the summer now begins

My breakfast consisted of five strips of bacon, two easy-over eggs, a banana, a glass of milk and some toast with marmite. No pancakes though. I guess I'm not getting the nutrition I need.

I am now done for the term. I presented my 701 presentation this afternoon, was grilled a bit by my profs, and am now home, about to go get some Wendy's for dinner. I can now truly move into "summer" mode; there is much prep work to do over the next few weeks. Unfortunately my intent to leave in the middle of this month will not come to fruition. Ed's away from Monday until the 17th, and Phil's away from the 12th to the 24th. So we've booked the truck for June 1st, and will depart then instead. The intervening time will not be a vacation for grum, though. Oh no. I'll complain about it later; for now I'm just too happy to be done and free for the weekend!

Regarding the presentation... it went well, I thought, but was not easy to prepare. Imagine the following: You are to prepare a presentation. The subject is the geology of a certain area, and your information is to be gleaned from as many different sources as possible. The presentation is to be 15 minutes long, and (here's the kicker)... you are presenting to the two men who have contributed the most of anyone in the world to the literature you have been researching.

How do you present to an audience like that?!! The figures I used had been drawn by them... the data I used had either been written or reviewed by them... frankly I felt a little silly and totally intimidated. I guess the problem stemmed from my impression that the person doing a presentation generally knows a little bit more about it than at least some part of his/her audience. The discussion following my weak little spiel was long and actually extremely interesting... as they pointed out mistakes I'd made, but primarily lectured me on the detailed stuff I'd missed. In my defence you get no impression, from reading papers, of the behind-the-scenes scientific debates between authors, the different schools of thought, or the problems people don't know how to address (because if they don't understand something, they won't write about it because they don't like admitting that they don't understand). So my profs enlightened me. I got no impression of their impression of my talk. Actually I know my talk wasn't great; I put most of the effort into the paper, which they had at this point only had time to skim (seeing as I only gave it to them this morning).

Anyway I suggest you try lecturing the experts on something you don't fully understand sometime. It's a highly embarrassing faux-pas to discover you're doing so, accidentally, in a social context... its even more fun to deliberately do so in an academic context, for marks.

If there's even one person there who doesn't know the stuff it's okay... because you can be hugely general and "dumbed down" for them, giving large amounts of general background information to run down the clock in the guise of "scientific accessibility". And you can get away with giving no specifics because surely the experts present understand you're just trying to help the rest to understand the subject. At least you can fool yourself into thinking so.

Executive summary: It wasn't easy, or particularly fun. But I do feel confident that the paper is good, at least in terms of grammar and spelling and my use of good terms that make it sound like I know the score.

The score: Mica Creek 1, Grum 0. Now awaiting the results of round 2: reviews of my paper.
The final round is the mark for the course... and whether I feel it's decent.

Since Ed's away for the next 2 weeks I won't see the results of round 2 until then.

Okay bye for now... I'll soon post one of my nice sunset photos from my office window from the evening of the all-nighter on Wednesday night.