It rained for a bunch of the day. I'm wondering if it's sort of marking the change from "summer" to "autumn/winter". We'll see...but if it is it sort of underscores the importance of me getting my research proposal in relatively quickly.
I headed into Perth today, since the city had the only stores open for some grocery shopping. I also got an Australian SIM card and set-up my phone (although it looks like I have to call them on Tuesday to set-up my voicemail, because the PIN they gave me for that doesn't seem to be working). I finished the application to get permission to work though (since I figured it was safest to have a phone with voicemail and that I would have with me). I'll have to do that tax file number when I have that permission (which is apparently more of a rubber stamp process than something extreme...I just have to abide by the conditions of only working 20 hours/week during class time.
For one of my classes we have to do a book review and if it's good it can get submitted for publication in a journal. I decided to read "The Discovery of the Hobbit" (I figure reading a new book from 2007 that surrounds a controversial discovery probably betters the publication chances). It's actually been really good. It's almost made it more into a story than it is about the actual discovery. And for someone in science, it describes the conflict and other things that you have to overcome when you stumble upon something as big as the discovery of a new human species. I think the thing I liked the most though was that they didn't hide their own surprise...almost the first half of the book dealt with their initial research questions about how people got to Australia, etc., and it's good to see people not be tempted to explain it like they knew they would find something. The way they describe it it's like they almost didn't want to believe what they had found themselves. Here's an explanation for anyone who doesn't really know what happened (it's been described as one of the biggest scientific finds in the last century, and it happened in the past decade...which seems to be rare now...unless you consider theoretical stuff in physics, etc. to be a find). The site I gave describes it as a "possible" species...I think you'd have trouble arguing against it...but people still seem to. My personal opinion is that people who argue that it can't be part of a evolutionary chain connected to people are only worried about it derailing their previous research or changing what people currently believe. The other people are worried about religion vs. evolution debates when in reality the two things can co-exist and I don't know why people haven't figured that out yet either. But nonetheless...one of the most controversial and important finds, at least in natural sciences, in the past century probably. And it raises a lot of questions.
I headed into Perth today, since the city had the only stores open for some grocery shopping. I also got an Australian SIM card and set-up my phone (although it looks like I have to call them on Tuesday to set-up my voicemail, because the PIN they gave me for that doesn't seem to be working). I finished the application to get permission to work though (since I figured it was safest to have a phone with voicemail and that I would have with me). I'll have to do that tax file number when I have that permission (which is apparently more of a rubber stamp process than something extreme...I just have to abide by the conditions of only working 20 hours/week during class time.
For one of my classes we have to do a book review and if it's good it can get submitted for publication in a journal. I decided to read "The Discovery of the Hobbit" (I figure reading a new book from 2007 that surrounds a controversial discovery probably betters the publication chances). It's actually been really good. It's almost made it more into a story than it is about the actual discovery. And for someone in science, it describes the conflict and other things that you have to overcome when you stumble upon something as big as the discovery of a new human species. I think the thing I liked the most though was that they didn't hide their own surprise...almost the first half of the book dealt with their initial research questions about how people got to Australia, etc., and it's good to see people not be tempted to explain it like they knew they would find something. The way they describe it it's like they almost didn't want to believe what they had found themselves. Here's an explanation for anyone who doesn't really know what happened (it's been described as one of the biggest scientific finds in the last century, and it happened in the past decade...which seems to be rare now...unless you consider theoretical stuff in physics, etc. to be a find). The site I gave describes it as a "possible" species...I think you'd have trouble arguing against it...but people still seem to. My personal opinion is that people who argue that it can't be part of a evolutionary chain connected to people are only worried about it derailing their previous research or changing what people currently believe. The other people are worried about religion vs. evolution debates when in reality the two things can co-exist and I don't know why people haven't figured that out yet either. But nonetheless...one of the most controversial and important finds, at least in natural sciences, in the past century probably. And it raises a lot of questions.
Labels: ECU, Miscellaneous, Weather
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