One More Epicycle

I’m currently struggling to overcome a mysterious energy-sapping will-to-live-destroying illness which makes it hard to eat, lie down, stand, sit, walk, sleep, and so on.

You know, I’ve never been as sick in my life as I’ve been since I came to London; I suspect it’s all the weird European bugs meeting my spleenless immune system. Timing couldn’t be worse, as the last few weeks have been very busy. The brats are back in full, and I have to cover a friend’s tutoring duties while he’s off serving a mandatory three-week stint in the Turkish army, of all things. Never rains but it pours!

So I’m trying to think of happier times, and one was a few weeks ago when I managed to drift into some weird perfectly awake and lucid but somehow not-quite-there state.

For reasons it would take too long to get into, I was reading about various controversies involving Stuart Kirkpatrick, son of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN. He’s also known as Traktung Rinpoche, and some believe him the reincarnation of Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje, a nineteenth-century mystic.

I don’t believe in any kind of Buddhism. I don’t think the meaning of life is escape from suffering (“He suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was buried”), but instead the presence of love (“Love one another as I have loved you”); I don’t believe in reincarnation or karma, and reject the idea that if something bad happens to you it could be because you’ve done something bad in a past life (“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned. This happened so that the works of God might be revealed in him”); and I don’t believe that the universe is any kind of illusion (“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good”).

For what it’s worth, Traktung Rinpoche’s answers to comments and questions generally run like this [typos in original corrected]:

Q. But “you” are sitting here talking to us.

Traktung Rinpoche: No, I am not. It seems that way to you because you insist on the narrow “point of view” implied by the uninspected tendency of awareness to identify with consciousness, Beingness and body mind. All these arise co-emergently. Bam! All at once, consciousness, Beingness, and world arise as a single whole. The result of a little mistake in awareness. If you take the trouble to inspect, perhaps you will have to first strengthen the tool of inspection – that is all the spiritual path is, strengthening the tool of inspection – then you will discover something most amazing and all of your comparative competitiveness will dissolve.

Well, then!

In any case, I was learning about the complex relationships between various streams of Buddhism in the Tibetan community and their counterparts in the West, especially some movements which take different attitudes to “form” than I’ve always associated with Buddhism.

And while I was doing this, I was listening repeatedly to a terrible earbug of a song called “Hip Hop Vegetable“, which is honestly about vegetables. If I believed in meditative states I’d swear it drove me into one. Really, I’m sure the song is just very relaxing, with warm, friendly lyrics and a catchy tune; but it felt very, very strange.

So if you find yourself about to read up on Vajrayana Buddhism while listening to soft J-pop about produce, don’t say you weren’t warned!

I’m still recovering from the disaster of last week. It turns out that I may have gotten off lightly, compared to one of the students about to defend his PhD, or so I’ve just heard.  Hopefully the rumour’s mistaken.

In happier news, there’s a story floating that Mossad — possibly with American support — finally killed Imad Mughniyeh, one of the most dangerous men on Earth. He does (did?) operations for Hezbollah. With most people, you don’t have to worry that they might fake their own deaths, but with Mughniyeh it’s not impossible. Hopefully this rumour is true.

An early Valentine’s day present to the world. Thanks, Israel!  Kosher pizza for everyone.

On the one hand, the Giants defeated the Patriots in a glorious game in which God restored balance to the football universe.

On the other hand, several hundred gigabytes of my work over the past year and a half was lost when the raid array on which the data was stored died on Monday. A loss which was entirely avoidable granted even minimal competence on the part of those responsible for maintaining the server.

So I’m not sure how to feel, exactly.

Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.

Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.

Proverbs 31:6-7

Intense-looking young woman standing behind booth with posters cheering socialism and handing out information packets about (or so I understand) dangerous cuts in publically-funded health care?  Check.

Quite obviously underage kid insisting that the grocery store on the corner should sell him Smirnoff — at lunch, no less! — despite the fact he “forgot” his ID even though he managed to remember his wallet?  And then shouting angrily afterwards?  Check.

Large crowds blocking doors who seem offended that I ask them to step aside so I can leave the building through the only exit?  Check.

Yeah.  The brats are back.

Hooray.

