Out of my hat

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 junk mail folder (which is called “Spam” by default): at the top of the directory listing, you’ll see a link that says something like: Spam casserole, 35-40 minutes, serves 4.

This probably demonstrates something about the use-mention distinction, or about why text-searching isn’t the omega of knowledge management. I just thought it was funny.

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 to, well, vacate. I’m not feeling the tremendous sense of liberation that I have often done at the end of term, maybe because I’ve been teaching nothing but cool stuff (or at least, what I consider cool stuff) for well over a month at this point.

(“Mostly” slack time? Yes. I’m looking to have drafts of two papers out to co-authors by this time tomorrow; I’ve got final exams to set, assignments to grade, and various other errands related to my classes to complete; and I’ve got to work out the syllabi for next semester’s classes. And that last should be done soon, since I’m getting requests from people who need approval from their graduate committees to get the class to count for their degrees. None of this has the same relentlessness that a regular teaching schedule has, and so I can be fairly flexible about what I do when. Still, it’s not the vacation yet by any means.)

In other news, Elections Canada is one of the most efficient government organizations I’ve come across. The government was brought down last Monday; this Monday just past, I received my absentee-voting kit in the mail. I still don’t have any candidates to vote for yet — none are officially declared in what passes for my home riding — but I have my ballot. Yay me.

• 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 yet then you probably should.
• Apparently some of my current students have found this site. Hi guys! I guess I’ll have to stop complaining about grading here.
• My continuing unproductivity is, well, continuing. I think tonight’s going to be devoted to xfig whether I like it or not, even though I really do have to finish reading about the physics of superheroes sometime soon since the library wants their book back someday.

…and otherwise, I got nothing.

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 and reinstall everything directly rather than try to figure out what segments of /usr I’m safe in recopying from the previous systems folder. This isn’t so bad because it gives me the opportunity to upgrade all of the relevant software to its most recent versions anyhow, which is something that one should do periodically when said upgrades are available for free.

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 print leads to a crashing of the application in question.

The various message boards for such trouble tend to leave one fairly hopeless, since there’s sporadic reports of the problem and all of them tend to end with, you should re-install your OS, or sometimes you should upgrade. Well, I’m more or less at the end of the upgrade road as far as this vesion of the OS goes, and I don’t feel like waiting for my department to process the required paperwork to up myself to 10.4, so Archive & Install it is.

As usual, there’s a few issues with this process; one of them is that I rely heavily on a number of applications that live in /usr but don’t come pre-installed… such as the entire TeX subsystem. These get swept away in the re-install, which means that — while most of my Cocoa applications are still in place — I’m going to be spending a lot of time on Monday rebuilding my command-line environment.

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 they satisfy a more rigid set of criteria.

But wait, objected one of the back-benchers. (This particular classroom extends back a fair ways compared to its width, and so there’s a stronger-than-usual stratification with the troublemakers drifting to the back.) Isn’t every poker hand equally likely? After all, my chances of getting a royal flush in spades are just the same as my chances of getting any other set of five named cards, right?

And that is right, as far as it goes.

The thing about the poker hands specifically isn’t that any particular hand is vanishingly rare (there’s not quite 2.6 million such hands, all of which are equally likely). It’s that, a priori, we agree on interesting constraints/features to look for in a hand: cards of the same rank. Cards of the same suit. Cards in sequence. By defining these things as “interesting”, we are creating structure in the world, and imputing an order to the different hands of five-card poker.

Is there anything particularly special about the constraints of poker? No, not really, except that they’re easy to check for. One could, if one wanted, invent a game just like poker but with an entirely different set of criteria for what makes a hand interesting, but it would probably be harder to play.

This same principle applies nearly anywhere that we talk about order and chaos. There’s nothing intrinsically disorderly about having a pile of papers on a desk, in that one could imagine a set of protocols where an orderly workspace required such a thing. Any sense of order follows from the observance of preconceived constraints; the simpler the constraints are, the more “natural” the order seems. A state of disorder is only distinguished in that small changes are less noticeable: it’s easy to break from order by accident, but hard to find order (i./e. break from disorder) by accident.

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 if there were they were secret elections that no one put up campaign signs for. This seems unlikely.) From the progressive standpoint there was good and bad news, as one might expect. Among the bad news was the decision in Texas:

…voters made their state the 19th to ban same-sex marriage…

…or at least that’s what they tried to do. Here’s what the ballot said (boldfacing mine):

The constitutional amendment providing that marriage in this state consists only of the union of one man and one woman and prohibiting this state or a political subdivision of this state from creating or recognizing any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

Take a close look at that second part: the state is prohibited from recognizing any legal status identical to marriage. “Identity” is what we in the math business call an equivalence relation; two things are equivalent when they’re the same from a certain point of view. It’s a handy sort of concept, and comes up a lot. And one of the three defining properties of an equivalence relation is this: any object X is equivalent to itself. “Reflexivity” is the fancy name, but it’s a pretty natural thing to ask. Think of equality: a number should certainly be equal to itself.

