The Blog

   A thoughtful article on the issue?...

The Boston Globe has a very interesting article on the joys of yaoi and why it's becoming so popular with American women. This was something we covered in our Manga Studies class at uni, although we were talking about why it's so popular with Japanese women. The general consensus is that it's a nice safe form of exploring sexuality, without becoming personally involved. If all the characters are boys, the woman reader doesn't feel uncomfortable.

I personally prefer my yaoi without sex, where it's just cute boys flirting with each other, but that's okay. I'm just happy that this stuff is available for those who do want to seek it out.

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   *Happy Scientific Ninja Dances*...

Okay, so I've been working really hard at getting this code working for my project. I've ignored my blog, and my life to a certain extent, and I've been dreaming in FORTRAN 77. Pathetic, I know.

But yesterday I got it all together. The results were making sense and reproducing those of the guys whose work I am building on. It's a simplification of what I'm hoping to have eventually (in that there are no magnetic fields in my current calculations) and not at all groundbreaking, but it worked.

Today I tweaked the initial conditions a little bit, and was able to reproduce near-exactly the graph the other guys had in their paper. The graph was messy, it didn't have labels on the curves, and the axes were creatively known as "Column 1" and "Column 5", but that didn't matter to me. What mattered was the shape of the curves, and those I had gotten right.

I took it to my meeting with my supervisor and he loved it. He was as excited as me, and I had been doing the happy ninja dance all morning. But more than that, he was proud of me, and stuck my silly little graph up on the door to his office.

That act nearly brought me to tears, it was exactly like being a kid and having mum put a favourite drawing or story up on the door of the fridge to show it off. No one may have gotten that stuff but me and her, but to us it was important and deserved displaying.

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