Out of my hat

This coming month’s looking like it’s going to be pretty full. Here’s why:

• I’m moving both house and office in the next little while. I’m getting keys to both spaces tomorrow; I figure I’ll be spending much of the weekend carting stuff between my old office and the new one, figuring out the finer points of how to arrange my new (window-licious!) space. Hopefully, I’ll work out some way of keeping the new space somewhat more kempt than my current. As for the change of residence, I haven’t figured out the means yet — movers vs. old-fashioned moving party — nor the exact timing of the move, including factors like whether I want to paint (and whether I could afford to paint, even if I wanted to).
• I’m teaching a totally new-to-me class (Math History). The week of introductory lectures have been short, but hopefully that’ll be changing next week once I get into the real meat of the subject. There has been a certain amount of positive feedback to the idea that I should podcast the course, but doing that might possibly run afoul of the distance-ed people on campus; what I might do instead is wait until the fall and put together a “Math History Break” series once I’ve got a little more leisure to do so.
• Still trying to reach ten-and-ten: earlier this summer, my tenth research paper has been accepted for publication. I’ve got something like four more out being refereed right now, and a lot of mostly-finished papers lying around the bottom of the hard drive; it’s not impossible to finish another six, giving me ten papers at the referees to go with the ten already accepted or published. (Although this might be an example of summer vertigo.)
• 
  Social obligations: a wedding in Waterloo, a DANGER meeting, and a couple of visits to ecogrrl while she’s in exile a little ways south of here. I’m having a certain amount of trouble readjusting to my usual social isolation after spending the better part of a month and a half around my people again, so I welcome these opportunities; however, getting to and from does take a certain amount of time.
• Oh, and a bunch of new novels came out last month; I’m grabbing and reading them as they appear at my local public library. Probably shouldn’t count for this list except that they’re what’s driving my waking hours into Alaska Standard Time at the moment.

I’m beginning to think that airlines don’t really do the whole travel-rewards thing. Oh, they’ll say they do, but when it comes down to it…

So the two airlines with which I have accumulated miles¹ both have two tiers of rewards; let’s call them “Level Suck” and “Level Rock”. Level Suck requires only half as many miles as Level Rock, but there are restrictions; specifically, “peak routes” might not be available at Level Suck, Saturday-night stays might be required, etc. At no point does the documentation for either programme really get down to cases and explain in detail when one must redeem at Level Rock and when Level Suck is available.

The flight that I am trying to plan is entirely within the continental United States, over a weekend. I am trying to fly from a minor airport in a Midwestern city to a minor airport in a Southern city; “minor” should be understood here to indicate that the number of baggage claim belts at the airports in question — combined — can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Peak Route.

And yet it seems that no reward flights are available at Level Suck on the days in question, on either airline. There was briefly the possibility of such a flight, but when I tried to redeem it I got a message informing me that I cannot book this online, and must call a toll-free phone number. The message did not inform me of the fact that no one would answer the phone at the number in question, but that turns out to be true as well.²

And so the whole frequent-flier thing gives certain indications of being a scam. By the time I’ve got enough miles on either plan to reach Level Rock, I suspect that they’ll have changed the rules again somehow to prohibit the redemption of miles on days containing a Y or something.

[1]: The two airlines in question are now partners, as it happens, and one can earn miles for one’s plan by flying with the other. This is a very different thing from being able to just, say, pool miles between the two plans and come up with something worthwhile; the latter seems to be a fundamental logical impossibility, somehow.

[2]: Plus, one of the airlines will happily quote “prices” at you which are impossible to achieve using the guidelines in the Member’s Guide. If reward travel happens at x and 2x miles, how is it possible to get a search result which costs 1.7x miles?

The sign of a great bibliography: I’m currently referencing two papers with the titles “Generalised domination and independence in graphs” and “Generalized independence and domination in graphs”. These two papers seem to share a starting point and a couple of results, but how they go from the one to the other is very, very different. In a way, the paper I’m working on is yet another approach to the same material, but it would be difficult to come up with yet another sensible re-ordering of those words for the title.

(And yes, the s/z difference is present in the original sources: one’s by a pair of South Africans using the Commonwealth spelling, the other’s a pair of Poles using American spelling. So I suppose that gives me two technically distinct titles I could choose, if I wanted to further obfuscate the literature.)

Tip o’ the cap to clvrmnky for directing me to Cork’d: an online communal wine journal, complete with tagging and friends lists (“drinking buddies”).

Anyone who’s interested in discussing such things, my UID’s “mattinthehat”; go sign up & let us find out what each other is drinking. (Note that as of this writing, I haven’t got anything in there; that’s likely to change in the next day or so.)

What’s the reciprocal relationship to “friend of the family”? It seems that I’m officially a friend of the extended ecogrrl-decogrrl family, and it sort of bothers me that I don’t have an easy expression for this. “Family of friends” doesn’t seem quite right.

