Out of my hat

The bottle of wine I’m currently going through lists tasting notes of “Sweet blackberries, raspberries, and plums”, but somehow omits the much stronger taste of burnt twigs.

(Note that this is not meant as a put-down of the wine in question; I’m quite fond of “earthy” flavours of smoke, tobacco, or leather in a hearty red. I just wish they’d mention them, rather than trying to give the impression of something light and fruity. Because, well, it just ain’t.)

(Which I knew going into the bottle, really, since this is one that I picked up last year at the winery proper. I’m remembering now that I bought it to cellar, and apparently eight months was insufficent cellar time for it to calm down and open up. As it sits in open air it’s improving a little bit, but it’s probably not something I’ll get again.)

The root of the word happy is hap, also found in happenstance and haphazard; the original meaning is something like “chance” or “fortune”.

To be happy, hence, is to be lucky.

There’s all kinds of sites that offer driving directions, but fairly few that give walking directions. Since when walking one often prefers to avoid multi-lane highways with no sidewalks, the two are not always isomorphic.

(Of course, even if such a site existed it would pretty much be restricted to a subset of urban areas. It’s pretty unlikely that my current city — even if it is one of the hundred largest in the country — would make the cut.)

clvrmnky reports that switching from Blogger Classic to New Blogger broke the RSS feed for the Nutshell. If the problem persists, then I’ll see about doing something about it.

This is post #222 for me, which means headache, which means alcohol. Yay for reasoning by association! Here’s an obvious sort of drink recipe I came up with last night.

Lemonderry Air
In an old-fashioned glass combine 1 oz London dry gin with 1 oz limoncello. Top with tonic water and an ice cube or two.

If I had it around the house, I’d probably garnish with lime. Since I generally don’t, I can’t really add it to the “official” recipe in good faith.

Just upgraded to the new version of Blogger, which presumably shouldn’t change much except that I know better. We’ll see how this goes.

For those of you who live in Ontario, there’s a series of Citizen’s Assemblies regarding electoral reform at the provincial level. The goal is to discuss moving away from the plurality (aka first-past-the-post) system currently used for provincial Parliament towards something a little more proportional, or at least something that sucks less. (If people are curious, I’d be glad to discourse on what’s so bad about plurality, but I imagine you can find plenty of information about that if you’re interested.) As I understand it, the goal of the Assemblies is to hash out a proposal for an alternative system, which is then put up for referendum this fall. Here’s the list of dates for Assemblies; K/W folks, take note that you’ve got one in town tonight if you’re interested.

In other news, the new school term has started, and so I’m fairly busy with all that goes along with that (together with all that goes along with returning from nearly three weeks of vacation). I’m going to try to post here more often, though much of that is likely to be observations about a methodology in the social sciences called Social Network Analysis because I’m going to be doing a lot of reading in that over the next couple of months. I’ll try to balance that with the kind of randomness that I’m sure my readers have come to expect. Or something.

Look at me, I’m posting from a game console!

A more substantial update will follow, sometime when I have an actual keyboard.

Some days, research happens. Other days…

One of the things that distinguishes mathematics from the sciences (and from almost every other field of academia) is that a mathematician needs no lab, no physical apparatus, no research subjects; while all of these things can be employed, it’s entirely reasonable to do mathematics with no external aids at all. ecogrrl likes to joke about how I do research by sitting on her sofa and staring off into space, and that’s a pretty accurate account.

But I do, in a sense, have an apparatus. I’ve called it my math-brain in the past, which isn’t entirely accurate; one of the characters in Proof refers to “the machinery”, which might be closer. It’s the part of my mind that delights in mathematical research, and is apparently reasonably good at it, when it’s working. The trouble is, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. (“Math-brain” isn’t accurate because I can still work through calculations, explain concepts, etc. the rest of the time; it’s just my ability to come up with interesting questions and the desire to pursue them that comes and goes.)

I don’t generally time it, but it seems like my machinery is capable of running for periods of a month or so at a time; during such intervals (the most recent of which, I think, ended last week) I tend to be fairly productive in that special technical sense of “productive” that doesn’t necessarily indicate that anything concrete is being produced. I get ideas, I pursue ideas, I tell other people about ideas, and if I’m really smart I write ideas down in a form that I’ll be able to comprehend after time has passed. Because when the machinery shuts down, it often does so for weeks at a time & during those periods I’m not terrifically useful research-wise.

It’s frustrating, because it means that even though I’d like to work on something, I find that I can’t. I can’t focus my attention, or I can’t come up with any way to develop the concepts in question, or (often) it just doesn’t occur to me to even try working (except in the form of the idlest sort of fancy: lying in bed in the morning, thinking “I should work” before drifting off again for ten minutes or so).

Yesterday I got a postcard from my dental insurance company, briefly explaining how much they value the privacy of my personal information.

My very first thought upon reading it: “Who have you sold my information to, you rat-bastards?”

Today’s linguistic oddity: I’m currently in possession of a computer part that I’ll be delivering to its rightful owner in good time. The box lists specs and a marketing blurb in three languages: English, French, and German. I don’t know enough German to comment on that translation, but I’ve still got enough French to find this a little weird:

S’auto-configure avec l’ordinateur hôte

It’s a little more concise than the original English (“Auto-configures to host system’s logic”), but that’s not the strange bit. It’s the reflexive form — that s’ which expands to se, and is used to indicate that the subject of a verb is also its object. But that’s more or less implies by the “auto-” prefix, isn’t it? Surely there’s a less awkward way to phrase that.

Alternatively, “auto-” here means “automatic”, and I’m growing curmudgeonly about language use as I get older.

Been a little more preoccupied than usual, which is a bit of a trick for me. Much of the extra time’s been going to work-related endeavours: the conference I was organizing two weeks ago, of course, but also a bunch of other service stuff as well as the getting of somewhere on a couple of research projects and one or two new collaborations a-borning.

Got word today that a paper I submitted over the summer was being accepted, to be published next month. Gotta love small journals.

This weekend I’m somewhat impulsively heading to a conference one state over from here. Next weekend is Thanksgiving in this country, and so naturally I’m taking a trip across the continent to someplace where it’s not. The weekend after that I’m meant to be back in Ontario, since someone’s gone through the trouble to schedule a party for when I’m capable of being around & it would be graceless in the extreme to then miss the do. And after that there’s no fixed plans, but the current intent is to do something about my wisdom teeth; presumably this means that I’ll get some sleep, drug-induced though it may be.