sanguinity

So, on Towel Day I forgot my towel. Not surprising, really, not if you know me, and not if you know what towel-location-knowledge is proxy for. I'm the kind of person you'd expect to almost know where her towel is.

Note, please, that almost knowing where one's towel is is almost entirely unlike actually knowing where one's towel is.

(I take comfort in the fact that Douglas Adams himself was the guy who didn't know where his towel was. In general, I experience great personal resonance with Adams's writings about his lack of having his shit together. I would quote him on deadlines and whooshing noises here, except that there's someone reading this who is waiting on me wrt a fast-approaching deadline, and I do not wish to alarm her. [1])

In contrast, my mother, who has never read H2G2, emailed me on Towel Day to remind me / ask after my towel. (A year or two ago, she was in town on May 25th and took us to breakfast. She was amused by our insistence on carrying towels with us [2], and fascinated that someone else at the restaurant was carrying a towel, too. Consequently, Towel Day has apparently forever made an impression on her, even if Mom does seem to think that May 25th is the day that we believe we will get raptured into hitchhiking the galaxy. [3]) My mother is the sort of person who always knows where her towel is. Why yes, I do find it humiliating that my mother, WHO HAS NEVER READ DOUGLAS ADAMS, is better at celebrating Towel Day than I am.

So that was two days ago. Yesterday, I demonstrated that yes, towel-forgetting is indeed an honest proxy for determining the state of my togetherness: I took the bus toward work, got off a half-mile later and hiked back because I had forgotten some VERY IMPORTANT WORK DOCUMENTS, got home and discovered that no, I had not forgotten the VERY IMPORTANT WORK DOCUMENTS, they had been in my pack the entire time, went back to the bus stop, got on the next bus, and brandished a fistful of bus transfers from my pocket at the driver. "Hi, um, hi, I don't know which one is for today."

(Hey, at least I still had the fucking bus transfer that I'd been given a half-hour earlier. That was nothing like a given in this story.)

So, around about then, I was feeling very dejected about the headless-chickenness of my life, and called

grrlpup from the bus. I told her the whole story, and she made appropriate sympathetic noises.

When I got to the end of the story, I dejectedly asked, "On a scale of one to ten, how much do you love me?"

"Ten," she said.

"And what would be the multiplier I'd get, if I knew where my towel was?"

"That would be a 1," she said.

Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee...

I love her so much.

[1] Note to said person: I prefer the whooshing noise of an approaching deadline. I am mostly pretty reliable about not letting them whoosh past. (Insert bright confident trustworthy smile here.)

[2] Why, yes,

grrlpup did have to ask me, on our way out the door, "Did you remember your towel?" And yes, I did have to go back for it. Why do you even need to ask?

[3] Note to Mom (who doesn't actually read this journal): if the Vogon Constructor Fleet had arrived, you wouldn't need to email me to check. Vogon Constructor Fleets are obvious like that. Also, by then, email probably wouldn't be working.

grrlpup is running around the house, frantically gathering stuff to catch her bus, and quizzing me about my day's schedule. Which, as is usual this summer, involves a lot of math tutoring. She brings up the fact that I'm allegedly teaching her math, too -- some time back she decided that she wanted to learn calculus, and I said I'd help her. I previewed all the calculus books at the library to pick out just the right one for her, and brought it home. From my end, it was like picking out exactly the right puppy. I gave her a loving tour of it, and with starry eyes, looked forward to the mornings/evenings/whatever that we sit together, playing with the new ~~puppy~~ calculus book.

As you might imagine, however, the ~~puppy~~ calculus book sits on the shelf, untouched. Which isn't really surprising, but still makes me kinda sad. From time to time I bring it up, and she's always, "Yeah! I want to learn calculus! Let's do that!" But she never wants to learn it this week, yanno?

