stoutfellow

It looks as though our three-years-and-counting exile is soon to end.

In January 2014, the math department was relocated to the athletics building, while the old science building was renovated. (Bio and chem were moved to the new Science Lab West; physics went to another building.) We were promised that it would only be a year or so before we were returned to our old home, but budget battles in the state legislature slowed the work. "A year and a half" was the next word; "two years"; "eventually". Real Soon Now....

Yesterday afternoon, the chair came by with floor maps, to ask me which office I wanted when we moved back. I had no real preference - as long as there's room for me to sit and work, and for my students to sit and talk, I'm fine - but chose a room more or less directly above my old office. (We used to have the first floor; now, we'll have the second and half of the third.)

:sigh: I dislike relocating, but it will be good to be closer to our classrooms, and to not have to cross that enormous parking lot several times a day.

It's been a while since my last post. Work's been a little heavy - classes, committees, a seminar or two - but not so much as to justify my laziness in posting.

Anyway, it's also been a while since my last trip to Amazon. One prompt for doing so now was a conversation with a potential Senior Project advisee. Normally, if they want to do something in geometry, I give them a copy of a certain book and ask them to pick a topic from anywhere after Chapter Three - but I'd already lent my copy to another possible advisee! The library didn't have a copy, so I told him I'd order one to lend to him. (It's probably good for me to have two copies of that book, anyway.) So, this morning, I went upriver and ordered that book. I also had decided to buy some more CDs, but instead of seeking out new performers, to get more albums by performers I didn't have much of. The result: I ordered Al Stewart's Past, Present and Future, Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and Sara Bareilles' What's Inside: Songs from Waitress. On top of all that, I downloaded copies of Martha Wells' The Ships of Air (#2 in the "Fall of Ile-Rien" trilogy), Andrea Höst's The Pyramids of London, and Carrie Vaughn's Kitty and the Midnight Hour, and ordered dead-tree copies of Barry Strauss' The Trojan War, Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age, Terry Pratchett's The Shepherd's Crown, and Bill Willingham's 1001 Nights.

I'm still plowing through Lyell and Fustel de Coulanges (although the end of the latter is in sight); I've finished off Andrea Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, P. G. Wodehouse's The Adventures of Sally (amusing; a bit less manic than his usual, though), and Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (short, but very creepy - it reminded me a bit of Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow, which I think is roughly contemporary with it). Current fiction includes a reread of the 1632 books - Ring of Fire at the moment - and Harry Connolly's The Way into Chaos.

Today I have no reason to go onto campus, and I'm feeling very sluggish. I think I might take a nap.

I don't actively try to get people to read Bujold's stories; if they ask for recommendations, yeah, she's high on the list, but I only spontaneously evangelize if I'm pretty sure they fit the person's tastes (as with my sister E). Sometimes, though, inadvertent recruitment occurs.

This past semester, the department interviewed several people for a tenure-track opening. The in-person interviews always include lunch at the university restaurant, attended by the candidate, the search committee, and as many department members as can be rounded up. Discussion at those meals is free and wide-ranging. At one of those lunches, for some reason, I found myself explaining that I had written a number of Bujold-centered filksongs, which necessitated an explanation of "filksong" and a brief discussion of some of the salient features of the Vorkosigan Saga.

This morning, I received an e-mail from that candidate, telling me that even though we didn't hire him, something good had still come of it: he's been reading through the entire (new to him) Vorkosigan Saga - currently, he's on Diplomatic Immunity. He expressed wonder that he had never encountered LMB's work before.

(I haven't responded yet; I'm thinking about just how to recommend the Sharing Knife and Five Gods series....)

Today was the departmental end-of-semester potluck, Mexican themed as usual. Most people brought taco fixings of one kind or another; somebody brought a batch of churros, which were very good, and I made a pan of cornbread. There was a bit of a scurry this morning, when I realized my honey had crystallized and I didn't have time to fix it; I fell back on straight sugar. It came out all right, I guess; the last time I looked at the pan, more than 3/4 of it had been eaten. (I didn't bring the pan home tonight because I had to give two finals back to back, and the scramble to catch the bus didn't leave time.)

Tomorrow I'll probably do some grading, and I'll be one of the judges of the Senior Presentation for one of S's students. Thursday, the take-home final for my DiffGeo class is due (but almost half of them have already turned it in); I'll hang around as late as 4:30 if necessary. Saturday is my turn to attend Commencement. and with that the semester will be over.

I got plans for summer. Lotsa plans.

I've decided not to go to the Kansas City Worldcon. It would be extremely convenient - just a hop across Missouri - and I'd love a taste of their famous BBQ, but I really need to get the Taxonomy of Polygons papers (which may be metastasizing) written up and out the door, and I suspect I'll need all summer for that.

I will be buying a Supporting Membership, though, so I'll be able to vote on the Hugos.

Somewhat related to the last post: Wednesday was a rainy day around here, and occasionally a thunderous one.

This week I began writing up the first of my papers on the taxonomy of polygons. Wednesday, I tackled a section centered on one particular rather finicky proposition. Basically, it said something like "Exactly one of situations A and B holds. In Situation A, Event X happens; in Situation B, Event Y happens". Proving it required a careful case analysis - "Suppose n is odd... Suppose instead that n is even, but not a multiple of four... Suppose, finally, that n is a multiple of four...." - and I went through the cycle "Write / Read / Think / Delete" several times before satisfying myself. I finally hit on the right way to distinguish A from B, and the most efficient way to prove X or Y, plus, as a bonus, the easiest way to handle one detail (in both cases) that I'd been kind of sluffing off.

