Mr. Wright

Grad school; The next month; Mathematical Fiber Arts

2009-04-06T22:54:26Z

Grad school continues to happen! I have a better idea of what I'll be researching now, and I've written some of my topic proposal (a paper which relates to the topic exam, which I'll be doing in a month or so, but which isn't actually a commitment to a certain research topic). I'm pretty excited about it. About the only bad thing this quarter is that the class I'm TAing is at 8:30AM, but I think I'll be able to tolerate that.

The folk festival happened again, and was enjoyable. Over break I had a great time skiing at Lech. Next weekend is UChicago's dance weekend; last year's had a wonderful band and caller, and I'm really looking forward to this one. The weekend after that is CMU's Spring Carnival, for which I'll be visiting Pittsburgh (and on that note, if anyone has space for me to stay—a floor is fine!—please let me know!); I'll be arriving on the 16th and returning on the 19th. Not too long after that is UChicago's annual Scavenger Hunt, which should also be great. The next two months or so look like they will be busy but fun!

And on an unrelated note, you might recognize at least one of the names here (and on the other two pages linked from the top)! Nothing I haven't posted here about, but it's neat to see stuff I've made on display at a math conference!

Titles of my posts have been getting less and less descriptive.

2008-12-16T07:25:24Z

I'm back home for the break.

Visiting Pittsburgh for Capture the Flag was, as expected, awesome. It was my first time playing under the new rules, and I liked them: gameplay hasn't changed significantly, but the rules have gotten simpler and more consistent. Later that weekend a few of us looked at an abandoned blast furnace; it was impressive.

TAing the logic class was a lot of fun, as was teaching two of the lectures for the class. And I learned yesterday, much to my lack of surprise, that next quarter I'll be TAing another logic class (the successor of the one I just TAed). Last quarter's class was mostly first-order logic; next quarter will be more set theory --- stuff I love, and which should be a lot of fun to teach.

Speaking of next quarter: I'll be taking three classes (this quarter I took only one), but they should be interesting ones. I've also finally started to get a better idea of what I'll probably be researching; up until two weeks or so ago "logic" was about as specific as I knew! I'm looking forward to actually starting on research.

Here are photos of a bobbin lace doily I made. The pattern was, again, from Doris Southard's book. This is by far the largest thing I've made in bobbin lace, and I'm very pleased with it. I don't tend to keep track of how long projects like this take, but I think this one took me about a week (quite a bit less time than I expected).

I've also finished the sweater I'd been making; I'll post photos as soon as I can.

On an entirely different note, since fashion by democracy somehow seems like a good idea: should I shave? I've never really liked having facial hair, but I've also never liked shaving.

A short update about CTF plans, TAing, and my sweater.

2008-10-15T19:41:02Z

I have plane tickets to Pittsburgh for CtFwS! I'll be arriving in Pittsburgh late on Nov. 6 (Thursday), and leaving on the 10th (Monday). Anyone in Pittsburgh have a couch or floor I could sleep on while there?

As predicted, TAing has been fun (except for grading!), and I already knew a surprising number of the students in the class (probably a quarter or so).

The sweater I've been knitting is nearly done --- it's wearable, in fact, but the zipper still needs a bit more sewing. I like it quite a lot; I'll post pictures of it sometime if I can convince my camera to cooperate (and not blur everything)!

Paragraphs don't need more than one or two sentences, right?

Things are going well!

2008-09-07T05:31:57Z

I've been in Montreal for the last while, and it's been nice. While here, I got together with kojaxs, ramaxela, Fehr, and Josh; finished all of the knitting on the sweater I've been making (though there's still a bit of sewing left); and learned Morse code. In two days I leave for Greece, where I'll be for ten days (and for the first time my birthday will happen while I'm outside of North America!).

Office and TAing assignments have been sent out, and I seem to have won with both: I'll be in a rather large office (as I wanted) shared with many awesome people, with several more awesome people in nearby offices. And I'll be TAing an introductory logic class (which meets twice a week, at noon).

I also got an email from Sarah-Marie Belcastro:

[...] At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January, Carolyn Yackel and I will be hosting a juried mathematical fiber arts exhibit. Would you be interested in submitting anything to that? Of the stuff you have posted on your webpage, we particularly like the crocheted Seifert surfaces and the LES scarf. [...]

Hooray!

I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS!

2008-08-13T02:45:23Z

The last week or so has been fun.

There was a Portal party. It was my first time playing the game, and I loved it. The turret-robots are the cutest things ever, and I want one as a pet. About my only complaint about the game is that it's quite short, but we spent a while playing other levels we found on the internet (the best of which was a Rube Goldbergesque level where balls would roll down tracks which would move under their weight). We decided that we should bake a Portal cake (the recipe appears on the computer terminals in the game). sulenda and I finally got around to baking it on Sunday; here are some photos:

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction!

On Friday was a board/card game party; there was lots of fun stuff including Apples to Apples and someone (not entirely sober) talking about Atlantis (and making a lot of sense, amazingly). It's somewhat noteworthy because the person there I'd known for the longest I'd met the previous week; everyone else I'd either met the day before or at the party. I'm getting a lot more comfortable in social situations with people I don't know well; a year ago I probably wouldn't have imagined myself going to a party like that without anyone I knew well. But I'm glad I did; the people were awesome and I had a lot of fun!

