In keeping with my obsession with Dylan and his seeming obsession with adverbs, I thought I'd title this post something like the above. I keep listening to "Buckets of Rain" over and over again. It's the closing track to "Blood on the Tracks," for those of you less versed in Dylan's repertoire, and one of Eric's favorites, if I recall correctly. There's something quiet and brilliant about it, like the sermon of a broken-hearted Minnesotan Buddha. Here's a gem:
I been meek
And hard like an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke
Friends will arrive, friends will disappear
If you want me, honey baby
I’ll be here
Cool.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
New Quarter
I've got a shiny new quarter! We are on the quarter system, so this is kind of a pun.
So, what is on tap for the next few months? Class #1 is Complex Analysis, which is not just normal analysis but harder, but specifically analysis (think calculus) in the field of complex numbers. I don't know why but it seems like complex numbers are a thing that everybody who's had at least Algebra II should know about, but nobody seems to know by name. They're just numbers of the form a + bi, where a and b are real, and i is the familiar square root of -1. There are bunches of ways to think about them, but usually people think about the real numbers as being a line and the complex numbers being a plane where the real numbers are one axis and the imaginary numbers are the other axis. Other times people think of the complex numbers, with a "point at infinity" attached, as a sphere. Then the real numbers would form a great circle on the sphere, as would the imaginary numbers, or any other line, for that matter. The most important thing, though, is that this is the last of my "required" courses.
Class #2 is part two of Applied Functional Analysis, which I am taking just to fill out my credits and because the first quarter was almost laughably easy, so I'm assuming we'll continue on in that fashion for the next ten weeks.
Class #3, which I haven't gotten officially recognized as a class yet, but only because I haven't talked to the secretary over break, is a reading class with the professor who taught my Topology I & II courses over fall and winter terms. He asked me if I would want to finish (the relevant parts of) the book we had been using and then read some stuff about model categories and other nonsense, probably because I was the only one who liked all this abstract nonsense and diagram chasing and wasn't busy doing research about numbers in boxes or some such. So, I'm keeping busy reading and re-reading stuff until I can't think any more.
As far as teaching goes, I was expecting to be doing a recitation section or two for what I call "math for dummies," but the first years don't have any teaching experience yet, so they got all those, which means I am relegated to the tutoring center for nine hours/week. Until now, the most I've had in there is six hours/week, so I am trying to get my hours scheduled to days that aren't before large exams. Those are the worst days because all these people who have never gone to class and can't do basic algebra come in and ask you to basically teach them everything in a few hours, and it is frowned on to just tell them that that is stupid and they are stupid and should just drop their class because they will assuredly fail, even if it is true.
I should specify: there are a few types of students who come for help.
1. Students who come in periodically for help with specific problems/concepts that they don't understand - Most of these students are good and nice to work with because you can't do problems for them and then let them do similar problems, or just guide them through the problems step by step, or sometimes just casually watch over them as they work. Usually these students come from one of the many calculus classes or linear algebra, which is understandable, since linear is the first time that most people have to think abstractly at all, and sometimes calculus problems just involve seeing some clever transformation that isn't obvious the first time, but also sometimes they come from lower classes, trying to figure out when to apply what formula.
2. Hopeless students - These students are usually continuing education students or sometimes low-level people trying (often for the 2nd or 3rd time) to get the math requirements for their major done. These students are a huge pain to work with because while they try, they will never succeed, and you can't just dismiss them, because at least they are trying and aren't putting it off till the last minute. I don't know whether it speaks to the absolutely horrendous state of math education K-12 in the U.S., or if there is just a segment of the population that is completely incapable of reasoning or the use of symbols to further that reasoning. One of the biggest hurdles is people that, as I mentioned earlier, can't do even basic algebra. I really think that if you graduated high school without the ability to do everything in a typical Algebra I (I am talking h.s. or junior high level) class without any real thought or effort, you are basically on the same level as someone who is still sounding words out when they read and your school completely failed you.
The reason I can't figure out whether it is the fault of the educational system or of just some people is that people seem to lack a fundamental understanding of what they're doing, rather than the specifics of how to do it. For example, you are probably familiar with the quadratic formula, and most people that come in have at least that formula drilled into their heads. But if I give you the equation of a parabola and tell you to find x-intercepts, would you know to use that formula? People don't make the connection between an equation and a graph, that the graph is a set of points with coordinates (x,y) that satisfy a given equation. They don't seem to even understand what that means, i.e., that an equation is a statement which is either true or not. They can't distinguish between an equation and an expression, and instead just memorize how to solve equations and are baffled by what an equation, or any mathematical expression, for that matter, is saying. I don't know whether this is something that most people can be taught or if it is just something you have to work out for yourself.
3. Awful students - These are the previously mentioned students who don't care enough to do anything but care about getting passing grades. Another thing they love to do is try to make you do their take home quizzes/homework for them. Some of them realize that we won't just do their problems for them, but will do similar problems, so they "cleverly" copy their problems to another sheet of paper and then ask us to do those problems. I don't know why people think this will work. It is insultingly dumb and really annoying.
