Bounded in a Nutshell

Something I'd like to see on sites with random folks writing reviews: cumulative frequency statistics.

What I mean by that: a problem I have with amazon, IMDB and the like is that comments and ratings tend toward the extremes (and thus away from the middle). This is, one should note, to be expected: it's people with strong opinions -- in one direction or the other -- who tend to go through the bother of commenting on these sites, one imagines. But really, not every book or movie or whatever is the best or the worst ever; most of them are just, y'know, there. (The extreme numerical reviews are ameliorated somewhat when people actually go and write cogent comments regarding what they liked or disliked, but as often as not the comments amount to THIS BOOK IS TEH SUCK which isn't all that helpful.)

And so: for each reviewer, I'd like to see a little histogram, outlining how often they give a given number of stars. Or at the very least, a little note to the effect of: 58% of books received this ranking or higher. Computationally it's a little profligate, perhaps, but in a world of targetted banner ads, it doesn't seem infeasible.

Sitting in my office thinking that I should really get some coffee or lunch or something, which would require a trip to a bank machine. At the very moment I come to that conclusion, a textbook buyer shows up. $50 for books I'll never use? Sold!

...is my Ontario wine recommendation of the moment: a pleasant red, light but earthy, which is a neat trick. I know there are those who say that one should never drink alone, but if I followed that then I'd almost never get any drinking done.

I made plans this afternoon for a trip to San Diego, where an old roommate is getting married in July. This is apparently an expensive city to stay in at the best of times, and most of the cheap options I looked at were pretty much booked. I was chatting to the groom-to-be about this, and he said, yeah, there's baseball games that weekend... oh, and there's a comic book convention too. And I checked, and yes, the San Diego Comic Con is in fact that same weekend. This was, perhaps, not the best planning on the happy couple's part.

(On top of which, it's looking like the only people that I'll know there will be, well, the bride and groom; there was another fellow in the wedding party who's a friend of mine, but life's intervening and he's having to bow out. So, anyone who wants to come to San Diego and hang out with me mid-July would be more than welcome. There'll be baseball games...)

On the upside, I'm apparently the champion for this round of pre-calculus bingo, which pleases me in a sick sort of way.

For those playing along at home, I'm back from my sojourn Down South.

It was a bit of an odd trip. I left graduate school fairly early -- three years between my Bachelor's and Ph.D, which is really rather short -- at least in part because I could; I'd gotten an early start on a research project, and then more or less let momentum carry me through. I'd occasionally regretted finishing so fast, since by the time I left I'd actually settled in fairly well.

The regrets were only occasional because, well, it's graduate school, and thus ephemeral by nature. (Well, if you're doing it right. There were a couple of tenured grad students around my old department, and I suspect you can find the same in almost any school, but that's not what I'm talking about.) I could have stuck around for another year or even two, but it probably wouldn't have accomplished what I'd have wanted to accomplish; that is, I'd become comfortable in my milieu, but the milieu itself wasn't a fixed sort of thing.

It's this latter insight that was really driven home during my trip down this past weekend. The small, coherent community that I'd been a part of doesn't really exist any more, or at least it doesn't exist there anymore. And, being that we're academics, we're all pretty scattered around these days; it's not nearly the same as my (several) undergraduate socail circles, which for the most part still exist in some form or another in whichever city that particular collection stayed in or migrated to.

This is a weird sort of week for me, since tomorrow I'm flying down South, back to the place where I took my doctorate. This is strange on several levels, not the least of which being that it's only Tuesday and I'm done with my classes for the week.

Right now I'm feeling vaguely disconnected from things, perhaps because of my trip twisting my week into something new. I know that there are things that I'm supposed to be doing, and if I concentrate I can even figure out what those things probably are. But it doesn't quite translate into an impetus to get them done. And at the same time, I don't really seem able to concentrate on any of my usual distractions.

Hm. Whatever.

Something I meant to mention last week: I saw a post on a political blog about "Intelligent Design". And one of the ID proponents was listed in a press release as a "key design theorist". To which I say: no, get your own damn discipline name! A "design theorist" is one who does design theory, a perfectly respectable subdiscipline of combinatorics; the name's already taken, thankyouverymuch, and those of us in the mathematical community have no intention of giving it up easily.