A Smile

As my amused smile
turned full-face grin
staring at my plate
I hated her for making it so

I couldn't look up
I knew I'd see
Her smile.
Her eyes on mine.
His smile.

It's ok to smile
I told myself
and never came
her sass about it

The mistakes I've made.

=========
Sorry usual readers. Back to my usual confused rants with the next post, surely. I reckon this one at least fits the "confused" trend.

Still Right Here

This post was inspired by my lack of having posted anything else here in a while (2 months, to the day, apparently). Of course, if you've got nothing to say, which I don't, then not posting isn't a bad thing. Another inspiration for this post is that when I sat down to do "real work" (research, toward my Ph.D.) today, I found that I was on the last page of yet another notebook. Seems like a good time for reflection. I wish I could say that I felt like this last notebook had useful ideas. Or that I felt that way about any of the previous notebooks. I guess if it were true I might be out of here by now, or on my way out in the spring.

This post is fairly personal. The only thing you'll learn about, from reading it, is me. And I'm not a particularly interesting subject, I promise. Go find something else to do, there's plenty out there.

For some reason this academic year has been a huge source of confusion and frustration for me. I'm now in my 6th year of graduate school (for math, in case you forgot that part). For the past 5 years, I knew why I was here: I wanted to be a math professor. Maybe I still do, but I'm not so sure any more. My thesis advisor says he thinks I'd make a good prof at some small school, which was always the goal. And yet, I have a hard time convincing myself that this is still what I want. It's sort of an odd feeling to have your main plan in life for... a decade?... not really matter to you any more. Or, to maybe not matter.

I only have some vague idea(s) why I don't care as much about being a professor as I used to. I'll see what I can put into words, as much (more) for my benefit as yours (hopefully you stopped reading around the end of the second paragraph).

• Research sucks. Or I suck at research. Or... something like that. I've been reading math books for fun since high school (after I read all the books on sharks at the local library, and then decided I wasn't one for the water). I still do. And I love reading about math. But perhaps "doing math" is not something I care much for. I know, I know... math isn't a spectator sport, and... if you aren't reading with a pencil and paper and trying to guess what comes next, you're doing it wrong. But F that. I love reading math, the way I read math. If the way I read math means I'm not a "real mathematician", then maybe I shouldn't be here anyway, or shouldn't be teaching the next batch of math students.
  
• How am I supposed to be a professor, and tell my students how to learn math, if I don't do it myself? How can I tell my students to go home and work more problems (a habit I never had), and bang their heads against problems for a while (when, every time I sit down to do research I find something else to do as quickly as possible)?
• Sure, I can tell my students about math. I can tell them definitions and theorems and how to work problems, and maybe even tie it all together in some meaningful way. But lots of people have already done that, and their work exists in textbooks and, increasingly, online.
• Speaking of online, I feel like (and I know I'm not the only one) higher ed. (and probably other ed., and plenty more) is going to be going through a bit of an upheaval in the near future. I'm not sure I see how small, private, liberal arts colleges (like the one I went to, and always envisioned myself teaching at) are in a sustainable position currently. They are too expensive, and for what? I believe that many people are going to start recognizing that the diploma you get from such an institution isn't as valuable as, say, an impressive online resume, which is now something anybody can create with little effort (besides the "doing things that go on the resume" part). People can show everything they are capable of online, for everybody to see. What good is another diploma in relation to that? (I know that a diploma is still good... I'm not going to argue any of the things I say here)
  