So that does it for my rant, and since this is already a basically impenetrable wall of text, I'll just end the update here.
So, what is on tap for the next few months? Class #1 is Complex Analysis, which is not just normal analysis but harder, but specifically analysis (think calculus) in the field of complex numbers. I don't know why but it seems like complex numbers are a thing that everybody who's had at least Algebra II should know about, but nobody seems to know by name. They're just numbers of the form a + bi, where a and b are real, and i is the familiar square root of -1. There are bunches of ways to think about them, but usually people think about the real numbers as being a line and the complex numbers being a plane where the real numbers are one axis and the imaginary numbers are the other axis. Other times people think of the complex numbers, with a "point at infinity" attached, as a sphere. Then the real numbers would form a great circle on the sphere, as would the imaginary numbers, or any other line, for that matter. The most important thing, though, is that this is the last of my "required" courses.
Class #2 is part two of Applied Functional Analysis, which I am taking just to fill out my credits and because the first quarter was almost laughably easy, so I'm assuming we'll continue on in that fashion for the next ten weeks.
Class #3, which I haven't gotten officially recognized as a class yet, but only because I haven't talked to the secretary over break, is a reading class with the professor who taught my Topology I & II courses over fall and winter terms. He asked me if I would want to finish (the relevant parts of) the book we had been using and then read some stuff about model categories and other nonsense, probably because I was the only one who liked all this abstract nonsense and diagram chasing and wasn't busy doing research about numbers in boxes or some such. So, I'm keeping busy reading and re-reading stuff until I can't think any more.
As far as teaching goes, I was expecting to be doing a recitation section or two for what I call "math for dummies," but the first years don't have any teaching experience yet, so they got all those, which means I am relegated to the tutoring center for nine hours/week. Until now, the most I've had in there is six hours/week, so I am trying to get my hours scheduled to days that aren't before large exams. Those are the worst days because all these people who have never gone to class and can't do basic algebra come in and ask you to basically teach them everything in a few hours, and it is frowned on to just tell them that that is stupid and they are stupid and should just drop their class because they will assuredly fail, even if it is true.
I should specify: there are a few types of students who come for help.
1. Students who come in periodically for help with specific problems/concepts that they don't understand - Most of these students are good and nice to work with because you can't do problems for them and then let them do similar problems, or just guide them through the problems step by step, or sometimes just casually watch over them as they work. Usually these students come from one of the many calculus classes or linear algebra, which is understandable, since linear is the first time that most people have to think abstractly at all, and sometimes calculus problems just involve seeing some clever transformation that isn't obvious the first time, but also sometimes they come from lower classes, trying to figure out when to apply what formula.
2. Hopeless students - These students are usually continuing education students or sometimes low-level people trying (often for the 2nd or 3rd time) to get the math requirements for their major done. These students are a huge pain to work with because while they try, they will never succeed, and you can't just dismiss them, because at least they are trying and aren't putting it off till the last minute. I don't know whether it speaks to the absolutely horrendous state of math education K-12 in the U.S., or if there is just a segment of the population that is completely incapable of reasoning or the use of symbols to further that reasoning. One of the biggest hurdles is people that, as I mentioned earlier, can't do even basic algebra. I really think that if you graduated high school without the ability to do everything in a typical Algebra I (I am talking h.s. or junior high level) class without any real thought or effort, you are basically on the same level as someone who is still sounding words out when they read and your school completely failed you.
The reason I can't figure out whether it is the fault of the educational system or of just some people is that people seem to lack a fundamental understanding of what they're doing, rather than the specifics of how to do it. For example, you are probably familiar with the quadratic formula, and most people that come in have at least that formula drilled into their heads. But if I give you the equation of a parabola and tell you to find x-intercepts, would you know to use that formula? People don't make the connection between an equation and a graph, that the graph is a set of points with coordinates (x,y) that satisfy a given equation. They don't seem to even understand what that means, i.e., that an equation is a statement which is either true or not. They can't distinguish between an equation and an expression, and instead just memorize how to solve equations and are baffled by what an equation, or any mathematical expression, for that matter, is saying. I don't know whether this is something that most people can be taught or if it is just something you have to work out for yourself.
3. Awful students - These are the previously mentioned students who don't care enough to do anything but care about getting passing grades. Another thing they love to do is try to make you do their take home quizzes/homework for them. Some of them realize that we won't just do their problems for them, but will do similar problems, so they "cleverly" copy their problems to another sheet of paper and then ask us to do those problems. I don't know why people think this will work. It is insultingly dumb and really annoying.
