Bounded in a Nutshell

I wonder: when the sign says Automatic toll lane -- coins only, does it take an act of supreme deviousness to interpret this as meaning:

• Toll must be paid;
• Toll must be paid in coins;
• Bills will do you no good.

Not much else new in the Nutshell. Pursuant to some books I've been reading and some spirited discussions the other night at House Eco-Monkey, I can feel a post about sociobiology coming on, but that'll have to wait for another day.

Today's choice bit of weirdness:

I'm sitting out my office hour for the afternoon flipping through the internet, and the Dean of the college I work in stops outside my door, glances in, and says to whoever he's talking to: I'll just be a minute... I have to fondle something.

Now as it turns out, he was refering to a rather nice chess set I keep in my office. And, true to his words, he walked in and weighed a couple of the shiny metal pieces is his hand, chatted with me for a moment, and then left to go and do important Dean things.

For a second, though, it felt like there was a sitcom moment waiting to happen, and I'd half-braced myself for the laugh track.

So classes have officially started hereabouts. On my way to my first class yesterday, one of the department secretaries pulled me into the office and let me know that there's a room conflict, and that my class -- yes, the one I was just then on my way to teach -- was moving. To a different building. A building that I'd set foot in maybe once in my two years here so far, and had forgotten the location of.

But that's OK, 'cause no one had told the students yet either. I don't get very many opportunities to feel like a mother duck... and really, I'm OK with that.

Not much else new here. Had a bit of a birthday this past weekend -- I'm prime again -- but the less said about that, the better. But I will say this: I wish that cookbooks would either give all measurements in reasonable units, or else have a handy conversion chart somewhere that told you, say, exactly how much space six ounces of flour is supposed to take up.

I'd like to thank Kevin Drum of Political Animal for clearing up a bit of the nonsense around the phrase statistical tie.

Essentially: if in a two-candidate race you have people's preferences within the margin of error -- say, 48% to 45% with a 4% MoE -- there's a fair number of folks who'll call that a statistical tie, with the implication that the apparent lead is actually meaningless. This is wrong, because the whole idea of a margin of error is meaningless without the companion notion of a confidence interval.

OK, so many of you probably already know this, and most of the rest probably don't care. But if you want the numerical details for the implied confidence in a statement like X is winning, go see Kevin's post.

When I was enumerating (in the Java, not the combinatorial sense) the comforts of being back in my Midwestern Industrial Hub, one that I'd neglected to talk about was the public library. Usually my library visits involve a lot of impulse borrowing, but this time I was organised: I made a list of books in my Visor, and hence went in fully intending to come out with a massive armload of tomes... rather than that just happening by accident.

In case you're curious, here's what's now on my reading list:

• American Aurora, based on a recommendation on Tristero's website. The story of a somewhat contrarian newspaper in revolutionary and post-revolutionary America, and by extension a somewhat contrarian take on the Founding Fathers. It looks a little dry, though; I might just dip in and out of this one, rather than reading it cover to cover.
• Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders trilogy. I was obscurely disappointed with her earlier Farseer trilogy -- at least the third book thereof -- but I've been assured by a couple of people that this series is more satisfying.
• Some books by Matt Ridley, who writes about evolution and genetics. Wendy speaks highly of him, which is a strong point in his favour. One of the books -- I can't recall the title off the top of my head, and foolishly left my books in the car when I discovered that two arms would be inadequate for carrying them and my groceries -- deals with the evolution of co-operation, a topic that's been dear to my heart ever since I read Hofstadter's articles on the Prisoner's Dilemma, way back when I was in high school.
• The Last Light of the Sun, Guy Gavriel Kay's newest novel. Set in the same world as his last few books, but in a part of it we haven't seen of heard much of yet: the analogues of Scandinavia and the British Isles. Though I know a number of other Kay fans, I can't think of anyone who's actually read it yet, or at least anyone who's told me about reading it.

So I guess I'm pretty much set for the next few weeks. Especially if you add to the list the textbooks for the courses that I start teaching next week. You'll forgive me, though, if I don't count them.

While beginning the Great Apartment Cleanup that is one of my main goals this weekend, I found and revived my old Handspring Visor Neo. I picked it up back in my grad student days, and have come back to it every now and again, but I never stick with it for long.

One reason for my fickleness in this regard, I think, is that the device is fundamentally designed for right-handed people. Which isn't to say that it's impossible for lefties to use, of course. But I write with a bit of a hook, as do many other left-handers I know, and this contortion means that when I'm scratching away with Graffiti (which I was surprised and pleased to discover I remembered), I can't see most of the screen. Since I'm also enough of a microklutz to make the actual scribing of Graffiti a somewhat error-prone endeavour, this is suboptimal.

(Oh, microklutz? A klutz in the small, clumsy with regards to detailed work with one's hands. Contrast with macroklutz, one who is clumsy in grosser motions of the body: walking, catching balls, etc. I'm more of a micro- than a macroklutz, although I partake of both.)

On the other hand, it's sort of handy to have around, particularly now that I have a computer where I keep things like an address-book and a calendar. The iSync-Palm conduit works wonderfully well; my only complaint is that it doesn't transfer over everything from my Addressbook records; I get phone numbers and addresses, but miss details like birthdays and the like.