And so: Texas has just adopted a law that prevents the recognition of anything with a legal status identical to marriage.

Including marriage itself.

I’m so bringing this up in class tomorrow. And here my students were probably wondering when any of this comes up in real life…

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 straightforward: I drink, I write, I occasionally get up to change loads in the laundry machines. I’ll be refreshing this post on a roughly hourly basis with details about what I’ve been drinking and what I’ve been writing, although not what I’ve been laundering I’m afraid.

What am I writing about? I’ll start by mixing a metaphor by putting the last nail into the albatross which is this paper I’ve been intermittently complaining about; once that’s done, then we’ll see where the Muse takes me.

At the moment I’ve got a pint-glass in front of me full of Hornsby’s Hard Cider — Amber Draft, an apple cider brought to us by E&J Gallo, purveyors of fine California plonk for who knows how long. This is by way of being a warm-up to the main event; the serious drunken writing will require sterner stuff, of which I have an ample supply.

Aut vincere aut mori!

Update: 8:56 pm

The cider was kind of disappointing; I like a certain crispness in my hard ciders, which this one almost entirely lacked. Currently I’m most of the way through a bottle of a Pale Ale by a local brewpub that got a licence to go retail; interestingly, I don’t like this particular brew on tap, but the bottle-aging seems to help it along nicely.

As far as writing goes, I’m still working on the Dreaded Paper; there’s one main argument that I want to get written up, and I think I finally see clearly how it’s supposed to go. Now, I’ve known more or less how it’s supposed to work for a few weeks now, ever since I got the proper definitions in place, but (as many of my readers are aware) math isn’t usually a “more or less” kind of thing… despite what you might see in any number of research papers.

I don’t usually do this much involving fine motor skills (i.e. typing) when I’m drinking. This experience so far is leading me to believe that when I do drink, I’m often slightly drunker than I think I am.

Update: 9:57 pm

Took a break for a while to have some dinner, having realised how little I’d eaten today compared with how much I was drinking. Then I got stuck on a couple of details in a proof, asked someone who had a better chance than I did of knowing how to clear them up, and ended up chatting over messenger for a while. I’m a bad bad NaDruWriter.

After I finished the ale, I figured it was time to move up in the world of alcohol percentage, so I pulled out the Sheridan’s. It saddens me that you can’t apparently buy Sheridan’s in my city; this particular bottle was one I bought in Ontario some months ago. Unfortunately, the cream side of the bottle doesn’t actually pour half as fast as the dark half, which means I always run out of the cream liqueur first. I finished that drink a couple of minutes ago, and currently has a Kahlua especial and milk waiting for me to finish drinking a couple of glasses of water.

(What’s so special about it? About twice as much alcohol as the ordinary stuff, apparently. Y is for yowza.)

At some point soon I’m going to get bored with typing up math, and then I’ll turn my attention to something more entertaining. Hopefully I’ll finish this proof before then.

Update: 11:00 pm

So far I’m quite disappointed in myself on both counts. I haven’t had a drop to drink since I finished my Kahlua&milk forty-five minutes ago, and I’ve barel;y written a word on the aforementioned proof.

Part of the point of this whole NaDruWriNi thing is to babble: let down the defenses, give the little editor in one’s head the night off, and just go. And it’s possible that I’m just not a natural babbled. Oh, I know that I’m capable of writing long, rambling e-mails — as some of my readers could attest — but it’s not an easy thing for me to do. And it’s not really babbling if you’re agonizing over turns of phrase and word choices, now is it?

Since much of the art of proof writing for a research journal involves just such agony, I’m leaving that be for now; I’ve hand-written some notes about how to finish the proof, which hopefully will make sense tomorrow. I’m turning my attention for the moment to another writing project; we’ll see if that goes any better. I’ve got a G&T lined up to continue the drinking, with little chunks of lemon zest floating in it for a bit of extra flavour; someday, I’ll have to get someone to teach me how to do a proper twist.

Update: 3:28 am

Well that didn’t go according to plan.

I’d gotten about three-quarters of the way through my gin & tonic (or, to be more precise, my GIN & tonic: I have no shotglasses, and so mix by eye. Sometimes this works better than other times) when I get messaged. This turns into a nearly two-hour phone conversation… and when I get done with that one, I end up getting involved in another twoish-hour phone conversation.

(This is not because I’m going through any particular crisis myself, I hasten to assure any of you who might be concerned. Nor, oddly, do I mind getting phone calls past midnight… at least, as long as it’s not too long past midnight. Seven hours past midnight, for instance, is utterly unacceptable. But I digress.)

