LONGLEAT OTTERS

Set your cuteness meter to 'overwhelming'...!

THE PETERED OUT PRINCIPLE

Hmm.

Is the situation that I don't have anything new to say or write about? Probably not.

The problem is that my load of district-mandated coursework has entailed me writing, on average, about 3,000 words a week since late April. It's been a bear, and with two other jobs plus all the time I seem to find it necessary to spend at my school site doing various things, I just haven't been able to give the blog the kind of attention I did in the past. I haven't had a really high week of traffic (more than 300 hits) in about half a year, and I wouldn't blame anyone for not checking in anymore.

Having said that, I am just a few days from completing the coursework, and I will be having a few extra minutes a week to be overcommitted, so expect a slight increase in my offerings to the void.

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS!

Too awesome not to share. Jorge Cham has a wonderful comic strip about grad school called Ph.D, and he often has extended strips that discuss the state of research programs in the sciences, as when he talks about cancer or the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

But he has outdone himself here, showing a real-life grad student doing genetic research on pepper plants at New Mexico State University:

PHD Tales from the Road - NMSU's Chile Pepper Institute from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

By the way, my alma mater (CSU Fresno) has a research program involving pepper genetics as well: