Fast Chance

Less of a Conundrum

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:00:00 +0000

A woman responded to the note that the wife and I left. She's been taking care of the family for a month, thinks she can trap them and is looking for a home for them. She was delighted to get our note and wrote us back right away. There are still some issues to resolve, (e.g. what to do if we only trap a kitten) but the wife and I might be taking care of a family of cats in the next week or so.

A Conundrum

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:39:00 +0000

This morning I went fishing with a friend. I hate fishing, but I enjoy hanging out with my friend, and fishing is nothing if not an excuse to get up before the sun and enjoy a peaceful non-sweltering part of the day. We got to the section of river where we were planning to fish at 5:45 and found that it was closed to the public until 6:30. While we were waiting I saw what looked like a kitten dart behind a road barrier across the street. With nothing else to do, we went to explore. Behind the barrier was the entrance to a storm drain. Going down hill took us across the street to another storm drain, and then down to a two foot wide opening to a culvert that allowed runoff to flow into the lake upstream of the river. Right at the opening of the culvert was one of the cutest, littlest, skinniest, hungriest looking cats I've ever seen. Someone had left a plate of canned cat food (mostly eaten), a bin full of kibble and an open container of water inside the opening of the culvert.

Several questions came to mind. Did someone own this cat? If yes, why was the cat living in a storm drain? If no one owned the cat, who was bringing food and why? We figured that the cat had once been owned by humans because she would let us pet her, but that she had been abandoned. Perhaps someone who couldn't have her in an apartment was feeding her. We mulled over the situation and then we saw a kitten. It was teeny-tiny, with a great big head, and great big close-set eyes. The kitten walked as if balancing that disproportionally huge head was an unmastered skill. We began to understand. We, or anyone, could probably grab the mother, but the kitten was so skittish that there was no chance of getting the mother and kitten and the kitten would surely not fare well on its own.

Someone came by and granted us access to the river. My friend suggested that we take away the food, go fishing, and, by the time we came back, the cats might be lured out of their hiding area with food. After about fifteen minutes of fishing and hoping that I didn't catch anything, I told my friend that I was going back to see how the cats were doing. When I got back to the culvert, mom was out and walking around. She seemed a little leery about me being too close to her, but didn't bolt, merely scooted a few feet away anytime I tried to approach.

I got in the car, drove to the nearest gas station and convenience mart and bought three cans of cat food -- two small ones and a large one. I drove back to the culvert opened a can, dribbled some of the juice on the ground at the entrance of the culvert, and then placed the can maybe five feet from the opening right next to me. Mom came out first and circled me several times meowing. Hunger won out and she approached to eat. As she ate, I would pet her. At first she would back off, but finally she let me rub her unbelievably bony back. Two kittens appeared at the entrance of the culvert. I wanted them to see that it was OK for them to come near and eat, but nothing doing. Any motion or any sound, such as a cell phone flipping closed after I texted the situation to my wife, would send them running back up into the storm drain. Mom finished eating and went maybe two feet back into the storm drain and the kittens began to nurse. So the kittens are not going to be tempted by food for at least a few weeks and they really need mom to stay with them. I went back to where my friend was fishing and after some discussion we concluded that unless we could get both kittens in the car, there wasn't much we could do. I opened the second can of cat food and left it inside the opening of the culvert.

When I got home the wife assumed that I would have at least one cat with me. When I explained, she decided she wanted to go see for herself. So, before heading out to do our weekly shopping, we drove back to the culvert -- it's right by a super busy road. I am seriously worried about these cats -- and found that someone else had come by and provided more food. We moved the food out from the opening of the culvert, mom came out and the wife pet mom while she ate. Mom purrs when you pet her, so I figure this was a good thing. After a few minutes she went far back into the culvert and didn't come out again. We put the food back and left a note for whoever else was taking care of them.

Tomorrow I'm going to call up the local humane society and ask what I can do. Perhaps I could set a live trap, but I'd probably only catch mom. Further, I'd have to leave the trap and it's in a public place and I worry that the trap would get stolen. I am more than willing to pay for all three to get spade when they're old enough and pay for whatever shots they need. Mom looked like she had a slight eye infection in her left eye.

So I'm going to try to sleep tonight thinking about this family of cats living in a storm drain by a busy road. The wife and I are already planning a trip early in the morning.

