Juneteenth

Happy Juneteenth everybody!  I had no idea that was a thing until I just looked it up on Wikipedia, but it's a nice way to open a post.  I just saw that some other people had updated recently, so I thought I would ride the mini-wave and let people know what's up with me.

The spring term is over here, and summer term doesn't start for another week or so.  It doesn't really matter to me, since I'm not teaching or anything during the summer term, which is when the math majors are on co-op, so there are few classes.  Not that there are many math majors, anyway, but summer classes are always in demand by the faculty so that they can continue to get paychecks all through these dog days.  Incidentally, it's probably not the dog days yet, technically, but it is awfully hot, so I'm going to pretend that the etymology is from dogs panting or something.

My research is going pretty well.  I typed up a giant (well, like 10 pages or so) document with a ton of computation on it, and now I'm just sort of reformatting and adding some signs (don't ask).  It's mostly a well-known computation, but nobody seems to ever write it out, or is ever even clear about what they are using the results for specifically, so it is good to be clear.  As you can imagine, making a bunch of little changes to a ton of code is not particularly interesting, so I won't bore you with the details, but it has given me a bunch of opportunities to take breaks, and since I'm not on campus, I use those breaks for things other than drinking coffee.  Things like making this:

As always, apologies for the weird coloration provided by the inadequate lighting here.  It's a strawberry-banana pie.  Actually I was short one banana, so I threw in a very ripe peach, as well.  I haven't actually tried it yet, except for a little bit of the crumble stuff on top.  Incidentally, it was also baked in a pi-tin.  Well, pi-plate.  That is, there's a big letter pi on it, and the digits around the rim.  It's not mine.  It just happened to be the only thing that looked like it would work for making pies.  The pie crust is also made from scratch, so haha!  I'm like a real homemaker or something.  Again, I haven't actually tried it yet.

In other news, there's not really any other news.  There are some shows that I've been watching, but nothing that anyone would be interested in.  It's too bad because Young Jutice (this is a children's cartoon) is actually quite good and the current storyline is pretty twisty and the creators were kind of bold in some of their choices, especially considering it's a cartoon running on Saturday mornings.  Unfortunately, I don't really have any friends who are that interested in amekomi = American comics, as Mie-chan calls it.  Ah, well.  Everyone else's loss.

I don't think anyone reading this has an iPhone, but I do want to mention that recently I got to play Ticket to Ride on one, and I have to say it is awesome and pretty much the only thing I've seen on them that really makes me want one at all.  I mean, siri is cool or whatever, but I can't see myself using much of the functionality.  Ticket to Ride is an awesome game, as you probably know if you are reading this blog, but it's even cooler when all the shuffling and whatnot is taken care of for you.  You can pass the phone back and forth to play with other people or play with multiple phones, but either way, it speeds the game up a ton.  I think only the America map is available, but there are some expansions and whatnot.  Anyway, I think it is pretty cheap to buy.

Alright, I guess that is pretty much all of my news.

Update: the pie is delicious (^_^)

Late Night Post

What's up?  Late night post is what's up.  So, I don't want this to just become my brog (this is a term I just made up for brag-blog), but I should probably mention that I was awarded, or at least informed that I would soon be awarded, another teaching assistant award, this time a department-exclusive one.  So that's kind of nice and will probably result in some more money coming my way.  So, real topics:

My research is actually going pretty well.  I am just finishing up a problem that I have been working on for basically ever involving homotopy categories of modules, blah blah, nobody really knows what that means.  At least I think I am in the home stretch.  There is some sort of connecting material which I am not totally clear on, but I think it is just classical results that I can adapt if need be.  It's odd that most of the time I have spent seems to be on simply understanding what the problem even was, and the second most time I spent was trying to decode the particularly French way that some stuff is encoded.  The French style can be, from what I can tell, generally summed up succinctly as "obfuscation."