Anyway, in her running about this morning, I wryly point out that sure, you could say that I really am tutoring her in calculus: even though exactly no teaching is happening, she's being no more flaky than some of my paid students. (Seriously, I've had some doozies this year, people who pay a lot of money for me to watch them do the homework they should have done between sessions. People who, when they're scheduling tutoring with me say, "Yeah, we should have a session this week, because when you're sitting there is the only time I get any studying in." (Yeah, grad school is going to work out GREAT for you.))

Her: The problem is that I don't have a calculus gatekeeper in my future.
Me: Yes, you don't.^*
Her: Maybe you should refuse to marry me until I learn calculus.
Me: ...?
Her: *expectant*
Me: ...um, okay.
Her: Yay!
Me: Yay?
Her: Now I have to learn calculus! Otherwise you won't marry me!
Me: ...so you better hurry up and learn calculus, because you never know when marriage will become legal.
Her: You're right! I better hurry up!
(and then, so help me, she actually bounces in excitement)
Her: So you're not going to marry me until I learn to do calculus?
Me: Yes.^*
Her: Are we going to do calculus at the ceremony?
Me: Yes.
Her: The officiant will say, "And now Holly is going to, um, integrate this function!"
Me: Yes.
Her: It'll be very romantic!
Me: Yes.
Her: And everyone will cry!
Me. Yes. Yes, they will.

Whether they cry from the romance of it, or because we've just brought up a LOT OF VERY BAD MEMORIES for everyone, I couldn't say. But if, someday, you're witnessing us getting married and wonder why Holly starts spontaneously doing calc during the ceremony, that's why. Because her learning calculus is now a condition of my marrying her.

I also imagine that the wedding-planning period -- assuming that we actually plan a wedding again -- is going to be more stressful than usual, because I'll be doing my best to cram a bunch of calculus into her head. Because it's not enough to be worrying about whether the caterer is going to cancel at the last second, no. We'll have to worry about whether the function is continuous and differentiable on the interval, too.

---

* Yes, I natively choose yes/no by logical truth value, and not by the English language convention of using a negative to agree with a statement with a negative in it. Yes, I spent much of elementary school being horribly confused by the speech patterns of my teachers, a la a "Who's on First" routine.

A final project from students in a History and Philosophy of Engineering class. Parts made me laugh out loud, and other parts got me all teary.

from Sciencewomen

Me: Whadja get me for my birthday? A catapult?
Her: What? No. I was considering one, but--
Me: Acrobots? Didja get me Acrobots?
Her: What are Acrobots?
Me: *explains*
Her: Ah. No. I didn't get you Acrobots. What's this all about?
Me: *meaningful glance*
Her: *notices the newly-arrived ThinkGeek box*
Her: Ah. ...has it occurred to you that maybe I bought something from ThinkGeek for myself?
Me: *considers it* Didja get me a... *waves hands* ...engine. Heat-cold engine. Hot cold silver--
Her: Stirling engine? I considered it. But I didn't know if it was something you would rather make yourself...?
Me: *shrugs* They're kinda finicky. Didja get me a carnivorous plant desk set?
Her: Did you spend the afternoon browsing the catalog, or did you have it memorized?
Me: Memorized. Didja get me a roller-coaster building set?
Her: Maybe I should have gotten you a gift card.
Me: Didja get me a 42 towel?

On Donald Knuth, and the "brilliant, hideous, beautiful, godawful piece of software called TeX."

I started using TeX again last year, and as I said then, it gave me the nostalgic warm fuzzies. So did encountering papers and books that had obviously been typeset with TeX. There's a look to a TeXed document, as distinctive as the smell of the house you grew up in (and exactly as invisible to those who didn't grow up there), that sets off all sorts of nostalgic emotional responses. I confess, every time I'm done typesetting a new paper, I want to spend a little while petting the finished product, savoring that look, those fonts, the elegant equations. And yet, despite all those fuzzies I have for TeX, Chu-Carrol's characterization is absolutely true: the program is horrible. TeX equals lovehate squared.

