Out of my hat

So far my biggest accomplishment this weekend has been to buy a bookshelf. The principal utility of said bookshelf is that it’s just tall enough that I can easily put things on top of it, and it’s right by the door and hence convenient for things like my keys, my wallet, the daily mail, etc. Plus it’s a bookshelf, which means I have more room for books; I bought a shelf when I first moved here, and found that my currently collection of books filled it up. So I naturally kept buying books. Finally, a remedy for the situation has arrived.

Constrast this, now, with what I’m (still!) hoping the biggest accomplishment of the weekend is going to be: cleaning my apartment with a large fraction of the thouroughness I usually associate with moving days. This part of the plan’s not going quite as well, partly because I have almost no patience with cleaning and no instinct for same, and partly because I made a library run yesterday and picked up multiple sequels of multiple books I was reading while at the parents’ house the other week. I have, therefore, no end of distractions available to me.

Other than that, summer session is in full swing. Week two of throwing high math at students and waiting to see if they catch it starts tomorrow: on this week’s menu we’ve got multiply-quanitifed statements and an introduction to mathematical proof. I’ll also have a visitor in town for much of the week, furthering the goal of getting research done, and a long weekend thereafter.

Every now and then I remember that I have to figure out how JPEG compression works well enough to bedazzle a small class of high-school-teacher types with it in about three weeks time, but then I push that thought away again.

I’d hoped that I’d be able to take some of my vacation to maybe assemble the syllabus for my summer course, and maybe finished typing up one of the two or three papers that want finishing. My bad planning put paid to the first plan when I managed to leave the textbook in the Midwest, and so far the second hasn’t happened yet.

Vaguely paying attention to recent news: the coverage of last night’s vote in Parliament has been pretty awful. The general consensus in the press is that the Conservatives won a vote requesting the PM to dissolve Parliament, and have every right to be outraged that he hasn’t done so already. What actually happened, of course, is that the Conservatives won a vote to direct a committee to recommend the dissolution of Parliament to the PM, and — since I don’t know that the committee has had a chance to meet and discuss this direction yet — the PM’s fully within his rights to maintain the government for the moment. And the American governmental reaction — that Canada might be about to collapse into instability and chaos — is a little silly.

My office is a place I go to in order not to do work.

Seriously. I work in coffeeshops. I work (after a manner of speaking) when I’m driving long distances. Hell, I get more work done waiting for car repairs than I seem to do on a typical day at the office.

A clarification is perhaps in order: my work as an academic can generally be divided into three sorts: teaching, research, service. That last tends to happen in meetings with other people, which don’t happen in my office because there’s not the room for them. Teaching as such happens in classrooms; attendant on that is grading (which happens anyplace but my office or apt., I sometimes feel) and having students visit to attempt de-confusion (which does, admittedly, happen in my office). And research itself isn’t any more common in my office than anywhere else it seems to me.

So what do I do here? Well, I type. I suppose that’s something, though it’s not precisely what I get paid for. And there seems to be a lot of general mindwandering happening. And blogreading. And other newverbing, I’m sure.

Or maybe it’s just been a bad couple of weeks from the productivity standpoint; I don’t know.

Just a few quick things, since I feel like I haven’t been posting enough.

• I’ve been reading through an extensive — some might say exhaustive — review of Mac OS 10.4 (AKA Tiger). He goes into a lot of technical details, some of which I follow; this is clearly a man who Knows His Shit. I haven’t finished reading through it all yet, so I don’t know whether the total impression is positive or negative; it’s that sort of piece.
• Classes are over, exams are upon us. I’m expecting tomorrow’s office hours to be quite busy with last-minute crammers who sat through the complete review of relevant material on Thursday last without absorbing any of it, and who then proceeded to not pick up their notes and texts until Monday at about noon. Or maybe I’m being unfair.
• Kitsilano in Vancouver. Lincoln Park West in Chicago. The Annex in Toronto. I’m trying to put my finger on exactly what it is these neighbourhoods have in common, because I feel that whatever commonalities are represented define my ideal urban environment.
• British Columbia is contemplating changing their electoral system from the first-past-the-post (plurality) system (that’s currently used provincially and federally all across Canada) to STV on multi-member districts. It’s not perfect, of course — but then Kenneth Arrow’s taught us that no voting system is perfect. And this one’s a damn sight better than the current system IMO. I was chatting about this with an old friend earlier this evening, and he was telling me that the NDPs (avowed socialists, for the Americans out there) have been pretty lukewarm about the whole thing, despite being strong proponents of proportional representation in general; apparently this wasn’t the flavour that they had in mind. This seems rather short-sighted to me: if an incremental improvement is available for the taking, why not go for it?

Something I’d like to see on sites with random folks writing reviews: cumulative frequency statistics.

What I mean by that: a problem I have with amazon, IMDB and the like is that comments and ratings tend toward the extremes (and thus away from the middle). This is, one should note, to be expected: it’s people with strong opinions — in one direction or the other — who tend to go through the bother of commenting on these sites, one imagines. But really, not every book or movie or whatever is the best or the worst ever; most of them are just, y’know, there. (The extreme numerical reviews are ameliorated somewhat when people actually go and write cogent comments regarding what they liked or disliked, but as often as not the comments amount to THIS BOOK IS TEH SUCK which isn’t all that helpful.)

