Phew! At last, fall semester comes to a close. When this semester began, I knew it could get kind of rough towards the end -- I didn't have many breaks, as I was in Yellowstone over fall break and in Dublin during winter break, then back to Princeton for exams & fun, and now, at last, I'm done. I managed to space things apart and get essays done ahead of time, so it was pretty painless, but I'm just glad that I now have a week where I'll be able to spend some time chilling and hanging out without having to worry about *the next essay* I ought to be preparing over break . . .

Anyway, I write now because I had my history of science final -- my final final -- today. All in all, it went very well. I knew all of the term identifications, although some of them were, I felt, a little too specific to spend my time writing on (Sadi Carnot was one of them). I ended up writing on deplhogisticated air, Joe-1 (a Soviet atomic bomb), the Copenhagen Interpretation (has to do with quantum mechanics), "soft heredity," and something else, I can't remember. I spent a little too long on some of these, but the upside is that I should almost definitely get full credit on all of them. The next section was a quotation identification section, and here, too, things went well. One of the quotations was from like the one reading I didn't do, then originally looked over (a physicist writing about the aether), but everything went well on that section, too. We then had two essays, one more content-based, the other more thematic. In the first essay, I wrote about how "Big Science" was, in fact, a large break from tradition. I wrote about how Big Science generally reduced the freedom of research that university professors used to have and how it permanently divorced epistemology from physics, etc -- it was a pretty solid essay. The next essay was about whether individuals have an impact on scientific change, or whether change is more contigent on the circumstances being right. I opted to say that individuals, in particular ballsy ones, do in fact have a large effect on scientific change. I was a little strapped for time (I finished with three minutes left), but on the whole I'm very happy with how the exam went and think I should get an A-, maybe an A on it.

That brings me to the academic report for this semester, where things have gone great. I found out today, via SCORE, that I got an A in Borges, I know I got an A in German, and barring a disaster on the final paper (which would just be bizarre), I should get an A in Astrobiology. This certainly wasn't what I was expecting when I began the semester, but I'll certainly take it. Next semester, I'll be doing more distribution requirement stuff, but I want, for the sake of my departmental GPA, to be getting high grades in the history & science classes I take in the future. This semester has been a good start towards that.

All in all, I feel very relaxed right now. I shaved off my entire beard last night, which was a relaxing experience in itself, and everything is going fine. Tomorrow, I'll just get up fairly earlier, do some packing, spend some time with Nicole, and be home in the evening.