I managed, for the first time, to pick a Best SFIC lock (these are the locks that were used at CMU). I'd never tried very hard, thinking I probably would have no luck, but it turned out not to be so bad (it now generally takes me just a few minutes to pick). Here's a photo:

After the summer I want to see if I can make a torque tool like the one described here and use it to remove the core from the lock.

As for the rest of the summer: I leave Chicago on the 24th (actually a few days earlier for a dance weekend near Indianapolis); I've started to pack but have barely made a dent. I'll be in Montreal from the 24th until Sept. 8, when I leave for Greece. I'll be getting back to Chicago on Sept. 18 (just in time for a Crüxshadows concert on the 20th, which will (if all goes well!) be one of the few times a band I like will be playing in Chicago and I'll be able to make it!).

Lace

2008-07-28T00:56:59Z

A few bits of bobbin lace I've done lately:

These are resting on the pillow used to make them; at the top of the first picture you can (sort of) see the holes from the pins that were used in making the square.

Here's a closeup of the fan. I started on the side that's on the right, working toward the left; it gets noticeably better as it goes. The rightmost fan and chevron aren't very great, but the other two seem to have come out reasonably nicely. Apparently I'm managing to learn!

A closeup of the square. There are four chevrons (by the middle of each side) and I decided to do a different stitch for each, but two ended up being barely different from the ground (the pattern forming the majority of the lace).

If you're curious, all of the patterns are from Lessons in Bobbin Lacemaking by Doris Southard; I find it well-written and well-organized, and a good choice if you want to learn how to make bobbin lace.

HOPE

2008-07-22T00:15:26Z

I got back last night from HOPE, a hacker con in New York. It was awesome! Thanks to those who gave me a place to sleep during that time, and to all the others I know who were there and helped make it awesome!

A few of the presentations I went to (the list of all presentations is here, and I went to several I don't have too much to say about):

Introduction to MCU Firmware Analysis: talked about disassembling and analyzing code for the MSP430, a fairly popular microcontroller. The approach was somewhat interesting: disassembling the program, and making a SQL database of jumps that could be queried to figure out call graphs. It talked a bit about modifying firmware without understanding much of it (you could easily modify interrupt handlers for, say, the serial port to log all data sent and received). Nothing new or earth-shattering, but it was interesting.

Wikipedia: You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villany: discusses tools written by the presenter for exposing abuse of Wikipedia. Wikipedia displays IP addresses of anonymous edits, and so it's relatively easy to monitor Wikipedia to find out, say, what companies have been editing their own page (and several have indeed made edits to remove negative comments about themselves or otherwise make themselves look better).

Kitchen Hack Lab: food hacking! Some parts of the presentation were downright disgusting; but other parts were amazing. Perhaps the most interesting was a project they're working on to automatically modify recipes to your desire: finding ingredients, for example, that can be put in place of others, or figuring out what to change if you want it to take less time to cook.

One Last Time: The Hack/Phreak History Primer: an interesting talk about the history of hacking and phreaking. But perhaps most interesting was the way that the presenter, Jason Scott, was dressed: in a purple suit, with a top hat and goggles!

Methods of Copying High-Security Keys: a reminder that limited availability of key blanks doesn't mean that the keys can't be copied. They mentioned that many keys can be easily copied by making a mould of a key with clay, removing it, and pouring in hot metal; in most cases they key that was produced worked fine.

BagCam: someone put a video camera in his checked bag while traveling, with a hole in the bag so the camera could see out. None of the video he got is particularly damning (though watching someone loading bags into a plane by literally throwing them into the plane might make you think twice about ever packing anything remotely fragile), but I think that the idea is really neat. There was talk of starting a wiki so that others who feel like making their own BagCams can share their results; it will be interesting to see what comes of it.

Social Engineering: a panel, with a few live demonstrations. There were many interesting stories by people like Kevin Mitnick about getting out of situations by social engineering, as well as stories of the 2600 van (which is painted with the Bell logo) being let onto closed roads by police thinking it was a legitimate Bell van. The phone calls that they made during the presentation were amusing, in the way that watching improv is amusing (they didn't manage to get any information they really shouldn't have, but it was fun to watch them come up with stories on the spot).

Kevin Mitnick: while I think that Mitnick is quite overrated in the hacker community, his presentation did have some amusing stories. After the talk he gave out his business card to everyone who wanted one; it breaks apart into a lockpick set.

Simulating the Universe on Supercomputers: an interesting talk about physics and physical simulation, with lots of pretty pictures of distributions of dark matter.

Postal Hacking: amusing stories about what can and can't be sent by USPS. The presenter has sent all sorts of things by post, with all sorts of addressing, to see how long they take to get through (or if they do at all). As an example, a message with only a barcode (for a P.O. box) but no address got as far as the post office in the destination city before being returned (presumably because the postal employee couldn't figure out where to put it, though the machinery for routing messages dealt with it just fine). I think the most amazing thing about the talk was how many things did get through. The presenter mentioned sending a letter to someone in New Orleans just as Katrina was starting; they later told him that when they got back to their house after the hurricane they had no power and no water and had backed-up sewers... but the letter was waiting for them. It gives you quite a lot of respect for the postal service. (Update: they have a website with a lot of the stuff they talked about.)

The conference badges are also worth mentioning: those who wanted them got badges with active RFID to track their movement through the conference. When they finally got the system to work (sometime on Saturday) it was pretty neat; there was a display with a map showing a red dot for every person being tracked. The badges also expose the programming pins of the PIC, so they could be reprogrammed to do pretty much any kind of short-distance digital radio communication you might want. (I think it would be interesting to write mesh-networking firmware for them, or to use the realtime location data to do things like suggesting talks based on where those who seem to have similar interests are going.)

