(b)logophile

Since around 1:30 yesterday afternoon, I am de zeer geleerde heer Dr de Jager. Difficult to imagine, isn’t it? The invigilation was relatively gentle (my committee were kind), and my mother startled all the straight-laced Dutch folks by bursting out in Maori as the diploma was handed over, something ringing and powerful that left tears [...]

Er… that is: PhD defence is Go! Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? But I’m excited. So: on December 15th of this very year 2009, Michael Franke and I will defend our PhD dissertations in a battle to the death ritualised question/answer session, before a committee of fogies in dresses professors [...]

Theory: We of the jury may wish to ignore [a particular possibility], and wish it had not been mentioned. If we ignored it now, we would bend the rules of cooperative conversation; but we may have good reason to do exactly that. [...] We would ignore the far-fetched possibility if we could—but can we? Perhaps [...]

I’ve taken the plunge, and posted my first dissertation chapter online. It’s still not quite complete (needs some transition paragraphs and general tidying up) but it’s readable and the content shouldn’t change much from here on in. It’s slightly terrifying, sending your ideas out into the wide world like this, but I think they’re solid [...]

I haven’t posted much lately, because I’m having a spurt of dissertatory activity (less painful than it sounds). Tomorrow I’ll present the main ideas of my thesis at the LeGO (our internal colloquium, feel free to stop by if you wanna), and next week I should have a short version of my first chapter drafted. [...]