Taking a Second to Realize What Happened

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:22:00 +0000

This is pretty funny. Not sure why I didn't see it earlier. (found via boing boing)

Teaching Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 05:04:00 +0000

Maybe you have those dreams where you're back in college and it's the end of the semester and all of a sudden you realize, "Holy Fuck! I haven't done any of the homework for, or attended a single class meeting of (choose one: french/calculus/western civ)!" For me it was french. In the dream the teacher would say "Ja blue blah bling blang?", everyone in the class would stare at me, and I had to respond appropriately or my efforts to graduate would all come to naught. I would wake up in a sweat and realize that my degree was awarded years ago.

I'm slated to teach freshman calculus this fall, and I've started dreaming about it. The dream is, in some sense, a perfect mirror of the I-haven't-gone-to-french-class-all-semester dream. I'm in a lecture hall that is long, narrow and curving. Many of the desks are placed around a corner so the students -- none of whom are more than three and a half feet tall, and all of whom wont stop talking while I lecture -- can't see the blackboard. The blackboards are small and extremely crappy. I keep trying to explain something, every time I pick up a piece of chalk to write on the board the chalk breaks, or worse, I think that I'm picking up white chalk, but instead I'm picking up the colored chalk that can't be erased. I keep making mistakes at the board and since I can't erase I begin running out of board space.

When I finally do run out of chalkboard space I notice the discount rack of women's hand bags. nearby. I throw out the hand bags and grab the plastic bin in which they were stored and attempt to write on the bottom of it. I hold up the plastic bin for the students to see. None of them are paying attention to me. Finally, I give up and tell them to come back tomorrow. As they swarm out of the room, the two professors who were observing the class approach me shaking their heads in disappointment.

I Want One

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:00:00 +0000

For various reasons I watched this without sound, but it looks amazingly cool.

Old School Boating

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:20:00 +0000

The following footage of a descent of the Niagara Gorge was, I thought, striking. In particular:

Those are some seriously long boats and the cockpit entrances are frighteningly small. The possibility of getting those boats pinned (and the boater pinned in them) is much higher than it would be in a more modern creek boat. In the intro clip of the guy going off the waterfall, observe the assistant giving him a shove. I'm sure that was to help prevent the boater from dropping vertically over the falls.
The boaters did not have lightening fast rolls, they looked like they just came from a class on eskimo rolls. The comment that preparing for such a run included practicing holding one's breath didn't make me feel overwhelming confidence in these guys.
Check out those sweaters.
When Carrie Ashton starts her run the announcer is all like, "Carrie starts out on a bad line. Maybe she's too scared." The announcer doesn't know jack about good lines vs. bad lines. Further, the announcer didn't say anything about the fact that Ken Lagergren got flipped, lost control of his boat and ran much of the rapid backward.

It was some impressive boating through huge water.

Cell Phones.

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:13:00 +0000

The wife and I ordered cellphones. We chose one of T-Mobile's pay-as-you-go plans. For all my misgivings about cell phones, there are two reasons (justifications, rationalizations?) for this choice. First, I feel slightly irresponsible not having one. If I were the sole witness to an accident on a highway, I could little more than provide basic aid and hope that someone else came along who had a cell phone. Two, T-Mobile's plan doesn't have a monthly bill, we just purchase blocks of minutes. In addition I've found that Skype's service that allows one to call regular phones is pretty OK -- there's a delay, but the voice quality isn't bad. Skype has some three dollar per month plan that allows unlimited calling in the US. This would end our need for a land line and hence for ATT since Speakeasy provides DSL service where we live. Most interesting is that what we would pay for Speakeasy, T-Mobile, and a Skype subscription would be considerably cheaper than our ATT bill at the moment.

Broadband Not-So-Funnies

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:23:00 +0000

The wife wished me a good night several hours ago. I've got 18% left on my laptop's battery. I've been battling networking issues as least as long as she's been asleep. ATT sent me a new DSL modem and after solving a bushel of little technical mysteries (Why wont my router pick up the IP addresses of DNS servers as provided by my ISP? Why can't I hardcode the IP addresses of DNS servers that I know to work already?) things mostly work again. My server is still doing things that make my head hurt. I can SSH into it from a math department server at school, but I can't SSH into it from within the network in my apartment. I'm too tired to come up with any more hypothesis as to what the problem could be.

Broadband Funnies

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:12:00 +0000

I lost DSL access last week. My DSL modem is dead as a doornail. I plug it in and no lights come on, not even the power light. I go to the ATT website, find the tech-support page and learn that I can get help via e-mail. I enter my e-mail address, and a note that consists of the first three sentences of this post. A day later, I get an e-mail saying, "Thank you for your note. Your case number is blah blah blah. Someone will help you shortly. This message was sent automatically do not respond." A few days go by and I get the following e-mail message.