The conference also had a floor of interesting stuff, including a "lockpicking village" with a bunch of different kinds of locks; Segways (one of which I rode); tables with soldering irons; as well as various technical art projects. One of the ones I found most interesting was the Wiremap, a 3D display using a normal projector. 256 vertical strings were placed between two horizontal pieces of plywood such that, from the perspective of the projector, none were blocking any others. The projector could therefore project something different on each string, allowing true 3D images to be displayed. It was extremely impressive, especially considering how simple it is.

Mystery Hunt; Scav; Contra; Advisor; REU; and more!

2008-07-10T23:56:12Z

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.

Grad School; Loreena McKennitt; KGB Hunt; Crochet and Knitting; Melting Snow

2007-12-27T22:50:10Z

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.

Pittsburgh! Chicago!

2007-09-09T03:36:30Z

I just got back from visiting Pittsburgh. The visit was great, and this year's group of freshmen seems awesome. I think I graduated too early! Thanks to chrisamaphone and gustavolacerda for giving me a place to stay, and to them and everyone else I saw for making the visit awesome!

I'm now in Chicago, moved into my new apartment. Orientation starts on Monday; classes start two weeks after that(!). aleffert, who will soon be my apartment-mate, will be here in a week. The apartment seems quite nice so far, and is near enough to campus that I can (just barely) use the campus wireless Internet, if my laptop is in just the right place. I still need to find a good ISP around here, though...

chrisamaphone wrote my PhD thesis for me. Here's the front and the back. This will make grad school much easier!

00: Vangelis - Alpha. If this sounds familiar, it's probably because you saw Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series. If you haven't, you should; that show did a lot for me when I was young in getting me interested in science. Not to mention that the soundtrack, with Vangelis' music, is awesome.
01: Schandmaul - Dein Anblick
02: Vienna Teng - Between
03: Simon and Garfunkel - Bookends theme (sleepsong)
04: John Du Prez - Ending theme of Captain Star, an amusing cartoon that was broadcast in Quebec when I was younger.
05: Loreena Mckennitt - Caravanserai (sleepsong)
06: Robyn Miller - Catherine's Freedom (from Riven) (gaussjordan)
07: REM - Driver 8 (betaphen)
08: Hungry Lucy - Fearful
09: Machinae Supremacy - Great Gianna Sisters; cover of Chris Huelsbeck's music for Great Giana Sisters on the c64 (note: you'll need a SID player to play the original). The same band did covers of several other SID tunes, and some of the sounds you hear are made by a Sidstation, a synthesizer based on the c64's music chip.
10: Beatles - You've Got To Hide Your Love Away (sleepsong)
11: Assemblage 23 - Madman's Dream
12: Depeche Mode - New Life
13: Carbon Leaf - Toy Soldiers (rbraun)
14: Seabound - The Promise (alternate version)
15: Show of Hands - Tall Ships.

Crochet

2007-08-16T23:49:26Z

Photos of some stuff I've crocheted:

Let's start with the Seifert surfaces. These are orientable surfaces (essentially, you can't get from one side to the other without crossing an edge, as you can with the Mobius strip) with some knot or link as its boundary. A good introduction to them, with lots of pictures, is this one. It's kind of surprising that they exist for any knot or link --- and in fact, there's a rather easy algorithm for finding them. The nice thing is that the algorithm gives the surface in terms of a bunch of discs and twisted strips connecting them, both of which are easy to crochet! Putting it all together, it's not too hard to come up with a method that will let you crochet any Seifert surface.

A while back I posted pictures of a Seifert surface of a trefoil I made this way; in those pictures, you can see the two discs and the three twisted strips connecting them. For the trefoil, though, I've found it nicer to cheat a bit and not bother crocheting the discs separately (you get the same surface, but I find that it looks a bit nicer). In these pictures I've also run some stiff wire around the boundary so that it keeps its shape better. Here are the results (click the images for larger versions):

But we can also do links! Here's a Seifert surface of the Borromean Rings, three rings linked together in such a way that if any one is removed, the other two come apart as well. This was quite hard to make; all of the twists have to go in the right direction and it's quite difficult to keep track of them at the beginning (in one of my earlier attempts I got one wrong, giving me some less-exciting three-component link). Again, I've run wire through it so it keeps its shape.

Moving along, here's a Klein Bottle. I also have a figure-8 immersion of a Klein bottle lying around somewhere, but I'm not sure where (it's much easier to crochet, actually). I'm not too fond of this one; the seams are too obvious (the blurriness of the photo actually makes it look a bit better than it is!)

Here's another, this time done with a kind of checkerboard pattern so you can see inside (at least, you can when you're looking at it in "real life"; the pictures don't show it well at all). The downside is that it's really floppy; it was hard to get it to stand up and pose for these pictures!

We can also make a (sphere with a) crosscap, one way of shoving a projective plane into three-dimensional space.

Here's how it looks before stitching it together. We can see two discs that pass through each other along a line.

Finally, for something different, I had been wondering what it was like to crochet with finer yarn. Here's the result, my first doily! (Unlike the rest of the things here, this was made from a pattern; it's not my own design!). You may be wondering why I cut the yarn where I did, leaving a foot or so left. The answer is that I haven't cut it yet: that was the end of the yarn! I felt like the luckiest person ever when I finished it; I was getting really worried near the end!

