I survived!

Dear readers, I survived Friday's dissertation defence and am now a Doctor of Philosophy (that is the only time that you will see me use that title). What this means is that I now have my academic drivers licence (to quote dear colleagues). The defence was quite an experience. It is indeed hard to come up with proper answers to critical (and really hard) questions on the fly with 70 people watching the ritual. It was sort of fun, but I can actually tell you I was kind of overwhelmed by the pressure that I felt during the last week before the defence. So the procedure itself lasted for a couple of hours: First I had 30 minutes to present my work. Then the faculty opponent, Erik Hollnagel, had one hour to make my life hard with tricky questions connected to the thesis. And he did. Really good (but hard) questions with openings for many kinds of answers and follow-up questions. After that hour the word was given to the three members of the decision committee (who are invit