Bounded in a Nutshell

This weekend's being spent at DANGER, a sort of but not really impromptu meeting of mathematicians in Tennessee. (DANGER stands for something, but damned if I can remember what anymore.) I suppose you could technically say that this is the third year that something like this has happened in the autumn; last year we called it the Nashville Project, and the year before it wasn't called anything in particular.

So far, the mathematical content of the weekend has involved villainous and indiscrete graphs, as well as a conjecture on categorical products. The non-mathematical portions have involved caffeine, alcohol, and the mutual exchange of adjectives. Right now there's a small child who's playing with my guitar... not terribly gently, I'm afraid.

My biggest problem with trips south during the fall is that they totally throw off my sense of season. It feels like in the eight hours it took me to get here yesterday, I went back in time by two or three months, and that's just not right.

Am I the only one who's moderately disturbed that the U.S. Post Office's website is at http://www.usps.com/, with http://www.usps.gov/ set up as a redirect?

I mean, sure, there's been a lot of abuse of .com, .net. and .org domains, with a vague sense of interchangeability between them... but this is the government, right? They've got all this lovely namespace that's set aside only for them; wh do they need the dot-com? Even if there's a perfectly good reason for it -- like, they don't want someone setting up Pr0n w4r3z there or something -- shouldn't they set that up as the redirect?

Or maybe there's something I'm missing, and USPS was privatised when I wasn't looking.

It wasn't that long ago that I was complaining about how warm it was, it being autumn at all.

The national weather service forecast tells me that the temperature in my vicinity is expected to dip below freezing this coming Monday night.

Rock on.