So that does it for my rant, and since this is already a basically impenetrable wall of text, I'll just end the update here.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Not Much Happening
As the title would leave you to believe, there's not much happening. The term is almost over, which is nice because I won't have to deal with all the work that teaching (teaching assisting?) Data Analysis entails. It's not a horrible class or anything, but the grading takes forever since it's all explanations, not math. I often have to read through paragraph+ length answers despite the fact that all the questions can be answered properly in AT MOST two sentences. The problem is that the class is for bio major seniors who have spent the last four years learning to regurgitate terminology mindlessly, and who have taken to heart the lesson that the less you know, the more you should write. So, there are all these practically novella length completely wrong answers, which I have to read through. The kids that are good at it have started to learn how to be concise and right answers are generally easy to grade, anyway, because I can just comb through them for the right combination of words, but wrong answers take forever because I have to try to figure out what they are thinking (which is usually nothing) in order to give partial credit, and then I have to write something about how they are wrong or what they should have said.
They just had an exam this last week, which means the grading was even worse because I have to be more careful and the length of their answers has been stepped up War and Peace levels. One girl, who is almost surely the worst student of all time, actually wrote a whole page of nonsense that didn't even answer the question, and then a request for at least partial credit for addressing something tangential to what was asked. I wrote "this does not approach an answer" and gave her 0 points for that. They lose points with me for wasting my time with stuff like that. Other things I have written on exams include "don't write me a novel," "answer the question," "do this [with an arrow pointing to the directions]," and "baffling." That last one actually made some other TAs laugh. They are generally sympathetic, but not sympathetic enough to help grade.
Most of the classes have many sections, taught by a few instructors/TAs, and there are usually one or two TAs who just grade, which means when the low level classes have an exam, there's an all day grading session in the common area/break room/whatever it is called where the mailboxes and coffee are. I have been part of a couple for a class last spring, and it's almost nice because it's social and there is pizza. Of course, the social aspect can be not so great if you don't like the people you are working with, but sometimes I get jealous, since when I am grading exams, it is just me and the one professor who teaches the class in our separate offices for nine hours at a time and there is no pizza :(
On the learning side of things, there's not much happening, either. I have three courses this term, as I am trying to finish up all my course requirements this year, which means three courses per term. They're not bad, though.
One of them is applied functional analysis, which is probably the easiest course I have had here. It's like baby analysis, definitely a step down in difficulty from the analysis course I had here last year, which was intended to be preparation for the qualifier, so it was fairly rigorous. This course is for people who have already had analysis, but the book we use is for someone who never has, so a lot of the exercises are nothing new if you have a solid grasp of things like vector spaces and metric spaces. Since this post is already rambling and fairly low-content, I guess I will explain.
A vector space is just a set of vectors that meets certain basic algebraic conditions. This may sound daunting, but it isn't. It just means that you can add and subtract vectors and stay in the space, as well as multiply them by scalars (which basically just means real numbers or complex (!) numbers). The addition and multiplication have to behave nicely, too. They have to be associative and commutative and whatnot.
A metric space is just a set that has a distance function on it. I think I've talked about them before, and it's not super hard to figure out what is meant by a distance function, anyway. It just needs to tell you the distance between two points in a way that a distance does. For example, d(x,y) = |x - y| is a metric for any Euclidean space [n-tuples of numbers].
In this class, we are specifically interested in normed vector spaces, which is basically a vector space that is also a metric space, and the metric behaves like an absolute value, and even more specifically in inner product spaces, which are normed spaces where the norm (absolute value) comes from something that acts like a dot product, if that means anything to you. So, it's not highly interesting from my point of view, but it's alright.
My second course is abstract algebra, which is concerned with abstract algebraic (duh!) spaces, such as rings and groups and whatnot. I had a class in it in undergrad, and I haven't picked up a whole lot here, but it's nice to get the review and to learn Sylow's theorems, which are super useful.
My third class is my most interesting, so I arbitrarily numbered it third. It's algebraic topology, which I can only define in an abstruse way. Topology is generally the study of topological invariants, and algebraic topology is just a branch where these invariants are algebraic structures like groups. There's more to it than that, but I can't really explain everything. It's the field of study that primarily lead to category theory, which is probably the most abstract form of math. It's also very difficult to understand in my experience. A category in the mathematical sense is just a collection (not even just sets!!!) of objects with morphisms, which are basically just arrows between the objects that you can compose if the head of one points to the tail of the other. This makes everything basically into a category, and they can usually be thought of in tons of different ways if you just change what you want to be the morphisms, and ultimately you sort of don't care about the objects at all. It's very bizarre. Here's an example:
A group is an algebraic concept. It's just a set where there's a "multiplication," which is associative [ (ab)c = a(bc) ], and there's an identity element ,e, which acts like a 1. That is, ea = ae = a, and every element has an inverse, which basically means you can divide. Anyway, we can think of a group as a category with only one object, which is the group itself, and all the morphisms are multiplication by one of the elements of the group, so that all the arrows in the category point from the only object back to itself, so it's a very simple category.
For a totally different example, you can think of the collection of all sets being the objects of a category, and the morphisms just being functions from one set to the other. Since if f:X -> Y and g:Y -> Z, then we can compose the functions like g(f(x)), this makes sense as a category. Technically, we also need identity morphisms, but for each set X, the function i(x) = x suits works fine. So, this is a gigantic category. In fact, it is so big that the objects don't form a set at all, but rather a proper class. IT'S CRAZY.