Dear Mr. [LAST NAME],

Thank you for contacting AT&T Internet Service Email Support. I
sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused. I
understand that you are having trouble with your modem.

Please powercycle the modem with the following steps.

Powercycle Modem
1. Disconnect all of the cords from the back of your modem, and turn
your computer completely off.
2. Once the computer is off, wait for 60 seconds.
3. Turn the computer back on, and plug the cords back into your modem.
4. Attempt to surf again, and see if the issue has been resolved.
5. If the issue has not been resolved, please contact technical support
at 1-888-321-2375.  We will troubleshoot this issue further.
All Steps Complete

If the problem persist please contact our helpdesk at ...

The fact that the e-mail was signed with a plausible name, and the use of the pronoun "I" might lead one to believe that there was a human involved in this process. Although the advice has absolutely nothing to do with the problem I faced so I called tech-support this morning and, before I spoke with a person, I had to speak with a computer. The computer would ask my questions like, "Is the ready light blinking or solid?" and I would say, "It is neither blinking nor solid. It isn't on." to which the computer would say, "I'm sorry. I didn't understand you. Please say `blinking', or `solid' to indicate if the light is blinking or solid." The human I finally spoke with was quite helpful and told me I'd be receiving a new modem for only the cost of shipping.

None of this makes me feel a deep sense of love for ATT. Not that I imagine Comcast is much better. Playing hockey last night I heard folks referring to each other as "comcastic" as a means to say one is excessively slow, and maybe a little bit sucky. I was about to start whining about the great woe and suffering of living under not-so-competent, monolithic corporations, but then I realized that there are alternatives. I've started looking into Speakeasy's broadband service and I might switch if it isn't too expensive.

Fewer Items of Note

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:57:00 +0000

This blog isn't particularly anonymous -- I've left enough clues so that anyone who cared could learn my name. My goal was never anonymity, rather to make sure that Google doesn't return a link to fastchance if someone searches on my name. I couldn't figure out a way to remove my name from the list of shared news items so I've taken it down.

Items of Note

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:36:00 +0000

Last weekend I went to the Smokys to go backpacking. Each time we've gone, we've had a better time than the last, and this time was mostly OK. The weather was Smoky-esque, but we knew how to stay dry. The hiking was pleasant, although we arrived late Friday afternoon and ended up hiking the last mile in the dark. (not dusk, but full on dark.) The only reason hiking at night in a huge forest known for its population of bears didn't give us the heebie-jeebies is that this was the third time we've done it, and we've got the drill down. When you start tripping over roots and rocks because you can't see, you break out the headlamps and hope you make it to your campsite before the batteries go dead. I think the stumbling followed by cursing is enough to inform any nearby bears that we are probably too stupid to taste good. (That's a joke -- black bears don't eat smart people either.)

Along the way I started reminiscing about my first year of grad school. During that first semester I felt like I was going to be washed away in the torrent of new material. To keep up I would wake up at 5:30 or 6:00 go to my desk and, while the wife slept, read over the material I thought would be presented in class. At 7:20 I would crawl back into bed and spend some impossibly short amount of time talking with my wife. Then I'd get up again and start another overwhelming day. My wife said that she traded in her husband for a roommate during year between the start of classes and passing the prelims.

The feeling I remember most is that I was hugely inadequate to accomplish the task at hand, but that I really, really didn't like failing. I have since come to learn that this sense of inadequacy follows a lot of academics around. Certainly I don't feel like I will ever be at a point where I can sit down with an open problem and tick it off in an afternoon. Of course no one expects that I will ever be at that point, and the joy of research mathematics is that if one has two publishable results a year, one is doing remarkably well.

In the years since the start of grad school my brain has stretched and deformed in the process of absorbing so many new ideas. On the other hand I feel far more emotionally inflexible. Who was that lunatic who got up at 5:30 in the morning? There is no way I would do that now. I feel like, "This is who I am. If that isn't sufficient to succeed at this, I'll do something else." Put another way: I've got stress fatigue. Four years ago I responded to stressful work situations by working harder, now I take all the signs of impending career doom with a grain of salt and pretty much work the same rate all the time. Stress levels feel more akin to stock prices -- they go up and down, and you shouldn't really worry about the high-frequency stuff.

Better still, I'm beginning to form a queue of research projects I'm interested in, and, more importantly, I think I could make progress on. This to me feels like a crucial step in grad school and one that I suspect a lot of students don't make.

