Another one bites the dust

Three papers (~25 pages last week) and one final down, one thesis to go, one week to finish it. It's going alright - 38 pages so far, and I'm shooting for 42 or so.

I'd be delighted if it ended up being exactly 42 pages long, because there's a distinct Douglas Adams theme running through it... I'm writing about dolphin intelligence and communication, so of course I had to cite him:

“Intelligence” is an ill-defined concept to begin with. Even among humans there is no universally agreed-upon definition, nor any meaningful measure of individual intelligence. As Darwin wrote in his discussion of intelligence, “no classification of the mental powers has been universally accepted.”And, as Douglas Adams wrote, “Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.”

(Full disclosure: I have this on a t-shirt.)