I don't know if I have ever posted about this stuff before, but I probably did at least mention that based on my admittedly small (n=1) sample size, being in grad school has a weird sort of specialization effect to it, where people on the outside just see you and your peers as "doing math (or whatever you do)," but you each see what the other people do as completely foreign.  Maybe it is more exclusive to math, but I actually have the feeling that it is even less pronounced in math than in other fields, but as mathematicians, we don't really see outside of our own bubble.  Actually, a tree is probably a better model than a bubble, but I digress.  I only learned relatively recently that the number of, say, biologists doing research today is something like 10 times the number of mathematicians doing the same, so it is even more disparate.  I don't actually know if that is true; it's just what I heard.  Ultimately, I don't care that much if it is true, but it would be sort of interesting if it were.

The whole point of that last paragraph was that I got into some totally non-serious argument weeks ago with another student about how I act like my math is harder than other people's math, but it's really not.  I don't really think that's fair, because I usually preface talking about my stuff with "it's actually very easy," or "anyone could do this," or "it's just composing linear maps" if I am feeling fancy.  I do get to name drop a bunch of crazy sounding things like "total derived functors" and "supercommutative algebras associative up to homotopy" and "quasi-coherent sheaves of modules," for example, but this is just the benefit/curse of doing anything algebraic.  The field necessitates a bunch of terminology, which makes it very front-end heavy when learning.  That's compounded by the fact that a lot of the difficulty comes in actually understanding what result you are trying to get, as opposed to how to get there.  I can't really explain it without getting into more detail, which I don't want to do, but oftentimes the actual computational work is relatively simple, without analysis-like complicated inequalities, or crazy functions like ! or Gamma or zeta or anything because that's not algebraic by it's very nature.  Also, people tend to turn off if they don't immediately know the thing you are talking about because they (understandably) don't want to spend all their time wading through definitions they'll probably never use.

Just to contrast, the argument came up because I said sometimes I was jealous of her (she does combinatorics) because often you can just pick up a paper and read the intro or the initial definitions and say to yourself "ah, I see what you would like to count; that's a reasonable type of object," even if the actual work in getting the result is painstaking and, well, sort of awful to do.  It's just kind of nice not have to stop after the first sentence to chase down the ridiculous set of axioms that define a "triangulated category" or something.  She didn't really read what I was saying as that, but it all worked out, and, anyway, my other friend, who also does combinatorics-like stuff, totally understood what I was saying.  I think he only understands it better after slogging through ten weeks of algebraic geometry to get to the realization that it's mostly things like zeroes of polynomials.  Ha ha.

Ok, so I guess there's not much going on in my life outside of school?  I saw three, three, woodchucks in rapid succession on Monday.  They were definitely all different woodchucks, too.  I thought it was pretty impressive.  When I told my friend (the first one, above) about it, she said "do you mean groundhogs?"  I said, "yes, they are the same animal," and she said, "yes, but you are here, and here they are called groundhogs."  So maybe it's a regional thing?  I mean, I definitely have heard both, but I prefer the name woodchuck.

Oh, yeah, and another note about math.  My advisor once told me I was "kind of a weirdo for this school because you're the only one that likes algebra."  He also said in class that algebraic geometry was kind of a "crappy field to go into, because everyone else will be publishing papers and you'll still be trying to figure out what's going on" or something to that effect.  I just thought that was kind of funny.

BOA

I just want to rant about how stupid bank of america is.  I only got an account with them so that I wouldn't get charged for using ATMs, by the way.  I keep trying to set up direct deposit for my paychecks, but, understandably, I need the account number.  You would think in the 21st century that this would be easy to get via ATM or the bank's website, but, no, BOA insists on hiding my number from me at ATMs, for what reason I cannot fathom, and their website refuses to let me sign in because I don't know the passcode that THEY NEVER GAVE ME and I can't reset because "security purposes," even though I've already given them my debit card number, my PIN, and my SSN.  There is literally NO WAY ON EARTH that I could have all this information and not be me.  Why not just look on my bank statement, you ask?  Well, they keep sending my statements to my old address, and I can't tell them to change addresses because I would need to sign on to the website to do so.  In what universe does this security system make any sense?  I just want to know my account number so that I can put money in the account, something which I am able to do via LESS INFORMATION than I have already given them.  Just to belabor the point, with LESS INFORMATION than I have already given them, I could take all the money in the account out in cash and close it.  These people are morons.