Bounded in a Nutshell

I'm with Jan-jan on this: it's a Chi, not an X. Calm down, folks. Particularly those of you with fish that say (transliterating) ICHTHOS on your cars, since you're using the Chi as well. Which, I suppose, probably doesn't describe any of my regular readers, but just in case I've become a cult classic...

So it's ten a.m., and all of the gifts are opened. At the moment all four other people in the room are reading books; this is fairly typical for our family gatherings. Outside it's very, very cold, and so I'm content to be here with my warm, toasty laptop and a nigh-limitless supply of chocolate.

In case anyone cares, it is possible to decompose the complete 3-uniform hypergraphs on 8 and 14 points into STS(7)s. I can't imagine that many of my readers would, but I'm pretty excited about that right now so I thought I'd mention it.

Peace be upon you all.

• I have mixed feelings about students leaving questions blank. On the one hand, it's a horrible waste, and doesn't even allow me to find the leanest sliver of an excuse for part-marks. OTOH, it does make things go faster.
• I seem to have a bit of a plague of people who are conflating addition and multiplication. It's one thing when people do it in the Product or Chain Rules, but I've now just found my third test where someone took the derivative of 3y³ and ended up with 6y²y'... presumably because they searched their brains for 3x3 and came up with 3+3 instead. This bothers me.
• Another frustrating thing is when you give two classes close-to-identical exams and find a massive disparity in the results. And it's not attributable to extra information, I don't think, because the later group did much, much worse. Tomorrow morning before I submit the grades, I think I'm going to have to pore over both classes' exams to make sure that my grading standards were consistent.

I don't understand why it is that some people seem to take on the persona of Asshole as a first line of defense. (And we're talking about the Jungian Architype here... the Platonic Form of the Asshole.)

The context: a bunch of folks were being loud in the hallway right outside my classroom. Since the class was writing a final exam at the time, I felt that this was to be discouraged, so I went out and asked them -- quietly and politely -- if they could possibly keep it down. Two of the three guys apologised and agreed; the third one -- and these are older men, maybe in their 50s -- started hectoring me about how it was a public hallway.

After the incident, of course, I came up with all sorts of properly florid ways of telling him to go to Hell. At the time, I think I rolled my eyes, went back into the (slightly overstuffed) classroom, and got people to fidget their desks in such a way as to make closing the door a possibility.

Jerk.

Warning: random musings about internet culture ahead. Probably puerile.

Once upon a time, the measure of net.chique was whether you had a homepage. Typically, the homepage was a page about you: your interests, your projects, maybe interesting or useful links that you commended to the attention of the masses. Essentially, the homepage was a crystalization of you at a certain moment in time... and it often would stay that way, since people seemed to develop the habit of creating their homepage, stocking it full of stuff, and then letting it be. Just this evening I was browsing through the homepage (and associated webspace, since technically the "homepage" is only the portal to someone's conceptual space on the web) of a friend of mine, and I'm reasonably sure he hasn't updated much of the content in the past four years.

Presently, it seems that the in thing is to have a weblog. This serves much the same function as a homepage, but with the stagnation aspect filtered out: the whole point of a blog is that it's reasonably dynamic, that it gets updated on a reasonably timely basis. Symbolically, I think that perhaps the effect of this is to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. With homepages, the end result was often the enshrinement of a moment for the ages; blogs seem to suggest that the only sacred moment is right now, and that what one writes on a given day, at a given hour, is a truer representation of who one is than anything that came before.

(I'm talking about personal blogs here. Technical, political, or other topic-oriented blogs have their own semiotics attached, I suspect, compared to more traditional modes of information sharing.)

Homepages aren't dead by any means, but it seems that they're mostly used to present someone's professional persona. Thus, a freelance developer will have a homepage that showcases their work, and then maybe a blog on the side for personal commentary. Academics will often follow the same pattern: a homepage which is essentially an extended CV with some course information on the side, and if they want to talk about the rest of their lives they'll have a livejournal or something. Frequently a blog coexists with a more traditional homepage; in these cases, it seems to me that the blog is often the focus of the site, with other pages and features updated sporadically if at all.

This isn't a universal sort of thing, of course; recently I've run across a couple of websites that are set up using Blogger or something like it, but are not really blogs in conception; that is, the creators have made what is ultimately a static site, sometimes with comments added in, and only use the Blogger framework to avoid doing any actual web coding and to get themselves a bit of free hosting.

Does all of this mean something? Well, probably. I'd imagine that the drift from homepages to blogs is similar in kind to search engines becoming pre-eminent over the web indices of the mid-90s. And it's also related, I'm sure, to the webification of net news; I'd imagine that most non-techie users of the internet equate "the internet" with "the world-wide web", an equation that's been aided by the services that put e-mail and newsgroups on web pages for people to see.