Today in the University meeting my professor told me that my pre-thesis defense will consist of an one hour presentation, followed by an one hour Q&A session. Since my Master Thesis presentation 2 years ago here in Tokyo university was a paltry 20 minutes, I was both relieved and a bit apprehensive. I was thinking that maybe one hour was a bit too much (I was expecting more like 40 minutes), but talking to Y I realized that among the three techniques and two problem I will have to explain and discuss at length, one hour might even be too little. Anyway, I’m breathing a little easier now that I know exactly how much time I have available – now I just need to do the work. I just wished they would give me the damn deadline already so I could prepare my schedule better.

Also, In today’s meeting we had visitors from another laboratory which presented to us their research on DNA computing. DNA computing is a sort of wet computing where you use the chemical reactions between DNA strands as the processing units. They were explaining their work in developing an AND gate with DNA. To be honest, I was not very impressed. I had heard before of wet computing before (maybe chemical computing?), and in my mind the state of art in this was a bit more evolved. But in their presentation, one AND operation would take more than one hour to complete, and they would need to do the experiment from scratch to change the data inputs. I wasn’t very convinced (although the rain might have made me grumpier than usual). Either you try to emulate electro-mechanical computing, but do it faster, or you get some new operators to do different stuff (like quantum computing). Could someone enlighten me about what I’m missing here?

In other news, RPG game tomorrow, and I got a pretty neat series of encounters for my players. Report coming from Sunday on :-)