Mystery Hunt; Scav; Contra; Advisor; REU; and more!
Quite a lot has happened since December, when I last updated. So much, actually, that I'm not going to bother with individual lj-cuts for each topic! For the benefit of those of you reading my archives, I've gone though and put in more descriptive cuts.

I went to the Mystery Hunt for the sixth time, and once again had a great time! The hunt was very long and the puzzles too difficult (they ended up unlocking rounds for us when it became clear that if they didn't, the hunt would have lasted for days longer than it should have). Several of the puzzles, also, seemed to have too many layers; you'd solve what should be the tricky part, but still have no idea how to get an answer. But despite all of that I certainly enjoyed myself, and seeing so many of my friends again was great!

There were a few changes our team made this year to how we did things. None were very huge --- things like moving metapuzzle solving out of its own room, having a no-shoes policy, and having regular bus runs to ET for sleeping and showering --- but they all worked very well and together had a big positive impact, I thought.

In somewhat related news, I participated in my first UChicago Scavenger Hunt, and it was great. Undergrads here, like at CMU, are very geeky; unlike at CMU, though, the geekiness is not pretty much entirely dominated by CS-geekiness. Working on the hunt with them was a lot of fun. The list for the hunt was eighteen pages long and had 269 items. Among the ones I helped with were #169, "The most useful thing you can knit out of plastic grocery bags" (we knitted a plastic grocery bag --- after all, if you think you know of something more useful that can be knit from a bag, you could just knit it from ours!), and #56, "A Zeusaphone", which we sadly never got working (though it did make an impressive pop as a MOSFET exploded when we were testing it, tripping the circuit breaker in the process), but which I may be inheriting to work on at the end of the summer.

I've started to get into contra dancing, and it's been a lot of fun. Besides the dances that happen on campus every month and the weekly dances off campus that I sometimes make it to, there have been a few larger events. The first was the Folk Festival on campus, which had dancing and performances and which was a lot of fun (especially on Sunday, when I was backstage during the performances. You wouldn't imagine the gossip you get about the performers and volunteers!). There was also a dance weekend on campus; Nightingale was playing the music for the contras, and they were fabulous. They'd tend to suddenly add energy to their music just when I was getting tired and needing it; the end result was that I was dancing even more energetically than I normally do! They also tended to do slower dances now and then, which gave me a bit of a chance to recover; even so, by the end of the evenings I was completely exhausted. I'm very much looking forward to next year's dance weekend. And just this past weekend was another dance weekend, this time in Milwaukee. I especially liked their session on mixing things up --- things like swapping partners during a dance, or changing roles during a dance (something that my friends and I do all the time, but it was nice to be in dances where more people were doing it and where it was encouraged!). We also did an eight-person square several times, with one more person getting blindfolded each time (we managed, somewhat, with seven of the eight people blindfolded). Edit: And I just realized I forgot, originally, to mention the Dutch Crossing. I'd been wondering for a while about how possible a 16-person dance, arranged as a 4x4 grid, would be. Anyway, such a dance ended up happening. It turns out that many of the things I'd thought of for such a dance had been thought of already, and it was awesome!

I visited Pittsburgh for CMU's spring carnival; seeing most of my friends again was great, though sadly I never made it to halfprice. I really need to try to visit more often; it's sad that it's so far from Chicago.

Spring Break was spent skiing with my dad in Lech, which was amazing. Amusingly, the village got snowed in one or two days after I left; for a day or two there were no busses running to or from Lech. It's a good thing we left when we did!

I gave a talk at Pizza Seminar, where a grad student talks each week about whatever they want to talk about. My talk was about the axiom of determinacy; I think it went reasonably well, though not as well as I would have liked: I realized partway though that I had skipped over something important I'd meant to cover (that choice lets one construct non-determined games), and went back and did it a bit hastily. Still, it seems like people followed the important parts and found it interesting; I got a lot of good questions, as well as people asking me about the talk later that day in the tea room.

The end of the first year of grad school for me and eighteen others was celebrated at the lake house of one of the grad students (Mike). It was wonderful, both because it meant spending time with the other grad students and not having lots of work to do, and because the lake nearby meant we could go swimming, tubing, and wakeboarding. Not to mention skinny-dipping at night.