Some months ago, hanging around before our writing group, I told Dave my fave new joke of the day: How many octopuses does it take to screw in a lightbulb? [1]

Upon hearing the answer, Dave laughed in the omg-you-are-such-a-FREAK way that I often get, and asserted that this was obviously the sort of joke that Math People tell.

Not at all, I told him. That's nothing like the sort of joke that Math People tell. Then I gave him an example of that sort of joke: What do you get when you cross a mosquito and a mountain climber? [2]

Dave looked befuddled at the punchline -- which he would, because you need to know a little about vector spaces and cross-products to make any sense of the answer -- but Ken, sitting across the table, gave an involuntary bark of laughter. Ken is one of those cryptic folks who have a difficult-to-guess background, but some years ago I realized that somewhere along the way, he had done academic time as a mathematician and a computer scientist.

Dave looked from Ken to me in puzzlement. I explained the joke as much as it can be explained without first having had a basic course in vector spaces. Then I pushed on. What's purple and commutes? [3]

At the punchline, Ken gave another snort. This explanation made even less sense to Dave, if that was possible. And then, because I am a Very Bad Person, I told another one: What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice? [4]

Ken was giggling now. Dave kept looking back and forth between us, and finally, angry, challenged Ken. Ken tried to explain that he had a bachelor in mathematics, so he did in fact get why these were funny, but Dave dismissed Ken's claim. "You do not! You didn't even GO to college!" Dave entreated me to back him up. "YOU don't believe him, do you?"

I gestured at Ken, who was still giggling, and thus obviously in possession of a mathematics education. "Judging from that, he's spent at least three years in a mathematics department somewhere. If he claims a bachelor's, I have no reason to doubt him." Dave glared at me. "Oh, come on," I protested. "He's laughing. Sure, there's an outside chance that he did physics or something, but seriously? That's as good as a secret handshake."

Despite Dave's doubts, it's true: that first bark of laughter marked Ken as one-of-us in a way that quizzing him on actual mathematical topics probably wouldn't have done. I've forgotten most of the math I used to know, and might not be able to pass such a quiz nowadays; Ken has probably forgotten even more. But did Abelian grape produce a shock of recognition? Did he flash on the upperclassmen keeping strict track of the progress of this year's Abstract Algebra class, just so they could be the first to oh-so-casually spring Abelian Grape on those who were finally primed to get it? Did he flash on a memory of torturing your non-math classmates with this joke that they will never, ever understand, and then snickering knowingly when they didn't? Even if he doesn't nowadays remember what an algebraic group is, oh, yes, he was one of us.

For those of you have been following the footnotes and hyperlinks, there's a reason that I linked to Wolfram's MathWorld for all the explanations -- it's a mathematician's mathematics site, and thus understands the importance of these jokes and includes them in all the relevant articles. If you're going to be talking about Abelian groups, it's not enough to know the relevant definition. Oh, no, if you're going to be talking about Abelian groups, you damn well better know the jokes.

...which is the long way of explaining why I pulled that quote of Chu-Carroll's up at the very top, where he described TeX as "brilliant, hideous, beautiful, godawful." It gave me the kick-in-the-gut one-of-us recognition that can't cross a vector and a scalar gave Ken. As clear a shibboleth as one could want. As clear as walking in a crowd in a foreign city, and hearing the accent of home slicing through the muddle of alien voices. Unmistakable; unfakeable; unignorable.

---

[1] One-eighth.

[2] Nothing. You can't cross a vector and a scalar.

[3] An Abelian grape.

[4] Zorn's lemon.

In other geek notes: dot is making me very happy.

 digraph Quaternions {	i -> j	j -> k	k -> i }

Thanks,

ziptie!

A couple folks asked about the new computer: MacBook Pro, 2.16Ghz, 2G RAM.