In any case the trip ended with the wife and I hiking the last five miles in sandals. They were remarkably comfortable and airy compared to my hiking boots which needed new insoles.

Shoes

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:51:00 +0000

For reasons I cannot begin to fathom I find the wear patterns on the soles of shoes fascinating. I do have other interests. I'm interested in minimal energy problems. I'm interested in potential theory. I'm interested in developing new ways to use technology to allow people to work together. But I'm really interested in how shoes wear out.

In the summer of 2003, the wife and I took a huge road trip. Before we went, I bought a pair of expensive Tevas. They were billed as "expedition sandals", and while I was a little skeptical that one would take sandals on an expedition, I figured the high price indicated durability. It didn't. We were in Zion and the sandals were less than four months old. There is a beautiful hike that goes along a river at the bottom of a canyon. The hike literally requires walking through knee deep water and I could think of no footwear that seemed more appropriate than my expedition sandals. Halfway through the return part of the hike the sandals fell apart. When I looked down I saw that the foot bed had come apart into layers and that the straps had pulled out. I was able to tie the straps together to make something approximating flip-flops. Still, I had to stop every hundred feet and re-tie the straps. The experience left me pissed off at Teva, and at sandals in general.

Some years later the wife saw a pair of Chacos on sale for $30. She suggested I get a pair since my feet don't do terribly well in the summer in normal shoes, and the walk to and from school made quick work of flip-flops. I hummed and hawed and decided that $30 wasn't too much money to waste if I had similar luck with them as I did with the Tevas. The Chacos have lasted years, I've probably walked hundreds of miles in them. When I wore through the rubber, I was able to send them back to Chaco to get re-soled. That was a sad time for me, not just because I was without sandals, but because the beautiful wear pattern I had developed over the years was taken from me and replaced with spiffy, new, unscuffed up soles. The sandals weren't really mine again until the rubber on the soles began to show signs of being abraded against concrete. Not that this explains my fascination with wear patterns on shoes.

The thing is that shoes take way way more abuse than any other article of clothing. When I'm walking, each sandal or shoe takes a compressing force of 160 pounds every second and a half. Both the force and frequency are higher for running shoes. The compression isn't constant. The shoes are loaded up with force, and then unloaded, loaded up with force and then unloaded. The soles are applied to hard, abrasive, surfaces like sidewalks. And you can do this to a good pair of shoes for years. Further, a good pair of shoes will make your feet feel comfortable while you're doing this. To get a sense of what shoes do for you, try walking a quarter mile in bare feet on a sidewalk or street. A good pair of shoes solve a technically challenging problem. Put another way, if I had to, I could make pants and a shirt, they may not look nice, but wearing them wouldn't cause injury. The problem of making a good pair of shoes or sandals is something I find fascinating, and in particular the wear patterns indicate how the shoe is breaking with use. It somehow tells you exactly where the problem lies.

I just needed to get that off my chest.

Airports and Math

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:02:00 +0000

One of the joys and curses of being a mathematician (in training, anyway) is that one has the option of practicing one's craft nearly anywhere. This leads to some amount of guilt when one has the time but not the inclination to work. What is nice, though, is that when one does have the inclination, there are no barriers, save one's mental state, to reaching out to a world of ideas.

I spent today in airports and airplanes and had a surprisingly productive day. It was surprising in that I normally require quiet and big chunks of time, but somehow the ambient noise and the small pieces of time worked for me. Whenever I travel I carry pencil and paper, and, waiting for my first flight, I opted to push on a very old idea. I had that rare experience where everything just fell into place. I was able to show that a certain alternate normalization for energy was equivalent to my normalization. It was like bowling four strikes in a row. Everything kept lining up perfectly. It makes me fearful of picking up the next bowling ball, so to speak, because I don't want my luck to end.

Ice Hockey and Airplanes

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:51:00 +0000

At the beginning of the summer the captain of a team I used to play with asked if I'd be interested in playing as a sub. I said sure. I haven't played with this team in years. After tonight's game I remember why I stopped playing in this league. It's full of assholes. This league is the entry league where players with no hockey experience, and minimal skating experience start. I think, this allows fantasies of one day joining the NHL. Anything that darkens that fantasy -- like, say, someone who can skate better than you -- causes anger. I got knocked around tonight and endured some childish name-calling, and it isn't like I'm even a good hockey player. In the leagues where I normally play, hockey is not nearly so much a fantasy, but an enjoyable pastime, something that precedes drinking beer. The games are so much friendlier, everyone understands that it truly doesn't matter what happens. Not sure how much I'll keep subbing in with my old team. Mostly it just pisses me off that I let things get under my skin.