More music memes

2007-08-16T04:37:27Z

This is the one where I posts several clips of music and you identify the ones you know; unlike the last time I did it, I'm not restricting whether or not they may have singing.

The clips are here (note: extracts to the current directory!). I'll update this post as they're guessed.

The ones that have been guessed are:
03: Simon and Garfunkel - Bookends theme (sleepsong)
05: Loreena Mckennitt - Caravanserai (sleepsong)
06: Robyn Miller - Catherine's Freedom (from Riven) (gaussjordan)
07: REM - Driver 8 (betaphen)
10: Beatles - You've Got To Hide Your Love Away (sleepsong)
13: Carbon Leaf - Toy Soldiers (rbraun)

"Look here, old sport," he broke out surprisingly. "What's your opinion of me anyhow?"

2007-08-15T22:15:30Z

This is a variation on a meme that's been going around lately and some that went around a while back.

Tell me honestly what you think of me. Unless you indicate that you don't want me to, I'll respond to the comment with the same for you.

As always, anonymous commenting is enabled and I don't log IPs (though of course I'll have a hard time responding with what I think of you if you post anonymously!).

Also, if you have any questions you want to ask me, feel free to ask here. I can't guarantee that I'll answer them (especially questions about authentication data such as passwords :) ), but feel free to ask!

Gliding!

2007-08-05T22:34:59Z

I went gliding today.

Here I am in the glider! There are two sets of straps here: the seatbelt, and the straps for a parachute in case things go very wrong (they didn't!). The person in the back seat in the second picture was the one doing the steering: the front and the back each have a set of controls.

Being tugged by a small airplane (we're moving pretty fast at this point, and it's pretty bumpy since we're still on the ground).

Off the ground!

Quite far off the ground!

At 3000 feet, we release the cable. There's no longer anything powering our flight except gravity and air currents!

We found an updraft pretty quickly. Here we're turning sharply to stay within it.

We released the tug cable at 3000 feet; after riding the updraft for a little while, we're at almost 4000 feet (the altimeter is in the bottom left). It's quite amazing that our rather heavy glider, with no engine, can climb so much just from an updraft!

The view is really nice!

Unfortunately, the movement got to me a bit; I was slightly sick to my stomach after landing. The ride was actually really smooth; I think what got to me were the forces from climbing/descending fairly sharply (I don't tend to like rollercoasters either because of this). I also wonder if perhaps the seatbelt was too tight: it didn't feel tight, but near the very end my toes and fingers (and even my tongue, slightly) got quite tingly; by the end I couldn't move my fingers nearly as much as I normally can (I guess the tinglyness could also have just been me reacting a bit to the seasickness). It all went away a minute or two after landing, though. My dad (who flew after I got back, in the same glider and with the same pilot) had neither of these problems.

Despite all of that, the trip was well worth it. It was a lot of fun, and the view was incredible!

Visiting; Graduating; Lounging; Concerting; Jupiter.

2007-07-28T23:26:28Z

I'm thinking of visiting Pittsburgh at the beginning of September (from around the first to around the 8th or 9th). Anyone have a place I could stay during that time?

And, for those of you who have been bugging me, here's an update! (Note that most of the stuff here happened several months ago, but I've gotten quite lazy about updating the journal...)

I graduated! I used to think that the graduation gowns were completely impractical; now that I've worn one, though, I've found that they have several uses. For example, if you wear a sarong underneath one, it's very easy to adjust the sarong no matter where you are --- if necessary, you can even completely take off the sarong in public and nobody will notice because the gown is still covering everything. The gowns for master's students offer a great deal of storage space: the sleeves can store a poncho, a water bottle, and the cap (which is nice because the tassel on those tickles *a lot*); the hood offers still more storage space. So the gowns aren't *completely* useless after all!

chrisamaphone reserved the room that used to be the cslounge; we had it for the entire period of exams. It was really nice to have the lounge back for a while --- after the lounge went away people started to use the cluster, but the cluster was centered more around the computers. It was nice to play non-computer games again; there was lots of Mao, and I introduced Dvorak to several people. It was awesome; I really miss the old lounge!

I saw TMBG live a while back. It was good, though not as good as I remembered the previous time I saw them being. It seems to me that there's less variation in their newer songs; maybe that's just me, though (and maybe I just notice it more because TMBG is no longer new to me). I also saw And One and VNV Nation; both were great, but I thought And One was better. One thing that bugs me about VNV live is that the singing and music seem totally separate... while it can be good not to sing too mechanically and to slightly break the rhythm, I found that the singer for VNV overdoes it. The singing often seems to lag significantly behind the music.

I've decided that I really, really like Jupiter. It is very pretty. Lots more pictures here.

Tetrinet; IRC; Hunt website

2007-05-26T08:33:25Z

A quick announcement: for the summer, the tetrifast server is at wavelet.ath.cx. Andrew's zephyr server seems to dislike unauthenticated zephyrs from behind a NAT, so the server now sends announcements using cclub zephyr. So, if you still want zephyr notifications for tetrinet games, you now have to subscribe to <functor,*,*@CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU>; you can do that with "zctl add functor \* \*@CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU" from the commandline on a machine with zephyr (eg. a cluster machine or unix3x).