My previous machine was a 800Mhz G3 iBook. It's been showing signs of trouble for a year or more, and it was never really up to handling my simulation projects for school, so I was planning on replacing it over the summer. About a month ago the hard-drive started to go -- I could hear it in a way that I oughtn't. A few days later, it started to fail functionally -- not so much that it wouldn't read/write, but that it read disastrously sloooooowly, operation seemed to be dependent upon the machine's physical orientation, and it had a tendency to make incredibly awful sounds if you bumped the machine. So, yeah; I replaced the machine ahead of schedule.

And OMG, the MacBook Pro is sexy. Apple's designers have always been able to get to me, but this time... Well, I had to take a break from opening/unpacking because I needed to clear my head. It's the same problem I've had with certain pretty shopgirls, where the only thing I'm thinking is, She's smiling at me. Oh, she's still smiling at me. Oh, please, let her keep on smiling at me. Three minutes outside of the shop my brain snaps free of that pretty smile and I have a nasty few moments of You just paid how much to buy WHAT?

I'm telling you, a pretty girl ain't got no problem in getting my credit card out of my pocket.

Anyway, yeah. My brain was doing that thing. Over a piece of hardware. It freaked me out enough that I had to put the computer down and go find something else to do for a while.

---

TeX (pronounced with a hard chi -- "tekh" or "tek") has been a sweet excursion down memory lane. All the Reed math theses were typeset in it -- just try to use MSWord to embed a bunch of italics and Greek symbols and sub/super/sub-of-sub-of-superscripts in your sentences, and see how stable that is. Around about February, the math seniors would start asking each other, all casual-like, "Have you started TeXing your thesis yet?" If you said yes, they'd be disappointed and start searching for new prey, but if you said no, there'd be an artful little sigh, maybe a little teeth-sucking, a regretful shake of the head. "Oh, dear. Haven't even started? It took me eight hours to TeX one page."

What would spoil the game was to say was that by page five or so, the per-page-rate drops to about an hour. Which is a lot better than it sounds -- simply reading a page of mathematics can take about an hour, depending.^*, ^**

But that was fifteen years ago. I was a little worried about going through that eight-hours-a-page learning curve again, but I'm pleased to find that I pretty quickly got back to my hour-a-page rate. Booyah.

It amuses and pleases me that most of the mathematical books and articles that I'm using for this project have been done in TeX. There's a recognizeable fingerprint to TeXed documents, that given me the warm fuzzies. They all look just like my thesis, just like the TeX user manuals, just like the paper I'm writing. It isn't quite like going home, but there is a sweet sort of homelike comfort there.

---

* First day of fall term one year,

grrlpup and I were sitting on the lawn at lunch, bemoaning the weight of our assigned reading. "I'm supposed to read two hundred pages by Wednesday. Can you believe??"

"I know, I know!" I replied. "They assigned me fifteen pages!"

** This is one of the contributing reasons that so many people struggle with math -- it's easy to mistake needing to spend ten minutes of concentrated effort on a mere three sentences with "OMG I'M NOT GETTING THIS, I'LL NEVER GET THIS, I'M SO STUPID, OMG!" Especially during the first nine minutes. :-/

And no, I'm not snarking. I, too, am quite sure that OMG I'M SO STUPID I'M NEVER GOING TO GET THIS OMG! See the previous post.

From the altfriday5:

1. What was the last question someone asked you (not including this one)? What was your answer?

"What is this distribution? Look at the variable; that's the most important part. Come on, what is this distribution?"

My answer, along with everyone else's, was a blank look.

The professor then went into a rant on the travesty of the American education system, and how we don't study enough because we have jobs, and in India all the students would answer right off that this was the gamma distribution. We really ought to study more, because at this rate we'll never be successful, never!

