Saturday, September 8, 2012
只今！
So I just got back from Japan a little bit ago. Sorry for the lack of updates on that, but I had little to no internet access over the last couple months, but now I have good internets again and also a bunch of pictures of the trip, although they are mostly pictures of me making faces in front of stuff, so I will get to posting that tomorrow or later. As for now I must get my body back on EST.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
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 (^_^)
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 (^_^)
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, June 1, 2012
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.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Lemon Chicken
Before I get around to the meat (haha) of the post, I just want to vent that Google changed their layout a few weeks back and it is very frustrating. I don't really know why it's so difficult to get from the sign in screen to the new post screen. There should just be a button saying 投稿 as soon as you sign in, but instead I have to dig through a couple pages to get here. It really makes no sense, because writing new posts is pretty much the most important thing. I don't really care about some page view statistics or all this other integrated crap that Google thinks I will want to see on the front page, and I don't really know why anyone would. And while I'm ranting about Google, I'll also mention that I wish they would stop asking me for my phone number. I didn't want to give it to them before and I still don't. Why is there no option to make that annoying message go away? There should definitely be a "I will never give you this information" button.
So I made lemon chicken the other day, using a recipe from an actual cookbook. That's the result. Pretty delicious looking, right? The lighting is bad in the kitchen; it always looks much more yellow than it really is. Coloration aside, it was pretty good, but if I make it again I will probably double the lemon juice that goes in the sauce. I made orange chicken the night before and it was even better, but I don't have a picture of that, unfortunately.
And in other, possibly more exciting, news, I won an award for being an excellent teaching assistant recently. It's sort of funny because I'm currently not teaching anything, just "grading" for a linear algebra class. I actually just write solutions to homework problems for the students to use as a guide, and what's even funnier about it is that the guy actually teaching the class is a first year grad student who should really be studying for his qualifying exam. He's a nice guy and doesn't ask me to do much, so I don't resent it or anything, but it seems like kind of a waste of "teaching excellence."
There were something like five winners of this award, but I'm the only one from the college of arts and sciences, I think. The CoAS is kind of the low man on the totem pole here because engineering is what built the school and what it's most famous for and the business school brings in the big bucks. It seems like the main job of the math department is teaching future engineers how to take limits without knowing what a limit is and trying to get business students to add fractions. Probably needless to say, a lot of people don't seem to hold other schools/departments in high regard and don't really like having to teach baby math because the more important schools/departments don't want their students to learn, you know, actual math, but just how to do whatever they will need. Sigh...
Anyway, it's nice to win an award, and there's some money that comes with it, which is even nicer. I probably won mostly because some people in the department were pulling for me because I had to fill in for a couple sections of the class I was assisting with in the fall because the professor got seriously ill all of a sudden. It's kind of weird because even if I were a terrible teacher, I probably would have done it anyway because nobody else has the experience in that subject and the department didn't really have any other options. Also, aside from the actual teaching time, it was not really much additional preparation other than making more copies. But, whatever, a win is a win and I'm happy about it. Alright, that's enough bragging.
And in other, possibly more exciting, news, I won an award for being an excellent teaching assistant recently. It's sort of funny because I'm currently not teaching anything, just "grading" for a linear algebra class. I actually just write solutions to homework problems for the students to use as a guide, and what's even funnier about it is that the guy actually teaching the class is a first year grad student who should really be studying for his qualifying exam. He's a nice guy and doesn't ask me to do much, so I don't resent it or anything, but it seems like kind of a waste of "teaching excellence."
There were something like five winners of this award, but I'm the only one from the college of arts and sciences, I think. The CoAS is kind of the low man on the totem pole here because engineering is what built the school and what it's most famous for and the business school brings in the big bucks. It seems like the main job of the math department is teaching future engineers how to take limits without knowing what a limit is and trying to get business students to add fractions. Probably needless to say, a lot of people don't seem to hold other schools/departments in high regard and don't really like having to teach baby math because the more important schools/departments don't want their students to learn, you know, actual math, but just how to do whatever they will need. Sigh...
