So I signed up for GMail some time ago. And I got three invitations I could send out; I think I used two of them. After sending out my second, I got five more invitations; these have all been happily idling away in whatever conceptual space they live in.
I check my account today (for the first time in a little while), and find out that I now have 50 invitations available.
So if any of my Loyal Readers want a GMail account… or two… or five…
I was working on a research problem in between watching my room full of students struggle with histograms and standard deviations, and then I suddenly saw it.
The particulars of the “it” in question are probably of no interest to most of my readers, and little enough to the rest. Hell, in the “of great mathematical significance” sense, it’s not even very interesting to me. It’s not a solution that’s going to save the world or make me rich or anything.
But the reason that we do mathematics — at least, the reason that I do, at least sometimes — is to catch these little moments when the clouds clear away and one can apprehend a Pattern in its purest form. When things, against all expectations, make sense.
The hard part, now, is to take the vision of How It Works and turn it into words and other symbols. I’m firmly in the camp that has mathematicians as explorers rather than inventors: the things that we discover are already, in some sense, there. I can see the pattern for this particular family of structures, and its construction makes it clear (to me) why it’s correct. Justifying it is going to be a bit of a pain.
The thing I hate about Tuesdays: it’s almost 10:30, and I feel like I’ve been awake for too long. In reality, I’ve only been awake for a little over three hours, but they’ve been three hours before 10:30. I don’t mind Thursdays as much, even though I do the same thing; I’m not sure whether that’s because after my last class on Thursday I go play cards and am then done with my week, or some other, more sinister reason.
On the other hand, today’s the first day I felt really comfortable about my early morning class. This might be because I didn’t lecture so much as give the kids a worksheet and a laptop apiece and set them to playing. But it was good: I was in a room full of people discussing and debating about mathematics, and how can you not like that if you’re in my profession?
After class, one of my students came and asked me about a mortgage problem we’d discussed last week. (This is an upper-division math course, so this came up by way of deriving the formula for mortgage payments… not just applying it.) I showed him how to set up a spreadsheet to check his answer, figured out why his answer was wrong (sign error!), and then was bamboozled regarding why his corrected answer disagreed with my spreadsheet. Turns out I’d made the Third Classic Blunder: my equations started counting at 0, but Excel rows start at 1. Oops. Me good mathematician, really.
Later today: inflicting standard deviations on unsuspecting liberal arts students. Twice. Then sleep.
OK, perhaps I’m overstating the case. But few things are as disappointing to me as when my first cup of coffee of the day is as bland as the one I’ve got in front of me now. (There are those who would say that I’m totally crazy for having my first cup of coffee be at 1:30 in the afternoon… particularly when my waking-up happened sometime between 7 and 8 in the morning. Of course, others among my friends don’t drink coffee at all and I tihnk secretly look askance at those of us who do, so maybe it all balances out.)
So today’s the second day of lectures at my Urban Commuter Campus, which translates as my first day of lectures, thanks to a Tuesday-Thursday-only sort of schedule. Sort of rambled in the morning class, but that’s OK because we didn’t do anything real today anyhow. (I tend to make it a firm policy to do either review or overview on the first day, and that’s it; since all of my classes this time out are sort of self-contained units, not directly dependent on any one thing, the lecture plan is just to give a broad look at the material.) The noon class went much better, possibly because I’ve taught versions of this class in the past and am correspondingly more comfortable with the material. After dismissing the class, one guy came up to me and said that I was the first math teacher he’d had who didn’t have him feeling bad about the class after the first day… which is quite a complement in a math-for-people-who-hate-math class, I think.
I’m wondering if I should give up on trying to guess the pronunciations of my students’ names beforehand, because I always end up feeling like a bit of a show-off. I’ve got one student with an obviously Italian last name, which loses a syllable when she says it. On the other hand, I had one student correct the way I said her (reasonably obviously Arabic) name, only to come up to me after class and say, Actually, you pronounced it right. I told you the Americanized version from reflex.
People in the first-class cabin on an airplane aren’t just paying for better treatment. They’re paying for worse treatment for the people in economy
class.
I’m with Jan-jan on this: it’s a Chi, not an X. Calm down, folks. Particularly those of you with fish that say (transliterating) ICHTHOS on your cars, since you’re using the Chi as well. Which, I suppose, probably doesn’t describe any of my regular readers, but just in case I’ve become a cult classic…
So it’s ten a.m., and all of the gifts are opened. At the moment all four other people in the room are reading books; this is fairly typical for our family gatherings. Outside it’s very, very cold, and so I’m content to be here with my warm, toasty laptop and a nigh-limitless supply of chocolate.
