EUfuckingREKA

WAIT, I just wrote in a note to myself so I wouldn't forget the BLINDING INSIGHT I'd just had:

You were talking about looking at the differences between observed and expected usage frequency, right, and doing the graph in terms of the logarithms of these figures rather than the straight figures themselves, because with the straight figures the differences were obscured by the sheer scale of the thing.  Only the trouble was, and you were planning to talk about this in a paragraph loosely describable as "well, but it's only a master's thesis", when you subtract logarithms you're actually dividing "real" numbers, meaning that thing you keep on describing as a difference is actually a ratio.  Not that there's anything wrong with this (because, see above, only a master's thesis), but, still, it's not really quite exactly doing what you set out to do.

Only, listen, listen, instead of graphing logObs-logExp, is there any good reason you can't graph log(Obs-Exp), which will really honestly be a log of the difference?

[trembles with the grooviness of this, and the fact that it occurred to self rather than to supervisor]

I mean, I still have to do the bloody analysis.  But, but, but.  Yay?

memo

to:  self
from:  self
re:  tone of academic writing

Dear self:

Kindly recall that you are not yet at a point in your career where you can spend a couple of paragraphs (or a couple of pages) laboriously getting to a point and then, before you move on to discussing the point, shove in a one-sentence paragraph reading "Now, at last, we're beginning to get somewhere".

signed,
self.

memo

to:  my innards
from:  self
re:  heartburn and related GI fun

Dear guts:

Honestly, how much antacid do you want me to take?  I'll do it.

signed,
self.

[falls down]

My supervisor wanted the latest (and, ideally, close-to-finished) draft of the thesis in hard copy by the middle of the day today, so he can poke at it over the weekend.  So last night I wrote and messed with stats and things until I stopped making sense; went to bed around 3:30, got up this morning a little before 9 and kept on banging at the paper until about 1, when I printed it out and walked it over to his office rather than make it wait for the next pickup of interdepartmental mail.

I'm at about 9700 words, and I have notes for some more stuff to talk about and some things to fix that might add up to about another two thousand.  I'm not concerned about the length, really, you understand, as much as the thoroughness.  Where length does matter, though, is in binding.  Exam regs say theses and dissertations have to be bound; my department exempts MSt dissertations and MPhil theses (but not DPhil theses) from that requirement, which is decent of them, but the thing still has to be held together in some way.  The standard is that all pages have to be securely fastened; a clamp-style report cover is okay, but a slide-style one would probably not be.  You could staple the damn thing if you wanted, though it probably needs to be a little classier than that.  A ring binder?  No dice.

So all the clamp-style report covers I've been able to find appear to hold no more than about 50 pages (and I assume it would be a little less if they were pages of heavy laid paper).  I'm at 40 pages of text-and-footnotes at the moment, to which I'll have to add a title page and bibliography; plus the paper itself will get longer -- so I might be over 50 even before I address the question of whether to include these appendices, which would be, no joke, another hundred pages, give or take.

In short:  I may have to get the thing bound after all.  I can do softcover instead of hardcover, so that's all right, but that subtracts at least 24 hours from my writing time, you know?  GAH.  Bastards.  Rar.

And right now, I'm almost too tired to go take a shower.