Friday

Tomorrow is Summer Convocation, and I've been assigned as one of the marshals. Joy... At least my post is on the far side from the parents, so I won't be involved in crowd control. I'll just have to shepherd students, remind them of the alphabet, remind them to take their name-cards up with them, capture any loose beachballs, etc. Fortunately, Summer Convocation has fewer students and a larger proportion of graduate students than, say, Spring.

I finished reading The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 today. It's an interesting book, if you like that sort of thing; I have a fair grip on the history of mathematics, but statistics, not so much. The biggest eye-opener was the following sequence of events. (I'm vastly simplifying a complex story here.) In the first half of the 19th century, social scientists - what we'd call demographers today - noticed the regularity of vital statistics such as marriage rates, death rates, crime rates, and the like. Eventually this led them to the conclusion that seemingly random behavior by individuals could yield regular and predictable behavior en masse. One of the leading proponents of this view was the historian Henry Buckle, and it was reading his work that inspired James Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann to introduce statistical methods into physics. This is a striking case in which the physical sciences took their cue from the social sciences; I don't know of anything else quite like it.

I also finished Song for the Basilisk, and I've started on The Tower at Stony Wood.

Alan Keyes? Should be interesting...

Mutts!!

Murphy and Ben have begun disemboweling two, possibly three of their toys. There are little (and not-so-little) hunks of white fluff all over the place. There's a stuffed dog with one leg hanging by a thread, a little bear with a gaping hole in its chest, and an, um, octopus-thingy with a little opening in its head.

I think I'm going to have to dispose of the dog and the bear. The octopus-thingy probably still has some life in it.