In case anyone cares, it is possible to decompose the complete 3-uniform hypergraphs on 8 and 14 points into STS(7)s. I can’t imagine that many of my readers would, but I’m pretty excited about that right now so I thought I’d mention it.
Peace be upon you all.
I don’t understand why it is that some people seem to take on the persona of Asshole as a first line of defense. (And we’re talking about the Jungian Architype here… the Platonic Form of the Asshole.)
The context: a bunch of folks were being loud in the hallway right outside my classroom. Since the class was writing a final exam at the time, I felt that this was to be discouraged, so I went out and asked them — quietly and politely — if they could possibly keep it down. Two of the three guys apologised and agreed; the third one — and these are older men, maybe in their 50s — started hectoring me about how it was a public hallway.
After the incident, of course, I came up with all sorts of properly florid ways of telling him to go to Hell. At the time, I think I rolled my eyes, went back into the (slightly overstuffed) classroom, and got people to fidget their desks in such a way as to make closing the door a possibility.
Jerk.
Warning: random musings about internet culture ahead. Probably puerile.
Once upon a time, the measure of net.chique was whether you had a homepage. Typically, the homepage was a page about you: your interests, your projects, maybe interesting or useful links that you commended to the attention of the masses. Essentially, the homepage was a crystalization of you at a certain moment in time… and it often would stay that way, since people seemed to develop the habit of creating their homepage, stocking it full of stuff, and then letting it be. Just this evening I was browsing through the homepage (and associated webspace, since technically the “homepage” is only the portal to someone’s conceptual space on the web) of a friend of mine, and I’m reasonably sure he hasn’t updated much of the content in the past four years.
Presently, it seems that the in thing is to have a weblog. This serves much the same function as a homepage, but with the stagnation aspect filtered out: the whole point of a blog is that it’s reasonably dynamic, that it gets updated on a reasonably timely basis. Symbolically, I think that perhaps the effect of this is to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. With homepages, the end result was often the enshrinement of a moment for the ages; blogs seem to suggest that the only sacred moment is right now, and that what one writes on a given day, at a given hour, is a truer representation of who one is than anything that came before.
(I’m talking about personal blogs here. Technical, political, or other topic-oriented blogs have their own semiotics attached, I suspect, compared to more traditional
modes of information sharing.)
Homepages aren’t dead by any means, but it seems that they’re mostly used to present someone’s professional
persona. Thus, a freelance developer will have a homepage that showcases their work, and then maybe a blog on the side for personal commentary. Academics will often follow the same pattern: a homepage which is essentially an extended CV with some course information on the side, and if they want to talk about the rest of their lives they’ll have a livejournal or something. Frequently a blog coexists with a more traditional homepage; in these cases, it seems to me that the blog is often the focus of the site, with other pages and features updated sporadically if at all.
This isn’t a universal sort of thing, of course; recently I’ve run across a couple of websites that are set up using Blogger or something like it, but are not really blogs in conception; that is, the creators have made what is ultimately a static site, sometimes with comments added in, and only use the Blogger framework to avoid doing any actual web coding and to get themselves a bit of free hosting.
Does all of this mean something? Well, probably. I’d imagine that the drift from homepages to blogs is similar in kind to search engines becoming pre-eminent over the web indices of the mid-90s. And it’s also related, I’m sure, to the webification of net news; I’d imagine that most non-techie users of the internet equate “the internet” with “the world-wide web”, an equation that’s been aided by the services that put e-mail and newsgroups on web pages for people to see.
This weekend I was staying at a Days Inn in Muncie, IN, and I’m a little puzzled. First of
all, the advertisement at the front desk for frequent-stay rewards makes a big
deal about how rewards can be earned (or possibly redeemed, I didn’t really
look that closely) at some number of retailers. One of the retailers was
Canadian Tire, which is a logo you don’t see much of in Indiana.
If that’s not weird enough, in the hotel guide in the room they give a
brief list of local radio stations… only it’s not really local stations. In
fact, all of the call letters begin with “C”, and some of them — CFRB, for
instance, or CHUM, or CFNY aka “The Edge” — are very familiar to me from when I lived
in Toronto. Did someone do a cheap photocopy from a Days Inn Scarborough or
something?