Anyway, it's nice to win an award, and there's some money that comes with it, which is even nicer. I probably won mostly because some people in the department were pulling for me because I had to fill in for a couple sections of the class I was assisting with in the fall because the professor got seriously ill all of a sudden. It's kind of weird because even if I were a terrible teacher, I probably would have done it anyway because nobody else has the experience in that subject and the department didn't really have any other options. Also, aside from the actual teaching time, it was not really much additional preparation other than making more copies. But, whatever, a win is a win and I'm happy about it. Alright, that's enough bragging.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Pork Chop Blues
I was messing around on the keyboard the other day, doing one of my favorite tricks for playing the twelve bar blues, which is sort of mashing the flatted third and then the non-flatted third in rapid succession, and I noticed it sort of sounds like an oinking in the lower register, so I sort of threw these lyrics together (it's actually a slightly modified twelve bar blues):
This little piggie went to market
And this little piggie stayed home
This little piggie had pork chops
And this little piggie had none
And this little piggie went
Wee wee wee wee wee
Stick to your bones
Oh, this little piggie likes sausage
Oh, this little piggie likes ham
This little piggie get some bacon
Gonna fry it up in the pan
Gonna make a pig of myself
Gonna eat up all I can
Don't gimme no chicken
That stuff's no good to eat
Don't gimme no turkey
Can't even compete
Just gimme some of that
Other white meat
If little pigs had wings
Away they'd fly
Up to that big old
Mud hole in the sky
But if you wanna get to hog heaven
First you gotta fry
Better not build your house of straw
I'll blow it down on you
Better not build your house of sticks
You know I'll wreck it, too
Ain't no more bricks for houses
I used 'em for my barbecue
So hopefully that's a mildly entertaining post.
This little piggie went to market
And this little piggie stayed home
This little piggie had pork chops
And this little piggie had none
And this little piggie went
Wee wee wee wee wee
Stick to your bones
Oh, this little piggie likes sausage
Oh, this little piggie likes ham
This little piggie get some bacon
Gonna fry it up in the pan
Gonna make a pig of myself
Gonna eat up all I can
Don't gimme no chicken
That stuff's no good to eat
Don't gimme no turkey
Can't even compete
Just gimme some of that
Other white meat
If little pigs had wings
Away they'd fly
Up to that big old
Mud hole in the sky
But if you wanna get to hog heaven
First you gotta fry
Better not build your house of straw
I'll blow it down on you
Better not build your house of sticks
You know I'll wreck it, too
Ain't no more bricks for houses
I used 'em for my barbecue
So hopefully that's a mildly entertaining post.
Saturday, April 21, 2012
And He'll Be a Good Man
I'm not going to focus too long on this, but I'm sure you have read somewhere that Levon Helm of The Band died a couple days ago, which is sad. Here's a link which is probably unnecessary for anyone who is either American or Canadian, which should cover pretty much my entire audience, since you've no doubt heard the song, but it is still one of the best ever, and no doubt it is getting tons of views lately.
Anyway, what's new with me? Well, not a whole lot. There's a lot more going on over at JLink's blog, so why not head over and check it out? I'm pretty much just grinding through math and getting up to my usual boring hijinks when I'm not doing that. In my math life, I am taking a class in algebraic geometry while slowly progressing on research, so have two more paragraphs on that:
Algebraic geometry is all about schemes and varieties and whatnot. It's very terminology heavy, as you can probably guess from that last sentence. For example, a scheme is the spectrum of a ring, equipped with the Zariski topology, and its structure sheaf. If you don't know what those are, don't worry, I won't explain, but suffice it to say that each will require a couple more sentences just to tell you what they even are. It's quite complicated to say it all, but in some sense is just formalizing geometric notions as algebra. It's also highly unintuitive to just look at and I doubt anyone would be interested in it, but tell me this isn't a convoluted way of building stuff:
ring -> prime ideals on the ring -> topological space on the set of these ideals -> sheaf of rings over this space
My research is, well, my research. I'm currently trying to show that the cohomology of the cone of the inclusion of a certain module category into another module category is acyclic, which will show that the two categories' homotopy categories are equivalent. That seems quite out there, but the actual calculation is basically just trying to find the preimage under a certain operator of a given pair of sets of linear maps. Even that sounds confusing, but it's really just saying if I know d(f,g) = 0, how can I find h and k so that d(h,k) = (f,g). So, it's a lot like guessing at stuff and seeing what happens when you apply d. I won't explain further.
