Out of my hat

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”

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Mongol Rally: an 8000 miles from London, England to Ulan Bator, Mongolia. In cars with 1L engines or worse. (Although to be fair, the rules say that you have to start out in such a car; if you can arrange a trade-up somewhere in Kyrgyzstan, so much the better for you.) With absolutely no guarantees of arrival, or support services of any kind from the organizers. All in the name of charity.

See, if I’d known about this before getting rid of the Flaming Datsun of Doom…

A conversation at dinner last night had someone comment about one of my recent posts; this led to a bunch of confused looks around the table and remarks like, “wait, you blogged something?” In resposne to this — well, really in response to my own apathy about posting — I’ve set up an Atom feed for this site. My browser auto-detects it as RSS so yours probably will as well; if not, the relevant link is http://matt.goldenempires.com/atomblog.xml.

For my next trick, I’ll probably be updating the sidebar someday soon.

March 2003:

The cafeteria menus in the three House office buildings changed the name of “french fries” to “freedom fries,” in a culinary rebuke of France stemming from anger over the country’s refusal to support the U.S. position on Iraq.

February 2006:

Iranians love Danish pastries, but now when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they have to ask for “Roses of the Prophet Muhammad.”

Dude. It’s been, like, a month since I wrote anything here.

I’d like to be able to tell you that I’ve been off saving the world and stuff, or building geometrical shapes in Siberia so that aliens will know that there’s intelligent life on Earth, or something like that. And while I could — the blog here is billed as fiction, after all — well, there’s not a whole lot of point, really. So forget what I just said about Siberia.

What have I been doing? Living the life, such as it is. I’ve got a firm handle on my classes this semester, which means it’s time to start thinking about my summer class. (Another new course for me, another class I’ve technically never taken myself, another grad-level course… should be a gas.) Intermittently working on one project or another; this is meant to be the semester for clearing the decks, and getting all of the mostly-finished papers out of the metaphorical drawer and into the world. That’ll give me a chance to get some work done on the half-finished papers this summer, and then the fall can be devoted to the barely-started papers. With, since I have no self-control in this regard, a bunch of incidental ideas for new projects sparking off every now and again. (If that sounds at all impressive, it’s probably because you’re unfamiliar with the ideas in question: trust me, they’re not all that.)

If you don’t mind reading long-ish essays online, a couple of weeks ago Michael Bérubé (a professor of English and Cultural Studies at Penn State) wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago about academic freedom which is definitely worth a perusal. His site in general is one of the more engaging acadmic-type blogs I’ve run across, which makes it a minor mystery that I’ve not yet bookmarked it.

Anyhow, I’ll try to lead a more anecdotable life in the future to try and provide you the readers with more frequent updates.

I feel very adult today: I’ve both cast my vote in an election and gone to a dentist entirely of my own free will.

The voting thing isn’t anything new, since I generally make it a point to vote in those elections for which I have the franchise. Initially I had a ballot but no candidates, and then I was away from home for a few weeks, but now there’s no excuse. I had a bit of a dilemma in who to vote for, since my sympathies are reasonably evenly split between two parties, but I know it doesn’t matter greatly since my home riding’s almost certainly going to be carried by the incumbent anyway. (Said incumbent seems like a good guy, all things considered; but oy, the company he keeps…)

I haven’t actively been avoiding dentistry and those who practice it, but nor until recently have I been seeking it out. The reasons for my indifference have been almost entirely economic: until about a week and a half ago, I had no dental insurance whatsoever in this country. Now I do. Hence, it doesn’t bother me to go and get my teeth checked anymore. Besides, the fact that one of my cuspids had a hole large enough that I could feel it was getting annoying. (Now, of course, there’s fake tooth-stuff there, and also a fair amount of pain; I’m sort of hoping that the latter will fade over the next day or two. Teaching class this afternoon should be interesting.)

In other news… well, there is no other news. Carry on.

Yes, I’m still here. I spent the last few weeks wandering around Ontario, often staying in places with little to no internet connectivity, so even had I been inclined to write in this space I was more or less unable to.

Not a whole lot to report about the vacation: it was good, I enjoyed it, I got to see a great many people I care deeply about for greater or lesser expanses of time. Christmas was fairly placid, New Year’s a lot of fun. Most of the requisite driving around was without incident, which can only be good.

And now I’m back in the Midwest, where I discover that winter’s pretty much gone. How very strange.