re: Russell Death Cross: BS or valid indicator?

They are beyond me too at the moment.

I often get on kicks where I try to outline subject material that is just beyond my grasp, in hopes that it will help motivate me to learn it better. Sometimes it works, and sometimes.... well sometimes I just leave behind an unfinished mess.

I find that academic papers on subject matters like this can seem virtually unapproachable for months on end, but if you have some motivating factor that makes you come back to it and hack away at it again and again, bit by bit, then once your done with your little project, you come to "own" a lot of what the paper is all about, and become fluent in understanding the jargon, and also gain a common sense intuition for what it all means.

I think I'm still a few months away from all that, but hopefully I'll get there.