I blinked, and the entire third termester flew by. I apologize for the lack of updates - I'm blaming a break in the pipes that send internets from my house to the university. I'll try to summarize how it all went, but honestly, I'm trying to repress those memories like the ones of gym class in junior high, and so things might be a bit fuzzy.
Things started out well enough, after a refreshing two week winter break. The Master's program was basically the only one at UNH that was in session for the first two weeks of January, so we had the whole campus to ourselves. It's amazing how effective a learning environment a university can be when there are no undergrads around. The first half of the semester went pretty smoothly, but at some point all the professors realized that they wanted to teach another 8 weeks of material in the last 5 weeks of class. That's when things got ugly. We had classes starting early and ending late, and additional classes on Friday afternoons, and a constant stream of new assignments. It was nuts. Somehow, everyone survived, though I still have trouble sleeping because I'm afraid that I haven't finished something.
In other news - starting the fourth termester means focusing on some sort of final research project/Master's paper. I've decided to look into comparing the cost of life imprisonment to the death penalty. From what I've seen, there hasn't been a very good measurement of either. For life imprisonment, estimates generally fail to account for the increasing cost of health care as a prisoner ages. I don't know the exact numbers, but I bet that these costs can get enormous, especially considering that any lack of medical care is considered 'cruel and unusual punishment', and thus, unconstitutional. This, despite the fact that our gubmint submits 99% of its citizens to cruel and unusual punishment by failing to provide universal health care to non-prisoners, but that's another issue. As for the cost of the death penalty, some studies have shown that it can cost up to $2 million, mostly because of court costs. These costs are in addition to the costs of holding the person in prison for several years while the trial is underway, and many of those who are sentenced to death are never actually executed. It'll be difficult to assign a value to either of these choices, and also difficult to avoid the morality issues that inevitably come up whenever the death penalty is discussed.
That's all for now. I'm hoping that the internet pipe has been unclogged, and this makes it through.