Miscellany

1. My former student S stopped by today. She's been carrying out empirical investigations of a certain family of group rings, and making a series of conjectures on that basis. We spent an enjoyable hour or so chatting about her latest; we were able to show that 1/6 of the conjecture is correct. (The other 5/6 is still up in the air.)

2. After listening repeatedly to the albums I bought back in January, I've decided that the two I like best are the ones by Joni Mitchell and the Guess Who. It's been a while since my last post on music, so I'll probably say something about those two sometime soon.

3. Having completed the cycle of all 26 leaders in Civ IV, I'm now going back to my lowest-scoring leaders and trying to improve them. I just redid Saladin, and boosted my score from 4094 to over 8000. It would have been higher, I think, except that the bloody Russians attacked me. I was going for a Cultural Victory, but to put them down I had to switch my civics from Free Speech (with that blessed boost in Culture points) and Pacifism (ramping up Great Leader production) to Vassalage and Theocracy (both increasing my military capacity). I think the Russian attack delayed my eventual victory by at least a decade. (On the other hand, I'm pretty sure population and area factor into the final score, and I did conquer almost all of Russia, so maybe there was actually a decent tradeoff.)

Animals

One of my favorite books, when I was a kid, was a picture book displaying and briefly describing a range of exotic animals. Through that book, I was introduced to the anoa, the babirusa, the chevrotain, and a host of others, and when I go to a zoo I always keep an eye out for the animals from that book - at least, the ones that I remember. (I still recall my first sight of a chevrotain, at the San Diego Zoo.)

And so it always startles me - unjustly, I admit - to run into an educated adult who isn't familiar with those critters. One of the bloggers at the Volokh Conspiracy has just become acquainted with the coati... There's an exhibit of coatis at... it might be the San Diego Zoo again, but I think it's one of the zoos around Tucson, probably the Sonora Desert Museum. They are delightful creatures, almost as much fun to watch as prairie dogs or meerkats.

How can you get past the age of, say, thirty, and not know coatis? (Don't hit me.)