Wow, I wasn't even trying!

[kareina]

Today I opted to start reading over what has been written thus far in my thesis, so that I can give my advisor a reasonable draft next week, since he is out of town the following week, and trips are often a good time for academics to check over their student's work. I managed to read & revise 22 pages of one of the chapters (which is currently 44 pages long), and when I decided that it was time to put it down for the night I did a word count, and discovered that whilst I may have deleted some words, I've also added some, as it is now 424 words longer than it was yesterday! I suspect that it will take me a couple of days to go over all of what I've written so far and make it say what I meant to say at the first typing. As soon as I've accomplished that and sent the draft off to him, I can get started on the next chapter and resume the fun part of watching the total number of words grow!

The morning involved errands down the hill. I had a document delivery request arrive *in paper*, so I had to go pick it up from the library (I very much prefer the pdf files I normally get when I ask for a copy of a journal article!), and while I was there I also made a photocopy of an article I've been meaning to collect from a journal our library takes only in paper copy. I wish it wouldn't do that! Sure, paper is nice to hold, but it is *not* as convenient as an electronic copy! Particularly as the bound versions tend not to open very well, making it difficult to photocopy them. I heard sometime back that one geology journal has decided to phase out its paper edition altogether and only publish pdf versions. Sensible of them! I also make time to show the curator of the rock storage area my collection of samples, so that she will know how much shelf space to keep for them--she's already assigned the permanent catalogue numbers to them for me, since my collection permit required that I catalogue them within two years of collecting them. After that clovis_t and I went for a walk along the river, it being a nice change from our usual mountain strolls, and did the grocery shopping we've been procrastinating on doing. As a result, once again my uni work was mostly done in the evening. Oh well, so long as I'm doing it, I suppose all is well.

Comments

Electronic Journals

[massaria.livejournal.com]

Many of the smaller astrophysics journals are now entirely online, and the larger ones all have both online and hardcopies. Best of all we have a service run by NASA that archives electronic copies of all the journals, including scanning old articles (now dating back to the 1780s). I have not had to physically go to a library since 2001. When last I went it was to the UC Berkeley library to find a copy of a PhD thesis from 1919 which was unavailable otherwise. I remember it well - it was by Meyer and was one of the first works on astronomical polarization from galaxies (which is what my PhD was on and why I needed this work), it was so old that in fact it was before we knew of other galaxies so it talks about polarization of "nebulae".

However, such is the wonder of the NASA archive that I just checked and you can now get the details for this PhD thesis online as well (as opposed to having to find things like this by backtracking through references in papers, which is what I was doing when at Berkeley). My understanding is that astrophysics is very advanced in this respect but I am sure it will filter to all science very soon :-)