Bounded in a Nutshell

Finally fixing up a few things around the blog here, in preparation to actually opening up other sections of the website which have been Under Development for, like, ever.

As such, anyone who's got one of my posts permalinked (for some reason that I can't even imagine) should be warned: all of the archive pages are going to have their extensions changes from html to php. In fact, they already have; I'm just keeping the old archive pages up for another week or so on the off-chance that abruptly deleting them will disrupt someone's quality of life.

So I'd had a steak defrosting in my fridge for a couple of days, and it wanted eating, and I thought it would be nice to prepare a marinade for it of some sort. Most of my experiments in marinades have been alcohol-based — beer or wine — and I saw no particularly good reason to deviate from that pattern. The problem with this plan was that my beer supplies are dangerously low (in fact, currently empty), and my wines… well, at this particular moment most of my wine stocks are of sufficient quality that I was loath to use a significant fraction of a bottle on a steak. But sacrifices must be made, and so I cast my eyes over my wine racks…

…and saw the Two-Dollar Riesling. Perfect, I thought.

A few weeks prior I'd been making a grocery run, and the store had a big cart of wine bottles in the middle of the main aisle with Sale! stickers on them. Naturally I stopped to investigate; the first bottle I picked up was a German Riesling in brown glass, and bore the label:

Special Savings
50% OFF!
You Pay $1.84

…which isn't even $2 with taxes. The vintner or distributor had supplied tasting notes, which described the flavour as grapey, and upon reading that I knew, I knew that this would be a wretched bottle of wine. If the best description that you can come up with for your wine is it tastes like grapes, then there's something seriously wrong somewhere.

Of course I bought it. Dude, $2.

And my impulse purchase was shown to be prescient a scant few weeks later, when a cheap bottle of wine was exactly what I was looking for. Rieslings — particularly bad ones — are all about sugar and acidity; the one would help to carbonize the surface of the steak, I reasoned, while the other would tenderize it.

The wine, incidentally, was just as awful as the price and tasting notes promised: it was sort of like drinking sweetened white grape juice, a little like drinking grape jelly. No subtlety, and — more's the pity — almost no acidity. This meant that my Carefully-Considered Weevil Plan about tenderizing the meat came to naught. (It was still edible, but it was rather chewier than a good steak should be.

I don't know that there's a lesson here, which means that, if there is, I didn't learn it. Désolé.

Really, why would anyone drink green beer? I don't think "Irish" is intersection-closed, so the whole concept as a St. Patrick's Day thing is perhaps ill-conceived.

It happens I was at a bar/restaurant on Friday night, and the bartender offered to make my beer green. I declined, politely. Across the bar were a pair of young gentlemen with glasses full of viridian brew, and I can't say that they looked terrifically happy with their decision.

Well, I could. But I'd be lying.

A mathematician talking about math? What a concept. Except it's not really about math, so don't stop reading just because it says "mathblogging" up there at the top of the post.

So I was at a conference last week, as I noted elsewhere. (If that's an unfollowed link for you, then here's the summary: I apparantly won the combinatorial equivalent of Rookie of the Year. Go me!) One of the many things that conferences are good for is that they tend to spark new projects; sometimes that means agreeing in principle that sometime several months from now one is going to start thinking about a thing, and sometimes it means that a puzzle invades one's brain and starts sending out for pizza and beer, and won't leave until it's been resolved one way or another.

I've been working on one of the latter problems, a pretty little question about cycle decompositions of certain circulant graphs that was proposed by Codename Triple-M. I don't usually reason analogically in graph theory --- that is, I seem to think in the concepts themselves rather than metaphors for the concepts --- but I find myself thinking about this particular question in terms of coloured yarn for some reason, and so have been phrasing ideas to myelf in terms of tying off ends, straight vs. twisted strands, etc.

I typed up a bunch of the ideas & sent them along to Triple-M earlier, and now there's a supremely unreasonable part of my mind that's muttering things like "what, no response yet?" and wondering who's going to clean up all the beer cans and pizza boxes littering the floor of my brain.

Via Unfogged: This proclamation might almost be enough of a reason by itself to move to Kansas. Almost.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dennis “Boog” Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas, do hereby proclaim the days of February 4, April 1, March 28, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 16, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 1, October 17, and October 26, 2006 as “INTERNATIONAL DADAISM MONTH”