They just had an exam this last week, which means the grading was even worse because I have to be more careful and the length of their answers has been stepped up War and Peace levels. One girl, who is almost surely the worst student of all time, actually wrote a whole page of nonsense that didn't even answer the question, and then a request for at least partial credit for addressing something tangential to what was asked. I wrote "this does not approach an answer" and gave her 0 points for that. They lose points with me for wasting my time with stuff like that. Other things I have written on exams include "don't write me a novel," "answer the question," "do this [with an arrow pointing to the directions]," and "baffling." That last one actually made some other TAs laugh. They are generally sympathetic, but not sympathetic enough to help grade.
Most of the classes have many sections, taught by a few instructors/TAs, and there are usually one or two TAs who just grade, which means when the low level classes have an exam, there's an all day grading session in the common area/break room/whatever it is called where the mailboxes and coffee are. I have been part of a couple for a class last spring, and it's almost nice because it's social and there is pizza. Of course, the social aspect can be not so great if you don't like the people you are working with, but sometimes I get jealous, since when I am grading exams, it is just me and the one professor who teaches the class in our separate offices for nine hours at a time and there is no pizza :(
On the learning side of things, there's not much happening, either. I have three courses this term, as I am trying to finish up all my course requirements this year, which means three courses per term. They're not bad, though.
One of them is applied functional analysis, which is probably the easiest course I have had here. It's like baby analysis, definitely a step down in difficulty from the analysis course I had here last year, which was intended to be preparation for the qualifier, so it was fairly rigorous. This course is for people who have already had analysis, but the book we use is for someone who never has, so a lot of the exercises are nothing new if you have a solid grasp of things like vector spaces and metric spaces. Since this post is already rambling and fairly low-content, I guess I will explain.
A vector space is just a set of vectors that meets certain basic algebraic conditions. This may sound daunting, but it isn't. It just means that you can add and subtract vectors and stay in the space, as well as multiply them by scalars (which basically just means real numbers or complex (!) numbers). The addition and multiplication have to behave nicely, too. They have to be associative and commutative and whatnot.
A metric space is just a set that has a distance function on it. I think I've talked about them before, and it's not super hard to figure out what is meant by a distance function, anyway. It just needs to tell you the distance between two points in a way that a distance does. For example, d(x,y) = |x - y| is a metric for any Euclidean space [n-tuples of numbers].
In this class, we are specifically interested in normed vector spaces, which is basically a vector space that is also a metric space, and the metric behaves like an absolute value, and even more specifically in inner product spaces, which are normed spaces where the norm (absolute value) comes from something that acts like a dot product, if that means anything to you. So, it's not highly interesting from my point of view, but it's alright.
My second course is abstract algebra, which is concerned with abstract algebraic (duh!) spaces, such as rings and groups and whatnot. I had a class in it in undergrad, and I haven't picked up a whole lot here, but it's nice to get the review and to learn Sylow's theorems, which are super useful.
My third class is my most interesting, so I arbitrarily numbered it third. It's algebraic topology, which I can only define in an abstruse way. Topology is generally the study of topological invariants, and algebraic topology is just a branch where these invariants are algebraic structures like groups. There's more to it than that, but I can't really explain everything. It's the field of study that primarily lead to category theory, which is probably the most abstract form of math. It's also very difficult to understand in my experience. A category in the mathematical sense is just a collection (not even just sets!!!) of objects with morphisms, which are basically just arrows between the objects that you can compose if the head of one points to the tail of the other. This makes everything basically into a category, and they can usually be thought of in tons of different ways if you just change what you want to be the morphisms, and ultimately you sort of don't care about the objects at all. It's very bizarre. Here's an example:
A group is an algebraic concept. It's just a set where there's a "multiplication," which is associative [ (ab)c = a(bc) ], and there's an identity element ,e, which acts like a 1. That is, ea = ae = a, and every element has an inverse, which basically means you can divide. Anyway, we can think of a group as a category with only one object, which is the group itself, and all the morphisms are multiplication by one of the elements of the group, so that all the arrows in the category point from the only object back to itself, so it's a very simple category.
For a totally different example, you can think of the collection of all sets being the objects of a category, and the morphisms just being functions from one set to the other. Since if f:X -> Y and g:Y -> Z, then we can compose the functions like g(f(x)), this makes sense as a category. Technically, we also need identity morphisms, but for each set X, the function i(x) = x suits works fine. So, this is a gigantic category. In fact, it is so big that the objects don't form a set at all, but rather a proper class. IT'S CRAZY.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Risk-y Business
In case anyone was wondering, I tried to let that dude down easy, and he hasn't replied, so I assume he's feeling a little (-_-;)
Anyway, my students have an exam on Tuesday, and most of them had their last lab on Wednesday, so they generally wouldn't be getting the graded labs back until after the exam, but since some kids asked me for them, and since I am such an excellent TA, I came in today (Sunday) just to grade them. It's not particularly long or anything, but I will make sure they know how I slaved and slaved for their benefit, of course.
