International Journals

For the entire period of my study, one of my supervisors has encouraged me to check the international literature on my subject. Only recently have I begun to run into problems. I've found that, for most journals, articles are written almost exclusively in English. I'm not sure why this is, but I'll take advantage of it to read articles from Japanese and Italian researchers. In the last week I've found two articles that would be very helpful to me, but cannot be read because they are in other languages. The first is an article in French about the formation of clay minerals in some volcanic deposits. The second is an article in Japanese about a similar subject, although this one deals more with the successive changes in mineralization with age. They both have English abstracts which helps me get a general idea of the article, but does not provided the amount of detail that I prefer. If any who reads this blog (if anyone does) would like to translate either paper for me, let me know and I'll get in touch with you.

In other news, I'm still plugging away towards level 53 in WoW. I've discovered that the Searing Gorge is actually a viable questing zone, with decent XP and monetary rewards. I'm trying to decided weather to buy a normal level 40 mount, or just wait and save up for the Epic level 60 mount. Tough choices I have to say.

I received a package of books from my parents this morning at 7. I was a little upset at having to jump out of bed and throw some clothes on to answer the door, but I've been waiting for this package for some time. Now, I'm just waiting for the package that will carry my monitor cable for my desktop computer. When that arrives, I'll finally have a working computer for both Crystal and me. This will probably make our internet usage go up, but we enjoy playing together so much that I can't see this as a bad thing.

I've also been waiting for some form of email contact with my supervisors for quite some time. I finally hear back from one of them, and they remind me that I have a presentation on Tuesday. I had added it to my calendar and I still forgot about it. But its only 10 minutes, so I don't have to talk about much. The primary concern at this point is me relating the work that I've done to one of the organizations that provided funding for me last year. Personally, I think that if I have to give presentations that they should continue giving money.