On a related note, the KGB mystery hunt page can now be found here, though it looks like it will possibly move to cmukgb.org for real sometime soon, now that KGB exec has root on their own machine. The writer's wiki, which chrisamaphone should update, is also at wavelet.ath.cx; Chris will find some way to not notice this sentence, though :)

Also, I want to remind cslounge people that #cslounge on irc.freenode.net still exists, and is (along with frequent games of tetrinet, of course) a good way to keep in touch with each other during the summer!

A "real" update to my journal will come one of these days.

Water computer videos

2007-04-16T04:55:12Z

Water inverter (about 2MB), and two inverters (about 3MB) connected together --- these videos should explain things much better than my last post (the inverter is very simple). We were also able to connect the two with thread, so that a signal to the bottom one would affect the top one.

Here are the 160MB of pictures and videos of it from gwillen's camera, though I think the two videos I linked above are the most useful.

Chicago; Water Computer

2007-04-14T05:08:17Z

I mailed the acceptance form to Chicago earlier today. It's nice to finally know where I'll be next year!

In completely unrelated news: tonight chrisamaphone, gwillen and I started to assemble a water computer, something we've been wanting to do for a while. The basic idea is that instead of electricity, we have streams of water; a 1 is water flowing, and a 0 is absence of water. We've had a design for a NOT gate for a long time now (which has water flowing out of it at a certain place only if there isn't any water flowing in); and an OR gate is easy: it's a funnel to combine two streams of water. NOT and OR together can be used to build any other gate. It seems to work really well (far better than I expected it to on the first try)! We made two NOT gates, and were able to get the output from one to be the input to the other; we were also able to tie the two gates together (literally) so that signals further down could be sent back up. This means that, in theory, the design should be able to scale to any number of gates and allow one to build water versions of any circuit (we calculated that if it were made using this sort of water logic, a Z80 processor, the kind used in the TI83 calculator and old gameboys, would occupy about 1000 cubic feet and would need about a kilowatt of power just to pump the water it needs. I'm actually sort of surprised at how low these numbers are).

We took photos and video, which should appear online somewhere soon and which should make all of this a lot clearer. I'm hoping that we can eventually build a two-bit adder out of water logic (or perhaps I should say water gates, though that may be too scandalous).

Berkeley and Chicago

2007-04-11T23:15:22Z

Even though platypuslord's comments were very useful, I visited some more grad schools :)

I'm back from visiting Berkeley and Chicago (and have been for some time, but too busy to update livejournal!). Both were really nice; I could see myself at either. I'm leaning a bit toward Chicago, though.

My impressions about the differences between them: the students at Chicago seemed a bit more social, especially in the first year. There's a first-year work area that seems to be used a lot (though apparently how social it is varies a lot from year to year: several students and professors mentioned that this year's first-year class is much more social than last year's); first-year students are encouraged to work together there on the first-year classes. My impression is that the first-year classes at Chicago are a lot of work; on the upside, they're the only thing students need to do (there's no teaching during the first year).

As for teaching: TAing at Berkeley involves two sections (covering identical material); each meets three times a week. TAs grade exams, but not the homework. At Chicago, grad students TA only during the second year; TAing there doesn't involve as much time in the sections as at Berkeley, but does involve grading homework. From the third year on, grad students at Chicago are lecturers for the basic math classes, in some cases with undergrad TAs --- which sounds nice; of course, I have no idea how it is in practice.

Of the two, Chicago's program seems much more guided and structured --- the first-years all take the same classes; in the second year, students work with a faculty member (who often becomes their advisor). Berkeley's program doesn't seem as rigid. I'm not really sure which of these would be better for me.

Both seem to have lots of professors researching the areas of math that interest me, though. I still don't know exactly what I want to study (probably algebra or topology, but I'm not sure what specifically within those fields), and both places seem to have plenty of people who could advise me in whatever I decide on.

Somewhat interestingly, at both places, the professors I talked to seemed to be trying quite a bit to convince me to go there, while when I visited Cornell the people I talked to also spoke really highly of several of the other places I was considering, and strongly suggested that I visit several. I wonder if that's just the people I talked to.

Grad school visits

2007-03-28T21:19:38Z

I'll be visiting two grad schools next week: Berkeley (arriving the evening of the 3rd, leaving on the 5th), and Chicago (arriving later on the 5th, leaving on the 7th). If anyone at Berkeley wants to show me around (or give me a place to say for the two nights), let me know! (I'd say the same for Chicago, but I don't think anyone who reads this goes there).

Grad schools, Concert, Mystery Hunt

2007-03-21T12:49:34Z

I've finally heard from everywhere I applied; in the end, I was accepted at Berkeley, Chicago, Cornell, Michigan, UIUC, UT. Austin, and UW. Madison. I was rejected by Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. I'm really amazed; I didn't expect to be accepted at nearly that many places. Unfortunately, this makes deciding much harder... if any of you have opinions about any of these places, please let me know!

In particular, for those of you at Berkeley... many people I've talked to at places other than Berkeley have said, if I'm understanding them correctly, that Berkeley doesn't really have the same kind of close community among math grad students as many other places, and that, since it's such a large program, it's "easy to get lost." That said, I haven't heard that from anyone I know who actually goes to Berkeley. Do any of you have thoughts? What do you like about Berkeley, and what don't you like about it?

I went to Cornell's prospective student weekend. I had an amazing time.
The visit started Thursday evening (March 1... I'm positing this quite a while after writing it!). A grad student picked me up from the airport and showed me around the math building a bit. There are two rooms of grad student "offices"; one quieter and one more social. I spent quite a bit of time in the latter; the impression I got was that it was somewhat like the 5203 cluster at CMU (but not nearly as noisy; really, just a pleasant, social place). That evening, the school paid for me to have wonderful food at an Indian restaurant.

