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Miscellany
Nov. 19th, 2011 09:24 am1. I'm off next week for Thanksgiving break. (At least, nominally I have the week off; I'll probably go in for a while on Monday.) I'm thinking of making pad thai for my Thanksgiving dinners this year.
2. I just finished reading Richard Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. It's a collection of essays, interviews, and reports, on such topics as life at Los Alamos, the Challenger disaster, the value of science, and the relation of science and religion. Sounds a little dry, I know, but there's a surprising amount of humor in it as well. (In one passage, he recounts overhearing a conversation between a couple of high school girls, and his astonishment as one recounted some of the basics of analytic geometry to the other, and his greater astonishment when he realized they were discussing the knitting of argyle socks - all unknowing, applying geometry to the subject.)
3. I'm also reading A. Merritt's The Moon Pool. As expected, the language is overwrought (although not to the degree of, say, Lovecraft), but I'm beginning to get interested in the story. It takes a bit of an effort to remember that subsidence was the accepted geological explanation for things that nowadays we attribute to plate tectonics.
4. The last couple of days, I've come home nervously wondering whether the dogs will be loose again. Thankfully, they haven't been. I'll have to find time in the next couple of days to get a combination lock - and a few other hardware items I've been neglecting to buy.
5. I've made a little progress on the second paper, completing one section and about a third of another. That's another motive for going in next week. The new approach to polygons continues to be seductive; I've come up with two interesting (but, as it turns out, false) conjectures and some tantalizing hints that there's something deeper going on. Next semester, I'm going to try to revive the geometry seminar, so I can discuss it in more detail with T and W. (I've chatted a bit with W about it, but just hitting some highlights - no details of the underlying ideas.)
6. I'm a bit annoyed with the latest iteration of Firefox. In the past, if I had only one tab open and hit "Open All in Tabs" on a bookmark folder, it would do so and close the current tab. It doesn't do that now: the old tab remains open. I realize that it's more a matter of "that's not what I'm used to" than "that's the wrong way to do it", but it remains annoying.
7. I had a bit of a scare yesterday; the bus I was on was almost hit by another driver, running a stop sign at a T-intersection. Fortunately, both drivers reacted quickly enough to avoid collision - but I was on the side the other driver was approaching from.... We - the passengers and the driver - spent the next few blocks nervously joking about it.
8. I'm being lazy today; it's almost 9:30 and I'm still in my long johns. I need new long johns. Also a couple of pairs of pants, and some more long-sleeved shirts. A trip to Kohl's is in the cards.
2. I just finished reading Richard Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. It's a collection of essays, interviews, and reports, on such topics as life at Los Alamos, the Challenger disaster, the value of science, and the relation of science and religion. Sounds a little dry, I know, but there's a surprising amount of humor in it as well. (In one passage, he recounts overhearing a conversation between a couple of high school girls, and his astonishment as one recounted some of the basics of analytic geometry to the other, and his greater astonishment when he realized they were discussing the knitting of argyle socks - all unknowing, applying geometry to the subject.)
3. I'm also reading A. Merritt's The Moon Pool. As expected, the language is overwrought (although not to the degree of, say, Lovecraft), but I'm beginning to get interested in the story. It takes a bit of an effort to remember that subsidence was the accepted geological explanation for things that nowadays we attribute to plate tectonics.
4. The last couple of days, I've come home nervously wondering whether the dogs will be loose again. Thankfully, they haven't been. I'll have to find time in the next couple of days to get a combination lock - and a few other hardware items I've been neglecting to buy.
5. I've made a little progress on the second paper, completing one section and about a third of another. That's another motive for going in next week. The new approach to polygons continues to be seductive; I've come up with two interesting (but, as it turns out, false) conjectures and some tantalizing hints that there's something deeper going on. Next semester, I'm going to try to revive the geometry seminar, so I can discuss it in more detail with T and W. (I've chatted a bit with W about it, but just hitting some highlights - no details of the underlying ideas.)
6. I'm a bit annoyed with the latest iteration of Firefox. In the past, if I had only one tab open and hit "Open All in Tabs" on a bookmark folder, it would do so and close the current tab. It doesn't do that now: the old tab remains open. I realize that it's more a matter of "that's not what I'm used to" than "that's the wrong way to do it", but it remains annoying.
7. I had a bit of a scare yesterday; the bus I was on was almost hit by another driver, running a stop sign at a T-intersection. Fortunately, both drivers reacted quickly enough to avoid collision - but I was on the side the other driver was approaching from.... We - the passengers and the driver - spent the next few blocks nervously joking about it.
8. I'm being lazy today; it's almost 9:30 and I'm still in my long johns. I need new long johns. Also a couple of pairs of pants, and some more long-sleeved shirts. A trip to Kohl's is in the cards.
