Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I stayed overnight in school again, in the medical instrumentation lab, just like last week. Again I piggybacked on the permit of the same co-teacher who was doing her thesis program. Her thesis is a parsing program that tries to come up with the antidote for certain diseases using the protein strings from three different computational methods. Or something like that. Not really as graphics or simulation intensive as what they showed in Hollow Man but it beats having to write out all those protein strings by hand. The strings are also long enough (minimum of 150 character-equivalents, she showed me) to remind me of the DNA sequence letters.

Up until late last night and early this morning, the two students who were going to defend their thesis were also in the lab. Their defense is today, and I left the lab to go back to the department while they were holding a practice defense. They’re lucky I was not one of their panelists, because the last thing I heard before I left the room was that they tested 10 students for their research.

How can they give a valid conclusion to a study with only 10 people surveyed? I remember we already gave hell to a proposal that had a sample size of 50. What more 10?

Unfortunately I saw the students right outside Kenny Rogers after I had bought my dinner nearby. They said their work was done. I don’t know if that means they got revisions or not. I’m sure the answer would have been different if they were asked to redefend in the future. I guess tomorrow I’ll have to ask my co-teachers/their panelists.

On another note, today was the transition of Mercury across the surface of the Sun as seen from the Earth. It won’t happen again for another three years, although it’s supposed to be at least a once-every-seven-years event. The weather and the sky was perfect for its viewing; not a cloud in sight. There weren’t any viewers, though, even from my own department. Maybe the printout that I posted in the department from the astronomy website where I got the information wasn’t enough.

Or maybe instead of posting the calendar of celestial events for the whole month of May (including when the Moon and the planets are within single digit degrees from each other which is of interest only to astrophotographers wanting to get them in the same shot) I should have posted the article wholly about the transition itself. Speaking of astrophotography, maybe I should have taken pictures of the event myself for a press release. And maybe I should have announced the event to the whole institutional community via e-mail and the newsletter. Things to think about for the next time something like this happens.