The next day was very busy. It started with breakfast and meetings with professors. The first meeting was with Thurston (a fields medalist!). George (whom I knew from Mathcamp) was there with me. It was actually the least useful meeting of the three I had, and from what I've heard from several people Thurston isn't very good as an advisor anyway. The next two meetings were much more interesting, though; the first was with Prof. Brown and the second with Prof. Nerode. Both of them were reasonably talkative --- a good thing, since I didn't really know what to ask. I think I got a better impression at those meetings about what I should be looking for in choosing a grad school. I also got the impression that Cornell makes it quite easy to do things in the overlap between math and CS, which is nice (CS theory is one of the many things I'm thinking of possibly studying).

After that, there was a lot of talking with grad students. My impression (from talking with them, talking with professors, and sitting around for an hour in the office the previous day) is that it's a really friendly community: people seem to work together and be social, and most of them seem to know each other --- though my impression may have been biased by the fact that the people involved in the prospective students weekend are probably more likely to know each other than an arbitrary set of grad students. Even so, this seems to be the kind of environment that I would really like.

Even later, we saw an Olivetti talk. These are weekly talks given by grad students in whatever subjects they want; this one was by Matt Noonan and was about geometry (Matt, by the way, reminds me quite a bit of jcreed --- not in appearance, but in the way he talks and behaves).

Saturday was a lot less busy; it started with a campus tour (given by one of the math grad students, and therefore showing mostly things reasonably close to the math building or that a math grad student would be interested in). Later was a walk to a waterfall, which, especially with the snow, was really pretty (amusing quote from the walk: "Are we there yet?" "Of course. Just lie down on your side; you'll see a really spectacular waterfall!"), board games at the house of one of the grad students, and a party at the house of another grad student (where there were cats. And I had brought yarn! It was fun).

Anyway, what I've seen during the visit really appeals to me. I think there's a reasonable chance that I'll end up going to Cornell, but I still want to visit several more places before deciding for sure: from what I've heard (including from several people here), several of the other places I'm considering also have the features of Cornell that I really like.

I went to a Crüxshadows concert a while back. Two bands played before them. The first one was really bad --- I spent most of the time they were playing talking with pnelson, who realized that Derrick Brashear (also known as Shadow, who was one of the main AFS developers) was there, as was the main Windows OpenAFS developer. I'm willing to bet that few people have discussed ZephyrASCII at a goth club before.

The second band was reasonable.

The Crüxshadows themselves were absolutely amazing; the lead singer seems very good at making the audience seem like a part of it (he walked through the audience a lot, and also climbed around quite a bit).

Classes I'm taking this semester:

Algebra I: abstract algebra, taught by Cummings. I'm enjoying it a lot, even though it's at 10:30AM! (I am really annoyed with myself for writing on the midterm that polynomial rings over PIDs are themselves PIDs, though!)

Continental Philosophy: taught by Cavalier. I'm a bit disappointed in it, actually... I had Cavalier for Ancient Philosophy and it was the best humanities class I've had. I'd heard really good things about Continental Philosophy, but so far I think that Cavalier did a much better job in Ancient. I'm having a much harder time following things in this class. Perhaps it's just me, though.

Descriptive Set Theory: Schimmerling is much better at teaching grad courses, it seems, than he is at teaching 3D calc (which I took from him my freshman year). I'm enjoying the class quite a bit, and on top of that it's closely related to my thesis topic (well, basically, it is my thesis topic). Each of us has to give a talk in the class; I'll be giving mine next week (on Pi_1^1 determinacy), which should be fun.

Thesis! Going reasonably well, but still a lot more to do. People are right: a thesis really does take a lot of time!

~~Prikry Forcing~~ Also taught by Cummings. I dropped it early on... I'd gotten way too rusty on forcing (which, even when I learned it in Set Theory I, seemed like quite a bit of magic), and was pretty much totally lost by the second or third class.

I lent someone an LCD monitor about a year ago, but I no longer remember who... please let me know if it was you :) (I don't need it back urgently; I just want to remember who has it!)

I was involved in writing the first (annual or possibly semesterly) KGB Mystery Hunt (note: the URL will hopefully change soon to something under cmukgb.org). It was a rather short hunt (KGB events typically start at 7:00PM; we wanted this to start around then and to end around or not too long after midnight), designed for people with little or no puzzling experience. (As such, the puzzles might seem easy to veterans of MIT hunts --- they were meant to be solved in about fifteen minutes each by a team of four people with little hunt experience). Helping to write and run the hunt was a lot of fun; it's something I definitely want to do again (it's a pity I'm graduating, though I'll still be able to help write). My puzzles, by the way, were Block of Letters, Name That Puzzle, and Secret Message. I also wrote the final stage of the runaround, and acted as Tweedledee.

Next year, we'll definitely need to do a lot of things earlier. If you watch the video of the opening meeting, you'll notice gwillen in the corner on my laptop... he was putting his puzzle on the website! The rattles we gave the teams were somewhat improvised as well with plastic soda bottles (we went to a Babies R Us, but they didn't have baby rattles!) We also weren't prepared enough when the runaround started; instead of meeting the team five minutes after they solved the metapuzzle, we met them about fifteen minutes after. The call-in system could also have used some improvement: it was a web form that sent us a zephyr with the team name and phone number!