Outside of that, not much is happening. I substituted for a class last week and that earned me $100. My one friend bought Risk 2210, which is like Risk with extra territories, a currency system which is used for buying cards and special units that affect the game, and a 5 turn limit. It seems quite complicated at first glance, even compared to usual Risk, so I think it will be hard to find many people who would be willing to learn to play it, but it turns out that it is actually quite simple, and also quite fun. It's his birthday soon, so I bought Risk: Godstorm off the interwebs, and we'll see how fun that is to play. Don't worry, he doesn't read this blog, so I'm not giving anything away.
My roommate and I recently finished watching Star Trek: Voyager, so I'm kind of out of stuff to watch. I don't really like getting involved in tv dramas and they end up being boring to me after a while, and there's only a small subset of comedies that aren't terrible and I'm already watching/have watched all of them, I think. I may post some more thoughts on Trek, since probably one person out there enjoys those shows.
I originally started watching The Next Generation when it popped up on Netflix, and it was quite enjoyable, if very dated and full of stupid crap that makes no sense all the time. I also basically had to skip watching seasons 1 & 2 since they are painful, but from there on out, it is mostly pretty great, with a few egregious examples in the final season. Then we started watching DS9, just to keep watching something. It's another one of those shows that takes a while to really find its groove. I wasn't really much of a fan of it for the first couple seasons, but by the time Sisko shaves his head, it's fairly consistently watchable, if not good. It's also extremely dated and sort of strange to watch now, since apparently tv drama has improved quite a bit since then. Things that seemed good at the time now come off as really cheesy or bland. Another thing I noticed is that Jadzia is one of the most annoying characters of all time and every time she refers to something Curzon did as something she did, I just want to throw her out the nearest airlock, but I don't want to spend a whole post talking about this show.
Then we finished that show (incidentally, despite the huge run-up to the finale of DS9, it feels quite underwhelming and simultaneously rushes and drags, while All Good Things is a standalone classic of an episode), I was going to stop forcing my roommate to watch Trek, since even TNG doesn't really hold up to the test of time and Voyager wasn't even considered any good when it was on. But, my roommate decided to watch it anyway, so we plowed through that as well. I think a lot of it was made more enjoyable by my tendency to be doing something else while it was on because its ultimate failing is that it's really just not compelling at all. The characters are almost uniformly featureless and most episodes are just a forgettable technobabble problem with a technobabble solution. Like I said, I may post about this again, but I do want to mention that Kate Mulgrew is such a terrible actress that it's actually sort of interesting to watch her. It's like she doesn't really know how people actually behave, so she's constantly mugging inappropriately to the point where I sometimes would just laugh at the random reaction shots that seemed to be almost omnipresent in the show. And since I mentioned the finales for the other two sequel treks, the finale of Voyager is pretty much complete garbage, like the guys making the show realized that it didn't matter what they did at that point, so they just crapped out something that barely qualifies as wrapping up the story.
Alright, now that I've probably lost everyone, I'll end the post with note that the last time I posted, I posted twice in one day, so unless you are observant, you may not have seen the first, much more substantial post. I only mention it because nobody commented on it, but one person (thanks!) commented on the shorter post.
