Outside-y-ness, summer plans, and new fun stuff

This is a longish post. I guess I'm compensating for all the time I haven't gotten to spend blogging lately...

Why am I a nerd? I mean, I really like all the cool stuff I can do with mathematics and computers and so on, but at the same time, there's a big part of me that's just not cut out for this "nerd" job. In particular, I have a serious addiction to being outdoors.

It doesn't need to be the Great Outdoors or the Middle of Nowhere or anything. I'm quite happy with the approximation to nature right outside the door to my apartment. It's an old enough neighborhood to have mature trees (they're beautiful outside my windows, especially in the mornings and evenings when they turn all golden in the sunlight), and there are mourning doves and other birds that nest and sing here, and it's a beautiful neighborhood with all sorts of flowers and interesting plants. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of home, particularly the neighborhood I grew up in. My apartment building even has architectural similarities to my old house (around here, the buildings are fairly small, with six apartments each).

My university campus and my summer-job campus are quite nice, too. This summer, I am lucky enough to have a window again, and since I'm on the second floor it's almost like working in a treehouse. It's really pleasant to be almost up in the treetops like that; almost relaxing, except when it makes me sad that I can't really be out there. I do get a walk in during my lunch hour practically every day, though, and that helps.

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I am having quite a busy summer. I hadn't realized just how much I'm doing until I wrote it up for a friend's discussion board. I'm working veeeeeery long hours at my summer job to make up for some of the days I'll be missing for stuff like this:

I'm taking a day trip to Antietam with Boyfriend and Boyfriend's office-friend and his girlfriend. Apparently Antietam is only an hour and a half away from here. I didn't even know it was in Maryland. Oops. (Is being from the faraway Midwest an excuse for this?)

One weekend I'm going to western Massachusetts with Boyfriend to visit his family -- they live in a beautiful house up in the mountains there.

Another weekend I'm going home for four or five days (depending on how much I can count of the days I spend mostly on the plane). Boyfriend is coming along too. (Boyfriend and I have never yet flown anywhere together, even though we've been dating for nearly two years, but that's going to change very fast...)

Later in the summer, I have a Career Development Activity for several weeks. Yet again, Boyfriend is coming, and so is practically everyone I know who's working on anything remotely like the stuff I'm working on (my advisor, a couple of friends from work, my boss for the summer...)

Finally, at the end of the summer, I'm hoping to take a week or so off before classes start -- that'll be my "summer break," since I started work the day after my last final.

I'm really glad that the days are long, and that I get up early -- it means I usually get to drive home in the daylight and even spend time walking or reading or eating outside in my beautiful neighborhood. Happy summer!

Blogging from work...

Blogging from work is a bad idea. So this is *not* coming from work. But it was tempting.

Joining the eye-blogging meme

I *finally* defeated iPhoto and Flickr, at least long enough to join the bandwagon on the eye-blogging meme. (I got it from Jo(e)).

Here's a little selection (basically these are the people I actually have accessible photos of):


My eyes, from a picture I took of myself on my last day as an undergrad, not much more than a year ago.


My mom's eyes.


Boyfriend's eyes.


Boyfriend's dad's eyes.


My eyes again, looking a little like Boyfriend's eyes.

Oddly enough, I have no useful pictures of my dad's eyes, and no pictures at all of Boyfriend's mother's eyes, but I would say those are probably the parents we got our eyes from. He says his dad's eyes are a different color than his; I must have my dad's eyes, because my mom's the only one in our family who can see more than two inches from the end of her own nose. She also doesn't have the exaggerated lower lids that make my eyes look almost like they're on upside down...

Job

I have a summer job now. I started yesterday, the day after my last final. It's an hour there and an hour back, and I'm trying to work long days to make up for some times later in the summer when I'll be gone.

Blogging may continue to be light.

Thanks for the congratulations. :) I appreciate the sentiment, and it's always a rush to get comments from people whose blogs I admire!

All done!

I made it through my whole first year of graduate school!

Don't know what my grades are yet (though many of my students do -- and oh, the whining!) but I'm done with everything I can do to determine those grades. :)

I had a great meeting with my advisor this afternoon, too. I left campus late -- later than I'd planned, much later than I'd hoped -- but I felt like I could conquer the world. It might even have made up for losing the one free afternoon I had between school and work. Tomorrow I'm trading homework for a 2-hour (round trip) commute. Good? Bad? I dunno. I'm trying to be just the tiniest bit less cranky than the last couple of blogs.

I made it!!!

Lightning blog

Exam tomorrow.