Most classes start the first week of October, but various before-class meetings have already begun. There’s nothing to be done for it but to make sure the mp3 player is cranked up with foreign-language music, and remind myself that based on last year’s results a fair number of the students I see won’t make it to second term..

</anti-undergrad rant>

Before you credit me with coming up with one of the all-time great post titles — a title so hackneyed that it would make Stan Lee blush </Comic Book Guy> — I should probably admit I stole the line from an Alan Davis story I read the other day.

“Behold my unstoppable mandroids.” Give me strength.

Anyway, a certain mathematically-minded friend of mine reminded me the other day that I have a blog. He recently survived his thesis defence, so now he thinks he’s all smart and stuff.

My excuse is that I’ve been on semivacation for the past few weeks, working on various personal projects, but now I’m back both for research and blogging. Students are starting to show up on campus again, more’s the pity, and the department (which has been totally dead for the past month) is gradually returning to normal.

Many years ago I was stuck in Kingston over the Christmas vacation, and wound up watching a number of the Bowls around New Year’s for want of anything else to do. Fell in love with the whole American college football scene, and have been a fan ever since. So as one of the only fans around in this place where they only care about soccer and rugby and cricket, let me just repeat this because the words taste so sweet:

Appalachian State 34, Michigan 32.

I’ve been smiling ever since. Unstoppable mandroids indeed!

The weekend was a lot of fun.

The boss hosted a get-together on Saturday at his place out in South Woodford for the research group. I think it’s the most east I’ve ever been.. (At least on the ground. I’m not sure what Heathrow approach paths I’ve taken.) The area really felt like England to me, somehow. Narrow streets, red brick fences. More like what I expected the place to be. His backyard is very large, and very green. He and his wife were excellent hosts: lots of meat and mead both, and I count it a point of honour that I was up and moving about at seven-thirty the next morning.

When I mention that I’m from Canada, many people here mention that they have a cousin or a nephew or something living there. I’ve grown to expect it. What I didn’t expect was that one of the other guests — one of Richard’s grad students — would turn out to be Bryan Adams’ first cousin. Yes, that Bryan Adams. Go figure! I don’t see a resemblance at all, but some of the others do.

Sunday’s dinner was also pretty cool, for completely different reasons. I ordered some beer and some soup to start with, and thanked the waiter. Later I called him back and asked where my soup was — turned out he’d completely forgotten about it, for which he apologized, and I told him it didn’t matter. Asked if I could have a refill of soup after I’d finished my chicken, and he said that of course I could. At the end, I asked for the bill. He wrote it out, thanked me for my patronage and wished me the best, and I thanked him in return and praised the meal.

The careful reader will be able to deduce why I was insufferably pleased with myself for the rest of the evening.

To put it briefly:

“Through nonaction nothing is left undone.”

Aaaaaaaargh!

Aaaargh!  Aaargh!!!

Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!!

Whoa, was that ever a long week!

I gave up trying to repair my work process years ago. A sensible man works hard for eight hours a day and then goes to play. I instead goof off for days on end, accomplishing nothing, but then do nothing but work — barely stopping to eat and sleep — for as long as it takes to get the job done. It’s nowhere near as healthy as the alternative, but I don’t seem to be able to change, and so I choose to look at it as a feature..

The last week’s been one of the work-on weeks. Focused like a laser beam. (Aside: on a whim in high school I bought this self-hypnosis tape which was supposed to increase my focus and concentration, like a laser, especially when I pushed my thumb and my pointer finger together. The guy had a great voice for it, and I still remember his description of the carpet (“perhaps your favourite colour”) on the staircase you walked down at the bottom of which was an ultracomfortable chair. The entire idea of hypnosis is basically pseudoscience, but the tape was a great sleep aid. I wish I could find it again.)

First I spent a day tracking down a problem with a published paper (not one of mine, thankfully) when I found that I couldn’t even reproduce the first few graphs. After some time I realized to my astonishment that the graph wasn’t in radius but in diameter.. nobody plots diameter in our field, which is why I managed not to notice how the graph was labelled.