(At the end of class, btw, he was forecasting doom for students who have been skipping class: there's no way a student can learn as effectively from a book as from the one-to-one interaction in class, where he can help us if we get confused. Apparently, he's never noticed that no one asks him any questions. Ever. The closest I've heard to a question in that class is, "In the second equation? Did you mean to write alpha-sub-two instead of alpha-sub-one?")

2. What was the last question you asked? What was the answer?

"What was he going on about? About learning in class being always better than from the book. There's no interaction in this class. It's not just me, is it?"

To which several students sitting near me answered that they've learned exclusively from the book up to now, the lectures are mostly just confusing, and that whenever the professor asks, "Is that clear?" it's a complete joke, because it's never clear and no one ever thinks that asking him to clarify will do anything to help. (Questions about things not being clear, by the way, are often answered with a speech that this isn't Stats 2xx, and that we're expected to think.)

3. Do people often ask you questions? Why or why not? How many questions would you estimate you get asked in an average day?

On class days, I might get asked up to a half-dozen reality-corroborating questions from classmates: "Did you get all that reading done? Was it horribly redundant? Are you managing to keep up? Do you know what you're doing for your project yet?" etc. Also, the SySc professors usually ask me at least once what I'm laughing about. (Or grinning about. Depending.)

I usually get a few dozen logistics-coordinating questions from

grrlpup: "When do you want to go grocery shopping? Do you have anything to put on the list? I'm going to the Powell's reading tomorrow night, do you want to come, too? Shall I meet you there, or here?" Plus a whole bunch of gossip-y questions about our friends: "Did you see that So-n-So posted such-n-such? Did you think what I thought??"

I might get a question a day from non-geek friends wanting me to explain something for them -- a news article, something they overheard somewhere, whether I think xx makes sense, what today's xkcd was about, etc. (Which, despite my rant below on question 5, is fine. You people are my friends.)

On really good days, there will be long, geeky conversations full of hypothesizing and connection-making, in which case the question-count will jump by a gross or more.

4. Do you often ask questions? Why or why not? How many questions would you estimate you ask in an average day?

I'm not much of a question-asker. Or, rather, I ask lots of questions -- see the geek-joy of hypothesizing, above -- but I don't ask them of people much. Lots of folks don't really know or care what the answer is and start making crap up (I HATE that); or they consider the question's obscurity to be a veiled dig at them and get annoyed at me; or I want the answer in far more depth of detail than I think it's fair to ask of someone. Also, there's the tricky business of figuring out what the right question is: asking the wrong question wastes everyone's time.

So, I don't ask questions much. Either there's no point in asking, or it feels rude. Rude, as in: I can't be bothered to put in the time to figure this out for myself, but it's perfectly okay for me to ask you to drop what you're doing to explain it to me.

Hanging around with

leboyfriend, though, has taught me that people are inexplicably pleased to answer mundane, stupid, Google-should-be-your-friend questions. Consequently, I'm far more likely nowadays to ask someone around me for help with something trivial. (It feels recklessly forward: "Aw, what the hell; let's ask this random guy here if he knows where the #14 bus runs nowadays. If he knows, then he'll be all 'I helped somebody today!' And if he snarls at me, than I'll have had an adventure!")

5. When you hear a question, do you feel compelled to answer it?

Oh. My. Fucking. Gawd. YES.

I can't not answer questions. There have been times that I have wanted to wreak violence on the question-asker, because I canNOT walk away from a question. It's like a freakin' sickness. I can't seem to say, "You know, this is a bad time, but I'd be happy to answer that question for you later tonight." No, I must drop everything and write a three-page screed on the topic, answering fine points that they never asked for. And then I feel like an idiot, like I've just stripped naked and ran around in public. Because really, what are the odds that they cared about that umpteenth level of detail?

(In the movie theater one night, a friend was talking about scratch-off lottery tickets and asked, as a punchline, "What are the odds!?" I took the ticket from her and a calculator out of my pocket, and told her. Then everyone pointed at me and laughed.)

