We'll week-in-reverse this bad boy:
Sunday - put the final touches on a first draft for my law paper. A lot of time, probably way more than would indicate any efficiency on my part, was put into that beast, so it was nice to have it done.
Saturday - Wrote the arguments and conclusion for the paper. This took pretty much all day. Blar.
Friday - Great day. Came in early and polished off the "cultural arguments" section of the law paper. Went to my seminar class on Gender, Race & Technology and just had a great discussion, a lot of which was prompted by me and my impatience with people who don't talk. We were missing a few of the Bio & Society people due to conferences, so here was a high potential for some sitting and staring. I threw out some controversial ideas just to wake people up, and it completely worked, got people heated and bantering and all that. We talked about sexual language "inherent" in nuclear war, the appropriateness of fictional work as an academic tool, and different concepts in racial genetics. Cool stuff. A couple of professors were visiting, and though the tendency for them is to sit back and observe, they jumped right in. Awesome.
Followed this up with lunch with the HSD crew, then went to a presentation on nanotechnology and 4th amendment rights by Alan Rubel. He was one of the visiting professors from class, and in his presentation he essentially argued that nanotechnology will actually serve to improve privacy concerns. Tres cool. Ran back from that to the lab for about five minutes, then had a quick meeting with Dr. Steve Hoffman about his neuroimmunophilsophy course. Which sounds excellent - he's interested in concepts of self and mind as understood via immunological processes / pathologies. I'll probably take it.
And capped that day off by running home to take care of the dogs and then jetting over to Scottsdale to play some softball. We won both games big (20-1, 16-3), and then Beck and I grabbed dinner at Los Olivos. Yay for a fun end to the week.
Thursday - Spent the bulk of the day doing the reading for Friday's seminar course, though I also managed to get in a bit of preliminary work on the cultural arguments section of the paper. I also had a fun pizza lunch with Mark and Melissa and then met a bio student named Jake for coffee at 1. He is interested in collaborating on a cool sounding bio-philosophy project on the conscious experience as limited / defined by biological factors - exactly the sort of "informed existentialism" stuff I might be interested in. So a good, productive meeting, and I'm glad I'm not the only yahoo who thinks in this way - even a bona fide scientist type has noticed the problem! Yeah!
Wednesday - An entire day devoted to finishing up the legal arguments in the evolution controversy. I also went to a law class on "forbidden science" where we essentially learned that we're all going to die from bioterrorist attacks, and how! A sort of a bummerish day.
Tuesday - A day spent entirely writing and citing legal papers. I think I took a 20 minute break to toss the frisbee, but otherwise it was nose to grindstone from 7:15 - about 7 at night. Argh.
Monday - A morning spent on the aforementioned Alan Rubel's paper and a presentation on it from John in HSD. Law class featured discussions of democratic decision making and jury competence, focusing a little bit on genetically modifed foods. Otherwise I polished the outline for the law paper.
There you have it. A busy, productive week. There's alot of reading and meetings and whatnot that I glossed over in there, too. And lawn-mowing, Ultimate, and watching two (Beck-chosen!) movies, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and You Don't Mess with the Zohan, which were entertaining (the former much more so than the latter) when they weren't abjectly stupid (the latter, period). As a redemption, Beck also grabbed Pushing Daisies, a nice macabre show whose first two episodes were very solid.
More later. Time to get back to work...
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