Grading took at most an hour, since I already had one of the two sections graded and since I am very lenient and tend to grade people that I know work together just once and replicate the grade across the group. So I had a bunch of time left over, and the math grad organization recently came into possession of a bunch of board games for the purposes of a board game night, which I didn't go to in order to play board games in Virginia, but I have the combination to the locker in which they are stored, so I decided to simulate some world conquest in my office. As secretary (maybe???) of the organization, I have a lot of pull as to what we do with our money (note: I took the job because there is no work and I am not even required to go to meetings), so I insisted we get Risk. There was plenty of money, so this was no issue. The president (my officemate) picked out the original version of Risk, as per the advice of the department board game aficionado. So here is what is different:
Not much.
There aren't III or V pieces, just oblong pieces that represent X's. The I's are in this version just wooden cubes. Interestingly, there's no brown, but there is pink. I am guessing that they realized that guys do not like to play with pink things in general. I assume that most people who enjoy Risk are men, as well as nerds. I also couldn't find in the instructions, which seem to be pared down for the re-release, how many armies each side starts with, but fortunately I remembered. If there are six players, each gets 20 armies, and for each fewer player, each side gets 5 more, by the way. If you only have two players, there's some sort of dummy third player, but I'm not clear on how that works because who plays Risk with two players?
I think a big part of the fun is the unofficial diplomacy that occurs when you actually have 3 or more (ideally at least 4) people playing that know how to play and don't get all butthurt when you inevitably break your alliance by smashing through their continent's defense. Some more unorganized thoughts about the game:
It's interesting how taking Australia first almost always ends not just in disaster, but in a particular kind of disaster. Almost every time I play, there ends up being a color that is almost forced to try to take Asia because there simply aren't enough continents for everyone to take a safer one at the beginning, and somebody has to get stuck with a bad position, including a couple territories in northern Asia. That guy basically has to try to take over all the undefended territories in a way that lets him maximize the armies along the border, which means for slow playing. Trying to take Asia in one fell swoop at the beginning is essentially suicide, so you get this weird thing where there's one guy with Australia whose goal is basically to get out of Asia, but has no choice but to go through Asia, and one guy who is stuck with most of Asia but no army bonus because he doesn't have Siam/India/Middle East, which is the Australian's path to expansion. But, because he's always taking these little undefended countries, the Asian guy gets to collect a lot of cards, which means he'll eventually get a set, and it tends to be at a time after the Australian guy has his continent but doesn't want to expand north because it would be trying to take Asia from the guy who has been trying to take it all game. What usually happens is that the guy with the set smashes through the border because the set will by that point outweigh the continent bonus, and likely will just take over Australia in a single turn. Maybe it is only due to using the usual rules for sets, which highly favors taking territories because the set values quickly outweigh everything else. I'm not sure what happens if you use the rules where sets only increase in value by 1 each time, but I do sometimes play that way, and it seems like a similar thing happens, in that I don't think I've ever played a game where the color that take Australia first wins.
Since I usually have to play by myself, I have to make sure to preserve features of the game that come from different people playing, and I try not to bias it towards any color or anything by making one guy do stupid things, but of course that isn't perfect. I always have a soft spot for the color that ends up being what I want to term the "roving empire," or maybe the huns of the game. Usually everyone's best strategy at the beginning of the game is to take a continent that that are set up to take, but as I mentioned, if you play with six players, there really aren't enough continents for this to work, so one player will inevitably end up losing this bid. This player never, in my experience, wins, but he's (pardon my androcentric pronouns, but generally all sides are me) also generally isn't really knocked out until later because eliminating another player requires a lot of armies, which nobody will have early in the game. So, he's just this guy who inhabits a non-claimed continent but can't take it from a more powerful player, meaning that his best chances lie in trying to survive long enough to get cards and hopefully establish himself again once the superpowers start fighting over the Bering Strait or something. In effect, he becomes this wandering army, trying to take weak territories, but not really holding onto them because the cards matter more than any individual territory if the continent is impossible to get. I think it's natural to root for this guy and much more fun to play than the guy who has to take the other strategy for a guy who lost his continent bid, which is to sit like a rock, collecting armies and hoping that somebody gets messed up. Probably just counting out armies is annoying.
Some places in the game inevitably get contested more than others, particularly ones that are on the boundary of two continents, and it's funny that for every one that mirrors some historically conflicted area, such as the whole Mediterranean sea, which reminds me of Rome vs. Carthage, or Greece and Turkey, or the middle east, or even 30 Years War-esque battles for Europe, there is an oddball, like Iceland vs. Greenland, two places which have probably never had a historic war, or North Africa vs. Brazil, which seems almost laughable if you look at an actual globe.
As much as I love Risk, the end game isn't very fun, and I usually just give up because I know how it's going to end and counting out 50+ armies for a set becomes tedious. I think the +1 rules are better for sets in general and probably should have started playing that way today but didn't, so I got stuck counting out too many armies, which is especially tedious without III's and V's.
