To give you a glimpse at what I do at school every day, here's the introduction to a paper I've been working on.

 Most of us have experienced the surprising evocativeness of odor. We have all been allured by a perfume or cologne, repulsed by a body odor, or like moths to a flame, drawn to a kitchen or smoking backyard grill by the mouth-watering aroma of a favorite dish. Scents, as they waft slowly past our noses, conjure long-buried memories and emotions, and they even influence our behavior. Yet, we do not typically spend large portions of our days analyzing the significance of the many odors that are the subtle subtext of our immediate environments. Why is this the case? It seems intuitively obvious that it is because we have more pressing matters at hand. When we attend dinner parties, it is not particularly important to discern whether that faint flowery smell is coming from a rose in the vase on the shelf or the carnation in that man’s lapel, but it is important to listen to his banal work-related anecdote while we, with furtive glances, assess the degree to which our children’s roughhousing is going to affect that vase. So the question for this paper is not whether our behavior is influenced by scent-related information, because it is undeniable that scent does help us navigate our social worlds and rear our children. The question is instead whether the same scent can have domain specific effects according to cues in the environment.

Throw in a bunch of emails, a scant few interpersonal interactions, and a bunch of thinking, reading, and memorizing, and there you have it.

I haven't had a whole lot to talk about this week. For the most part, I've just been keeping my head down and trying to get things done as the semester winds to a close. I finished one final paper and am almost done with a second (which I should be able to finish up tomorrow). All that will be left after that is my neuroscience final on Friday. All that will be left after that is several more years of school, punctuated by a bunch of insignificant accomplishments, a career, and a short retirement. The end.

When I arrived at my new school in August, they told all the incoming students about the importance of getting involved in research. They said that there was nothing more important to our academic careers and that we should be as active as possible.

A fellow student and I decided that, if we worked together on most everything, we could get twice as much done. As it turns out, we could. In fact, we did so much research that they changed the rules about how much any one student is allowed to do during a semester, because apparently, we were taking away opportunities from other students and faculty. Oops.

I always have tended to over-do things.

I play basketball 1 - 2 times a week at noon at the campus rec center. It's sometimes fun, sometimes not. You'll recall some of my previous posts about altercations with professors and such. Anyway, today I had a great time. Most of the fun had to do with the fact that I made almost every shot I took, including about 10 in a row, and I scored the last two baskets in a 15 - 14 thriller that ended with me shaking one defender and, with another in my face, draining a long fade-away three-pointer for the win.

Someday I hope to be able to have fun while (a) losing and (b) playing poorly. Today, fortunately, didn't need to be that day.

This was posted anonymously online somewhere and then reposted here. I found it via here. It's a great commentary.

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.
At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to ny house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it's valuables thanks to the local police department.
I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.