Anyway, what's new with me? Well, not a whole lot. There's a lot more going on over at JLink's blog, so why not head over and check it out? I'm pretty much just grinding through math and getting up to my usual boring hijinks when I'm not doing that. In my math life, I am taking a class in algebraic geometry while slowly progressing on research, so have two more paragraphs on that:
Algebraic geometry is all about schemes and varieties and whatnot. It's very terminology heavy, as you can probably guess from that last sentence. For example, a scheme is the spectrum of a ring, equipped with the Zariski topology, and its structure sheaf. If you don't know what those are, don't worry, I won't explain, but suffice it to say that each will require a couple more sentences just to tell you what they even are. It's quite complicated to say it all, but in some sense is just formalizing geometric notions as algebra. It's also highly unintuitive to just look at and I doubt anyone would be interested in it, but tell me this isn't a convoluted way of building stuff:
ring -> prime ideals on the ring -> topological space on the set of these ideals -> sheaf of rings over this space
My research is, well, my research. I'm currently trying to show that the cohomology of the cone of the inclusion of a certain module category into another module category is acyclic, which will show that the two categories' homotopy categories are equivalent. That seems quite out there, but the actual calculation is basically just trying to find the preimage under a certain operator of a given pair of sets of linear maps. Even that sounds confusing, but it's really just saying if I know d(f,g) = 0, how can I find h and k so that d(h,k) = (f,g). So, it's a lot like guessing at stuff and seeing what happens when you apply d. I won't explain further.
Outside of that, not much is happening. I substituted for a class last week and that earned me $100. My one friend bought Risk 2210, which is like Risk with extra territories, a currency system which is used for buying cards and special units that affect the game, and a 5 turn limit. It seems quite complicated at first glance, even compared to usual Risk, so I think it will be hard to find many people who would be willing to learn to play it, but it turns out that it is actually quite simple, and also quite fun. It's his birthday soon, so I bought Risk: Godstorm off the interwebs, and we'll see how fun that is to play. Don't worry, he doesn't read this blog, so I'm not giving anything away.
My roommate and I recently finished watching Star Trek: Voyager, so I'm kind of out of stuff to watch. I don't really like getting involved in tv dramas and they end up being boring to me after a while, and there's only a small subset of comedies that aren't terrible and I'm already watching/have watched all of them, I think. I may post some more thoughts on Trek, since probably one person out there enjoys those shows.
I originally started watching The Next Generation when it popped up on Netflix, and it was quite enjoyable, if very dated and full of stupid crap that makes no sense all the time. I also basically had to skip watching seasons 1 & 2 since they are painful, but from there on out, it is mostly pretty great, with a few egregious examples in the final season. Then we started watching DS9, just to keep watching something. It's another one of those shows that takes a while to really find its groove. I wasn't really much of a fan of it for the first couple seasons, but by the time Sisko shaves his head, it's fairly consistently watchable, if not good. It's also extremely dated and sort of strange to watch now, since apparently tv drama has improved quite a bit since then. Things that seemed good at the time now come off as really cheesy or bland. Another thing I noticed is that Jadzia is one of the most annoying characters of all time and every time she refers to something Curzon did as something she did, I just want to throw her out the nearest airlock, but I don't want to spend a whole post talking about this show.
Then we finished that show (incidentally, despite the huge run-up to the finale of DS9, it feels quite underwhelming and simultaneously rushes and drags, while All Good Things is a standalone classic of an episode), I was going to stop forcing my roommate to watch Trek, since even TNG doesn't really hold up to the test of time and Voyager wasn't even considered any good when it was on. But, my roommate decided to watch it anyway, so we plowed through that as well. I think a lot of it was made more enjoyable by my tendency to be doing something else while it was on because its ultimate failing is that it's really just not compelling at all. The characters are almost uniformly featureless and most episodes are just a forgettable technobabble problem with a technobabble solution. Like I said, I may post about this again, but I do want to mention that Kate Mulgrew is such a terrible actress that it's actually sort of interesting to watch her. It's like she doesn't really know how people actually behave, so she's constantly mugging inappropriately to the point where I sometimes would just laugh at the random reaction shots that seemed to be almost omnipresent in the show. And since I mentioned the finales for the other two sequel treks, the finale of Voyager is pretty much complete garbage, like the guys making the show realized that it didn't matter what they did at that point, so they just crapped out something that barely qualifies as wrapping up the story.
Alright, now that I've probably lost everyone, I'll end the post with note that the last time I posted, I posted twice in one day, so unless you are observant, you may not have seen the first, much more substantial post. I only mention it because nobody commented on it, but one person (thanks!) commented on the shorter post.
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