deadline: it’s been done before… but in this field?).

Anyway, enough of that for now, since there’s not much I can do about any of it except stare in the mirror and shake my head.