Still scary after all these years

No, I *still* don't have my grade yet. I keep checking. Then I check again. Sigh.

Well, apart from reading the chapters in the neuroscience book that we didn't cover in the course, which is FUN! oh, yes! I mentioned that I'd signed up to take the GRE. This is a requirement for applying to grad school. Today was test day! OH, the fun.

I hadn't taken a standardized test in, oh, twenty-seven years or so, so I figured I'd just do this one cold, to see how it went, and then when it's actually close to when I'll be applying to grad school, take it for real and prepare and all that.

The computer version of the test scores it RIGHT THEN, right when you're all done (unlike some neuroscience final exams we could mention), so I already have my scores for the verbal part and the math part. The writing takes a couple of weeks, I guess. Anyhow, I did very well, to my amazement. It was pretty hard, and I began to despair on the math sections ("oh, god, no, not more proportions of different populations! argh!"), to the point where I was relieved when I just had verbal sections (so restful). I got: verbal 800; quantitative 710. Well. I guess I won't take it again, then.

Brief but fervent happy dance.

No, I didn't know what the scale was, either. It is (I checked when I got home) the same 200-800 scale we know and love from the SAT way back when we were folks who took SATs. So, go, me! Yay!

Ahem.

Hey, I went to knitting tonight! Apologies to Nicole and Rosanna for going a little too far into reminiscing about calculus class and logs and why IS it that the area under a hyperbola can be two...you see, I'm still doing it. Good grief. I still need to work on that "appropriate conversation" thing. Thanks for bearing with me, you guys. I'm trying, I'm trying. Sigh.

Ruth and Rosanna - yup, amblyopia is related. What the neurons do is pretty interesting, and correction can be in a whole range of things depending on how far out of kilter things are, and age of child, and all sorts of stuff. So, no, the exercises were not a bad thing; there is a range for critical period; and the worst case scenario here is that depth perception is not so good. Mine isn't, actually - I didn't get glasses until I was 19, and never developed depth perception for distances greater than about three feet. Made the seventh grade science lab on the topic kind of interesting - my lab partner thought I was joking. I can sort of fuse the images for distance if I really concentrate, but it doesn't come naturally.

Mel - okay, olfactory coming. And I fully understand why.

Onward we go.