It was very, very frustrating. Even after I fixed it, though, I still couldn’t match the author’s results. Finally I emailed him, after I’d narrowed the difference down to a factor of two or so that wouldn’t go away. He’s a good guy, and a friend-of-a-friend, so I figured it couldn’t hurt: he’s kindly answered my questions before. Turned out that indeed the graph was wrong, and the error was exactly a factor of two (I thought it might be, but I only trusted my reading of the logplot to within a factor of 25% or so), because of a mistake made in plotting the diameter! Aaaargh!

Why was diameter being plotted in the first place?! What’s next, plotting sizes of objects in terms of the size of an equivalent-volume object such as a cube with a central sphere removed with radius equal to the side of the cube divided by e? Sounds ludicrous, but if you did that, you’d only be off by a factor of 1.74.. and as it was the graph was off by a factor of 2!

Fortunately the author — who really is a great guy, and very knowledgeable — was very helpful and his turnaround time from question to response was very low, so I shouldn’t tease him too much. He’s better on his off days than I am on my good ones.

After working on implementing his model for a while, I switched to dealing with some code issues which had been troubling me involving planet-planetesimal mergers.

I won’t bore you with the details, but after thirty-two hours of barely-interrupted coding I managed to get things sorted out. Suffice it to say that I wasn’t the only one to blame, the guys who wrote gcc deserve some.. but it looks like things are working now.

So last night after Mass at the Cathedral I went for a walk, through St James Park and then around downtown, and finally decided to see The Curse of the Golden Flower, a recent Chinese film, at the impressive but overpriced CineWorld theatre down from Piccadilly Circus. Not really much of a movie guy — I prefer TV — and not one for seeing movies alone, but I was in a good mood and figured I’d indulge myself, especially seeing as I only had to wait half an hour before it started..

Movie had beautiful cinematography, and the lushly claustrophobic scenes of life at the Imperial palace overwhelm you with their intensity.. but the ending didn’t leave me completely satisfied. To say more would be the spoil the film. 9/10 for the optics, 6/10 for the story.

Still, it was fun to give in to temptation for once. (That’s not a claim to any particular virtue. It’s just that I’m ch– um, Scots — so I don’t surrender to expensive ones very often.) Almost gave into another as well, but I haven’t finished that confession post, so you can’t hear about that yet..

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed occasional mental lapses.  Usually it’s with names.  Once I forgot the name of my officemate (who I’d seen roughly seven hours a day, five days a week, for months) — it was embarrassing, because I forgot it as I was signing us up for a racquetball slot, and I stood there, mindblank, for quite a while — and another time I forgot the name of another friend who I’d known for years and saw regularly.

Some kind of early-onset memory disorder, I suspect..  </hypochondria?>

Yesterday I didn’t forget anything, but made a strange mistake.  In a line of documentation for code I was working on, I wrote “correctpong” instead of “corresponding”.

Correctpong?!

“That’s not even a word!”  (Points if you can place that line without googling.)

There’s no hand mispositioning which can explain this one: it was a genuine, full-fledged brain error.

During my last six months at Kingston I signed up for a whole bunch of experiments, partly to kill time, partly to help out fellow grad students, and mostly for beer money.  I had MRIs taken of my brain in a couple of them, and there didn’t seem to be any obvious anomalies..  Time to call in House?

I also managed to drop something on myself last night which gave me a respectable shiner on my left eye.  I won’t say what, or how, or where, because the details make me look like an idiot.  So to distract you, I’ll now mention the goofy but enjoyable 2002 Hong Kong drama “My Left Eye Sees Ghosts”.

Yesterday was not a good brain day.

[written yesterday]

Took the weekend off from real work to play tourist again, which I haven’t done nearly enough of lately.. between teaching and the various research projects I’m allegedly being paid to contribute to. (Alleged contributions, not alleged pay, thankfully.)

Which is what brings me to watch the sunset — it’s gorgeous, with a nice cool breeze: London can be pretty in the spring when she tries — here in St James Park, beneath a Heaven Tree, to write this post and wait for the evening service at the church. One disadvantage of going to the 7:00 Eucharist is that I didn’t carry a palm around for the day: I always enjoy the puzzled looks I get until the sudden realization.

I noticed something strange on my travels this weekend which hadn’t happened before.. I think I supported both of the protest booths I came across!