I've recently finished re-reading Freedom and Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull. I think this is my third reading of it since I acquired my copy about a year and a half ago; nine months between readings seems about right for this one.

Brust and Bull are both best known as fantasy and SF writers, and so in some ways it's a little odd that their collaboration resulted in a Victorian epistolary novel. (I believe the book's editor commented at the time of publication that the book is best described as science fiction: the science being that of Hegelian dialectics.) The philosophy and Marxist theory is fairly thick on the ground, but it's explained quite clearly. Also, if it starts to get a little heavy for you you can just skip over parts of it... as at least one character in the book admits to doing on occasion.

I haven't read very many epistolary novels, so I don't know how common this is, but one of my favourite features about this one is the fact that it does take time for letters to get from one place to another; thus, you end up with letters being written on one day, that don't arrive at their destination for several days hence... and meanwhile, we're still getting letters and journal entries from the future receiver of the first letter. The multiplex perspectives can be a little hard to keep track of on occasion, but it's well worth the effort.

The other thing that pleases me about the book is that it was written more or less as it appears: with the two collaborating authors writing letters back and forth to each other. The result is like a particularly dense long-form improv, where names and references get thrown out in early letters, which then get elaborated on by different characters (often written by the other author) in later letters.

...if that's a word
I know it's not 'cause I looked it up
That's one of those skills that I learned in my school

Back in the Midwest, this time for the duration. It's probably about time that I went and planned out my semester. Mine's not a bad schedule this time out, although a little awkward for one with my weekend road-tripping border-crossing time-zone-jumping lifestyle. But the two instances of the same course I have also meet on all the same days, which should make it fairly easy to keep them co-ordinated, and my other course meets on completely different days, which lowers the probability that I'm accidentally going to freak out my business calculus students with the finer points of ordinary generating functions.

Doing so on purpose is still an option, of course, if I wanted to be Cruel.

• Glancing over a list of famous people with personality type ABCD, I notice that Paul McCartney is listed, not as Musician, but as Beatle. Once you've transcended your profession, what can you do next?
• One feature that I sort of wish iTunes had is the ability to organize playlists in a tree-like structure, as one organizes directories (or folders to use the local dialect). I have too many playlists, many of which have no further identifying marks than someone's name, and it'd be nice to sort them into piles: playlists that represent CDs I've made for people, playlists devoted to certain artists, like that.
• As much as I enjoy being on vacation and, y'know, actually seeing my friends, there are a couple of good things I can look forward to once I return to the Midwest. One is my kitchen, with all of my kitchen stuff. Another is my bed, with a real mattress and everything; this is in sharp contrast to the foam pad that adorns my bedframe here at the residence. Is it bad to wake up with a pain between one's shoulderblades every morning?
• To dwell on an offhand remark for a second, I don't think that I have enough kitchen stuff. This is largely because I haven't accepted my current situation as permanent, and so am hesitant to acquire too much extra stuff. I can almost always convince myself that I can wait on getting good kitchen stuff... which is good, given that there are so many things that I can't always so convince myself.
• To (mis?)quote Steven Brust (translating a fictional character, who in turn is recording the words of another fictional character): it is a rare and wondrous thing to have friends.

While browsing through a local used bookstore with my one-time Lovely Assistant, I discovered The Superior Person's little Book of Words. It's a lovely little work, which gives definitions and suggested usages for something like 500 neglected or misunderstood words. The principle behind the book is that people often let so-called experts win arguments not because their ideas are better, but because their statements are more incomprehensible. Hence, this is a book of weaponry.

My favourite entry so far is for Antimony:

A poisonous metal. So-called, according to tradition, because of its use in a mass poisoning of monks in the fifteenth century by an alchemist named, rather delightfully, Basil Valentine. Hence, anti-moine, or hostile to monks. Its appropriate usage in the present century (ie, the substance, not the word) would lie in its administration to people who smoke pipes in elevators.

So I've survived my second trip to and from the Big City. Last time I'd made a vow to myself never again to drive anywhere near NYC, and, well, so much for that. Again, though, I followed the get in, park for a few days, get out strategy, which people have told me is the smart thing to do. I do enjoy occasionally doing the smart thing, especially when I'm tacking it on to a somewhat absurd road trip. Like a grace note for broken crockery or something.

So Friday was pretty much blown in the trip to New York, and Sunday by the trip from New York up to Toronto. (No, I didn't start in Toronto. Long story.) Saturday started off with the plan of taking a walking tour of the important bits of the city; that plan lasted maybe two hours before we decided that it was Too Damn Hot for this. And yet somehow my (one-way) travelling companion and I then proceeded to spend a couple of hours in the afternoon wandering around the East Village, in search of funky little galleries. Which were mostly closed for the weekend, it seemed. That evening we'd wanted to catch Shakespeare in the Park, for which tickets are free, but to get these free tickets it seems one has to line up four hours before the ticket window for that day opens. Unlucky. So we ended up catching a little improv show instead, which was entertaining.

Today, by contrast, I met up with many of the Usual Crowd, who were gathered in celebration of Elbie's n^th birthday. And now I've got someplace to sleep which, for the first time in four days, is not someone else's living room. Ah, the luxury...