So… it’s about this time that we start to receive yearly letters from various branches of our family. They average about two pages, and tend to be chock full of snippets about Josh’s soccer triumphs, Justin’s relationships with tree frogs, Oslo’s climbing feats, or Rio’s awesome Halloween costume. And each year we also get one from Lea and Ina. Lea is my aunt, daughter of Emily Exner Chi, after whom Exie was named (excellent; I managed to reference Exie after all). Ina & Lea’s letters differ significantly from the normal yearly wrap-up type. The first half usually covers Ina’s continued endeavors with horses (training them, etc.), and the second half launches into Lea’s work.
In general, I consider myself a reasonably intelligent and educated individual, but I must admit that I take a slightly perverse pleasure in consistently having almost no idea what Lea is talking about when it comes to these yearly letters. Perhaps it’s ’cause I never took biology (a fluke resulting from switching high schools), but I think that’s a cheap out since she’s actually in the Computer Science Department, a subject in which I received an advanced degree. Here’s an excerpt:
[Lea's] work with the applied mathematicians is presently investigating the longer term dynamics near a bent rod precessing in a viscous fluid. This is of interest to protistologists because it bears on both locomotion and feeding mechanisms of flagellate protozoa. With a table-top scale model, Lea’s collaborators have shown that (relatively) large scale toroidal flows are superimposed on the epicyclic circular orbits they had documented in their earlier studies of straight rods.
Her work on multiforce high throughput systems (MHTS) for magnetic force microscopy is now funded, …
There’s more, but you get the idea. My aunt rocks. Anybody that crams several legitimate words into each paragraph that the spellchecker doesn’t recognize is good in my book. Oh, and the work she’s doing is pretty awesome, too. Another good role model for Exie. :)
multiforce high throughput systems
So… it’s about this time that we start to receive yearly letters from various branches of our family. They average about two pages, and tend to be chock full of snippets about Josh’s soccer triumphs, Justin’s relationships with tree frogs, Oslo’s climbing feats, or Rio’s awesome Halloween costume. And each year we also get one from Lea and Ina. Lea is my aunt, daughter of Emily Exner Chi, after whom Exie was named (excellent; I managed to reference Exie after all). Ina & Lea’s letters differ significantly from the normal yearly wrap-up type. The first half usually covers Ina’s continued endeavors with horses (training them, etc.), and the second half launches into Lea’s work.
In general, I consider myself a reasonably intelligent and educated individual, but I must admit that I take a slightly perverse pleasure in consistently having almost no idea what Lea is talking about when it comes to these yearly letters. Perhaps it’s ’cause I never took biology (a fluke resulting from switching high schools), but I think that’s a cheap out since she’s actually in the Computer Science Department, a subject in which I received an advanced degree. Here’s an excerpt:
There’s more, but you get the idea. My aunt rocks. Anybody that crams several legitimate words into each paragraph that the spellchecker doesn’t recognize is good in my book. Oh, and the work she’s doing is pretty awesome, too. Another good role model for Exie. :)