One was on the Strand, where people were singing and dancing to protest the bloody and disastrous reign of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. I’ve found the unwillingness of nations like South Africa to use even moral persuasion against the Zanu PF thugs very depressing.

The other was up in Chinatown.. Newport Court, I think, just down from the the Guanghwa bookstore. There was a booth with most of the signs written in Chinese, but I had to approve of the English sentence they’d put up:

“China’s New Era Begins When The Communist Party Ends.”

You can always win me over with anticommunism!

Incidentally, I was the victim of some racial/linguistic profiling on Saturday: there were a couple of people handing out leaflets or papers or something, but they were written in Chinese. They offered copies to most passersby, but not to me! Now, admittedly, they were right: I can’t read any Chinese whatsoever, so giving one to me would have been a waste. But they had nothing to go on except a statistical correlation between my appearance and my likely behaviour, which under other circumstances would get people hauled before a court..

A few weeks ago, Carl Murray gave a public talk on the history of the Cassini mission. I thought it would be a good idea to go, not only because he’s a good speaker, but because I was giving a lecture on ring dynamics the next day and might pick up some helpful analogies.

During question period, one guy particularly annoyed me. First he introduced himself (Someone So-and-So) and explained that he was the chair of the local society of amateur astronomers. Then he offered Carl some fawning praise, and said that he hoped that no one would mind if he digressed into politics.. at which point he explained how much of a waste he thought the London Olympics would be and how much better use the money could have been put to by investing in several more Cassini-like missions. He asked Carl’s opinions of this idea, and his response — the correct one, of course — was “No comment.”

I thought of asking the next question myself: “I’m new to this country, so please excuse my ignorance of the local dialect. Is there a word for self-important jerks who hijack public discussions because the world desperately needs to know more about their pet causes even in an unrelated forum?”

This guy scored the trey. He introduced himself, to make it about him. He offered inappropriately-timed, awkwardly ingratiating praise (that it was accurate isn’t relevant), embarrassing the speaker. And then he used the “question” as a soapbox to rant. I can’t speak for anyone else, but it certainly made me uncomfortable.. and I’ve long since thought that the Olympics have grown too large and could do with being cut down by a factor of ten.

No one was going to be convinced by his “question”, and he must’ve known it, so it wasn’t about actually effecting any change. It was about the performance. He reminds me of someone I used to know distantly at Queen’s who was infamous across several departments for the same sorts of things.

Similarly, at Mass last night, an old woman shouted something — no quote for you! — in response to a very unobjectionable comment by the priest during the homily. (That only God could judge the heart; the reading was the story of the woman taken in adultery: “Go and sin no more”.) Did she expect the priest to start a conversation with her in the middle of the service in an enormous cathedral with hundreds in attendance?

And on the way to the church, there was a guy on the Underground who thought that headphones were beneath him, and instead let his music blare out of the player so that we could all be entertained by it. And a fine choice it was too, with the shouting and bad guitar and the drum line which would have shamed the autoplay features on a twenty-dollar keyboard.

Today’s peeve: people who can’t respect social boundaries involving speech and noise. Thank Heaven we’ve finally invented blogs, so that everyone in the world can publish all of their silly thoughts to the rest of the human race, and none but the willing need read them.

Yesterday turned out to be surprisingly productive: by the end of the day I was up by two thousand lines of code or so.

.. oh, all right, if you’re insisting on total disclosure. Admittedly some of that was duplicated code which I hope to get rid of eventually. Generally speaking, code duplication is just a subtle bug waiting to happen, but C’s a pretty weak language as far as inbuilt data structures and methods go.. and being both strongly- and statically-typed, it “sets” pretty quickly in the sense that it dries into something hard and difficult to modify. So if you’re practicing bottom-up development, there can be advantages to some short-term duplication when you haven’t figured out what the right level of abstraction is. I do hope to get rid of a lot of the code from yesterday soon enough, but for the moment it works nicely.

(How’s that? Too obvious for programmers and too vague for nonprogrammers. We’ve achieved zero-knowledge transfer, Doctor! Prepare to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!)

Apart from my main multiscale code, I’ve also made progress on some other fronts. The regime of planet formation I study is known as “oligarchy”, where the system divides roughly into two: a small number of large protoplanetary embryos which control the dynamics, and a large number of much smaller rocky planetesimals in which the embryos are embedded. Think of a much denser asteroid belt (looking more like Saturn’s rings) with a bunch of large moons flying around.

