So I gave the lensing talk tonight, I think it went reasonably well.  My professor interrupted me once to check to see if there were any questions from the group; some people said I was going a bit fast, so he told me to slow down.  But then he said: remember, this is a review talk, and is supposed to be helpful mainly for the first year graduate students, who may have not seen gravitational lensing in their classes; however, don’t forget you also have a world-renowned expert on gravitational lensing in your audience (a visiting professor).  So I slowed down for the benefit of the first years, which would have been fine, except that there was only one other first year at the meeting, and she heard me practice the talk the night before.  All of the other first years were off somewhere finishing homework.  So, I probably bored the world-renowned expert to death.  I guess it’s ok, since he got free pizza.

   On a side note, I read an article yesterday about how the word “so” is to scientists as “um” is to everyone else.  Re-reading the paragraph I just wrote, and my previous posts…man.  Hopefully I didn’t throw out too many sos (soes?  so’s?) in my talk, although the article seems to think that sos are good.  If you say so, article.

   I’ll try to update the post below with the rest of my talk at some point in the future.  Yeah…probably not gonna happen any time soon.