today was the first day since i've been here when the cold has been serious, no longer the half-hearted between-seasons sort of chill, but the kind that signals that the winter is coming in earnest. i was the first into the cfn, and only a few more people trickled in during the morning -- the research staff get both thursday and friday off, and i guess most of them decided to just take the whole week. it was angela and dawn and chris and i, and all of us were doing monkeywork, so we chatted about heroes and house and i did the sudoku. now that i have a couple years of experience, i can say with assurance that my research is approximately 85-90% monkeywork, the kind of tedium that anyone off the street could do -- point, click, drag -- and that that number isn't moving anywhere in the next few years (unless someone wants to be my research assistant). when i was a (very) wee lad, i used to love to play this make-believe game of 'factory', where all these playing cards got 'processed' along a conveyor belt of 'machinery' -- and funnily enough, that's the bulk of what i do now: raw data in, mindless, yet not completely automatable processes, interpretable pictures out. the developmental psychologists would have a field day with that one.