Made out of people

Will trade food for comments.

Update: Links removed. See newer version

This is it in first draft form: most of the words, none of the prettiness.

7 chapters plus an incomplete technical appendix. 5 zipped megabytes. 4 different roman body typefaces, at last count. Microsoft Word. (Word count below the fold).

(By request, 8 happy megabytes of PDF)

Next week is entirely dedicated to making this thing look good, have a correct bibliography, and so on.

Want to give it a read? Feedback eagerly sought until July 30th. (After July 30th, and before August 6th, I'm officially going nuts worrying about my defense. Feedback eagerly sought after August 6th, but there'll be a better draft then.)

In exchange for your thoughts, I'll take you out to dinner when I next see you.

I'm particularly interested in the thoughts--even casual ones--by anyone who hasn't been immersed in this stuff for years. Does it get too rapidly geeky? Do I flit like a butterfly between important concepts, especially when I might linger more lovingly on something? (This is most likely a problem in the conclusion).

The word count:

Chapter 1: 4500 words (17 pages)
Chapter 2: 7800 words (23 pages)
Chapter 3: 4200 words (22 pages)
Chapter 4: 6700 words (41 pages)
Chapter 5: 3550 words (18 pages)
Chapter 6: 2700 words (13 pages)
Chapter 7: 1300 words (7 pages)

My dissertation, in number of pages, appears to follow a rough Poisson distribution. I'm not sure how to interpret this. Number of pages is only weakly correlated with number of words. Mysterious.