i have taken a day off work to try to catch up with my study. it is going badly. physics is a bastard. it's taken me about 4 hours to do a 90 minute activity about beta plus and beta minus radioactive decay. did you know there's something called the valley of the nuclides? trust me, you don't want to know. even mattgreen, who has always been the font of all scientific knowledge in this household, no longer knows what i'm talking about. now that's depressing.

i have learned a couple of things though.

1. i really, really hate einstein, marie curie, and a bunch of other nosey fuckers like mendeleev. if i'd been doing science a couple of centuries ago, it would've been dead easy. i am growing to despise the swotty bastards who came up with all these so-called "great ideas" that just make everything more difficult. they put in little biographies of all these people in the text to make it 'interesting' and mine have all sprouted moustaches and little devil horns. (actually, mendeleev didn't need much help, he already looks like a freak).

2. why, oh why, did they have to call a computer game "half life". do you know how hard it is to find any USEFUL information about half lives on the internet now? bastards.