Alright, well, that's probably enough for now.
Anyway, my students have an exam on Tuesday, and most of them had their last lab on Wednesday, so they generally wouldn't be getting the graded labs back until after the exam, but since some kids asked me for them, and since I am such an excellent TA, I came in today (Sunday) just to grade them. It's not particularly long or anything, but I will make sure they know how I slaved and slaved for their benefit, of course.
Grading took at most an hour, since I already had one of the two sections graded and since I am very lenient and tend to grade people that I know work together just once and replicate the grade across the group. So I had a bunch of time left over, and the math grad organization recently came into possession of a bunch of board games for the purposes of a board game night, which I didn't go to in order to play board games in Virginia, but I have the combination to the locker in which they are stored, so I decided to simulate some world conquest in my office. As secretary (maybe???) of the organization, I have a lot of pull as to what we do with our money (note: I took the job because there is no work and I am not even required to go to meetings), so I insisted we get Risk. There was plenty of money, so this was no issue. The president (my officemate) picked out the original version of Risk, as per the advice of the department board game aficionado. So here is what is different:
Not much.
There aren't III or V pieces, just oblong pieces that represent X's. The I's are in this version just wooden cubes. Interestingly, there's no brown, but there is pink. I am guessing that they realized that guys do not like to play with pink things in general. I assume that most people who enjoy Risk are men, as well as nerds. I also couldn't find in the instructions, which seem to be pared down for the re-release, how many armies each side starts with, but fortunately I remembered. If there are six players, each gets 20 armies, and for each fewer player, each side gets 5 more, by the way. If you only have two players, there's some sort of dummy third player, but I'm not clear on how that works because who plays Risk with two players?
I think a big part of the fun is the unofficial diplomacy that occurs when you actually have 3 or more (ideally at least 4) people playing that know how to play and don't get all butthurt when you inevitably break your alliance by smashing through their continent's defense. Some more unorganized thoughts about the game:
It's interesting how taking Australia first almost always ends not just in disaster, but in a particular kind of disaster. Almost every time I play, there ends up being a color that is almost forced to try to take Asia because there simply aren't enough continents for everyone to take a safer one at the beginning, and somebody has to get stuck with a bad position, including a couple territories in northern Asia. That guy basically has to try to take over all the undefended territories in a way that lets him maximize the armies along the border, which means for slow playing. Trying to take Asia in one fell swoop at the beginning is essentially suicide, so you get this weird thing where there's one guy with Australia whose goal is basically to get out of Asia, but has no choice but to go through Asia, and one guy who is stuck with most of Asia but no army bonus because he doesn't have Siam/India/Middle East, which is the Australian's path to expansion. But, because he's always taking these little undefended countries, the Asian guy gets to collect a lot of cards, which means he'll eventually get a set, and it tends to be at a time after the Australian guy has his continent but doesn't want to expand north because it would be trying to take Asia from the guy who has been trying to take it all game. What usually happens is that the guy with the set smashes through the border because the set will by that point outweigh the continent bonus, and likely will just take over Australia in a single turn. Maybe it is only due to using the usual rules for sets, which highly favors taking territories because the set values quickly outweigh everything else. I'm not sure what happens if you use the rules where sets only increase in value by 1 each time, but I do sometimes play that way, and it seems like a similar thing happens, in that I don't think I've ever played a game where the color that take Australia first wins.
Since I usually have to play by myself, I have to make sure to preserve features of the game that come from different people playing, and I try not to bias it towards any color or anything by making one guy do stupid things, but of course that isn't perfect. I always have a soft spot for the color that ends up being what I want to term the "roving empire," or maybe the huns of the game. Usually everyone's best strategy at the beginning of the game is to take a continent that that are set up to take, but as I mentioned, if you play with six players, there really aren't enough continents for this to work, so one player will inevitably end up losing this bid. This player never, in my experience, wins, but he's (pardon my androcentric pronouns, but generally all sides are me) also generally isn't really knocked out until later because eliminating another player requires a lot of armies, which nobody will have early in the game. So, he's just this guy who inhabits a non-claimed continent but can't take it from a more powerful player, meaning that his best chances lie in trying to survive long enough to get cards and hopefully establish himself again once the superpowers start fighting over the Bering Strait or something. In effect, he becomes this wandering army, trying to take weak territories, but not really holding onto them because the cards matter more than any individual territory if the continent is impossible to get. I think it's natural to root for this guy and much more fun to play than the guy who has to take the other strategy for a guy who lost his continent bid, which is to sit like a rock, collecting armies and hoping that somebody gets messed up. Probably just counting out armies is annoying.
Some places in the game inevitably get contested more than others, particularly ones that are on the boundary of two continents, and it's funny that for every one that mirrors some historically conflicted area, such as the whole Mediterranean sea, which reminds me of Rome vs. Carthage, or Greece and Turkey, or the middle east, or even 30 Years War-esque battles for Europe, there is an oddball, like Iceland vs. Greenland, two places which have probably never had a historic war, or North Africa vs. Brazil, which seems almost laughable if you look at an actual globe.