This is understood reasonably well at low masses, which means that I can use semianalytic models to fast-forward through this early phase and start my numerical simulations much later when there are far fewer objects I need to track. In my thesis, I used a modified version of a model due to Ed Thommes, Martin’s grad student before me. More recently, John Chambers has developed a far more sophisticated model and I’ve been implementing it from his description in the paper.. unfortunately, there are a few missing pieces in his explanation which make it hard to know exactly what numbers he’s chosen to put in certain equations. It looks like I’m getting the shape of the curve right but there’s an offset, so it’s tough to know if there’s a problem or not.. I’ll have to compare with his previous papers.

I managed to get quite a lot of the Chambers model running yesterday, though, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact I wrote the Chambers code in python and not in C. I’m roughly a factor of five-to-ten more productive in python, although that’s a pretty handwavy comparison because there are problems which are trivial in python but would take forever to code in C, and so I’m not sure how long it would actually take..

I’m a big believer in the use of VHLL (very high level languages) for programming in general and scientific programming in particular. As a rule, if you find yourself needing to write in C or fortran it’s usually a sign you don’t understand your problem well enough, and you’re wasting large amounts of time you should be spending at the pub.

Like most rules, of course, this one has its exceptions.. such as high-performance computation where the task doesn’t break nicely into discrete compute chunks it’s easy to optimize. Computations dominated by FFTs or eigenvalue finding, for example, can often be handled nicely even in VHLLs because 99% of the time is spent in routines which can be pushed out of the interpreter into tuned low-level libraries, and your VHLL code is basically scripting. Computations where the work is more spread out, where you have to take a lot of loop steps, are far more challenging.

Guess which kind of simulations I do?

Just my luck to work in a subject (HPC studies of planet formation) where I have to break my own policies to accomplish things. I look forward to the day — when PyPy is complete, maybe? — when I’ll never have to write in as frustrating a language as C again. Maybe if CASCA ever lets me rant during the education section I can help save the next generation from the brainrot that use of C and fortran causes.

Preparations for tomorrow’s lecture continue, I decided that a crazy idea which has been lurking at the back of my mind for the last few years might actually work, and I’ve started on the enormous backlog of emails which somehow built up. Frankly I’m astonished anyone still bothers to write, but it’s appreciated!

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

(That’s one of my favourite lines ever.  I’ve considered spreading rumours of my death just to have a chance to use it.)

The last few weeks have been unexpectedly hectic, which explains the lack of posting.  Some stuff — like work — has been going very well.  Code is progressing nicely, new nodes have arrived for our simulations, etc, etc.  Other stuff — like, well, life — has been less enjoyable.

To give you a taste of the flavour: now that I’m no longer a student, it’s time to start repaying my student loans.  They don’t amount to much, and frankly I could pay them all down right now with what I have in the account.. but that would blow away my rainy-day fund (should I need to leave the country in a hurry and change my name to Miguel Sanchez).  And it rains a lot here..

Anyhow, the wonderful folks at CIBC drove me crazy.  They took to calling my parents, which I use as my secondary number because of its permanence, at 6:00 in the bloody morning to get them to get me to call.. even though I already had, and had cleared everything up.  When I called to complain, they had no record of the call!  I explained, patiently at first, and then less so, that since this was the number they’d left they should bloody well be able to explain to me why they called at six A.M.

Finally it turned out that they have a semi-automated “COURTESY CALL”, whose database wasn’t correctly getting the right information for some reason.  “You keep using this word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  But they thought they’d sorted things out. I was complaining about this whole saga to a friend of mine (the one who keeps losing his mittens) when I got an email from Mom saying that she had just had ANOTHER call, making six or seven in total.. so I called CIBC again to yell at them, determined that I wouldn’t get off the line until it was dealt with, whoever I had to speak to.

(While I was on hold, they played “Baby, it ain’t over till it’s over.”  That was not the appropriate lyric given the situation.  I’d quote the right one but this is a family-friendly blog.)