Sometimes people ask me questions just because they think it's funny to jerk my chain. See Sanguinity's eyes roll with the frustration of not-knowing; see Sanguinity pretend she doesn't care that she doesn't know; see Sanguinity come back twenty minutes later with the inevitable screed of too-much-detail. My office-mates at my old workplace especially liked to pull that particular prank on me.

Grrlpup takes it one step farther: she uses me. She'll wonder aloud, oh-so-very-casually, just within my hearing, about something she's feeling too lazy to do her own research on. Can you believe that it took me years to catch on that these apparently idle wonderings-aloud are planned? Years! And even though I can now recognize when she's doing it, I still can't refrain from playing straight into her hands. "Hah! That's one of those questions, isn't it? I'm on to you. I'm onto-- Huh. Know what Google says?"

I've been laughing at this for two days now...

---

( For those who WILL not be content without they have an explanation... )

But no, if it wasn't funny the first time through, it's not going to be funny now. Go talk like a pirate for a while. Threaten to walk someone off a plank. You'll feel better.

( Geeky stuff about systems, perspectives, and marriage )

The library just emailed me to tell me a bunch of my holds are in. Most of them are post-secondary biology texts^* (or so I hope), but two of them are Biology of Star Trek titles. Both of them were published in 1998. Neither were published by the house that published the Physics of Star Trek (1995). (Or, I don't think they were. I'm not going to spend the afternoon playing Who Owns Who, Publishing Edition.)

Star Trek of Physics, I notice, is catalogued under the subject "Space Sciences". Nine books are listed as "Space Sciences". They range in scope from The Science of Star Wars to a house congressional report surveying the practical returns from space investment. Please tell me I'm not the only one amused by that.

BTW, you gotta love the subtitle on the Star Wars book: An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots, as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books. Independent? Independent of what, may I ask? The backroom conspiracies of the Luco-Industrial Complex?

In other news, I have art-project stuff waiting for me in Clackamas. :-)

Say, does anyone know where I can get affordable, non-trivial amounts of cosmetic-grade glitter? (In or around Portland, or via low shipping-costs mail.) Non-trivial, in this case, would be something like an ounce. Most of what I'm seeing around town are dram^** vials.

---

* Post-secondary biology texts: I'm plopping myself into a 300-level Biology course this fall, without the recommended prerequisites.

** That's 1/16 oz. 2-ish grams.

The Effect of Porn on Male Fertility.

Besides the fact that it's an inherently interesting topic (Is hot girl-on-girl action good for sperm production?), the comments wander off into a lovely discussion of p-values and effect sizes.

Everything's better with statistical analysis. Even porn.

(I really should get that graduate certificate in statistics, shouldn't I?)

---

Also, everything's better with power tools. Even Easter candy.

Have patience with me, the candy posts will stop soon. I have only one box of peeps left, and will soon have to move on with my life.

Despite the plethora of heavy posts lately, my life hasn't been all-brooding-all-the-time.

( Anya )

( Madeleine )

( Good Friday )

( I am a bright. )

( Statistics )

And I had some amusing-to-me thoughts about toruses, too, but I need to get back to what I said I'd be doing today...

Aw, here's a guy after my own heart: Good Math, Bad Math.

As he says in his introductory post:

...there are a whole lot of terrific science blogs out there: Orac, Pharyngula, Aetiology, just to name a few. But there's not nearly so much out there dedicated to math - and in particular to the misuse of math.

I think that that's a damn shame, because in my experience, one of the most clear ways of identifying a crackpot is through math. No matter the specific subject, the crackpots always either avoid or screw up the math. Whether it's the "mercuy causes autism" folks, the Velikovskians, creationists, alt-medicine quacks, republican pollsters, or scientologists - you can always recognize the crackpots by their math.

So I'm going to do my best to provide a voice of mathematical sanity - both by showing what's wrong with the bad math slop pumped out by the loonies, and by showing how good math works.

