Back to Basics

[stoutfellow]

Yesterday, in the geometry seminar, I was explaining some stuff I'd worked out over the weekend. Just as I was coming to the climax - the point where I could give them numbers instead of just theory - the fire alarm went off.

It is, after all, finals week.

Prof. W suggested that I take the chalk with me. ("To write on what?" "The sidewalk, of course!") When we got outside, I stooped to redraw the relevant equations and a couple of pictorial examples. At that point, Prof. W snapped my picture. (He has promised to send it to me, and not to post it on the Internet.)

We spent the next ten minutes or so - until the all-clear sounded - discussing things and working examples, as I continued to draw on the sidewalk. Fortunately, no Roman soldiers showed up to step on my drawings.

Comments

[toraks.livejournal.com]

Yay! Oh well on the last bit, did you get any helpful comments/questions? Or was it just: this is what I'm working on now, haven't figured it out yet. Silence. ?

I just ran into something that's really annoying me this morning -- running the last few experiments to ge the final data for the paper -- and boom! not what I expected. ARGH!

Fortunately, it probably just makes that bit of the paper more interesting and doesn't actually negate any of the really interesting bits. But. Somehow it makes me feel bad and stupid. But the biology is the biology, so we'll see how it works out in the end. I might be panicking too soon, they've still got until next week to go. But. If I remember correctly, these 2 I did now look different early on from the 3 I did before I went on vacation! blech.

Sorry to vent! hope you find some insightful ways of thinking about your problems soon!

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Hm. Doesn't the cliche say that it's the unexpected stuff that's most worth looking at?

On my side: my part of the problem we're working on deals with a whole family of polyhedra, each identifiable by one particular angle, which can be anything between 0 and 90 degrees. In the good part of the seminar, I gave them a nearly complete explanation of what happens in the 60-degree case. That case has some very special properties, which make it easier to see what's going on. The less-good part came when I tried to extend those methods to the general case, because I hadn't quite worked out some technical details; I was trying to show them how I hoped to overcome those obstacles, and kept running into "wait, how's that going to work, given that :blah blah blah:" responses. (The responses were perfectly valid, and I wasn't explaining very well, partly because, as I said, it wasn't fully clear in my own mind yet. Still isn't, but I think I'm gaining ground.)