• And also, while I'm on the subject of "online"... the experts are out there posting work online. Awesome teachers are posting full lesson plans, and all sorts of incredible resources. And my students could get to it as easily as I can. What extra value do I bring to the table? A convenient face to bounce ideas off of, to ask questions to (before thinking about the problem long enough alone)? Scheduled hours when I'll be around? I think there is a place for web collaboration tools in education, and I'm not sure how I complete with the sorts of individuals that my students have access to online.
• And a final thought: even going in to grad school, I was making a choice between grad school for math, or grad school for computer science. By the time senior year rolled around I was decided on math. I know at least one of my closest friends at the time was surprised. I sort of wish I had talked to my advisor and my CS professors a bit more about my decision, before making it. These days, I feel like I was probably wrong. I can spend all day online reading about computer/tech/programming stuff. I'll work on Project Euler problems, happily, until I solve them - in contrast to research, which I have a very hard time convincing myself to spend even an hour a day "doing". I don't know, maybe this is just a case of "the grass is always greener". Also, Project Euler problems, from what I've seen, aren't meant to be long, whereas math Ph.D. problems are sort of meant to take a little while. But what gets me excited are the projects I want to work on as a programmer, not as a mathematician.
  

Earlier this year I was at a party, and eventually the group I was sitting with decided to play a "tell me about yourself" sort of game. Mine was "I've been thinking about quitting grad school". Somebody asked me why I was still in it. "Inertia". They thought this was a good answer. To stay 5 years in grad school, and leave before getting a Ph.D. sounds like a pretty stupid idea, all around. But I was seriously considering it. A lease that runs until next summer, and no job prospects if I left, though, made it hard to leave. Around the same time as this party I had several talks with my advisor about what I wanted to do, and such. Eventually we decided I'd stick around into my 7th year and finish up, and then I could re-evaluate "be a professor" or "don't be a professor" at that point. That worked for a while. I'm basically back to wishing I'd just quit. I've also re-adopted my anti-social role, skipping most of the parties I've been invited to since. There are simply more interesting things to do. Which is the same problem I have with doing research.

So, anyway. I don't really know where I am. I don't really know where I am going. I'm apparently in not too much of a hurry to find out. I've killed another hour that I should have spent on research.

And, yes, the title of this post is a nod to Tool.

Fast Friday

I have decided to make Friday, August 15, 2008, a day of fasting for myself. I'll only drink water, and eat no food, from 12:00am to 11:59pm. I thought posting this here would help my commitment. Perhaps it'll encourage somebody else to do the same, and knowing other people are at it will help us all.

I've never done an all day fast. I've probably never even done a daylight fast, or anything like that. As Stephen Colbert said once on the Daily Show, 'I like to eat.' So why am I doing this? Lots of reasons, and no reason.

With running, I've been pushing myself physically. Presumably some part of the reason is to see what I'm capable of. Not eating for a day will be pushing myself.

In a similar spirit, I expect that not eating for a day has health benefits (at least, 'can have', with proper consideration). Again, with the running I've been doing, I don't feel unhealthy. I'm fortunate to never have had a problem with my weight. All the same, I expect there can be benefit here.

Also with things like marathons, it's something I can say I've done. Sure, lots of people have run marathons. Heck, Oprah ran a marathon. Still. Like bungee jumping, and hopefully someday sky diving, I, too, have been there. I can have some sense of what it's like. After Friday, I'll (hopefully) be able to add 'a day of fasting' to the list.

Finally, I know that I am fortunate to have the problem of deciding what to eat several times a day, instead of wondering if I'm going to be able to eat. I am a lucky member of a wealthy nation. I don't know how exactly a day of fasting fits in here. Perhaps by putting myself, even just a little, in somebody else's shoes, something beneficial will happen. Or perhaps I'm just another 'rich' asshole trying to make himself feel better without actually doing anything worthwhile.

Whatever the cause, whatever the effect, I'm going for it. I'll let you know how it goes. But before that, I'm heading to Knoxville to see Nine Inch Nails in concert, and then spend a day in the Great Smoky Mountains, so I'll presumably tell you about that, or at least point you at pictures.