Tomorrow I travel to a sort of distant city to attend a conference and give a talk. I've given various versions of this talk five times already. What I would really like to do is get this current paper hammered out, submit it, and start working on something new. I feel like it's been a while since I've been able to sit down with pencil and paper and actually do math.

An Interesting Read

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:37:00 +0000

I try to stay away from politics since I think it's a divisive topic and I clearly have my biases. Nonetheless the quotes in this post about the December 2000 decision to deregulate the energy futures market was a fascinating read for me.

"long double" doesn't seem to work on PPC

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 03:08:00 +0000

Part of my numerical experiments require that I add up lots of different numbers. These numbers can take on a huge range of values. Some of the numbers can be millions of times larger than others. The software I've written uses what is known as a floating point number to represent these values. The term "floating point" comes from the fact that the decimal point is not fixed at a certain place-value in these numbers. The decimal point could come after the ones' place, the tens' place, the thousands' place, or even the one-ten-thousandths' place. This allows us to represent specific values by multiplying as in the following examples

1234 equals 1.234 x 1000 (the decimal comes after the thousands' place)

.05678 equals 5.678 x 1/100 (the decimal comes after the one-hundredths' place)

The crux is that the computer affords only a fixed number of digits after the decimal place. This introduces what is known as roundoff error. If, for example, I only have four digits after the decimal place, then the following addition,

1234 + .05678 = 1234.05678,

will be problematic because the only representation I'm allowed for the answer is

1.2341 x 1000,

which is not the same as what is computed above. Fortunately computers provide more than four digits after the decimal place. Unfortunately it isn't a lot more, and even more unfortunately it isn't the same from one type of computer to the next.

Last semester an undergraduate and I came up with a relatively fast algorithm for adding up lots of numbers while minimizing roundoff error. Even so, we still need to measure the error. Instead of looking up the, quite possibly incorrect, answers posted on the web. I found a cute little algorithm for determining the roundoff error more directly. You perform the following sequence of computations

1 + 1/2

1 + 1/4

1 + 1/8

1+ 1/16

Now, none of these calculations should ever give an answer of 1. However, because of the roundoff error, eventually you are adding something to 1 that is so small that it is below the roundoff error for the number 1, and you actually get an answer of 1. This allows you to place an estimate on the roundoff error. The result depends on the type of floating point number you use.

The types of floating point numbers are:

float: About seven digits after the decimal point
double: Roughly doubles the precision, and gives about fifteen digits after the decimal place
long double: Step right up! Take your chances!

I wrote a program to implement the above test for the "long double" and found that it gave garbage answers. I got home and moved the program from my iBook (a computer based on the PowerPC chip) to my Mini (a computer based on an Intel chip) and the problems vanished. I then ran the software on the AMD nodes in the cluster and everything worked. Then I ran the software on the PowerPC blades in the cluster and saw the exact same problems I saw on my iBook.

So, Yah! I've recognized the issue, but, Boo! I hate hardware! It's a sure sign of society's unraveling that a poor schmuck such as myself should have to wander through a maze of different computer architectures in an effort to do something as basic as adding up a bunch of numbers accurately.

Google is Freaking Me Out!

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:34:00 +0000

Ever heard of optical tweezers? Yeah, me neither until my wife built a set in her lab. The latest round of ads on my gmail sidebar included "Building Optical Tweezers? Single Frequency blah blah blah is just what you need!" I've never e-mailed my wife about optical tweezers, I've never sent or received any e-mail about optical tweezers and there it is, in my side bar. The advertisement that should have been sent to my wife.

More Odds and Ends

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:51:00 +0000

Some months ago my university's cluster went from a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit OS forcing an end to my numerical experiments until I recompiled. Compiling software for our cluster -- perhaps all clusters, as ours is the only one I've used -- is a big hassle compared to compiling on a laptop. There are a variety of architectures, and a variety of libraries. Getting everything right involves a certain amount of trial an error. Eventually, I went to someone in the cluster support team and asked for help. Everything works now and is running once again. This brings back that familiar itch where I feel a nearly constant need to check the cluster's job queue and see the status of my jobs. Are they running? Are they producing good data? Did anything bad happen while I was away from a computer?

