Holidays fun.

Via Richard Wiseman.

Poetic science.

While I'm at it, I'd like to share two things today.

First, the world's tiniest snowman measures 0.01 mm and even has a nose!

This isn't snow though. He's made of two tiny tin beads bounds by some platinum. The face features have been designed with a focus ions beam. The link is here.

The second thing I'd like to share is a video showing droplets falling, but imaged at a rate of 2000 images/second...

I'm must confess that I don't remember much from my surface physics class, except maybe that interfaces require more energy than bulk to be created and that this is why nature tends to reduce the surfaces extent by creating spheres. I would have been more interested by this class if it had started by such a video.

Back.

No, I haven't given up on this blog. Writing my thesis and the numerous reading-correction-rewriting cycles became strenuous and obsessive. The only way not to completely loose my mind - and my friends - was to have a life as normal as possible during the rare moments of rest. This required not to blog on anything about my thesis. Or on anything closely - or loosely - related to science, technology, computers, libraries, books, paper, pens, etc. And during that period, I had absolutely no desire to read anything scientific.

So, here I am after a couple of months. I'm most likely talking in the big internet emptiness, as my rare posts haven't opened the doors of google for me - yet. But I do want to keep writing, even though this may be too time consuming to be done regularly right now.

I submitted my dissertation about a month ago, which means that I'm only a few days away from having to defend my work. My presentation's ready, my slides are pretty. My feelings about the present situation are mixed. I do know the people in my jury - at different degrees - and they have already submitted their report. Which means that the outcome is more or less already defined. Moreover, a thesis director who does their job doesn't let their student submit a work, whose quality is not sufficient. But still, here I am.  Nervous and full of questions. Nothing's never sure, even though the most likely question is how much correction I'll have to bring to the final version of my dissertation.

And once this is behind me, so many questions will arise: where do I want my career to go? Will I  go through unemployment? Will I find a job in Switzerland or will I have to move abroad? Do I want to move abroad? I'm trying not to think too much about this. Yet.

A few more days.