Bedtime FAIL

It being summer and my not having much of a schedule have ganged up on my sleep routine. They've pushed both the going to bed and the getting up hours later than normal. The other day I went for a run starting at 2 in the morning. Currently it's 5am, and I'm still reasonably awake. I had thought this would work out, but I just realized that I've got an organized group run Saturday starting bright and early in the morning, so I'd like to be back to regular sleep schedule by then. I figure the way to get back on track is to just stay up really long one 'day'. Of course, this will likely require above-average levels of caffeine. And since my run this weekend is fairly long, I'm going to need to spend at least the day before hydrating - focusing on water and perhaps some gatorade, instead of coffee and mt. dew. More than one day would be better, but I guess I'll take what I can get. Try to get lots of water in between coffee breaks.

This'll actually be my second 'all-nighter' this summer. And I don't even do that much, or have tests to cram for or anything.

Getting back on track now is also convenient because Tuesday I'm planning on waking up early-ish to drive out to Knoxville. The main point of the excursion being to see Nine Inch Nails in concert there. Since Knoxville is pretty close to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, I'm also going to spend a day hanging out there. Totally sweet.

So anyway, there wasn't much point to any of this for you lot. But it helped me stay awake another couple minutes. On to the next adventure, after making some coffee...

Experimental Get Together

I recently decided it would be nice to have an organized get together of grad students in the math department here at UVA. Being summer, I figured plenty of people wouldn't be around, and I also figured not everybody would be interested. Even moreso, I knew that I didn't want to be in charge of organizing such a thing. But if I didn't, I wasn't sure anybody else would.

To overcome this gap, I decided to try to make it self-organizing. I set up a spreadsheet on Google Docs and set it so that anybody could edit it. This was intended to be a repository of information about the outing: who was going, how they were getting there, what (if any) food they planned on bringing, and what sorts of activities they hoped to do while out and about. After entering my info, and having a friend in the department make sure he could edit it as well, I sent out an email to the math graduate students. In the email I emphasized that I didn't want to be in charge, and pointed everybody to the spreadsheet. I figured we're all supposedly smart (enough) people, we could certainly organize ourselves.

It didn't quite work out as I had envisioned. With little more than a week to go before the outing, only 1 more person had added to the spreadsheet. I had also gotten a couple of emails from people saying they would be out of town. But no word from plenty of people who I thought would be interested and around. One day I ran across one of the visiting instructors, who was teaching some of the summer classes UVA offers for incoming and rising second year grad students (it's an awesome feature of the department). Apparently he'd been thinking about having a group picnic or so for his class, and asked if he could just merge with my little experiment. I figured this was fine, and that many of the attendees would be from that class anyway (even if they weren't on the spreadsheet). I sent him a link to the spreadsheet, but apparently there were some technical troubles using it - he indicated that Google had required a login, which I hadn't expected.

So anyway, the day came, and plenty of people turned out. The majority of them were from the summer class, or probably had spoken directly with them. We had a good time sitting around talking and eating munchies, then playing some frisbee golf. It's quite fun to watch 10ish people all coming your way throwing frisbees, by the way.

But I'm still a little confused about the apparent failure of the online organizational aspect of the outing. I thought having one specific place where anybody could go to see about the day, and add their 2 cents, would be helpful. It could organize rides, and appropriate amounts of food. I wonder if perhaps a Facebook group would have had more traction with the other students, as most of them were not much more than a year out of undergrad. Perhaps such outings really do better with an overseeing individual, a role which may, this time, have been played by the other instructor. I still think a wiki-style organized outing would work. Maybe I'll try again sometime. I expect I'll be around for another summer...

sumidiot.com

I said I'd have one more post about sumidiot.com. Well, here it is. I've now got rss feeds available on sumidiot.com (all news, math jokes news, for now). So if you're interested in the site, I'll probably just let you follow those. Then if you aren't interested, you don't have to hear too much about it here.

Logging in seems to work (as long as you have cookies enabled), though it won't get you much right now. The next thing I will write should let you rate jokes, if you are logged in, and then it'll be totally worth it.

