Bounded in a Nutshell

I got polled the other day. Go me!

Specifically, I got a phone call from a nice robot at Survey USA, asking about my state's upcoming primary: how likely I was to vote, which party I'd be voting in, and which candidates (presidential and gubernatorial) I was likely to back. Yes, my state hasn't held their primary yet, which means that for the first time ever there's attention being paid by the presidential candidates.

There was also some demographic-type questions: how old am I, am I a party member (we have open primaries, so you don't need to be a member of Party X to vote in the Party X primary), am I conservative/moderate/liberal, and (oddly) am I pro-life or pro-choice. Some of these are the sorts of questions that I would hem and haw over if asked by an actual human, since they're not ones that necessarily admit clean answers relying as they do on arguable preconceived notations… but faced with a prerecorded voice, I had no choice but to press a button on my phone. Progress!

So now I'm watching the website to see when the poll results get published. Though if I'd visited before the phone call I would probably never have picked up; their "Why did they call me?" page is emotional bullying from start to finish, and mostly bullshit to boot.

The CD Cover meme: follow a series of steps to randomly generate text and images, which you then combine to get something indy-looking. Since I have no flickr account, I post here:

(Image La petite plage by Bertrand Monney, used under a Creative Commons licence.)

Look at me! I'm blogging from Cafe 1842 in Waterloo, like the cool kids do!

Last week at the conference, I blandly assured my old advisor (after several drinks on both of our parts) that a certain statement about objects called "trees" and "dominating sets" was clearly true. (More details available on request, but I assume that most of my readers don't care about the technical details enough to parse through them.) He, naturally enough, asked me to write up a quick demonstration of this, as it's closely related to a problem we've worked on in the past that he's currently waving at one of his present grad students.

I'm still convinced that the result is true, but nailing down the particulars is looking to be a mite trickier than I'd hoped.

I've heard that most people think in either words or pictures, and I don't think that's the case for me. If I were thinking of this in terms of words, then the proof would be concurrent with the thought, right? And if I thought in terms of pictures, then I could just draw out a diagram showing the source of my convictions on this score, and then explain it by describing what's going on where. Whereas with what I've got, I perceive how the proof has to work on some non-visual, non-verbal level, and converting that into things that other humans might understand is the sticking point.

The car dealership where I get the vehicle serviced has introduced free wi-fi. Hott.

In other news: last week was my usual Florida conference, which I only caught about two days off this time out because of it not being during my spring break. Actually, I was meant to catch two and a half days, but then there was an ice storm that impeded my progress to my outbound airport. But I got in to the conference over an hour before I had to give my talk, so it's all good.

The corollary to this is that I'm on spring break now, without a conference to be at. Today I'm getting things done around town; tomorrow I'll be heading into Ontario for the rest of the week, hopefully coinciding with the Big Thaw.

Jeff Healey has died.

I tuned into contemporary pop/rock music when I was about twelve. (Before that, pretty much all I knew about rock was from my dad's Beatles LPs. As groundworks go, that's a pretty good one to have.) The local AM station that I got turned on to first had an hour-long program each night at 9, "Up Front", that spotlighted Canadian music. This was the beginning of my modern musical education, the acts I heard on that show, and Healey was a part of that.

I hadn't realized his blindness was due to cancer. I hadn't realized he was as young as he was, not ten years my senior. And I'd lost track of his career sometime around when I moved to the States. But it feels like his passing is significant to me, somehow.