Author Archives: matt

So most people who care about such things know that Google Mail uses the Google “AdWords” scripts to supply links to websites related to text in your e-mail. A strange side effect of this is when you’re looking in your … Continue reading →

Today was the last day of classes in my semester here. I now have a week of mostly slack time before the Great Exam Marathon next Thursday, following which I’ve got a few weeks of vacation, during which I plan … Continue reading →

Crooked Timber’s doing a Susanna Clarke seminar (or really, a Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell seminar), which is totally great. I was utterly charmed by this novel when I picked it up last year, and if you’ve not read it … Continue reading →

The good news is that my printing problems have ceased. The not-great-but-ok news is that, as anticipated, all of my principally unix-based software (most notably, my TeX tree) got shunted off to the side, and it’s easier to just go … Continue reading →

For the past week I’ve been unable to print from my office machine. This is apparently a problem that crops up in OS X on occasion, when some vital system file gets clobbered; the effect is that every attempt to … Continue reading →

In class today I invoked one of my favourite examples of a counting problem: why are the poker hands ranked the way they are? I started explaining that the important thing is structure: more valuable poker hands are rarer, because … Continue reading →

Ok, this pleases me just a little bit. Yesterday was Election Day in this country; since it’s an odd-numbered year, the elections in question were limited to happenings at the state and local levels. (None here, though, or at least … Continue reading →

Initial post: 7:45 pm I’ve blocked out 8pm to 2am, local time, as my official NaDruWriNi period of observance. (If you’re asking yourself what this NaDruWriNi thing is, scroll down one post & follow the link.) The plan is fairly … Continue reading →

Wow, I really have been crap about updating this space recently, eh? Mostly, I think, I’ve been overwhelmed by my academic workload; teaching only two days a week seems like a good idea, but in execution it can be a … Continue reading →

…is that it’s not durable enough. I think that anyone who knows me is willing to agree that I’m rather hard on my personal possessions. Maybe I really am an agent of localized entropy; maybe I’m just careless. But things … Continue reading →