Monday, June 27, 2005

Me and my smart ideas

So after another weekend in Iowa, I was making the long drive home yesterday (left at 8:50 am Central time, arrived 11:30 pm Eastern time -- (13 hours and 40 minutes travel time). I had some brilliant ideas about how to shorten this time (so that it would only be about 12 1/2 hours), but they did not really work.

My first idea was to avoid the highway congestion from the construction work on I-80/I-94 in Illinois and Indiana by taking Highway 30 instead (at least it looked like a highway on my map--thanks Rand McNally). I don't consider something a highway unless there are no (or no more than 2) stoplights and speed limits of at least 55 mi/hr. This is not true on Highway 30. At first I thought things would improve once I got out of the town, but the town never seemed to end (and the speed limit was never above 45 mi/hr and it was frequently lower). I started out in some town that claimed to be the most patriotic city in America, then I was in Chicago Heights which appeared to be a black ghetto, and once I reached Indiana (it took me probably 30-45 minutes to go about 18 miles) I reached another town where traffic was stopped for some unknown reason. So I turned down a side street and got stuck in a parade in the next town. I finally went back to Illinois and got on the congested highway (although I missed the exit the first time and drove for a while in the wrong direction) because at least it was moving and I knew where it was going.

I stopped at the worst rest stop ever in Michigan. There was a used baby diaper draped over the handrail in the handicapped stall, the floor was covered in water, most of the toilets had wet stuff on the seat and solid matter in the bowl, and half of the stalls were out of toilet paper.

Other things happened, too: the worst (althought brief) thunderstorm I have ever driven in and a recklessly driven red minivan that was going at least 100 mi/hr and that I later saw (somewhat gleefully, I admit) at the side of the road with engine problems.

Anyway, I am glad to be back in Canada and that I will not be making the drive again for a while. NOT MEANT TO DISCOURAGE ANY OF YOU FROM COMING TO VISIT!!

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

The best and worse

Inspired by the quotations in my math book, I went online and searched for others. Here are some of the best and worst I've found at this site: Math Quotes.

Best:

"Mathematics is no more computation than typing is literature." -- John Allen Paulos

"A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction." -- Tolstoy

Statistics put to the test fails (although infinite and a million are very different, so I guess my claim (and Silensky's) is not quite true):

"If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the Iliad." -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Professor Robert Silensky

Worst: (and believe me, there are many)

"Decimals have a point."

"Calculus has its limits."

"Geometry is just plane fun."

"Without geometry life is pointless."

My real hypothetical family

Luis pointed out that I am one of those rare persons with the same number of brothers and sisters whose brother has twice as many sisters than brothers. Being an only child himself, he'd always supposed that the situation was one of those hypothetical situations presented in mathematical problems that never actually happens in real life.

Tutorial Centre

Here's something I wrote yesterday as I was trying to keep from falling asleep in the Mathematics Tutorial Centre.

Once again I am doing nothing. The first hour wasn't too bad--nobody needed my help, yet there was lively conversation on the other side of the movable felt walls as students talked about past co-op terms, job searching, the upcoming programming assignment. But now they have all left and the room is still. The other TA at my table says nothing. He works at his laptop for a while, then pulls out a thick stack of paper and slowly reads it--although I suspect that he's making just as much progress with his reading as I am with mine since he seems not to have moved past the first page for a while. He eats a croissant from Tim Hortons and his stomach and the saliva in his mouth make sounds that echo around the empty room. I've read the questions I am supposed to be working on a few times, tried to decipher my professor's cryptic notes from our last meeting and remember what he said as he wrote them, but I'm not having much luck and my neck hurts from the last time I drifted off and then jerked awake. I keep my book open to Section A.4, which begins: "This section features algebraic curves, the heroes of this book." I really like that sentence. It's much more interesting than definitions of sheaves and vector bundles. Only 10 more minutes to go. I flip through the book and read the quotations at the beginnings of sections. Some of them play with the subjects in ways that would surprise (but probably delight if they knew 20th century mathematics) their authors. Some of my favourites are:

Part A: The Geometry of Curves and Abelian Varieties

The heavens rejoice in motion, why should I
Abjure my so much lov'd variety.
John Donne, Elegies

Part B: Height Functions

It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Part D: Diophantine Approximation and Integral Points on Curves

He was a poet and hated the approximate.
R.M. Rilke, The Journal of My Other Self

If I ever write a math book, I will put in quotations to entertain the poor students who cannot read the math. But now my 4 hours of silence and required boredom are over for the week, so I will put this book away until tomorrow.

Monday, June 13, 2005

Windless felukka ride


This was our pathetic felukka ride. The wind died down, so the guy on the left had to push us through marshes and they eventually paid the police to tow us from their motorboat. This is near the end, when they were both rowing. The guy on the left is also in the earlier donkey picture. Despite the bad boat ride, he was nice and arranged the donkey and camel rides for us the next day.

Donkey Riding


I finally got my family to send pictures from when I was in Egypt. Here we're close to the Valley of the Kings. As Elisabeth pointed out to me, it's a nice picture of our asses.

Wednesday, June 01, 2005


New haircut. What do you think? (Also an excuse to try the features of Picasa2 :) )