Monthly Archives: July 2005

African Dialects

(11:52:54) David B.: sdfsd sd;lfksdf poweriqtn wet03mfskl
(11:53:03) David B.: I am practicing my african dialects
— EDIT — (more added below)
(12:03:01) David B.: speakers come next
(12:03:02) Brock Tice: *sigh*
(12:03:06) Brock Tice: no kidding
(12:03:10) Brock Tice: not till fall at this point
(12:03:16) Brock Tice: I’m too poor
(12:03:19) David B.: replace those first and then we will do the head unit…..
(12:03:19) Brock Tice: need more paychecks
(12:03:27) David B.: you can beg for money in Africa…..
(12:03:33) Brock Tice: yeah that’ll go well
(12:03:40) Brock Tice: they apparently think all white people are millionaires
(12:03:47) David B.: Poor student needs speakers for car…..
(12:03:49) Brock Tice: or equivalently wealthy, if you get my drift
(12:03:56) Brock Tice: except how do you write that in french?
(12:04:03) David B.: the starving people would love it and feel sorry for you……
(12:04:45) David B.: have fun, I have to meet my mom for lunch…..
(12:04:53) Brock Tice: okay, see you later
(12:06:18) Brock Tice: btw, it’s le pauvre étudiant a besoin de l’argent pour des haut-parleurs de voiture

(David’s a fellow Ph.D. student in the lab)

Countdown

T-120 hours and counting

Well, just under, since it’s now 10:59 and my flight leaves at 10:50 on Saturday. That will begin my journey to Niger. I have a lot of lab-related work to do. I need to get my ascending ramp simulations set up so that I can load them into the queue before I leave. I have to work on the regional ischemia paper. I need to print out the information on how I manage our lab server in case something goes wrong with it.

And then, there’s the Africa stuff. I have to finish my shopping list, go shopping, check inventory, recheck inventory, pack, probably deal with various problems packing, set everything in order at home and lab for a two week absence, arrange for transportation to the airport, pull a couple benjamins in cash, and send myself off.

Put the Lime in the Coconut

I’m giving a 25-minute talk this Thursday, July 14th at 17:00 at the Hilton downtown. I’m pretty sure you have to be registered for the SIAM conference to come see it, but here’s the information just in case you want to know. I’m part of a minisymposium: (schedule).

I have spent most of my time since returning to New Orleans working on this presentation, and it should be nice and sharp by Thursday night. I’ll try to get pictures or something.

It’s late. Bedtime.

Technical Writing

Technical writing, or my attempt at it, is killing me. It’s killing my motivation to write. It seems like writing can be technical or readable, choose one.

Is it because it’s hard to fit what needs to be said into the provided space? It seems that whenever I attempt to write something that’s readable, it’s critiqued as too colloquial or the like. People are used to seeing jargon in journals.

I know that it’s important to be precise — that it’s necessary to convey exactly what was done, or exactly what happened. I understand that there are certain terms and lingo that make a paper more likely to be published. I’m having a hard time reconciling that with readability.

It’s probably just that I’ve never done this before. I’ve never really had to work at writing. Typically, the words just come to me and I put them on the page. A reread or two to make sure that I didn’t switch thoughts midsentence, and the paper gets an ‘A.’ That worked before. It most certainly does not work now.

I read two books, you know, on how to write well. One addressed nonfiction in general with a section on scientific writing, while the other specifically covered journal-grade scientific writing. Perhaps they were lousy books, or I took the wrong lessons from them.

Why the passive voice everywhere?

Argh… any pointers on how to do this correctly would be appreciated. I just went through my advisor’s comments on some of my drafts and tried to figure out what I did wrong. This post is my brief break before digging back in and trying to fix what’s wrong. I’m tempted to start over with sentence fragments and thoughts and then rewrite.