Hurrah! Company! Do you know how much time I spend yelling at the TV over stuff like that?

But know what really makes me happy?

Out here, I'd like to try to make the crazy things that fascinate me more approachable. Because of the lousy way math is taught, most people get the idea that math is hard, boring, and shallow. But it's not - it's amazingly broad, with all sorts of amazing insights, it can be fantastic fun, and it doesn't have to be hard.

So true. Yet so few people believe it.

A woman who works for my officemate has been thinking of taking my math class next term. She keeps making nervous noises, wanting some reassurance that I'm not going to flay her alive. When I tell her flat out that no, my class isn't worth getting nervous about, and in fact, she'll do well AND she'll have fun, she freezes in her tracks while she tries to decide how big of a liar I am. She can't conceive of enjoying a math class, and doesn't understand how I can state with such conviction that this is going to be a good experience for her.

But you know what? Math is cool. And it doesn't have to be hard. And I've got the double advantage of both miniscule class size and the discretion to say that a student isn't ready yet. The usual reasons that people fail a math class -- it was beyond their current comprehension, or they were outpaced by their classmates -- aren't much of an issue in my classroom.

Plus, I love this stuff, and I have the gift of making my enthusiasm infectious.

Yes, you do have to concentrate when dealing with math. Yes, you have to think meticulously and carefully. Yes, that's something that most people don't spend much time doing, and thus it's uncomfortable and awkward. But it isn't beyond most people's reach.

Really.

What do you get when you divide the circumference of the sun by its diameter?

Pi in the sky!

---

I've posted various mnemonics:

Sir, I have a rhyme excelling
In sacred truth and rigid spelling
Numerical sprites elucidate
For me the lexicon's dull weight.

...and...

For a girl I loved contrived,
By nature tough,
Her heart survived.

...and more of their ilk.

My coworkers are still walking around with those bemused smiles. They have no idea what's going on, but they're willing to humor the crazy person...

---

ETA: The New Guy just got it! (at 1:52!)

"Stop making those PIfalutin' jokes! Get down off your PI-horse!"

I brought in cherry pie, and told people I'm serving it at 1:59 this afternoon. I've even told them what the occasion is. (Briefly. Just the name of the day, not the explanation of the day.)

No one has solved it yet. They all nod and smile, and figure that they'll eventually find out what I'm going on about, and if they don't, well, they'll at least get a slice of pie for their trouble. Which is probably a welcome change -- I'm often bizarre and inexplicable, but they don't usually get baked goods for putting up with me. ;-)

How long before they solve it, do you think?

This will come as a great shock, but Oregon doesn't revolve around Portland. Nor Salem. Nor any other location in the Willamette Valley.

It revolves around Hermiston.

Main source here. I especially like the gravity-density plot.

Yes, I'm a geek. What of it?

Why do white bears dissolve in water?

Because they're polar!

grrlpup gave me an early Christmas present tonight -- an ammonite fossil, hung as a pendant.

It makes me very happy.

Linked on BoingBoing today: How to make a wearable Game of Life lightshow.

Nerdy as all get-out, of course, which is one of the reasons I clicked through, but having read the instructions, I've gotta say that I'm impressed. The designer didn't kludge his/her way through this, like I might have done. The construction and circuitry details, both, are sweet.

I want.

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Entries tagged with geek

Like to the Lark at Break of Day Arising

Til Discontinuity Do Us Part

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It's Still Sitting There. Unopened. Unguarded.

The Brilliant, Hideous, Beautiful, Godawful Piece of Software Called TeX

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The New Computer and Other Unfettered Geekery

AltFridayFive: Questions

Math AND Pirates! What could be better?

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Stillgeek with Glitter

Statistics Porn. Or Porn Statistics. Either way, it's sexy.

Friday Omnibus

Good Math, Bad Math

The Celebrations Continue...!

Pi Day

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Science Friday

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Game of Life Nerd-wear

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