As much as I love Risk, the end game isn't very fun, and I usually just give up because I know how it's going to end and counting out 50+ armies for a set becomes tedious. I think the +1 rules are better for sets in general and probably should have started playing that way today but didn't, so I got stuck counting out too many armies, which is especially tedious without III's and V's.
Alright, well, that's probably enough for now.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Gaydar
So, I went with my friend who happens to be gay to a meeting for a grad students' gay rights thing because he didn't want to go alone and because there was a free happy hour after the meeting. The meeting was alright except there was a Chinese kid and an Indian kid, neither of whom understood the icebreaker of saying which muppet you would be. I chose one of the two old dudes, by the way. The happy hour was fun and saved me having to make my own dinner. Maybe I should have specified that I am not gay, though, because some dude sent me an email, which I got this morning, asking me out. Oh, dear. (~_~;)
Friday, February 4, 2011
Takoyaki party!
Since it's been almost a week since my last post, and since the trickle of comments has dried up on that one, I've decided to post some more pictures of my trip.
One day, Mie's older sister, who has two kids, invited us over to make takoyaki. Before that, we passed the time playing sugoroku, which is a generic name for a type of boardgame that generally just involves rolling a die or spinning a spinner, etc. to decide how many pieces to move. So, like Candy Land, except without the candy theme. This particular game was all about ojisan gyaggu, old puns and jokes that older men tend to say. An ojisan is an uncle, but it's also the term for any older guy who isn't old enough to be an ojiisan, a grandpa. So, you would play like normal, and on certain squares, had to say one of these gags, which are very corny and dumb, so of course I love them. The little girl in the picture is Misato, Mie's cute-as-a-button niece, whom we often call Mi-chan. Her younger brother was with his dad, so it was just the three of us and Mie's sister (not in the picture), Kaori. I don't remember who won, actually.
Here's us making the takoyaki. Tako means octopus, and yaki comes from yaku, which means to fry or burn or bake or whatever. The character is 焼く, if you are interested. The character for octopus is 鮹 or 蛸, but neither is used very much. Anyway, as you can probably guess, takoyaki is cooked octopus. Specifically, it is little balls of dough with octopus (sometimes other things like shrimp, too) that are cooked in this special maker thing that looks like a hot plate. It has little half-sphere indentations, and you fill those up most of the way with batter, and then add the stuff that goes inside. You have to turn the balls to make them cook evenly and get a nice shape to them, which requires a bit of skill.
Misato is quite the little cook, so hers were probably the best. Apparently, I don't turn them fast enough, so mine get cooked more thoroughly, but I think it's better that way. We divided the hot-plate into territories for which we were each responsible for one, except Misato, who was in charge of her mother's territory, too. Despite that, she still had time to intervene in mine because from her and Mie's point of view I ran my territory rather like a third-world country. Regardless, they were delicious!
Misato and her mom gave us these matching hats for Christmas, which turned out to be pretty convenient because it was easier to find each other on the ski slopes with them on. But, that's a post for another time!
One day, Mie's older sister, who has two kids, invited us over to make takoyaki. Before that, we passed the time playing sugoroku, which is a generic name for a type of boardgame that generally just involves rolling a die or spinning a spinner, etc. to decide how many pieces to move. So, like Candy Land, except without the candy theme. This particular game was all about ojisan gyaggu, old puns and jokes that older men tend to say. An ojisan is an uncle, but it's also the term for any older guy who isn't old enough to be an ojiisan, a grandpa. So, you would play like normal, and on certain squares, had to say one of these gags, which are very corny and dumb, so of course I love them. The little girl in the picture is Misato, Mie's cute-as-a-button niece, whom we often call Mi-chan. Her younger brother was with his dad, so it was just the three of us and Mie's sister (not in the picture), Kaori. I don't remember who won, actually.
Here's us making the takoyaki. Tako means octopus, and yaki comes from yaku, which means to fry or burn or bake or whatever. The character is 焼く, if you are interested. The character for octopus is 鮹 or 蛸, but neither is used very much. Anyway, as you can probably guess, takoyaki is cooked octopus. Specifically, it is little balls of dough with octopus (sometimes other things like shrimp, too) that are cooked in this special maker thing that looks like a hot plate. It has little half-sphere indentations, and you fill those up most of the way with batter, and then add the stuff that goes inside. You have to turn the balls to make them cook evenly and get a nice shape to them, which requires a bit of skill.
Misato is quite the little cook, so hers were probably the best. Apparently, I don't turn them fast enough, so mine get cooked more thoroughly, but I think it's better that way. We divided the hot-plate into territories for which we were each responsible for one, except Misato, who was in charge of her mother's territory, too. Despite that, she still had time to intervene in mine because from her and Mie's point of view I ran my territory rather like a third-world country. Regardless, they were delicious!