So I’ve been sipping a not-half-bad ruby port through much of the last phone conversation, but my buzz is essentially gone now. And there’s a huge f**king storm going on outside, and the power’s been flickering, so I’m going to go drink some water & then head to bed.

Final score for writing: not as much as I’d liked. Maybe I’ll try this again next weekend.

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 little tricky… particularly when you’ve got three classes in a seven-hour block on those two days. I fell very, very behind on my grading for a couple of weeks in there, and while I’m caught up now, I’m still dealing with all of the other things I put off while I was, erm, not grading.

(And it wouldn’t be so bad if I had a decent excuse, like “I’ve been partying the nights away for weeks” or “I got really, really drunk, and then stayed that way for a month” or even “My car was comandeered by Vermont secessionist forces and I had to walk back from Bennington”. But no. I’ve got essentially nothing to show for myself if you don’t count the nine bottles of wine I picked up in Niagara a couple of weekends ago.)

On the up-side, teaching’s fun again. Two of my classes are into basic combinatorics (in the strict sense: actually counting things), which I always enjoy. In my other course, yesterday’s lecture was about cryptography in general and RSA in particular, which often leads into some interesting discussions; one of my students clearly seems to have thought a lot about how one might get around computer security systems — a perfectly respectable pre-occupation, under certain circumstances.

For the weekend, I’m pondering a day-trip into Indianapolis to see a movie: Mirrormask has opened in Castleton somewhere today, and since it’s not likely to appear in town here for months (if at all), I might just take advantage of its relative closeness. Other thoughts include participating in NaDruWriNi:

…although what I’d be writing is a little up in the air. I’ve got a couple of research papers that want finishing, but that might not be in the exact spirit of the… event. There’s a couple of writing projects in which I’m already sort of engaged, but I’m not sure how public I want to go with them yet. I’ve had a few ideas for short stories lately, so maybe I’ll go with those. We’ll see.

If anyone has any ideas on finding cheap flights from the American Midwest to the Canadian Prairies over American Thanksgiving — where “cheap” currently means “under $600″, but would prefer to have a stricter definition — then please let me know.

…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 I own don’t tend to maintain a pristine state for very long at all. (And that’s something of a relief, really. If my alternative would be to care about keeping things shiny and new, and thus agonize over small dings, lost rubber feet, etc., then I think I’d take my life as it is, thanks.)

Now, there’s a lot of consumer goods where I think the manufacturers are perfectly justified in not going the extra distance (and spending/charging the extra cash) to make the things particularly heavy-duty. My television and my home stereo, for instance, are not items that I expect to stand up to constant entropic pressures. OTOH, something like a cellular phone — which is meant by nature to be carried around in a pocket or something all day — I expect a higher standard of ruggedness.

Which brings me to my bad luck with cellphones.

I am now on my third cellphone in three years. (For the two years prior to moving to the Midwest I’d had a single cellphone and was quite happy with it; unfortunately, the provider’s network didn’t extend to my new place of employment, and the next best option used a different broadcast network completely.) The first one began its descent into uselessness about a week after its first anniversary in my possession — in other words, right after its warranty expired. The pinnacle of its crapitude came when I was stuck in a horrible traffic jam on my way to a friend’s place in another state, and when I tried to call and say I’d be rather late, the green “send” button actually fell off the phone, and no amount of jamming it back into place would help.

The provider was subsequently so unhelpful that I proceeded to switch to another company, this one in a different country entirely. This time I got a better phone, in that it lasted about twenty months before showing signs of severe decrepitude. When it became clear that the thing was falling apart, I went into my local¹ retailer and asked about a hardware upgrade. The trainee was very apologetic but told me there was nothing she could do (since I wasn’t eligible for a free upgrade until two years in my contract; what she meant was, there’s nothing inexpensive she could do); the random dude in from the regional office that day was rather less apologetic, and then tried to sell me synchronization software which he old me straight out that I would be able to use.

So by coincidence, when I was gadding about southern Ontario this weekend, I mentioned to a friend in passing that I needed a new phone. “I have your new phone,” he replied; what he actually meant was that he had his old phone — the kind of phone that’s built like you could go off to war with it, possibly as a weapon — which he wasn’t using anymore, but that had Nothing Wrong with it. A nominal fee later, and my account’s transfered to the Battle Axe. Yay!

It’s not perfect; the security code required to clear out the phone book is lost, and I’m having issues with call display (which I was having before, so that’s probably an account thing), and the charger seems a little persnickety. But it works — with better sound than my old-but-newer phone, as far as I can tell — and I’m not as worried about using it into the ground like I’ve done with the others, because (a) it’s already survived years plural of being carted around, (b) I’ll still be eligible for a free hardware upgrade in a couple of months’ time.

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fn1: “Local” here meaning local to my phone number. It’s pretty far from being local to my apartment, but since I visit my cellphone’s area code & exchange fairly regularly, it works pretty well.