Friday, January 18, 2008

smells familiar

this is a picture of where i live. that is why i have not posted in a while. i'm still alive- doing research for work, in the middle of my 4th yr of graduate school, starting to write my thesis. i like it here and i don't, but this is where i am.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah, I love that smell. It's weird, though, now that I am married and am a father that I don't have much time to spend endless hours in libraries and bookstores like I used to in Chitown. Weird, since I should be spending more time in the the school library now that I'm a grad student. All I can say is "Thank God Al gore invented the internet!"

elnellis said...

you were a book worm in college, it always amazed me. i didn't fall in love with books till i married ruth. it's a good smell... one that digital technology wont ever match. not sure how i feel about ebooks and the kindel... something fails to be translated.
can't wait to see you this summer, do you have to train for this incredible physical feat?

Unknown said...

Yeah, I don't think I'll ever be able to read ebooks. The internet sure is amazing for research, though. I'll bet 95% of my sources come from online resources (journals and the like) and digital data.

I'm going to start riding my bike to school again this semester, and that should be training enough (8 miles each way on a single-speed). You can only train so much for something like that before diminishing returns set in. After a few 100+ mile days in a row, your body just gets used to feeling beat up.

Unknown said...

I like the redesigned sidebar.

The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems sounds really interesting. The interconnected concept relates to complexity theory, which I was trying to describe to you guys at chrinistincliclese's bachelor party. I just took a seminar class on complexity theory this past semester. It furthered my understanding of the concept, but I would really like to integrate the ideas in to my research in the future. I'm really interested in cellular automata
as a modeling methodology. Rather than reducing phenomena to their constituent parts, as rationalistic research does, cellular automata assumes that the "rules" governing the relationship between the parts are as important as the parts themselves. In other words, it assumes that the "wole is more than just the sum of its parts."