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    Zzz.

    No run this morning. My legs appreciate the break, and my entire body appreciates the extra sleep.

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    One mile, high reproducibility

    Today was the first day in my entire life I have run a mile without stopping. I didn’t clock it, because I usually clock my first mile, which includes my 0.25 mi. warm-up, rather than my first mile with a quarter-mile offset. But my first mile was 12:05 today. And the mile run wasn’t killer. By the end of the final lap, I was having some trouble controlling my breathing, and phlegm production had increased significantly. A quarter-mile recovery walk was sufficient for me to pick up and run another 0.625 mi. I would call that a “highly reproducible” run, which makes me all kinds of giddy. I only did…

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    Actinometry geekiness and some deep, dark desires.

    We have two lamps. These two lamps are crucial to the semiconductors project, in which we are testing how TiON will photochemically react to degrade several pollutants in water. Now, I don’t know the technical names for these lamps, but I think one is a mercury arc lamp. It shall be known as the Trash Can Lamp, because the merry-go-round reactor is set up in a trash can with a felt covering to keep out other light. It (theoretically) has a strong ultraviolet (UV) output. Our second lamp shall be called the Little Lamp. Its output is mostly in the visual spectrum, and we suspect very little hits the UV…

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    Is your conversation offending me? Perhaps I should speak up

    (Initial note: Mae has a blog. Let it be known.) So a recent dispute between C. and Mae has me thinking. (This is a good thing, although there may be some controversy.) Yes, another dangerous thought “thread” has forked off. The question: should we censor the topics of discussion to avoid possibly offending a friend who refuses to speak up on her discomfort? (And I’ll add to that that it’s even unknown whether the topic of discussion is offending the woman, or if she’s just tired of the topic being discussed. She just doesn’t speak up.) For instance: Some woman is Catholic. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that…

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    Steve Pinker’s Words and Rules

    In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker provides a well-rounded glimpse into linguistics, history of languages, language families, childhood speech errors, neural networks, and various other related topics through the examination of regular and irregular verbs. What one might consider a rather boring topic on the surface (“j’ai, tu as, il/elle/on a…”, anyone?) is presented in such a manner as to make reading the same lists of the families of irregular verbs (in four languages, no less) several times bearable and even interesting. I found my interests leaning towards the history of languages and language families discussed throughout the first five or six chapters and my attention waning on the last…