So busy.

Must sleep.

Must study.

Must worry about 10 million un-exam-related things.

Meanwhile, a followup on yesterday's grammar rant: "U" is not "You"!!! And in particular it's not a good idea to use it in an academic context (i.e. an answer to an exam -- yes, even a math exam -- or an e-mail to your TA).

And a Salon article on the nuances of saying "sorry." I'm not sure I agree with the precise distinction between "sorry" and "sorry if" -- or, anyway, it doesn't seem like the most precise way of saying what the author's trying to get at. But it's a good editorial anyway.

Sox

Today's Neurotic Spelling/Grammar Rant:

"Sox" is not ever the plural of "sock" in a plain-vanilla English sentence. Not. Ever.

It can be perfectly appropriate in team names (Go Red Sox!) or in references to the "bobbie sox" era, or possibly in other contexts (eye kant spel and eye kant fynd mi sox).

An example (many examples, actually) of inappropriate use of "sox" can be found at the Kiltmen's home page. They're not the only offenders, but they're the worst I've happened upon lately.

You have been warned!

Miscellany

Speaking of non-food food, here's a great example from James Lileks.

The 30 least-hot followups to a list of 30 hottest things to say to a woman (I think the original list was from Men's Health).

And the blogroll ----->
has been updated. (New, improved, more eclectic than ever! And still missing half the blogs I visit when I'm, er, NOT procrastinating. Definitely NOT procrastinating.)

And I certainly wouldn't procrastinate going to bed, so I'm going right now. Or better yet, an hour ago. See you in the morning!

Busy season

Tomorrow it's officially Finals Week. Posting may be light for a while. Wish me luck. :)

Rewrite me!

Although I'm a grad student in applied math, I've been grading essays this semester, so this essay-grading story from New Kid on the Hallway made me smile.

Narnia trailer

So, there's a trailer online for the Narnia movie that's coming out in December. It looks pretty good. A tiny bit cheesy, and yes, as somebody on Slashdot mentioned, it's filmed a little like LOTR with little kids instead of hobbits. But I still think it looks neat. I even think C.S. Lewis might have approved (although obviously I don't really have any idea about that). Another reason to get excited about Christmas time this year...

Food?

I definitely agree that if you have no idea how to make it yourself, it's probably not food.

Hear, hear. (Except for that creamy stuff they put in sandwich cookies! Doesn't that count as food?)

From the comments on an entry about non-food food over at My Own Private Idaho.

Unapologetic geekiness: Picking a random line from a file

My first definitively geeky post!

I just learned a cool method for selecting a random line from a file, without knowing ahead of time the number of lines in the file. Well, the method is sort of cool. The fact that it actually works is really cool. Here's the Perl code, courtesy of the Perl Cookbook:

srand;
rand($.) < 1 && ($line = $_) while <>;
# $line is the random line

OK, so why is this cool? Well, as you pass each line, it's selected with probability 1/N, where N is not the number of lines in the file, but the number of lines you've read so far. So the first line is definitely selected, the next line is selected half the time, the third line is selected a third of the time, and so on. After you run out of lines, you print out the last line you selected. And it's equally likely to have been any of the lines in the file. It's not horribly difficult to work out the math for this (and if you're interested, the proof is also in the Cookbook), but it's just counterintuitive enough that it made me say "Wow."

Quiet

Today's near-lack of blogging is brought to you by my last day of lectures in my first year as a graduate student!

Also by the fact that I need to catch up on sleep -- I was out quite late (for me) last night, because a friend was in the chorus for a performance of Bach's B Minor Mass. I hadn't heard it before -- what an amazing piece of music!

(giggle) again

I found Paper Napkin via Laura. Here's a sample, from an entry titled In Which I am Pee Em Essy:

There is something wrong with me. I can't quite put my finger on it, but an educated guess is that I suck in every conceivable way. Yeah, I think that about covers it. Also, I lack all the neccesary skills of a functioning adult.

I definitely admire the ability to be (at least a little) tongue-in-cheek chipper when one is in a foul mood.

EDIT: No, seriously, she's being funny! See:

What is it about Americans that puts the atic in fan? Isn’t it enough just to like the Lord Of The Rings trilogy without buying t-shirts, hats, and thongs printed with “I heart Smeagol,” “I brake for Smeagol,” or “Smeagol is my homeboy”? What's left? Arwen emergency medical bracelets? Yes! When you go into anaphylactic shock your EMT will know you're a True Fan, as he stabs you with the Sword Of Narsil EpiPen. Oi vey. And could I have any more rhetorical questions in this post? Do I know from rhetorical?

