I’ve been up to some fairly random stuff over the last few days (and not nearly enough working on projects). Just for fun:
- PhD Comics! Jorge Cham, the creator of PhD Comics was speaking at Cornell Thursday night. He was a very humorous speaker and it was a nice way to spend an hour and a half, even if it did mean I missed Grey’s. After learning about the power of procrastination of its benefits, several friends commented that the talk left them feeling much better about their life. I didn’t get that feeling, but then again I’m happily writing this rather than my cosmology paper right now, so perhaps I didn’t need a pep talk about procrastination.
- Expand Your Horizons Saturday was the EYH conference at Cornell. I was a buddy – meaning I spent the day with a girl whose parents couldn’t come. I had fun attending workshops with her, but I was beat by the end of the day. I felt much older than I should thanks to an aching leg/ankle/foot. Sadly, they weren’t all on the same side, so I couldn’t even just favor one side of my body. I left as soon as the conference was over, skipping out on the free food at the reception to go home and take a much needed nap. Fun tidbit of the day. I wore my favorite green pants in the morning without a whole lot of forethought. Turns out the volunteer T-shirts were dark green, so I had a very green day.
- SETI Lunch: Galaxy lunch attendance was high this week (standing room only) as we had a visitor talking about SETI for the day. He was arguing that SETI will fail because if alien intelligences existed they would have come to Earth already. His argument rested on a premise that you could assign human motivations/psychology to alien intelligences, which I am not convinced of. Regardless, it was an interesting talk and it was fun to watch people’s reactions. Read the rest of this entry »