I'm writing a paper with my advisor. (purely theory, nothing to do with the numerical experiments)(I hope the numerical experiments turn into a paper as well.) I would like to have it accepted for publication before I start looking for jobs, but I'm not sure if that's going to happen. The first part of the process -- getting the mathematics correct -- is done. The second part of the process -- getting the exposition down -- is taking a lot more time than I expected. Our mode of operating is that we'll sit down together and discuss how to best to present the ideas and state the theorems. This is a slow process because, when my advisor really focuses, he produces exposition far superior to mine. My role in this process is to remind him of how exactly the mathematics goes. This is one of the few times in grad school where I can't simply put my head down and work at a problem on my own.

Getting an E-Sex Change

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:50:00 +0000

My gmail sidebar now contains ads that are decidedly targeted at women. Perhaps this is because half my RSS feeds are from blogs written by women. The most recent ad was from a site called something like CatchHimAndKeepHim. The front page told me that I could learn how to keep a man faithful and loving, and the seven things that women do that annoy men and kill intimacy. The prospect of acquiring this knowledge was insufficient motivation for me to proffer an e-mail address to enter the site.

Test Post

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:50:00 +0000

Blogger appears to be having a bad day and this is a test post.

Odds and Ends

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:04:00 +0000

Tonight is the third night in a row that I've played hockey. My gear is simply not drying between games. It's developing a smell that is repugnant on an intellectual level. The smell is a blend of extremely sweet and spicy mexican. Neither of these smells are particularly bad in and of themselves. But when this mixture assaults you just after the sound of a hockey bag unzipping, and sight of soggy shoulder pads being lifted out, some part of the brain tells you, "Great Fuck! That smell should not follow the sound of a hockey bag unzipping and the sight of soggy shoulder pads being lifted out!"

It's my hypothesis that one's own stink is more repulsive to others than it is to one's self, and I find my own stink pretty repulsive. Indeed, when I open my hockey bag, I instinctively move my head so as to avoid the smell, as if the diffusion of extremely sweet and spicy mexican is somehow constrained to certain volumes of space around the bag. It doesn't work. I have another game tomorrow night and I feel truly sorry for my teammates.

An old girlfriend wrote me. I had not spoken with this person in nearly eight years, and then two days ago my inbox had an e-mail whose subject was my name followed by a question mark. The emotions were complicated. We didn't part on the best of terms, but after years (like five) I realized that I had a place in my heart for this person and that I truly wanted her to do well and be happy. She sounds like she is doing well, and I'm glad. Most interesting is the collision of the memories of overwhelming emotions and the inescapable fact neither of us are remotely the same as we were when we were together.

Roger Daltrey has a song 'After the fire' and the lyric that always catches me is "After the fire, the fire still burns. The heart grows older, but never, ever learns." It sounds so romantic -- love never dies! But it does because, ultimately, the love that Daltrey is singing about isn't really love but infatuation. One of the most depressing parts of getting older is recognizing infatuation for what it is. It is such a lovely illusion, and the world seems flatter and duller without it.

The only things in this life that I regret are the times I didn't treat people as I feel like I should have. At times this ex-girlfriend treated me quite shabbily, but that doesn't balance out the times I didn't treat her with respect. The dream I have is that everyone -- ex-girl friends, former bosses, the guy I cut off in traffic the other day -- can meet in a place where love can occur unhindered by all our needs and insecurities. Certain religious texts say that there is no end, only endless cycles, but this idea of a place where love reigns supreme really would be the end.

Personalities In Academia

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:42:00 +0000

I've pared down the list of RSS feeds to which I subscribe, and I'm returning to news websites to get my news. I wasn't better informed scrolling through hundred of unread items every day. While there is certainly bias in how news outlets choose the front page stories, I'm willing to accept this in exchange for some ordering by importance of the stories presented to me. The result is that I can spend more time reading the blogs that Google Reader has suggested to me. A number of which are by women in science or math and are quite good. (I should add them to my blog-roll)(eesh, I don't like that term at all.) Not surprisingly, a few of the posts are about being a woman in a male dominated field.

As a guy I'm less likely to see sexism, although a few women in my department have described encounters with men that were simply shocking. Even if there were some doubt of the veracity of these stories, the percentage of women in my department decreases as one goes up the ranks -- there are a fair number of female grad students, proportionally fewer female post-docs, and only one woman on the tenure track -- suggesting something widespread that causes women to leave math at a rate higher than men. What makes sexism so pernicious is that it isn't the only hurdle in academia. For example, a visiting professor told me of a department at a large university where the topologists and geometers were trying to drive the analysts out. (I'm an analyst, by the way.) A woman looking back on the wreckage that was once a promising career might have a hard time ascertaining the degree to which sexism was to blame.