Thinking

I honestly love that my boyfriend is intelligent and thoughtful.

But does he have to out-think me?

It's so tiring to be very jealous and very proud at the same time!

Dry Bones

Tonight I pulled two books off my shelf to read while I was getting ready for bed (I wasn't sure at first which one I wanted) : Possession, by A.S. Byatt, and The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt. The Last Samurai. (The latter is nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie.)



I didn't notice it right away, but both these books have rather similar characters: people hungry for knowledge, thirsty for meaning, who find the scholarly life dusty and meaningless, and very much unlike what they had hoped for. They frighten me, because they are so like me -- or what I might have been or might still become.

In particular, I am afraid of Sibylla, the mother of Ludo, the boy-genius hero of The Last Samurai. I want to be Ludo, but I'm afraid I'm much more like Sibylla, who loves beauty and knowledge but is depressingly weak and ineffectual. She is ordinary in a bad way -- trapped in the ordinary, and denying it, and so missing any beauty or purpose her ordinary life might be hiding.

In the following passage, Sibylla has come from small-town America to Oxford on a scholarship she earned by faking her grades and recommendations and lying about her own knowledge. I didn't lie to get my semester at Oxford, but this is unsettlingly like some of my experiences there. I was fascinated and thrilled to be reading in the actual Bodleian Library (not an easy privilege to get), and I drank in every detail of life in England; and yet my work seemed meaningless. The view Sybilla sees is exactly the view I saw; and I wasted time in the Covered Market just as she does, although I preferred buying massive cookies (the size of your liver, and sold by weight) to eschewing sweaters.

Roemer, anyway, was too obscure to be on the open shelves of the Lower Reading Room with more frequently consulted classical texts. Year after year the book gathered dust in the dark, far below ground. Since it had to be called up from the stacks it could be sent to any reading room in the Bodleian, and I had had it sent to Reserve in the Upper Reading Room of the Radcliffe Camera, a library in a dome of stone in the centre of a square. I could read unobserved.

I sat in the gallery looking out across a bell of air, or at the curving walls crammed with extraordinarily interesting-looking books on non-classical subjects, or out the window at the pale stone of All Souls, or, of course, at Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik (Leipzig, 1912). There was not a classicist in sight.

I formed the impression that the sentence meant: It is truly a fallow and new field which the author has trod and ploughed through in handling this subject, so especially might this statement sound in the first moment.

This did not really seem worth the trouble it had taken to work it out, but I had to go on so I went on, or rather I was about to go on when I glanced up and I happened to see, on a shelf to my left, a book on the Thirty Years War which looked extraordinarily interesting. I took it down and it really was extraordinarily interesting and I looked up presently and it was time for lunch.

I went to the Covered Market and spent an hour looking at sweaters.

There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.

There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.

I saw several interesting sweaters in the Market but they seemed to be rather expensive.

(from pp. 18-19 of The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt)

I don't agree with Sibylla at all when she implies that boredom is a fate worse than death, but I very much agree with her on the dust and the dark. Books should live. A library should be a nature preserve, not a mausoleum with the bones stacked up dry and delicate. And minds should be alive in the same way.

But since I am so much like Sibylla in some ways, I worry that I cannot or will not avoid becoming like her in other ways. She complains about stupid people and the way the world is, but she cannot get a job more fulfilling than computer-archiving old paper issues of obscure hobby magazines, and she never, never finishes what she starts. The only thing she produces, at least in the course of this novel, is her son, Ludo; and somewhere between the ages of four and six he seems to become entirely responsible for producing and polishing himself. Maybe there is meaning to Sibylla's life after all -- in her motherhood, perhaps, though it is hardly better than the rest of her work -- and maybe I am not old enough yet to understand it. Or maybe Sibylla is a bad fictional rendition of what a person rather like me could be like. Or maybe she is simply not me.

I hope one of those things is true.

Settlers of Catan online!

The Java-based version of Settlers of Catan I mentioned is at http://catan.jsettlers.com/ . It's free. You can register a username, but you don't have to; it also works if you just type in a nickname with no password (as long as nobody else is using that nickname at the time).

It's kind of slow to load, but once it loaded I didn't have any trouble with delays. Once everyone you want to play with is "sitting" at the "table," you can start the game and the empty seats will be filled in with bots -- little bits of AI for you and your friends to gang up on. :) The bots are especially nice to have around when it's time to move the robber -- you never have to steal from your friends again...