Die, thesis, die! This thing is taking over my life, it seems like every waking moment of my days is spent either writing on it or (much more frequently) feeling incredibly guilty about slacking off on it.

At least it's not influencing my dreams. Last night I dreamed I was part of a camera crew filming a nature documentary about a wildlife preserve filled with albino lions and moose. And when I say a wildlife preserve I mean a grass park the size of about two football fields. And there were about five camera crews stalking around the place. It made perfect sense.

Anyway, today's lesson of the XXI century talk was mildly interesting. It was called Mapping the future but I suspect its working title was Why your tax money should keep on going to the National Geographical Institute. I wish they'd spend more time on the aesthetics of maps, which I love, instead of boring conversions to calculate how high you are (geographically speaking) with GPS.

The most interesting fact I took away from the whole talk was that Belgium considers the average low tide level as the official sea level. France on the other hand (like most of the rest of Europe) uses the average sea level. As a result our sea level is 2.31 meters lower. So when you cross into France from Belgium you suddenly drop more than 2 meters. Oficially anywyay.

I hope that in the future, when the earth gets blown up and nanorobots reassemble it again in some far off corner of the universe, they'll take that snippet of information into account so future humanoids won't have to climb ladders to enter Belgium.