Academic knitting.

Before I get into the entry, I'd like to start off with a message:
Happy Birthday, Mom!!

This is going to make no sense until the end, but stay with me here. Had a meeting with my research advisor today. (For those who don't know, I'm a master's student in computer science, concentrating in artificial intelligence, further concentrating in natural language processing, and even further concentrating (lately) on not being able to concentrate.) This entire meeting was regarding choosing a knowledge domain for our research. To sum up this research, it involves a little conglomerate of clue word use and deciding what information to volunteer in discourse. So we needed a domain to discourse about. (Yes, I know "discourse" is not a verb. My English degree diploma is a license to do strange things to language.) I made a crack about how if I had to read about angina constantly (one of the researchers in the field uses medical stuff for her domain) I'd gouge my eyes out. So she asked me what I like to do.

Does anyone else see where this is going?

So my task for the next week is to do enough preliminary research to see if knitting will be a viable domain to build an expert system around. (Exactly what it sounds like. A program that has a deep and narrow knowledge base around one topic.) Oh darn, using assistantship hours to go to the yarn store. *wipes tear*

Knitting: not much has happened. I'm about 20 rows into the DNA swatch, and I'm still not sure if I like the alpaca I chose. It's Frog Tree sport weight, and it's a lot softer and fuzzier than the Indiecita worsted alpaca I used on Elise's scarf. I'm not sure if the fuzz i will obscure the cable yet or not. I'll do a repeat of the cable, bind off, and actually block the swatch (another thing I'm usually guilty of skipping *blush*) and see what happens. (So I should change the scarf's status from "started" to "swatching" in the sidebar, in the interest of full disclosure.) Gonna cast on Matt's hunting hat today too. Need idiot-knitting for the bus, and it doesn't get much more idiot than 2x2 ribbing in the round. (Okay, maybe stockinette in the round, but I just finished a Harry Potter scarf, so I need a break from that for a while.)

Got VK over the weekend. Just like the fall IK, I give it a big "meh." Some nice scarves, but I have scarf patterns coming out of my ears. Another thing I like about IK: there are separate spring and summer issues. VK: spring/summer, fall, holiday, and winter. I tend to like warm weather patterns a lot, so IK gives me more of them. Yay!