When compared to the software world I left, there are some striking characteristics associated with academia that, I think, make it more susceptible to sexism. First, the skills associated with software engineering are much more easily delineated and can be assessed quickly. Many of the places I've worked had a technical component to the interview process. While this isn't always the most enjoyable part of the interview process, it does allow a technically savvy interviewer to get a general sense of the interviewees skills in a matter of minutes. By comparison, if a math department were hiring a graph theorist and didn't already have a graph theorist, it would be quite difficult to understand the interviewees technical strengths. I imagine that the hiring process would be based more on the personalities of the people involved. Second, the supply of good software engineers does not meet demand, so once someone has been hired and demonstrated her or himself to be competent, managers will bend over backward to keep him or her happy, even if this person is socially different. As you might imagine, this happens from time to time in the software world. Again, assessing the competence of an employee is easier in the software world, and the employee isn't on the hook to sell her or himself. Finally, software offers avenues of advancement other than promotion e.g. learning new languages and honing one's design skills. Indeed, I've met software engineers who actively avoided promotion. The upshot of all this is that, compared to academia, software does a better job assessing people based on objective measures of skill, does a better job supporting people doing software, and provides avenues for growth without competition.

Whether these factors play a role in the lack of women in math, I can say that its my experience that women are not nearly as underrepresented in software. At all the large software places I've worked many of the top engineering positions were held by women who did great jobs. It's a little weird going to conferences and seeing so few women.

Hockey Tournament

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:57:00 +0000

I spent last weekend at a hockey tournament in Knoxville where my team, in the championship game, beat a team we had no business beating. With the exception of two people, everyone on their team was under thirty. With the exception of three people, everyone on our team was over thirty. They were all fast and had clearly played and practiced together a lot. They had a team cheer and wore matching, deliberately mismatched socks -- everyone on their team wore one solid yellow sock, and one solid black sock in keeping with the yellow and black jerseys.

Our jerseys and socks reflected who we were: rink rats who travel around with hockey bags full of old jerseys from the various teams we've played on. At the beginning of each game our captain would say, "Alright, we're going with blue tonight." Everyone would dig into their bag looking for an approximately blue jersey. The extra blue jerseys were tossed across the locker room to those who didn't have one. We always made it to the ice with at least four Nashville rec-league teams represented. Our socks truly didn't match and, in many cases, were grimy and full of holes. One of the older guys was in his fifties and wore a similarly aged helmet that looked like it would do little more than a knit cap in the event of an impact. I knew most of the guys on our team in as much as I had probably played a game with or against them at some point. The exact team with which we arrived at the tournament had never played together.

Friday night we gelled quickly, crushing the first team we played by a margin wide enough to make me wonder if we were in the wrong league. Saturday afternoon we beat another team but by a much narrower margin -- one of the things about tournaments is that the games get harder as the tournament progresses. Saturday night we played the team that we would meet again in the championship. We tied them after a game that left us feeling more exhausted than they looked. Prior plans to stay out late at various bars and parties were scrapped as most people decided that they were going to find some dinner and crash.

Sunday morning most of us awoke to tired legs and an overall sense of fatigue. It took me several cups of coffee to begin to feel like I was fully awake. We checked out of our hotel, and more or less napped in the lobby, waiting to go to the rink for the final game. Driving over all I could think was that we really needed to turn up the energy if we were to stand a chance, but that didn't I feel like I had much energy left. In the cool locker room we pulled on damp hockey gear that hadn't had a chance to dry from the game eighteen hours earlier. I definitely did not feel pumped up. I learned later that the refs who had watched prior games of both teams thought, in spite of the previous night's tie, we didn't have a chance.

The game started and we came out strong, controlling the puck in their end and making shot after shot. After about two minutes the other team decided that they'd had enough, and our domination came to an end. Our strengths lay in the experience of our older players who could stick handle through traffic and set up plays. We also had an exceptional goalie. Their strengths were that they were all fast, didn't fold under pressure, and were really good at finding each other on the ice. This was a problem for me. I'm not one of the stronger players on our team mostly because I'm not particularly good at stick handling. My one skill is speed. Normally, I can chase someone to the puck and, if I don't get there first, at least pressure the guy into making a bad pass or coughing up the puck. But I wasn't faster than them, and they were still making good, crisp passes to their teammates who raced back to get open. When they were in our end, they would do a good job cycling low and getting someone open in front of our net. This was how they got the first goal. We came back quickly with a goal or our own to tie it up before the end of the first half of the two period game. I sat on the bench between periods trying not to think about how tired I was, how hard we'd have to work, and how my efforts seemed neutralized by their skill and stamina. I thought that whatever happens, at least we were able to hang with these guys for the first half of the game, we hadn't embarrassed ourselves. I felt like I was playing better hockey than I had in a long time and felt proud to be on our team of beer drinkers, divorcees, sales-reps and parents.

