Hogs Gone Wild

Jeff has taken to watching a Discovery Channel show called Hogs Gone Wild. I'm shocked there is more than one episode of this thing. It's about these wild hogs... hold on... let me get the official description...

"A new adrenaline-packed series taking viewers to the front lines in the war against an increasingly destructive and invasive enemy: the feral hog."

*horrified shriek*

(That was me, walking into a room and seeing that this boring show is on.)

They go on and on about how the hogs are overpopulated pests who are disturbing the ecosystem and hurting people and animals, yet these hog wranglers insist on trying to capture them alive, putting themselves and their hunting animals at risk. Once captured, the hogs are corralled into hotel rooms, where Joe Francis convinces them to lift their tops and kiss each other on camera.

Heh.

Many hogs are killed during the capture process, with a knife to the chest. It takes them a long, sickening 30-60 seconds to die. They could just shoot them from a distance, right? I guess that wouldn't make for a very "adrenaline-packed series." It's just sort of absurd.


Patrick's Sunday Seven

I found a list of the Top 11 Reasons Why Students Drop Out of College. Which would have been most likely to trip you up on your higher education experience?

Name the seven factors that most likely did or could cause you to not complete college.

Well, I completed my BS, but I'll forever be one thesis short of my MS, so I can answer this one.

1) Moving away. The single biggest reason I didn't complete my graduate degree is that I moved away from College Station. Distance makes research difficult. It wasn't impossible. We discussed my doing research at UT and/or traveling back and forth to College Station. It would just have been an enormous hassle.
2) Moving away to AUSTIN. The jobs available in my field were/are extremely limited here (literally about 3-4 positions in the city), so I was dreading spending all that time, money and effort for what might be an unnecessary degree.
3) Thesis misfires. I was originally assigned to a research project that didn't pan out. That was a whole semester down the tubes. It took another few months for my advisor to get me onto a new project. By the time I started that one, I would have had to stay in College Station for several months after I got married, to complete the research. We decided to find a thesis project I could do from Austin.
4) Advisor change. My thesis advisor ended up taking an industry job at the same time as I left College Station, so I had to be reassigned to a new professor. The new one was great (another prof I knew, just not as well as my first) but I was definitely on the back burner for him, since I was out-of-town. He and I never could identify a workable project over the distance.
5) Finding a surprisingly awesome job. I started working because I was going stir-crazy at home, and the job sounded interesting enough to keep me busy. Turns out I absolutely LOVED it and it paid well and I was in a position to move up quickly in the company. I definitely wanted to stay with it, which left little time to work on a thesis.
6) Changing career fields. My pharmaceutical research job didn't require a masters degree in engineering. They also counted my fully-completed (with awesome grades thankyouverymuch) classroom graduate hours as meeting their requirement for a health-related MS for my position. So graduate school wasn't a wasted year at all.
7) The Girls of Nuclear Physics Gone Wild video. One crazy night at a Society of Women Engineers convention. You never think these things will come back to haunt you.