Grad School; Loreena McKennitt; KGB Hunt; Crochet and Knitting; Melting Snow
My first quarter as a grad student is finally over (and in fact has been for a few weeks now), and I finally have time to update Livejournal!

The first-year program at UChicago is a lot of work --- it's three classes each quarter, for a total of nine classes in the first year. I ended up having quite a bit less free time than I did as an undergrad, which is saying something. The group of first-years, though, seems like a great one; we work together very well (which is good, since we pretty much have to to survive the classes!). I'd say that so far grad school is going pretty well.

I visited Pittsburgh a while back, both to visit the friends of mine who are still around there and to help run the KGB Mystery Hunt. As it happened, during my visit there was a Loreena McKennitt concert in Pittsburgh, which sleepsong and I went to. We originally had fairly bad seats way in the back, but we ended up being moved to much better seats --- yay! The concert was absolutely amazing (Loreena McKennit is amazing enough in the recordings, but is even more amazing to see live), and sleepsong and I spent the rest of the evening talking about how great the concert had been!

The KGB Mystery Hunt went well, though with fewer participants than last year (there was, unfortunately, pretty much no advertising of it until the very last minute). My puzzles (keeping in mind that these are intended to be solvable in fifteen minutes or so by a team of four inexperienced solvers) were Blocks of Letters, which the testsolvers got but which turned out not to be well-enough clued; Engrish, which was intended to be an easy but fun puzzle and which seems to have very much succeeded (many people said it was their favourite puzzle); and Words, a fairly un-special word puzzle. I also made the metapuzzle and had the idea for something along the lines of ... I Climb the Tree with the Bees in It, but I didn't end up writing any of it. Unfortunately, you can't get much of an idea of either the meta or Bees, since the website hasn't yet been updated and really should be.

Anyway, running it was (as before!) a whole lot of fun, and was definitely easier the second time around (we were a lot more organized, and had a better call-in system that gwillen had written that morning). The puzzles, which were supposed to have been finished and testsolved a week before the hunt, were actually in some cases finished the night before (sigh), but nothing horribly broke (miraculously). Helping remotely to put together a hunt is slightly terrifying, since you don't get a very good idea of how much progress is being made and there's little you can do to encourage people to finish up their puzzles! (For the record, mine were finished during the summer!)

On a related note, the MIT Mystery Hunt is only a few weeks away, and I'm really, really looking forward to it!

I've been doing a lot of crocheting and knitting lately. Brent, one of the other grad students, said that I should crochet an Alexander Horned Sphere. I chuckled for a second, and then thought about it and realized it should be possible. Here's my first attempt. I was getting a feel for it as I was doing it, so the sizes of the various parts aren't very consistent; still, I think it came out reasonably well for a first try.




I'm going to try doing another, this time with the "horns" coming out at greater angles (so that the resulting horned sphere would look a bit more like the picture I linked and less like a squid), and knit instead of crocheted.

I also recently finished the Long Exact Scarf of Homology. It's nothing too special (just a double-knit scarf), but the design is the Long Exact Sequence of Homology for a space X and a subspace A containing another subspace B.


I've only recently started to knit much, and so I've been trying to knit some of the things that I'd gotten good at crocheting. Here's my first attempt at the Seifert surface of a trefoil (in a previous post I'd posted pictures of such a surface, but crocheted). When I crochet it I start with a "skeleton" in the middle and crochet along the one edge; to knit it, though, I did the top and bottom halves separately and joined them in the middle. One nice thing about knitting is that the "right" and "wrong" sides look very different (while in crochet, at least with the stitch I was using, you have to look somewhat carefully to tell the difference); as a result it's more obvious that the surface is orientable. Anyway, here's the result:

The method I used to make this should generalize to any Seifert surface, so hopefully later I'll be able to knit Seifert surfaces for things like the Borromean rings.

And, finally, a crosscap. This was one of the first things I knit with double-pointed needles, and it didn't come out that great (though stuffing it with something would probably make it look better; right now it's flat and just looks like a disc). Still, it shows that it can be done!



And I'll leave you with the guess-where-the-steam-tunnel-is game:

Interestingly, the same thing happens at CMU but only with buried pipes (CMU's tunnels don't melt the snow). The melting in the picture above, though, is from a tunnel.