The final period wore us down. Shifts got shorter, our team was visibly getting tired. On several occasions we stalled out on their blue line because someone was just too exhausted to hustle to get back on-sides after the puck came out. With maybe ten minutes left they scored a second goal and a whoop went up from their bench like they had won the whole thing. One of our older players offered this concise pep talk, "Get to the fucking puck! Don't fuck around!" With maybe six minutes left we caught a break and found the back of the net, tying it up at two all. As the clock ran down the other team fought with extraordinary tenacity, at times our defense began to break down but we managed to hold them at bay.

When the buzzer sounded, I was happy we hadn't lost, but the three minute, sudden-death overtime seemed like an impossible task. No one was talking, everyone was trying to catch their breath. Our strongest center came out to start. He has formidable skills, but wasn't able to find an opening. A moment later his son, playing wing, flew in on a breakaway and didn't quite find the back of the net. The next line went and made no progresses in the face of their defense. Finally it was my turn. I went over the boards and the game wound up in our end. They were doing what they were strongest at, making clean passes through traffic and getting someone open. Then one of our defense picked off a pass. Their defense were wide and had pinched in. I curled around and blasted out of our zone optimistically hoping that our defense man with the puck could get it to me. He looked up ice, saw me, and threw the puck. It bounced just beyond the reach of their defense who were now fifteen feet behind me. I managed to get my stick out to touch the puck slowing it down enough to get control over it near the red line. I crossed the blue line, their goalie wasn't coming out to challenge me, and this gave me a second. I saw a spot between his legs (and didn't trust my skills enough to try a higher shot.)

I buried it between his legs in the back of the net.

It wasn't until I blew past the net and saw the puck that I realized the game was over and that we had won. I felt an amazing an unexpected sense of elation. I didn't think I cared about hockey that much. But I did, I really cared about hockey. At that moment I cared about nothing else. My teammates were pouring over the boards coming to give me a hug, and clap me on the back. The sense of gratification was so strong and so unalloyed. I was skating back to my team with my stick clenched over my head yelling, "Yes!" at the top of my lungs over and over. It was such an impossible but natural story: I scored the overtime goal that won the incredibly difficult championship game.

I hide my happy memories away for safe keeping so they don't wear out from overuse. Nevertheless, the memory of the precise mix of emotions I felt at that moment will eventually fade and become a fact in my history rather than something I can call up to bring me happiness. What will remain is the memory that what I felt was so strong that I couldn't hide it, and didn't want to hide it. I felt so happy, in fact, that I could do little besides yell at the top of my lungs incoherently.

Some years ago I realize that there is peace to be had in this life, but there was always a resignation associated with it. Yesterday offered the possibility that the peace might come with a sense of triumph and joy.

Pictures from Porcupine Wilderness Mountain Area

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:30:00 +0000

I didn't have time to add captions or do much sorting, but here are some pictures from the recent camping trip.

Obsequious Bouffant

noreply@blogger.com (f. chance) — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:49:00 +0000

I received an e-mail about a a going away party for a post-doc who's moving on. What was most interesting were the ads that gmail displayed at the side of the message -- I like to click on the links, the advertisers have to pay, and I never purchase anything. One of the links took me to a site that earnestly explained how to end a friendship. At first I thought it was some absurdist joke, but who would pay to have people read a joke? The article, hosted on a site called LifeScript.com, went on for better than five pages.

Walking home I decided to see what advertisements I could conjure by sending myself strange e-mails. I started with this message, "I have an obsequious bouffant." with a subject that was the same as the title of this post. There were several ads for surgical scrubs (??) and one for hairstyles for different face shapes. What was most interesting was that the hairstyle ad was a link to a page also hosted by LifeScript.com. Now, I'm not the most with it guy, so maybe LifeScript is in the midst of going supernova, but I've never heard of them. Further, the link didn't take me to a page relating to obsequiousness or bouffants, rather it was a result of a search of LifeScript.com based on the keywords, 'face-shape' and 'hairstyle'.

The whole thing got me thinking that the ads Google displays aren't chosen based on the content of the e-mail alone. I suspect that Google is beginning to form a profile of me based on all the e-mail (and, perhaps, use of other Google products) and is choosing advertising based on that.

Creepy, huh?

On an unrelated note, I found this '50s ad for thorazine via Boing Boing.