Bounded in a Nutshell

Been a busy couple of weeks here in Nutshell Central. Principally there was Workshop Hell, which I've come out the other side of pretty much unscathed, and with a better working knowledge of Fourier transforms and weavelets than at any prior point in my existence. (Thanks here are due to Wendy, who has long been my principal source for explanations of analysis, and came through for me on the whole wavelets thing. Wendy, remind me to buy you dinner next time I'm in the region.)

Aside from that, the rather short term is coming to an end. We're doing what I consider the fun part of the course -- combinatorics, or "counting" if you prefer -- which lets me bring in all sorts of problems from different games. I'd been talking to Blue earlier this week, and he mentioned that on one of his Ultimate teams how many different men and women there were, and how many were required for a line on the field. A-ha, I thought to myself a little while later, there's a combinations question here.

The best new tool for the web I've seen in a while is YubNub: it's billed as a command-line for the web, but infinitely extensible, so really it's a little like a Forth interpreter for the web. The reason I like this is that I don't always remember to switch search engines in my FireFox search box, with disappointing results. Typing a prefix command will be easier for me to remember, because it means I don't have to mix mousing into my keyboarding.

I have an occasional weakness: every now and again, when I find myself at a bookstore and am not worried about money, I will buy a computer book. Principally, these books tend to be about programming in Cocoa, the native framework of my operating system of choice.

This is perhaps a little perverse, since I don't -- as a general rule -- program. I certainly don't program well. (While I'm reasonably competant in a handful of formatting languages, those aren't really the same thing. Anyone who uses the phrase "HTML programming" probably Does Not Know what they are Talking About.) And really, I don't need to program. I got out of that racket almost seven years ago.

But I still feel that, somehow, I should be able to program. I think part of it's a fascination with the idea of a programming language as a mode of expression. Mostly, though, it's probably that as an educated math geek at the tail end of Generation X™, I feel that some ability with computers is expected of me. I design algorithms; I should be able to implement them myself.

So I go and buy the books, and often try to read them, and then my actual work starts making demands on my analytical brain, which decouples from the part that sees reading as a default idle activity. And the book goes on a shelf (eventually, sometimes languishing in a satchel or my trunk, or occasionally on the floor someplace) and gets glanced at now and again. And, several months after that, I go and buy a new book.

The other week I bought Mike Doughty's new album; it features a song called "Busting up a Starbux".

This evening I was out doing math with my most recent visitor, and heard the album -- including said song -- over the sound system.

At a Starbucks.

This pleases me immensely.

OK, so I'm being bad about updating again. I plead summertime and easy living as my excuse.

Things going through my head recently:

• A long time ago I bought a bunch of "snack bags" (small, sealable plastic bags) on the presumption that there were sandwich-sized or so. They were not, and so since that day they've been hanging around my apartment with nothing to do... until today! For today I have determined that they are the perfect size for a coffeemaker's worth of grounds, which is a very handy thing indeed when one is taking one's show on the road.
• I feel like I should say something about the Canadian federal scene these days, but really, I got nothing. Conventional wisdom of the moment seems to suggest that Duceppe is going to resign from the Bloc in order to lead the now-headless Pequistes, thereby throwing his party into confusion and sounding the death knell for Charest's priemereship. This, in turn, probably means a weaker opposition coalition in Parliament, and possibly a weaker Bloc next federal election. (Those votes would, I suspect, go to the NDPs rather than the Libs or the Conservatives, but that's just a feeling I have and possibly wishful thinking.)
• I've been reading a lot of hackish books lately. I should stop, because at some point my neighbours are going to start wondering who I'm shouting "You hack!" at.

Anyhow, coffee's ready. Time to get to work.