stoutfellow

Jeopardy Answer

2011-03-20T15:55:48Z

Keith Humphreys points out that the late Warren Christopher has another distinction: "Who is Warren Christopher?" is the correct question to "The last white guy to serve as U.S. Secretary of State".

(Of course, that may change in a couple of years....)

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TWTWTW

2010-02-27T15:18:04Z

This has been an... interesting week.

Wednesday morning, I realized that the problem I'd had on Tuesday was that I was thinking like an algebraist instead of like a geometer. (Stoutfellow's First Law: Algebra gives knowledge, but geometry gives understanding.) Trying to find the coordinates of the vertices of a polyhedron by brute-force solution of equations was a mug's game from the beginning. Taking advantage of symmetries made the task much more tractable; it does require thinking about the precise behavior of those symmetries, but that's still much easier than the other way. At any rate, I've got the findCoordinates routine working reasonably well now. (There are still problems, and possibly bugs, but so far it's been able to do what I've asked of it.)

Thursday, I'd intended to stay home, but there was a committee meeting I'd forgotten about. I spent a few hours before the meeting fine-tuning things, trying to add further capacities to the algorithms, and revising my table of data - purging it of redundancies and the like. The committee meeting lasted less than fifteen minutes....

Friday, I was planning to give a quiz in my calculus class, but about twenty minutes into the lecture the lights went out. For the third time in three weeks, the campus had lost power; this time, the emergency lights didn't come on in the building I was in. I chatted with the students in the dark for a few minutes, then dismissed class. (Quiz *Monday*!) I went back to the Science Building, where the emergency lights were on, and W and I talked about polyhedra in his office. Power came back on just in time for our scheduled seminar meeting, which was abbreviated: we shared what results we'd been able to achieve in the past week and discussed what our student aide should do for his Senior Project. (I'd already shown each of the others, individually, most of what I'd done - too excited to wait for Friday - but W had some interesting things to tell us. He's going to start writing up our results soon; of course, he'll pass the draft around for comments and revisions.)

And tonight is another trivia night. This is supposed to be a large one, with maybe fifty tables - tough competition.

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The Week in Review

2009-11-15T17:25:07Z

This past week went pretty well, all things considered.

Monday: The landscaper completed the drainage job. (Well, almost. There are a number of bare patches resulting from the digging; he'll come back in another week or so to lay down some seed.) Also, I made a big batch of spaghetti all'Amatriciana, and, thanks to Tupperware, was able to take servings to work to eat for dinner Tuesday and Thursday.

Tuesday: The course assignments for 2010-11 are out. In addition to the mandatory section of calculus, I'll be teaching four senior-level courses: Euclidean/non-Euclidean Geometry, Differential Geometry, History of Math, and Advanced Linear Algebra. It's been a while since I last taught linear, and we're using a new text, so I'll have to do some prep work, but that's a pretty good lineup.

Wednesday: Another tiresome faculty meeting, but progress was made, and we agreed not to meet again until after the Thanksgiving break.

Thursday: I finished up the hyperbolic geometry segment in E/NE Geometry, and the students voted, as usual, to go on to spherical geometry. (The syllabus allows either that or a return to Euclidean geometry at this point. I usually manage to fit both of them in, but I like to give the students a choice just in case.)

Friday: The student who's working with us in the geometry seminar has made a breakthrough in his corner of the problem. That just makes it more imperative for us to settle a couple of other questions, which combined with his work would help us settle the problem as regards dodecahedra.

Saturday: I took care of maintenance problem #3, which leaves one more, much smaller one. It was an entertaining hour or so; it went more smoothly than I expected. (I'm not quite convinced the problem is completely settled, but it will take a week or so before I can be sure.) Also, it was trivia day again. The questions were pitched at a reasonable level, and the race was very tight: at the end of the next-to-last round, we were in a three-way tie for first, with two or three more teams within a point or so. The last round was hard. We finished tied for first on points, but lost the tiebreaker. There was a secondary "Survivor" contest: each round, one question was designated as the Survivor question, and missing that question meant elimination from that contest. We were one of two teams to answer all ten Survivor questions, and we won that tie-breaker. On top of that, three of our ten people won door prizes; I got a very nice set of screwdrivers, which would probably sell for about $20. Combine that with the $6 I got in second-place money and the nice blanket which was the Survivor prize, and I more than made up for the $14 entrance fee.

A good week.

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Trivia 2

2009-10-04T15:38:22Z

Last night's contest went pretty well. The turnout was kind of small again, because there were two other contests the same night, but there were enough people to make it interesting.

We had a good team, with a diverse set of knowledge bases - which was a good thing, because the questions were medium-hard and demanded a good range of knowledge. (For example: the answer to the very first question was "The South Sea Bubble".) The topics were spread across the rounds - one question per topic per round - rather than the more usual one-topic-per-round setup.

One of the topics involved the moderator reading the last few lines of a novel; we had to identify the novel. (I got most of those: "The Great Gatsby", "Animal Farm", "Frankenstein", ....) Another ("Chanteuses") had the moderator playing a song and asking us to identify the singer. Another of our people is a musician, and he answered most of those: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Minnie Pearl, .... Musicals, famous losers, people whose names were animal-names, remakes - good topics and tough questions. We won going away; our final score was 79/100, and the second place team only got 56 points.

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Trivia

2009-10-03T00:49:33Z

So it seems I'm going to a trivia contest tomorrow. It'll be the second one in two weeks.

Last week's was a rather small-scale event; there were only about ten teams. There was a twist to the category selection. We were given a list of about 32 topics, and allowed to buy tickets for drawings, before each round; the holder of the winning ticket had the right to name the topic for that round. It didn't always work to the winner's advantage, though....

Our team did fairly well. Some of the topics, we simply aced - "Animals of the World" and "World Capitals", for instance. (They didn't even do any of the hard ones - Vanuatu, or the FSM, or even Burkina Faso.) In others, we were lucky to get as many as five points (out of ten). With two rounds to go, we were a point out of first. Then disaster struck. Round nine was "The Disco Era". We scored one, count it, one point - and that point was our mulligan. (A mulligan is a declaration, "we don't know, but give us the point anyway". You can buy mulligan stickers ahead of time, but you can't use more than one mulligan per round.)

Round ten was "Comic Book Heroes and Villains", and we came roaring back. (I may have been the only person competing who knew what country Dr. Doom rules.) Ten for ten, good enough to tie for second.

We'll see what happens tomorrow.

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Things I Did Not Know

2009-08-06T23:46:55Z

Sir Arthur Sullivan - as in "Gilbert and..." - was a notable composer of hymns; among his compositions are such well-known pieces as "Crown Him With Many Crowns", "Rock of Ages", "It Came Upon The Midnight Clear", "Nearer, My God, To Thee", and "Onward, Christian Soldiers".

I did not know this.

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