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April 20, 2004
Dreary Tuesday
I was sooo tired this morning during classes, even though I got an hour more sleep last night than usual. I'm gonna blame it on the dreary, cold, rainy weather we had all day today. It kinda sucked. I mean, even our frisbee game this afternoon had to be postponed.
There was a guest lecture tonight in Olin by Eileen Friel that was pretty cool, it was sponsored by NSF. It was about where elements come from, from all stages of star formation, development and death/explosion. It was pretty interesting even though it was of course heavily permeated with cosmic evolutionary views. Paul was threatening to dock us points on our upcoming E&M test next week if we didnt show up, so our class was quite well represented at the talk tonight. :-)
Proclaim tonight was pretty cool. Jack Niemi from the Office of Church Relations came to speak, and he gave communion too, which was nice. I haven't missed a single Tuesday of going to Proclaim since I first went back in early January, and I really enjoy going to it every week. It's nice having some time set aside for worship set aside in the middle of the week. And I'm making some new friends there too, so that's always cool.
Chuck let Carl & I know this afternoon that he'd like us to give a Sigma Xi talk for Honors Weekend about the Wind Energy Research Project. That'd be April 30, and our abstract would have to be in by this Friday, so it was kinda late notice, but we should be able to scramble something together in time. The rest of the semester is gonna be sooo busy... Just four weeks of class to go. It's scary how fast the year is going by.
On the subject of energy, I'm sure that many of you have heard stories in the media about John Kerry and the Democrats accusing the Bush Administration of a "sweetheart deal" with the Saudis. They claimed that Bob Woodward, in his recently-released book that's been making headlines lately, said that the Saudis were gonna keep prices down before the upcoming presidential election, and they were all hopping mad at the supposed sneaky, underhanded, backroom deal that Bush had made. Well, as it turns out, the Saudis always do that for incumbent presidents, because stability in the American economy is good for them and for the world. They did it even for Jimmy Carter back when he was stuck in his malaise in 1979, and Bill Clinton in 1996. The Saudi Crown Prince Bandar came out on Larry King and Bob Woodward on 60 Minutes to set the record straight, that there was no oil conspiracy here, that it was just standard practice from the last 25 years. Quite a far cry from the picture that Kerry and the other Dems were trying to paint.
In other news, an Australian woman discovered that doctors left a 6 1/4" scissors in her abdomen for over a year after she had colon surgery. Needless to say, she's going to sue. That would've majorly sucked. And it appears that the doctors didn't know what was causing her intense pain after the surgery, until she badgered them into taking an x-ray. Yay for Australian health care.
Posted by Jared at April 20, 2004 11:58 PM