More recently (this summer), there have been Monday-evening games: people decided that Monday evenings should be for playing elementary-school games; last Monday was Capture the Flag (and I missed Ghosts in the Graveyard the Monday before).

I saw WALL-E. It's one of the most adorable movies ever; it's amazing how much emotion they were able to make the robots convey.

Other things that I don't want to go into too much detail about on Livejournal have happened as well; suffice it to say that I've been exploring a somewhat more kinky side of myself I never admitted to having while I was at CMU.

In more academic news, I now have not only one advisor, but two: Soare and Hirschfeldt (the logic people here tend to share their students). I haven't done all that much yet with either (over the summer I'm reading through Soare's book), but I've heard good things about Soare and I've taken enough classes with Hirschfeldt to know that he's awesome. (A joke Hirschfeldt came up with, which hopefully will appear properly (with a line over the A) in your browser: A mathematician walks into A and says "sorry, I didn't realize you were closed!").

Anyway, that pretty much brings us to the present. This summer I'm in Chicago, helping with UChicago's REU program. It's very different from either of the REUs I did when I was an undergrad. For one, it's much, much bigger (I don't remember how many students there are, but it's over fifty). It seems less focused on research (though students can do research) and more on learning (there are several classes that are part of the REU). And many of the students teach highschoolers as part of the program. It's been somewhat disorganized (we weren't really told what we'd be doing until a day into the REU), but I've been enjoying it. Two of my mentorees are interested in set theory, and so I've been having fun going through Halmos' book (Naive Set Theory) with them.

A week or so from now I'll be heading to New York for HOPE, a hacker convention. Several of my friends from CMU will also be going, and so it should be a lot of fun (though the bad news is I'll be missing performances by ThouShaltNot and Carbon Leaf as a result). After the REU finishes (mid-August) I'll be heading to yet another dance weekend, and from there to Montreal for two weeks and then to Greece for ten days or so. In mid-September I'll be coming back to Chicago and moving into my new apartment (a one-bedroom on Woodlawn, by 54th --- a very convenient place; it's about an eight-minute walk to campus and far closer to grocery stores than my current apartment).

And finally, no long LJ post of mine that summarizes several months of my life would be complete without photos of things I've been doing with yarn and thread, so here they are. These have less of a mathematical flavour than normal, in part because I've been learning various ways of making lace and am still trying to get comfortable with them before doing anything more complicated! (On the topic of lace, though, I think that a doily of a tiling of the hyperbolic plane should be doable).

Over winter break I bought yarn for a sweater (it's alpaca, and it's really soft). I haven't worked much on it since spring break (I won't really have a chance to wear it until winter anyways!), but it's nearly done. Here's the body of it:



(The spots are artifacts of the camera, not stains!) The original pattern had something different in the middle of the back, but I really like braids. I also added pockets. The sleeves are nearly done --- in fact, they're already longer than the pattern called for --- but it looks like I should make them even longer (my arms are long!). The pattern had a cable along the sleeves, but I decided to make them plain instead.

I've been trying to learn various ways of making lace. Here's a bit of what I've done:

The three things on the left are tatted (with shuttle tatting, to be more specific); two of them are Mobius strips (I'm probably going to add another layer to the white one, but I haven't decided exactly what do to; I've also been tempted to make little lacy ants out of black thread to make a reference to this Escher print). The two things on the right are basic bobbin lace (I was basically just practicing the stitches; bobbin lace is capable of far more complex and interesting lace... hopefully soon I'll be making such lace!). The little round thing is a dime, as a reference for the size.

I finished my second doily:

The pattern is here, if you're interested in making your own.

I've also been interested in braiding rope to make three-dimensional things (pretty much since I saw a Mobius strip Turk's Head knot in a book on decorative knots). Here's what I came up with:



The inspiration was the Seifert surface of the trefoil (see this post of mine), though at this size the twists would have made it less pretty and more difficult. Instead I have a simpler surface, but the Seifert surface should be doable. The quality of the photos is pretty horrible, but each of the three "arms" is a four-strand braid with each strand doubled. It's one continuous piece of rope. To make it, I started with four smaller lengths of the rope, braiding one arm at a time from them, then threaded the longer length of rope (the only one in the final piece) through them and finally removed the four helper ropes.