You better brush up on your Rabelais ... (or, when to say this PhD thesis is good enough)

August committee co-members

We, denizens of the Upper Aetherial Realms, commit all our work to our common repository (well, Professor Heartthrob commits our common work to [Spam] folder, but the rest of us do :) so we are up to very latest latest on the latest PhD thesis saga:

On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 3:23 AM, TheStudent wrote:

Author: TheStudent
Modified:
   thesis/thesis.pdf
Log:
I've addressed everything I intend to

Let me translate this for you.

In Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais thus describes the birth of the giant Gargantua (AKA PhD thesis):

Whereupon an old ugly trot in the company, who had the repute of an expert she-physician, and was come from Brisepaille, near to Saint Genou, three score years before, made her so horrible a restrictive and binding medicine, and whereby all her larris, arse-pipes, and conduits were so oppilated, stopped, obstructed, and contracted, that you could hardly have opened and enlarged them with your teeth, which is a terrible thing to think upon; seeing the Devil at the mass at Saint Martin's was puzzled with the like task, when with his teeth he had lengthened out the parchment whereon he wrote the tittle-tattle of two young mangy whores.

 

... and so has TheStudent's thesis adviser been lengthening out the parchment whereon he has been writing his desiderata for the said theses; TheStudent reports that it is a multi-branched, exceedingly lengthy affair with rewrites of the rewrites. The said adviser has pulled the same trick as for TheStudent-1 a year ago. He ignored our thrice, clearly and loudly repeated request that we take the signed committee approval of the thesis over to Chair, and is clutching it to his breast, unsigned by him as until such time he is fully satisfied with the said student's implementation of the aforementioned multi-sheeted Riemann parchment diktats.

One is inclined to think that this all has to either with male menopause, or something Newt Gingrich adds to the water in Gingrichland, north of I-285, but no - unbeknownst to the adviser, the aforementioned thesis committee member made TheStudent-2 write an entire new chapter in the 2008 thesis, before giving up hope, and writing to the lowly student that this was the Thesis of Missed Opportunities. Which is the work that in periods is one of the most cited article in the lowly Journal of Aqueous Mechanics, and upon which the entire reputation of several professors of tenure as honorable plumbers' guild members rests. But who are they to judge, with their lowly Cornell and MIT pedigrees.

So starting today, what TheStudent says in the above is: No More Rewrites. The matter is coming to the head fast, as the thesis has to be approved and uploaded in a week:)

Servus

Aeternally Yours
Panurge

PS clearly, this is an email from a professor who should instead be glued to grants.gov, completing the NSF report in the face of a very fast approaching deadline :) 

PPS This actually is not our favorite translation. You can try it in the original, if your medieval Latin and French are in good shape - the modern French footnotes for each page tend to run to many pages:)