One of the things I wanted to play with was another way to access the math jokes. If you direct your browser to sumidiot.com/jokeN, and it's a proper N (like N=1 works), you'll see a joke as part of the webpage. For example, if you follow the 'Random' joke link, it'll send you to a /jokeN. If you'd rather just get the raw joke text, you can send 'Accept: text/plain' in your HTTP header. I'm pretty sure this doesn't qualify this as a web API, but it's the closest I'm going to get for a while. If nothing in this paragraph made any sense, just ignore it.

Ok, I guess I better get back to things I'm actually supposed to be doing with my time...

[Update (July 31, 2008): Changed the feed links above to use feedburner. Nice to have stats sometimes, I guess.]

Keeping Up

It might be a mathematician's obsessive-compulsive tendencies, or lack of proper motivation to do other things, but I like to try to keep up with all my rss/atom feeds, and largely with my twitter stream. I tried, for a while, setting up Google Reader with a folder that I didn't keep up-to-date with, and would just check randomly when I was bored, but it never quite sat right with me. I'll star items to read later, but once I get over 20 or 30, and certainly by about 40 starred items, I start getting pretty antsy. Furthermore, I check Reader's 'Discover' link every few days, because the thought of it not being an empty list of recommended feeds is a little annoying. Sometimes I wish I could turn off the recommendation engine, though I suppose not clicking 'Discover' is about the same.

This past week I moved into a new apartment, which was, itself, newly renovated with all brand new appliances. I mention this because one of my new appliances gives me something else to keep up with. My fridge has a pretty productive little ice-maker. As it is summer time, and I'm trying to do a fair bit of running, I need to be drinking lots of water anyway. And I don't like drinking water without lots of ice. So it's nice that there's always ice. At the same time, it's just one more thing to keep up with :)

Miss Me?

I doubt it, but I thought I'd update you a bit anyway.

Two Mondays ago (9th of June) I finished moving out of my apartment. The next day I drove to my mom's house in Lansing, Michigan. The next day I flew to Portland, Oregon, where I rented a car and drove down to Eugene, Oregon, to spend a week with my friend Rob from undergrad days. Luckily I know somebody awesome who works for Southwest Airlines, so I was able to fly free (thanks again Susan). I was surprised by the ample leg room on the flights, so that was nice. My stop-overs (once on the way out, once on the way back) in Chicago (Midway) were both bumpy, but we made it. On my way out, the girl that set next to me had never flown before, so she was none too happy with the rocky landing. It was entertaining (of course, I was nervous myself).

Rob's easily the best Dr. Mario player I've ever met. I learned while I was away that there's a Wii version which allows for world rankings. I'm sure he's got high hopes for that, and I hope he doesn't let it impact too heavily his graduate school career. It also means I'm even more excited about the wii. I also got to see some Portal played, and it was about as awesome as I'd expected. I'm still trying to find the best way for me to get it (Linux version?), or even just a knock-off.

Rob and I hung out around Eugene for a while, and I got to meet several of his colleagues in the math department. The University of Oregon campus is pretty, and Eugene seemed like a nice town. Rob holds it in higher esteem, as his own Shangri-La. We climbed both Buttes in Eugene, and I went on a run with one of his friends that involved some trails near Spencer's Butte (the larger of the two, on the south side of the city). On a running note, Eugene is 'Track Town USA' and host to this summer's Olympic Track and Field Trials. Last time I visited with Rob we watched 'Without Limits', about the runner Steve Prefontaine, which I recommend. This time we watched (among other things) Wildboyz seasons 3 and 4 - fantastic stuff. I also learned that the county directly north of Eugene is the 'Grass Seed Capitol of the World', and was annoyingly reminded that I've got some allergies.

After a few days in Eugene, we headed out for a road trip. We drove out to the coast, and then straight up the pacific coast highway. If you're headed out that way, you can avoid the Sea Lion Caves, but all the other stops are probably worth it (all the ones we stopped at were). We stayed the night in Astoria, in the upper-left corner or Oregon, and the next day drove pretty much straight across to Mt. St. Helens. Sadly it was still early in the season, and the trail I convinced Rob to do was closed. We did the Hummocks trail, which was ok, and stopped by Coldwater Lake after visiting the Johnston Ridge Observatory. After Mt. St. Helens we headed back to Eugene.

