Smithy of Lies

I have vague memories of it, but I never really thought about it before. My mom told me when I was young, I used to always want to write with my left hand, but every time I did, she'd whack me in the center of my palm with a bundle of chopsticks. Something about how it will help me in the future, and when she was young, the nuns that raised her said writing with the left-hand was bad or evil or something. (She also used to have curly hair and the nuns said that it was the sign of the devil, but she really loved the nuns and they loved her.)

This is the project I pulled an all nighter for. 12 midnight (I worked till midnight today) to 7 am. I just crashed and now I'm up at 2PM. Dx I'm so glad I don't have to work or go to class today. xD I do have a birthday party to attend though. Oh lawd, I already feel like a grad student.

I think I'm set on where I want to do Archaeology this Summer. I was initially planning to do Balkan Archaeology, but I saw this opportunity and I couldn't pass it up. It's with the University of Pittsburgh and its in Mongolia. Hehe, sounds awesome. It's only $1,400 bucks for the program fee too. Which includes transport, training, and meals. It will be shorter than the England Field School, but that's fine.

So basically, I figured it out. I'm in love with archaeology and that's what I want to spend my life (or at least this first half of my life doing). I reassessed why I wanted to be a doctor in the first place and it was simply because I wanted to help the people in front of me. Basically I'd imagine what it would feel like for someone in front of my to be hurt and injured and I couldn't do anything to save them at all. That's why I wanted to be a doctor.

Sometimes I just need to stop feeling sorry for myself and buck up dammit.

But I bet they find it annoying when they do…

By: Christopher Faber
28 October 2009
EVE 10

Darwin-monkey-wallace-cjmadden

Two-thousand and nine marks a great year for recognition of amazing advances made in the field of Natural History. Or at the very least, it marks a great year for giving a lot of attention to this one guy in history: Charles Darwin, (I’m sure you’ve heard of him somewhere; he was really big back in the 1860’s; just had his 200^th birthday, you know him). On the eve of the 150^th anniversary of his hard-hitting book on the mechanisms explaining why certain animals look different from each other (i.e. like one species of a Galapagos finch and another species of Galapagos finch; or like one species of Galapagos finch and a zebra), I, being the party pooper that I am, would like to bring attention to the stealer of his thunder: Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin was a confidant of Wallace, and Wallace spoke to Darwin about many of his ideas. It was no surprise then that Wallace should send first to Darwin his essay titled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type;” a work that had outlined the very principles of the concept Darwin had been working on for years but refused to publish: Natural Selection. Of course, faced with the possibility that someone else might get credit for his idea first, Charlie-boy finally got past his bout of procrastination and raced to publish his “Origin of Species”. As we know it today, the live-by motto of academia is “Publish or Die”, a harsh rule suggesting that if you don’t have the mental fitness to publish your findings immediately, another individual with no such incapacity to write out a quick abstract and follow up, will outcompete you for resources (public eye, academic notoriety, etc.) claiming the find as their own, leaving you to wither away into scholarly obscurity while they thrive and live on to produce more successful offspring research with their newfound grant money and other benefits. Ironically sounds a bit like natural selection, eh? So why did Darwin not publish as soon as this bombshell of an idea popped into his head? Well according to Sir Julian Huxley, (descendant of Thomas Henry Huxley, known to be Darwin’s Bulldog, a loyal sort of companion that no good scientist should be without 

[– wait… What was that boy? Someone is attempting to do a satire on Darwin before me? Well sic’im Huxley! That’s right, go for the throat! …Ahem-]), Darwin had a “cautious, and almost diffident, temperament [which] held him back from publishing his conclusions.”

... intend to become a permanent citizen in Australia. =/

Basically at this point in my life, I'm at the crossroads. I made the decision before, but it never really hit, and I didn't know how much I'd really love the alternative.

Sometimes when people are in a slump, while it may seem that the most useful thing you can do is to give them advice, what they really might need is simply some encouragement. And a "do your best". Chances are, if you thought it up, it's a conclusion they could have very well drawn by themselves a long time ago, and simply need a bit of motivation to put it into practice.

I just found an anime movie that is probably going to be one of my favorites of all time. I'm surprised I've never heard of it before, seeing as how it's such a great movie. It has an art style reminiscent of Spirited Away and a somewhat similar plot. It's called Brave Story.