In praise of naked cucumbers

Praise be to:

1. Scotland’s Co-op for selling naked cucumbers; they expect to save 8 tonnes of plastic per year in so doing. I’m pleased about this, and hope it gets extended to other unnecessarily-overpackaged produce, and retailers. Tesco’s habit of placing their “Finest” range tomatoes in protective plastic trays and then wrapping the whole lot in plastic bewilders me. This is a good example of a little step that can make a big impact and doesn’t inconvenience anyone much. Not that I’m opposed to changing habits for environmental welfare, mark you. Just that I recognise that there are some adjustments that some people are not able to make.
2. LED headtorches. I got the Existentialist an LED headtorch for his birthday. This is a partial experiment. Firstly, we are hoping that it will be useful for him when he travels and stays in hotels/friends’ houses where the default is fluorescent lighting, and he can then turn off the fluorescents in his room and just use the headtorch instead.* The experimental bit is this: we’re hoping that he may be able to use the headtorch in public places where fluorescent lighting is default (eg, university lecture halls). Possibly if he can illuminate just his desk/notes with the headtorch, the fluorescent ceiling lights will be less bothersome. That’s the hypothesis anyway. We’ll see how it works. If the experiment is successful, I may invest in a headtorch too in the hopes that this will increase the amount of time I can work productively in the labs without getting migraines.
3. TENS machines, and all the people who have recommended them to me. The Existentialist got me one for my birthday, (also as an experiment). I tried it for my back, and the first few minutes felt weird, but I definitely felt better after 15 minutes. Yay! I am so pleased at having another non-medicine option for pain.

In other news, my research group and I have finished and submitted our project. It is done done done! Ask me anything you want about variational analysis of verb inflection. Go on, I dare you.

I only have two minor gripes:

1. I will never ever be able to believe statistics again. Not unless I’ve processed them myself and even then I’m not so sure. You would not believe the stats I have been crunching this week, to make something comprehensible out of what can only be described as a mess. I mourn the lost era of innocence and simplicity. But at the same time, the mourning is tempered by the fact that I’ve never been so fascinated by a problem in my life. I don’t even mind that I’m losing sleep, waking with urgent and important thoughts about multi-variate analysis that I cannot then remember upon waking. I worry that I may be becoming another spaced out obsessive academic, with all that that entails.
2. I’m exhausted. I do mind, actually. I know that contradicts the above, but there we go. Possibly a proper academic or a logician (or both) will have to sort that out. Maybe there should be an Academic Theory of Truth, or possibly an Academic Logic to accomodate that sort of contradiction (or non-contradiction, as the case may be) in very specific domains.

–IP

*For those who don’t know, both the Existentialist and I are sensitive to fluorescent lights, due to unrelated chronic medical conditions. Mine is migraines — I find I am sensitive to changes in light intensity and, when migraines are starting or when I have lower-key continuous headaches (which may be several days a week) I am sensitive to fluorescent lights.