The next day we woke up and headed out to Crater Lake with Rob's friend Pisa (sp? Pysa?) from Thailand. It was a bit of a drive, but entirely worth it. We drove in via a counter-clockwise route from the upper-right corner, and out straight west. Both routes were beautiful. Of course, the lake itself was also stunning. Again we were a bit early in the season, so the Rim Road was mostly closed. We walked a few miles along it though, and got nice views of the lake. We also saw a black bear, a deer, and a fox, though no elk (I wanted to see one the whole week).

The next day (I'm up to Wednesday the 18th, if you are curious) I flew back to Detroit, where my friend Pete from high school, along with his fiancee Barbara, picked me up and drove me back to their place in Ann Arbor. Pete's pretty much been my idol since high school, and visiting with him is always great. I've only met Barbara twice, but she's very nice, and they seem happy together, so I'm happy for them. Thursday morning Pete took me for a run, and then we visited downtown Ann Arbor (Borders and the outdoor store Bivouac and another little book store whose name I have forgotten) for a little while before returning to his place to watch the Germany/Portugal Euro Cup quarterfinal game. I haven't watched any soccer since the World Cup two summers ago, so this was fun, and I'm now looking forward to catching the last few games. After the game he drove me to mom's place in Lansing and headed home after dinner.

Friday was a pretty uneventful day at home, watching some movies and relaxing. Saturday morning I helped mom a little with a yard sale. In the evening we went to the Lansing Lugnuts baseball game. That was fun, and the fireworks afterwards were nice. Sunday I woke up and headed straight 'home' to Charlottesville. Of course, I'm between apartments right now, and staying at a friends place, hence the quotes around home. If you're planning a similar drive, between Charlottesville and Michigan or so, I recommend this route over Google's default suggestion, because it's not much different length/time-wise, but is much cheaper with regards to tolls ($2.50 versus something up around $18, if I recall correctly). Plus the bit through western Virginia and West Virginia is pretty.

I wish I had some pictures to show you of Oregon. Sadly my battery is out, and in all the moving and traveling I seem to have misplaced my charger. So you might not get any pictures until after I move into my apartment in July. Sorry. You can probably find better ones online of all the places I was anyway.

So there you go, you're all caught up. Lucky you.

[Ok, I've got a question for you about this post. Were the wikipedia links worthwhile? Are there words I should have linked (even if not to wikipedia)? I always wonder how many things to link, since you can find the same pages quickly enough if you are interested.]

Milestone!

I've been enjoying watching hits trickle in based on the Feedjit widget on the right of this page. Today I noticed I had hits from the 6 continents you'd expect. If anybody knows somebody in Antarctica with a few spare minutes, you could really make my day (though I don't know why you'd care to). At first it looked like that hit in Australia was from my birthplace of Alice Springs. But zooming in, apparently it's a little south of that.

Anyway, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to all of you who didn't find what you were looking for here. I know I've been even worse than usual about content with any value recently. I'd like to correct that.

Haircut

Sometime in April I started wondering about giving myself a haircut. Everybody "knows" it's a bad idea, so I was curious to see just how poorly it would go. I waited until the end of the semester, and then went for it. Since I was expecting disaster, I thought I'd document the process with some photos. It actually went better than expected, so I didn't bother much with the pictures. But last night I was going through some other pictures, ran across these ones, and got a chuckle out of them. So I thought you might as well.

Here's one before getting started:


And then I brushed it up, generally good for a laugh:

I'm vaguely reminded of Eraserhead.

After these two, I stood over the sink with a pair of scissors, grabbing bits of hair and chopping off those that felt long. Here's the result:

Probably a photo from the back would be a bit more like what you'd expect of giving yourself a haircut... but I'm only so flexible. I guess the trick with giving yourself a haircut is: if you cut everything short enough, you can't really go wrong.