Perfecto

I'm wondering if anyone out in the blogosphere may know anything about my dog's ailment.

Sugar Mama and I have a wonderful dog (code-)named Perfecto. Last Spring he came down with a mysterious nervous system ailment. It was peripheral, so only his legs were affected. The onset was sudden. Within the course of a day he went from normal to paralysed. He has steadily improved in the past 8 months, but is still only 80%. Unfortunately, we have no reliable diagnosis. The affect of the ailment was to all limbs, but his left side has been slower to recover than his right. And his front limbs came back much slower than the back ones. No limb is yet 100%. It has been deemed too "general" to be a stroke. Various nerve diseases have been mentioned (including the dog version of Guillian-Barre syndrome). Nothing quite fits his case, though. So I thought I'd throw this out to the ether and see if anyone else has dealt with some form of paralysis + recovery in their pet.

In other news: Happy New Year!

Elopement party

Went to a good friend's elopement party this weekend. He and his new wife eloped on kayaks by getting married in a tiny town in the Inside Passage (Alaska).

His sister is a hoot. One of those scientists who gets to work in a wet lab. I always love to hear stories from that side of science. Test tubes, rats, chemicals. Turns out that post-traumatic stress disorder is induced in rats by putting said rat in a straight jacket and shocking it. Stuff like that is shocking (no pun intended) for someone who works purely "in-silico". So I'm always impressed by those sorts of stories.

Holiday Cheer

Round I, FIGHT!

Gave a "first round practice" talk today for a conference. The talk is to be a 30 minute presentation on a paper describing a fair amount of work. The paper was submitted to a conference with a very general science theme, and (woohoo!) got accepted for a presentation. As I am a conference presentation virgin I'm spending oodles of extra time on it. In fact, the actual talk is not until late January. But here at Bitterly Cold U., we have a graduate seminar which provides a nice forum for "dry runs" like this. As the semester is coming to a close, today happened to be the last possible one until next semester.

I've found creating the talk to be rather challenging. Part of the problem is that 30 minutes is rather short. Nevertheless, it's a reasonable chunk of time that I can work with. No, the issue has been depth. An age-old problem I suppose. It's one of my first experiences banging my head against this particular stone, though. An added hurdle to the depth issue is the broad topic of the conference. Does that mean my audience will likely include many non-mathy persons? If so, how broad do I go? If the talk is too broad and shallow, it'll run aground. Nevertheless, if it's mostly non-mathy folk in the audience I would hate to drown them. I have so far erred on the side of too shallow. But this goes against my inclination, which is be far more thorough (as per my mathematical training). Luckily, I have a little time.

The talk in front of my fellow grad students went smoothly. It showed me a few places for improvement (places for clarifying bullets/slides). And it was only 25 minutes, so I even have time to include them.

Maybe I'll do round II in front of my running buddies. That would be a thoroughly broad audience. Nice litmus test....

Free Will

Never fear, this is not a sudden break into the philosophy realm. It just seemed a nice place to post a belated discovery of mine: http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures. The series on the Free Will Theorem are stellar.

Drat

Why is it so hard to finish stuff? I started November thinking that I only had a few things to do. All items seemed either, intermediate, or slightly hard. But none of them were time suckers. So some time here, and time there and they should almost finish themselves. Ya right. Here is December, and not even the easy stuff is finished. sigh. Of course, I've made progress, but so often progress in grad school has been followed by a step back. It's usually two steps forward, one step back. The issue seems to be that I'm working on the fringe of my advisor's expertise. It's exciting for both of us, sort of burst of light followed by groping in the dark. But there is very little efficiency to the process. Hopefully, when all is said and done, it is worth it (and I finish this god damned degree!).

So, as we usher in December, I am reminded to buckle down once again.