Misato and her mom gave us these matching hats for Christmas, which turned out to be pretty convenient because it was easier to find each other on the ski slopes with them on. But, that's a post for another time!
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Belated Pictures of Sand
I got pictures of my winter trip to glorious Nippon a while back, but I haven't gotten around to posting them yet, obviously, since it's one of those big projects, at least as blog posts go. So, I'll try to get them up with some sort of commentary about what we were doing, but it won't end up in chronological or logical or morphological or any other kind of -logical order because I've no doubt forgotten details in the time since and organizing stuff isn't really my forte.
Here we are celebrating our ascent to the top of the Tottori Sand Dunes. When I heard about the sand dunes, I figured it was just going to be like a long beach, but it turns out that the dunes are quite sizable and climbing up them is rather like hiking up a hillside except that the hillside is made of sand and thus more easily deformable under your feet. Forgive me for the topological terminology but I've been computing fundamental groups lately.
Perhaps this picture will give you an idea of how large the dunes really are. We hiked up to the top of the biggest dune we could see, which seemed to be the thing to do. It was cold and clear that day, so we were wearing winter clothing, which seems sort of odd against the backdrop of sand and sea.
My outfit, incidentally, was almost 100% Japanese made. The pants, jacket, and neckwarmer were all gifts from Mie, who apparently has a different idea than most westerners of what looks good on me. The shoes I bought last year in Japan, and the hat was a gift from Mie's niece, who should show up in a later post.
We weren't alone on the trip. Mie's friend accompanied us there. She lives in Tottori (the city, which is on the opposite end of the prefecture from Yonago, where we stayed), so she acted sort of as a tour guide. Her name escapes me at the moment because most of Mie's friends have names that end with -ko, which is very typical for Japanese girl names, but makes remembering them an exercise in frustration.
After tromping around on the dunes for a while, we decided to take a ride on a camel. But there was no real reason to do that, and it was cheaper just to sit on the camel and get our picture taken, so we opted for that. Also, I think we were sort of cold and tired at the time, so it was more practical. When we were sitting on the camel, it started making some weird noises, so the dude there had to calm it down, or at least we thought so. Mie's friend told us after that it was really just pooping and he was probably trying to get us not to notice.
Anyway, after that we headed back and I bought some pear-flavored soft serve because I had never had it before. Pears are a specialty of Tottori prefecture, so we never had it in Shimane. It was really good, even better than green tea ice cream, which is what I would normally get if I were eating ice cream in Japan.
Finally, here's another picture of me. I ran down to the ocean while Mie and her friend stayed up at the top. I suspect they didn't want to climb back up the hillside since it was rather a lot of work. Can you tell which one is me?
I was originally planning on posting more here, but there are too many pictures and I don't feel like spending the next two hours crafting a blog post, so it will have to wait. Until then, it's time for more category theory!
Here we are celebrating our ascent to the top of the Tottori Sand Dunes. When I heard about the sand dunes, I figured it was just going to be like a long beach, but it turns out that the dunes are quite sizable and climbing up them is rather like hiking up a hillside except that the hillside is made of sand and thus more easily deformable under your feet. Forgive me for the topological terminology but I've been computing fundamental groups lately.
Perhaps this picture will give you an idea of how large the dunes really are. We hiked up to the top of the biggest dune we could see, which seemed to be the thing to do. It was cold and clear that day, so we were wearing winter clothing, which seems sort of odd against the backdrop of sand and sea.My outfit, incidentally, was almost 100% Japanese made. The pants, jacket, and neckwarmer were all gifts from Mie, who apparently has a different idea than most westerners of what looks good on me. The shoes I bought last year in Japan, and the hat was a gift from Mie's niece, who should show up in a later post.
We weren't alone on the trip. Mie's friend accompanied us there. She lives in Tottori (the city, which is on the opposite end of the prefecture from Yonago, where we stayed), so she acted sort of as a tour guide. Her name escapes me at the moment because most of Mie's friends have names that end with -ko, which is very typical for Japanese girl names, but makes remembering them an exercise in frustration.
After tromping around on the dunes for a while, we decided to take a ride on a camel. But there was no real reason to do that, and it was cheaper just to sit on the camel and get our picture taken, so we opted for that. Also, I think we were sort of cold and tired at the time, so it was more practical. When we were sitting on the camel, it started making some weird noises, so the dude there had to calm it down, or at least we thought so. Mie's friend told us after that it was really just pooping and he was probably trying to get us not to notice.Anyway, after that we headed back and I bought some pear-flavored soft serve because I had never had it before. Pears are a specialty of Tottori prefecture, so we never had it in Shimane. It was really good, even better than green tea ice cream, which is what I would normally get if I were eating ice cream in Japan.
Finally, here's another picture of me. I ran down to the ocean while Mie and her friend stayed up at the top. I suspect they didn't want to climb back up the hillside since it was rather a lot of work. Can you tell which one is me?
I was originally planning on posting more here, but there are too many pictures and I don't feel like spending the next two hours crafting a blog post, so it will have to wait. Until then, it's time for more category theory!
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