Even so, the response to the hunt seems to be very positive (see, for example, this journal entry from someone on the winning team). One team of people in non-technical majors said that they were very happy with the puzzles --- they had been worried that they would require too much CS-type knowledge, and were pleasantly surprised. We also had many more teams than expected: instead of seven or so, we had thirteen! We're definitely going to need more people involved in organizing next year, as well as more room reservations!

Anyway, I think that the hunt went as well as or better than anyone on the writing team expected... I'm really happy about it, and pretty much everyone who played seems to be as well!

Random things:

Science Made Stupid is amusing.
I got an email from the HUB a while back, saying that my account had an outstanding balance. The website indicated that I didn't, though, so I sent them an email asking if there'd been some mistake. Their response:
```
 This message was received by you in error, please disregard this message. Your account is paid in full. 
```
Ah; I see. I received the message in error. My bad. I'll try not to receive messages like that again!

For those of you who were at the Mystery Hunt...

2007-01-31T06:31:57Z

... Colon-Inflating Rhinoceri has put the wordplay cats video online!

Those of you who weren't at the hunt may still want to see cute kittens solving crosswords. :)

Mystery Hunt!

2007-01-21T23:15:58Z

There was a Mystery Hunt! As usual, the hunt, as well as just being in Boston with a bunch of friends I rarely get to see, was absolutely amazing.

I thought that this was a great hunt, though it seems like it was quite controversial. I do think that meta 8 was broken (for pretty much the reasons described here); that said (and I hadn't really realized until Dan mentioned this), I had a lot of fun at the end working on it. It was fascinating to see how many different things our team thought of, most of which I wouldn't have thought about in a million years. So, broken or not, I don't at all think that it was a disaster.

I spent most of my time in the metapuzzle war room. I like metapuzzles: it's fun to see how soon (and with how little information) you can figure them out, and they get easier over time as more and more answers are found (they're not the only puzzles like this, but it's something that they have in common). I mostly played with seeing what words could possibly fit given various guesses about how the metas worked, rather than coming up with the guesses (there were already plenty of people with enough strong opinions!). I agree with what several people have been saying about the war room: it shouldn't be so separate from everything else (though I'm pretty sure that the door being locked was not intentional on anyone's part), and I think that we could benefit (not only in terms of enjoyment but also in terms of how well we do) by making it easier for more people to be involved in metapuzzles, and to have better communication between people solving metas and non-metas. I certainly plan to spend much more time in future hunts working on non-metas.

I was originally surprised that there wasn't really a final runaround, but (after reading some of the livejournal posts) it makes sense why: the runaround was earlier in the hunt so that more teams would get a chance to participate in it; I certainly think that the Bombers should be commended for trying different things like that. Making the hunt interesting for the wide variety of teams that are present is certainly difficult.

One very amusing moment: on one meta, we ended up with "MAKE A BAD SEQUEL TO ????PLAY" (we still hadn't solved some of the puzzles). We called up headquarters, saying "We'd like to make a bad sequel to foreplay." Their response, apparently, was something like "please don't do that!" The answer, it turns out, was "MAKE A BAD SEQUEL TO WORDPLAY"!

At the wrapup meeting, we got to see one of the sequels. It involved cats solving crosswords; it was absolutely hilarious. If anyone finds the video anywhere, please let me know!

Overall, I think that it was a great hunt, and that for the most part people enjoyed it a lot. I certainly did!

Conference!

2007-01-10T00:31:46Z

I got back yesterday from the AMS/MAA joint meeting in New Orleans. It was absolutely awesome; everyone in my research group from the Mt. Holyoke REU was there, and it was great to see them all again (I really hope that the five of us all end up at conferences like this again). I also saw (and had dinner with) a bunch of people from Mathcamp.

There were several great talks (and a few others that weren't as great, but the great ones more than made up for it)! One of the great ones was a talk about geometry in the movies (which talked about things like subdivision surfaces, and managed to have a great balance between pretty pictures and math). There was also an excellent talk about the history of Euler, in which the speaker made an amusing slip: "[Euler and Frederick II] both did what they were best at: Euler tried to conquer most of Europe... no, wait...". I'm quite sad that I missed Friday, though; it looked like there were lots of really amazing talks that went on then.

Anyway, I had an awesome time. It was great to see so many people I hadn't seen in a while!

Also, I now have an AMS pocket protector. I kind of want to wear it to a goth club :).

Hboxes, kittens, ETS, conferences, TSN, donus, leafpiles, ultrapowers, roofs, schools, piffles, ...

2006-12-25T05:00:11Z

It's been about a semester since I've updated about actual stuff happening. So here's what's happened this semester, in roughly chronological order, along with other random things I've been meaning to write about.

psifenix and I were both at REUs last summer, and each wrote papers about what we'd done. Naturally, when we were back at CMU, we looked at each other's papers. psifenix is the kind of person that cares a lot about his typesetting, so, when I noticed that the first line of his abstract had an overfull hbox, I started to mercilessly tease him about it.

After a few minutes of that, I decided to check if my paper had any overfull hboxes.

It had one. On the first line of the abstract.

How embarrassing!

I finally met chrisamaphone's kitten. It's so cute and playful! At the party just before break, I probably spent half an hour playing with it (having it pounce on my lanyard). I think it got tired out before I did :)

There were also two kittens (really tiny ones!) in the cluster a while back; one fell asleep on gwillen's lap. So cute!