In any event, I was recently visiting a branch of this family that I am friends with, and this particular branch includes two small children; for the sake of anonymity, I shall refer to them as Girl and Boy, respectively. Girl recently turned 6, Boy was just about to turn 4, and both (after an initial bout of shyness, perfectly understandable since (a) it’s been nearly a year since I saw them, and kids forget people after that long I guess, (b) I’m sort of a scary-looking dude sometimes) quickly incorporated me into the play structure. I think this was sort of handy for the parents, since there were all manner of preparations to be made for Boy’s immanent birthday party, and my distracting the children gave them a little space to work.

Anyhow, so it’s late Sunday morning, and I’ve been up for a few hours, and most of those hours have been spent playing with the children. I had engineered a game that involved them tossing little balloons at me and my batting them back to them, all with me sitting in a very comfortable chair. (That’s the part that required engineering.) After a little while of this, it seems that the kids caught on to my ulterior motives, and got me to go chasing after a baloon that had gone astray… at which point, they took possession of the chair. (Comfy Lounge Rules in effect already. Someone should start teaching them to play cards.) After making some mock-indignant noises about this, I took possession of the oversized ottoman sitting nearby.

This sparked a brief consultation between the kids, with Boy quickly coming over to try and annex the ottoman into their territory. Girl had a different idea: “How about,” she says, addressing me, “you lie down on the couch and we can jump on you.”

Now maybe I was just really tired, but it seemed so very logical, the way that she stated it: here is a plan that benefits everyone, was the clear subtext. I appreciate logical thought, even when it’s as twisted and misleading as this, so I tried to come up with a logical counter: there’s all kinds of toys on the sofa right now, I can’t lie down on it.

Immediately, the pair of them go and pile stuff from the sofa on to the coffee table. “There,” Girl says, “now you can lie down.”

So I did. And they started jumping on me, as promised. That’s about when their mother came in and scolded them lightly for jumping on the guest. I guess the Fresh Prince was right: parents just don’t understand.

I’ve recently gotten my hands on a couple of research papers that answer a couple of outstanding questions in one of my own projects. They answer them so well, in fact, that I’m not sure how much there is to say about our stuff. This is something of a shame, since I’m supposed to be speaking about it in less than 20 hours, but I suppose better now than later, right? Aside from which, saying “here’s a handful of results that we’re now going to apply in a completely different area of mathematics” should be worth something.

Aside from their content, the papers — or one of them, at least — hae also resolved for me another mystery: namely, exactly why it is that my old advisor uses the notation that he does. Whenever there’s a call to create notation, you can usually count on my advisor to come up with something that’s complex but complete: it covers all the bases, even if it does so in a somewhat impenetrable manner. Well, he was trained as an analyst, and from the looks of it that style of notation isn’t uncommon in analysis. So in some ways trying to read one of these papers was a little like coming home, if we add the proviso that “home” is a dark and strange place where you can’t find anything.

In other news, another term has ended, hurrah hurrah. Exams next week, then a few weeks of road-tripping to conferences and the like, and then something else happens. All the while, of course, I’ll be working on writing and editting drafts of papers, and playing around with some new ideas, and maybe even updating more frequently. I’ve noticed that I’ve got four or five draft posts lying around that I started and then got distracted from, or couldn’t find the words I was looking for, or something; maybe next week in between grading, writing, and dealing with panicked students I’ll polish them up and share them with you all.

When driving at night while using your high beams, please be aware that they might blind other people on the road, and lead to their subsequent death. This should particularly be kept in mind on undivided highways.

On a related note, hovering behind someone for ten minutes with your brights fully on, only dimming them when you are approximately ten feet behind the vehicle in question, is a bad idea on several levels, mostly because it could lead to their subsequent death.

As well, when driving during a horrific rainstorm, it’s possible that other people will be driving more cautiously (i.e. slower) than you. Passing them is quite acceptible, but it should be considered unwise topass them at speed and then immediately pull in front of them, as the massive wave of water then hitting their windshield could result in their subsequent death.

Thank you and good night.

Wow. There’s just so many cool places to go on the internet. I wish I had some place where I could share with the world some of the neat stuff I read there.

Oh, wait.

Of course, I don’t have the list handy, but via Making Light (or one of the sidebars, actually), here’s a lovely little piece on food in Argentina:

Eating steaks in Argentina feels like joining a cult. You find yourself leaning on friends to come visit, and writing YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND in all caps more often than feels comfortable. Argentine beef really is extraordinary.

I’ve been told that I need to visit Argentina for the wines; now it seems like I might stay for the steak, and that’s not even beginning to touch on my intermittent fascination with Jorge Luis Borges. All of which sort of suggests that maybe I should learn Spanish someday.

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.