And so: for each reviewer, I’d like to see a little histogram, outlining how often they give a given number of stars. Or at the very least, a little note to the effect of: 58% of books received this ranking or higher. Computationally it’s a little profligate, perhaps, but in a world of targetted banner ads, it doesn’t seem infeasible.

Sitting in my office thinking that I should really get some coffee or lunch or something, which would require a trip to a bank machine. At the very moment I come to that conclusion, a textbook buyer shows up. $50 for books I’ll never use? Sold!

…is my Ontario wine recommendation of the moment: a pleasant red, light but earthy, which is a neat trick. I know there are those who say that one should never drink alone, but if I followed that then I’d almost never get any drinking done.

I made plans this afternoon for a trip to San Diego, where an old roommate is getting married in July. This is apparently an expensive city to stay in at the best of times, and most of the cheap options I looked at were pretty much booked. I was chatting to the groom-to-be about this, and he said, yeah, there’s baseball games that weekend… oh, and there’s a comic book convention too. And I checked, and yes, the San Diego Comic Con is in fact that same weekend. This was, perhaps, not the best planning on the happy couple’s part.

(On top of which, it’s looking like the only people that I’ll know there will be, well, the bride and groom; there was another fellow in the wedding party who’s a friend of mine, but life’s intervening and he’s having to bow out. So, anyone who wants to come to San Diego and hang out with me mid-July would be more than welcome. There’ll be baseball games…)

On the upside, I’m apparently the champion for this round of pre-calculus bingo, which pleases me in a sick sort of way.

For those playing along at home, I’m back from my sojourn Down South.

It was a bit of an odd trip. I left graduate school fairly early — three years between my Bachelor’s and Ph.D, which is really rather short — at least in part because I could; I’d gotten an early start on a research project, and then more or less let momentum carry me through. I’d occasionally regretted finishing so fast, since by the time I left I’d actually settled in fairly well.

The regrets were only occasional because, well, it’s graduate school, and thus ephemeral by nature. (Well, if you’re doing it right. There were a couple of tenured grad students around my old department, and I suspect you can find the same in almost any school, but that’s not what I’m talking about.) I could have stuck around for another year or even two, but it probably wouldn’t have accomplished what I’d have wanted to accomplish; that is, I’d become comfortable in my milieu, but the milieu itself wasn’t a fixed sort of thing.

It’s this latter insight that was really driven home during my trip down this past weekend. The small, coherent community that I’d been a part of doesn’t really exist any more, or at least it doesn’t exist there anymore. And, being that we’re academics, we’re all pretty scattered around these days; it’s not nearly the same as my (several) undergraduate socail circles, which for the most part still exist in some form or another in whichever city that particular collection stayed in or migrated to.

This is a weird sort of week for me, since tomorrow I’m flying down South, back to the place where I took my doctorate. This is strange on several levels, not the least of which being that it’s only Tuesday and I’m done with my classes for the week.

Right now I’m feeling vaguely disconnected from things, perhaps because of my trip twisting my week into something new. I know that there are things that I’m supposed to be doing, and if I concentrate I can even figure out what those things probably are. But it doesn’t quite translate into an impetus to get them done. And at the same time, I don’t really seem able to concentrate on any of my usual distractions.

Hm. Whatever.

Something I meant to mention last week: I saw a post on a political blog about “Intelligent Design”. And one of the ID proponents was listed in a press release as a “key design theorist”. To which I say: no, get your own damn discipline name! A “design theorist” is one who does design theory, a perfectly respectable subdiscipline of combinatorics; the name’s already taken, thankyouverymuch, and those of us in the mathematical community have no intention of giving it up easily.

A selection of things that are raising my ire at the moment:

• I’m sick, and have been all weekend. It’s not bad enough that I need to go check in to a hospital or anything — really, it’s just a cold with some annoying refinements — but it’s bad enough to kill my ability to think in a concentrated fashion. (Anyhow, being sick in a city where you have no friends close enough that you can call them up and say, could you return my library books for me?… is pretty sucky in general.)
• Speaking of killing, my desktop at work chose to die today. No idea why; I was unplugging an unmounted FireWire drive when the thing shut down and refused to start up again. Since about 90% of the things I need to do right now are on computer — and better than half of those really benefit from the large screen of my desktop, compared to the tiny screen of the clamshell — well, it’s a good thing perhaps that I don’t have the focus to work today, since I also don’t have the tools either.
• The other 10%? Grading. Damn you, grading…
• I’m supposed to be giving a colloquium talk in about a week and a half at my doctoral institution. Pretty cool, right? Well, it would be if I had anything to talk about for the better part of an hour. I’ve sort of got one reliable standby for such things — a whole complex of topics which are being spun out into papers over time — but my principal partner in this endeavour is defending his dissertation the day previous and will be talking about precisely this stuff. I suspect that having too much overlap between our presentations might reflect badly on at least one of us.

I suppose that’s really it, on top of the baseline crap that one puts up with. On the other hand, I’m meant to be giving tests in two of my classes tomorrow… so I only have to prepare one lecture for tomorrow, and can sit at the front of the room and sniffle silently through the other two periods. That’s something. And hey, at least I live in a country with a sane, sensible governm– um, well, never mind.