Now, I write my papers using Scientific Workplace, which is a WYSIWYG shell sitting on top of a TeX engine; I've used it for, literally, decades. But SWP just upgraded from v5 to v6, and there is a definite learning curve. (There's at least one major improvement in v6, but a lot has changed, and v6 is not backward compatible with v5....) As a result, I found it necessary to repeatedly run Preview, so I could see whether what I'd written actually had the right appearance. Previewing the proposition I mentioned above, I saw one unsatisfactory bit, but I saw how to correct it, and did so. Then I saved, for the first time in something like an hour.

Literally two seconds later, the power went off.

(Yes, I know: waiting that long before saving is an act of folly. But they say the good Lord looks after fools and Americans, and I guess I qualify twice over!)

I just filled out a form, confirming that I had done such-and-such as required by my employer. The form asked for, among other things, my name. I typed in FirstName MiddleInitial+"." LastName, as I normally do in official contexts.

The form rejected it, demanding that I give a valid response without punctuation or numbers.

I don't know what to think about that.

1. My Inner Minstrel amused himself, much of yesterday, by trying to sing "Harper Valley PTA" to the tune of "Ode to Billie Joe". This is... disturbingly do-able.

2. The department has decided to begin putting out a twice-yearly electronic newsletter, and I've been appointed to the committee. (V and W are the others.) We met yesterday to kick around ideas for content and structure, and came up with a fair number. Should be an interesting task. We (probably) need to have it mostly together by early April, to give the higher-ups time to review and (one hopes) approve it.

3. One of the e-books I've been reading on the bus is Raymond F. Jones' The Year When Stardust Fell (1958); it belongs in the same general category as Stirling's Emberverse series, but it's very much a product of the '50s in plotting and style - no wannabe Numenoreans here! I finished it this week; not a bad example of the cozy catastrophe genre, but nothing special. (Huh - for some reason I thought he was D. F. Jones, who wrote the Colossus trilogy; they were rough contemporaries, but not the same person. This Jones is probably best known for This Island Earth (1952), which was made into a film in 1955.)

4. I also had a chat, yesterday, with my Mass Mutual agent. I pointed out some concerns I had with the distribution of funds in my account, with which she agreed, and we worked out a more satisfactory setup. She also suggested I put some of the extra (post-mortgage) funds I have into a Roth IRA. I know nothing about this, but she'll be sending me some information soon - basics and options.

:sigh: It's only the fourth week of the semester, and I'm kind of tired already. We're up to the Greeks in one of my math history classes and to Desargues in the other; in the differential geometry class, we just wrapped up the basics of curve theory, up to the Isoperimetric Inequality, and will start on surface theory on Tuesday. In late February, I have to take a one-day trip to Bloomington for an articulation conference. ("Articulation" refers to the coordination of courses and course content between different schools and colleges in Illinois, to make transferring credits, for example, as straightforward as possible.) The day after that is the annual math contest, so that weekend is pretty much locked down.

I keep wanting to just lie down and get another few hours of sleep....

This evening, I scratched a longstanding itch. I went online and ordered e-books of the first three (out of five) of James Herriot's "All Creatures Great and Small" series.

I originally read the books in their British editions; they were slim volumes with titles like It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet and Vets in Harness. (I bought them during my first trip to UK, back in 1978. They vanished during one of my parents' moves; I had left them there while I was in grad school.) The USAn editions consolidated them into five fat volumes, the first four of which took their titles from a hymn. Every so often, the idea of getting new copies and rereading them has occurred to me, and I finally acted on it.

I also bought a few more e-volumes of the Ring of Fire series, getting caught up (at least as far as the novels are concerned; ain't no catching up with the Gazette volumes). A Vogues album ("Five O'Clock World" was the attractor) and first-season DVDs of "The West Wing" rounded off the order. (I saw a handful of late-season episodes of TWW and enjoyed them, so I'd like to go back to the beginning and see the whole thing. "LA Law" and "The X-Files" are also on the to-get list, although I probably won't get the last few - post-Hamlin - seasons of the former.)

Otherwise, the status is quo. My calculus and advanced geometry courses are proceeding apace; I've got two Senior Project students - one working on the Simson line construction, in triangle geometry, and the other on the Sylow theorems, which are major mid-level tools in understanding the structure of finite groups. (This is group theory, not to be confused with group therapy....;-)) The dogs are well; Buster has rediscovered one of his squeaky-toys, and has been rambuncting, a lot. As the icon suggests, I've begun growing my winter pelt - rather early, but we had a cold snap a couple of weeks ago, and I decided to go ahead with it. The "pork pot roast" has turned out to be good, but not great; the flavors took two or three days to meld, and the Brie doesn't really sit well with the rest of the components.

Meanwhile, the state is still screwing us over; our health insurance provider does not presently have authorization to spend money, and as a result many health providers are asking for cash on the barrelhead from state employees.

Ah, well. I'll survive - as long as I don't, y'know, get sick or anything.

Last week was kind of a bummer. The Sad/Rabid Puppies crap, a less-than-stellar Annual Evaluation, the Padres' sluggish start, and a couple of other things I'm not going to talk about.... There are times when I just get so tired of everything.

Not that the week was a complete wreck. Monday night, as I was trying to get to sleep, the answer to a research question that had been bothering me for a couple of years finally came clear; the Padres came back with wins on Friday and Saturday (beating up Bumgarner pretty badly last night); the weather's been good - a few things on the right side of the balance.

My dinners the last two weeks have been reruns - jambalaya, and beef and barley soup - but this week I'm trying my hand at chicken cacciatore (that dish beloved of the American revolutionaries, back in '76). It's still got about six hours to cook, but it's already smelling good.

Here's to a new week, and better fortune!