Burns Night

The best bits are at the start and end:

Some hae meat and canna eat,

And some would eat that want it;

But we hae meat, and we can eat,

And sae the Lord be thankit.

Then this:

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,               (sonsie = cheeky)
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,                 (aboon = above)
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

etc. etc. etc.

Of course, the Loyal Toast...

Hmmm. Then a toast to the "lassies" (whatever they are...)
and then maybe some dancing.

Crazy!!!

(PS In case you were wondering, yes, this post has very little to nothing to do with astronomy or thesis writing....)

Things I'm finding out when writing-up (1)

A reason not to wholly go on citation counts.

This paper apparently only has 87 citations. WTF??

Desperate Housewives

Just relaxing this evening, catching the end of Desperate Housewives (one of Dez's favs! ;-)

Anyway, another v. good day at the office, fuelled by the ever-efficient Prof TS and some good, early-doors feedback on the AAOmega clustering Letter/paper. Thanks to Sawangwit (Durham) for providing some v. nice Bruzual-Charlot models for my riz-plots. Have a couple of things to check first thing tomorrow morning but things looking kinda nice.

For the third, sorry, I think fourth attempt, am trying to get the easymosiac going on the Spitzer COSMOS 8micron data.

In other news, Bielby (Durham) now has >500 LBGs. Nice. Very nice. Room 301 is rivaling, maybe even leading, the other postgrad offices. Hee hee hee!!

not much news really

Current page count: 112

Not mega-progress, but Ross et al. (2007a) is coming along v. nicely and in "prelim-final" draft stage with the supervisor...

TBs Viva on Thursday, 18th January, 9am.
DSs Viva is apparently on a Wednesday....

Good luck boys!!

When the night has come and the land is dark and the moon is only light we'll see...

Happy and Healthy New Years Everyone!!

Hmmm, what will oh7 bring.....

Well, now that I'm (kinda) in full writing-up mode, the "research" nature of this blog will probably take a slight hit, but instead to replace that we're gonna have a "Thesis Progress Monitor" - courtesy of
Butterley and Saunter (Durham). Ha ha ha!!!!

Anyway, NPRs thesis is currently 108 pages in length (probably an errorbar of about 2 pages on that due to formatting etc.). The chapters are basically all in place and I'm beginning to get that nice "seeing how everything fits into the bigger picture" feeling.

Said thesis will probably not win any prizes but I'm really feel it will be worth a PhD qualification.