It seems like everyone has their own story about ETS's incompetence (for those fortunate enough not to know, ETS is the organization responsible for the GRE test). In my case, when registering for the general test, I left "place of birth" blank (it was an optional field). It seemed fine with that, and let me proceed to payment, and gladly took my credit card information.

And then it gave me an error about "place of birth" being left blank. But only after it charged $130 to my debit card.

I called up ETS, explained what had happened, and asked if I had actually been registered. They told me that a lot of people had been having that problem (apparently not enough for them to fix it, or even put a note on their site about it), and that I was probably registered --- I should get an email within a few days. A few days later, I still hadn't gotten an email, and the charge had disappeared from my online debit card statement (they didn't bother to contact me about that, of course).

The second time everything was fine, at least.

The AMS meeting in January is coming up (I'll be presenting my research from last summer in the poster session). I'm looking forward to it!

Also, the idea of having a joke conference at CMU seems to be gaining momentum! You should all submit abstracts!

I went to a ThouShaltNot concert a while back. It was very good, though loud. I even danced a bit, and enjoyed it! It was also somewhat amusing to be in a goth club dressed as I normally am (sweat pants with a short-sleeved shirt with two pencils in the pocket). I probably seemed slightly out of place :).

There was a presentation about grad schools. I was one of three people who attended; qedragon was another. It seems that they had been planning for a much better attendance; there were several dozen donuts. When the presentation was over, qedragon and I brought the remaining donuts to the cluster.

I went to the cluster, said "Donuts! Lots of them!" and set the box down on the table in the Wean lobby. Within about ten seconds, the cluster was entirely empty. About twenty seconds after that, the donuts were entirely gone.

Clusterfolk can be very efficient at certain tasks!

There was a leafpile! The timing was perfect, actually. I had been feeling particularly stressed that evening, and so I went on a walk outside. I saw the leafpile and ran to the cluster to gather people, and about a half dozen of us went to play in it. I nearly jumped on Lucy, who was entirely submerged in the pile when we got there; fortunately, she had left her schoolbag next to the pile --- had she not, it probably would never have occurred to me that there might be someone already in the pile.

Anyway, we played in the leafpile for a long time. My stress melted away. It was great!

I have decided that "ultrapower" is one of the most awesome terms in mathematics. They're actually completely awesome for reasons other than just the name, but the name alone makes them really, really awesome.

Try saying "ULTRAPOWER!" in a deep, dramatic voice. It's really fun! Superman might have superpowers, but we mathematicians have ULTRAPOWERS!

Anyway.

I got to walk around on the Wean roof. Legitimately! The roof was open and there were telescopes on it to see the transit of Mercury. Unfortunately, the sky was completely cloudy (of course!), but it was neat to see the roof. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures.

I'm applying to Princeton, Berkeley, Harvard, UT. Austin, Cornell, Chicago, UIUC, Michigan, UW. Madison, and MIT. The first three of the applications are done; the next seven almost done. It will be very nice to have applications completely finished; they're a lot of work (my advice to anyone who will be applying to grad schools: start writing your personal statement early! Applying for an NSF fellowship is a nice way to set a deadline for yourself.)

Grad school applications (and the NSF app) have all sorts of silliness. According to the NSF, there are two ethnicities: Hispanic and not Hispanic. The NSF application also uses checkboxes for indicating disabilities, meaning that their form would allow you to express "I have a vision disability and a hearing disability, and no disability at all, and I don't want to tell you that anyway" should that be the case. Harvard asks for current citizenships, and requires an end date (sorry, Harvard; I've not yet decided when I'm going to die).

I hadn't realized that the reference to Woffles in the bibliography for Concrete Mathematics actually came from an "actual" paper (text is also here, for those of you without access to JSTOR). It's really amusing, and worth looking at!

Apparently the rule to The Game about saying "moo" is now fairly common at Caltech. Strange!

The Mystery Hunt is soon! Really soon! Yay!

A photo of the Blums. For reference, they look more like this nowadays. Avrim was considerably smaller back then.

The latest version of Ur-Quan Masters has support for melee over the Internet. We should take advantage of this!

I discovered that episodes of Newton's Apple are online! They bring back memories!

Complexity Theory was awesome --- I'd highly recommend it to those of you who like CS theory and who will still be around next time it's offered (which is not many of you, as it's offered every two years). Rudich was a much better lecturer in Complexity Theory than he was in 251, and the homework and exams were really awesome. And one wasn't even too hard ;).

The class ended with a party at Rudich's house. It started, as all good parties do, with four hours of lecture and an imploding lightbulb. It ended with Rudich teaching us magic tricks ("you can't say that you didn't learn anything!"). It was fun!

Measure theory this semester was interesting... in that there was no homework (even after students asked for it) and no midterm; our grade was based entirely on the (take-home) final. And I didn't think that I did well at all on it --- I was unable to answer many of the questions, and many of my answers were very handwavy. It caused me a lot of stress, and I handed it in convinced that it was the worst I'd done on an exam in college. I probably would have dropped the class (I'm pretty sure I could have gotten permission from Mark to drop that late) had it not been the case that my transcripts had already been sent to grad schools, and had it not been for the rumour that Tartar doesn't actually look at the finals and just gives everyone a good grade. Now that I have my grade, I'm convinced that the rumour is true: there is no way I earned a grade as good as the one I got. Not that I'm complaining!