Small Gray Matters

Seems like it’s been a while (over a year!) since I wrote anything in this space. I was originally going to use CNS ‘08 as an excuse to post something short and uninformative (again) about people wandering around poster halls looking lost, or seagulls eating pieces of fish tacos on the pier. But then I forgot. So instead I’ll babble a bit about what I’ve been doing over the past year:

• I got married.
• I published a few first author papers in reasonably good journals, and have a dozen or so other projects in various stages of rejection / submission / preparation / imagination. (It’s interesting how the number of projects you’re involved with magically balloons when you let yourself include manuscripts “in preparation” in the count.)
• I lined up a post-doc for next year (pending funding!) that I’m really excited about.
• I made a little bit of headway on my dissertation. Which is a nice way of saying I now know what the topic will be.
• I learned a lot of interesting things–some useful, mostly not.
• I picked up another musical instrument.
• I met twelve new people. I know, because I counted! No, just kidding. It’s more like fifteen.
• I visited some interesting places. Well, a handful, really. Where ‘handful’ means ‘two’.

This is a pretty standard list of things that could happen to a person over the course of a year, and you may be thinking to yourself that I lead a pretty uneventful academic life. Well, you’d be mistaken. Rest assured I’ve deliberately left out a good half dozen bullet points detailing my intricate dealings with petty dictators and rogue government agencies. One day soon I will tell you daredevil stories about high-altitude computation of paired t-tests that will fill your belly up with suspense and wonder. But that day is probably not today.

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