20,873 words

I have been a very, very bad blogger. Terrible, even. For which I am sorry, about as much as a guy can be sorry for not updating his web log. If it makes you feel any better, I also haven't been riding my bike much at all.

While I may not have been blogging, I have been writing. After the Motor Control Summer School, 2 months (or 11 posts) ago, I resolved to write one page of my thesis every day.

And so I have. Some days I took a break from writing, and others I wrote as many as three. I took a half a week off before each new chapter, to review the literature and flesh out an outline. I found a few great new spots for working, because the lab just wasn't a good venue for prose-synthesis.

Ducks are catalysts

The Intro, at least the first draft of the Intro, is finished. Three chapters ("Brain Injury and Rehabilitation", "Motor Control Analysis", and "PAMI Development and Assessment"). 63 pages in 58 days. 20 thousand plus words. More citations than I care to count. Plenty of late nights at the Highland Park Dunkin Donuts.

It's been a fantastically productive summer. As the senior grad in the lab, it's been my responsibility, and moreso my pleasure, to mentor the undergrads and help run some fun side projects. Getting things done has sometimes required that turn myself inside out, working consistent long days and never really leaving my troubles in the lab, but I have genuinely enjoyed the past two months.

It's just that after all of that, I have trouble applying myself to blog posts. It's not that I'm too busy to blog, it's just that there's a limited amount of writing in me, and it's all been used up for the thesis.

My thesis outranks my blog. A travesty if there ever was one.

When it's all said and done, the Intro as it stands may be a case of biting off more than I can chew. The rest of the thesis probably won't be as long, and the breadth of the background is likely a bit too ambitious. We'll see what the committee says. Better to have too much content than too little, though, right?

I'll be taking a week off from writing (although not from revising, and not from continuing work on manuscripts that I'll be submitting to journals), so hopefully I'll soon have the energy to compose some decent posts.

In the meantime, here's a pygmy marmuset that I photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.

Do not feed after midnight.