The reason for the lack of posts recently is that I've been finishing up my senior thesis in a mad haze of caffeine and bleary eyes, while simultaneously trying to pack up for the summer. While renting mini-storage holds few insights as to IP, the senior thesis bit has been interesting. It occurred to me, after days of tracking down citations for things that I've known for years, heard through word of mouth (or told from on high, as the case tends to be for we poor undergrads) and common knowledge. And at some point you just give up. Which makes sense, reading real papers. Rarely is every thing that probably could be cited actually cited. Often, a review of the subject is cited, which raises its own set of IP issues (if the 'currency' of academia is citations, and certainly it is at very least between journals, then you get no payment for a review article based on your work. [in fact, this may be one reason for the oft-opined critique of science--that it's highly regimented and somewhat conservative--given that review articles are almost always written by senior scientists in their field ]). Ok, back to finishing this thing up now.