Finally it turned out that they wouldn’t let me speak directly with the guy in charge of calling me — I’m unimpressed by his cowardice even as I have to respect his instinct for self-preservation — but insisted that things were now fixed.  Why?  Well, because apparently now the calling dep’t had a note saying they’d contacted me.  Which of course they hadn’t done, even though they have my London number.

No, what had happened is that my easygoing mother had told them in no uncertain terms that they’d screwed up and apparently this was enough.  So I speak to them a half-dozen times and this is insufficient to get them to toggle the “spoken-to-Doug” flag in my file.  On the other hand, they speak to someone who isn’t me at an address I haven’t lived at in a decade and a half in another country, and that apparently counts as a successful contact.

There’s a reason I switched from CIBC all those years ago, and now I remember why.

(“So let me get this straight.  You’re calling my elderly parents at six o’clock in the morning every day despite the fact that I’ve contacted you many times and everything is fine with my file.  Moreover, you have no record of the calls, although you think it’s because I’m on an autocontact list and they’re screwing up the timeshift. You can’t stop the calls, because it’s not your department making them, and you can’t put me in contact with the people who are making the calls because you’re the only group authorized to speak with the public.  So pretty much you’re going to keep calling until you feel like not calling any more, and there’s nothing I can do short of having the phone company forbid calls from CIBC to that number to get you to stop.  This is insane.”

“I can see why you’re frustrated..”)

Why not just turn off the ringer before bedtime as an interim solution?

Well, that takes us to the second unfun saga of late, involving my father, who’s had several operations over the past few months.  When they did the second surgery to drain some fluid which had accumulated after the first surgery on his back, the doctors were astonished that he was still walking around: the pain should have completely incapacitated him.

Unfortunately, or maybe not, after decades of continual anguish his pain tolerance has reached inhuman levels.  This isn’t actually a superpower, but a superweakness, because it means that he doesn’t get the information from the fact that something hurts which you’d normally expect.  A few years ago, I broke a bone in my right finger during football practice — and went on to score a couple of touchdowns afterwards, I’ll have you know! — and didn’t think it was broken because it didn’t hurt much the next day, so it took a month or two before I bothered to go to the doctor.  This is pretty much what it’s like for Dad all the time.

Pain has its purpose: it’s a message.  By studying patients with Hansen’s disease (leprosy), it’s been established that much of the tissue damage isn’t directly due to the Hansen’s but due to the resulting insensitivity to pain, which means the patients are continually harming themselves unknowingly..  (See the work of Dr Paul Brand.  Or that recent House episode about the girl with a similar condition.)

Well, even Dad finally decided to check himself into the hospital, at which point the doctors decided to remove his gall bladder.  Remember that car accident I mentioned months back?  It might have ruptured it — or not, who knows, maybe it was more recent.  In any event they decided it had to go.

Or that’s what they thought.  It turned out when they opened him up that he didn’t have a gall bladder any more.  It had burst and gone completely septic and gangrenous.  Ordinarily that spreads and kills you, but his body had formed this strange cocoon to keep it isolated, and completely encased.  The doctors had never seen anything quite like it, although I gather that similar things are known to happen.  Not unheard of, just infrequent: the sort of thing you might bump into once in a career.  They had great difficulty believing that he wasn’t already dead, much less that he’d been up and about.

(My father, the zombie.  Huh.)

He’s now home, and recovering.  For many years I was convinced that he was just too stubborn-mean to die, whatever the laws of biology would say about it, but over the last few years he’s definitely been mellowing out.. which worries me.  If he’s lost his anger, he’s lost his fuel.

So if you’re reading this, Dad, go yell at the doctors for not catching the fact they were operating on a half-dead man over the last few surgeries or something.  We have a heritage to live up to: “conquer or die“.

On a happier note, my friend planetary atmospheres guy James Cho and his wife now have their first daughter.. and while he’s on leave I’m covering his lectures, which has also been a serious timesink.. especially because I don’t know as much ring dynamics as I ought to.  This week I’m covering planet formation, though, so that should go much better.

Anyway, in every direction there have been antiblogging distractions.  Fortunately things look to have settled down somewhat now, and I should return to my usual off-centre snarking.

I also have a confession to make, and no, it’s not that I broke my no-beer-during-Lent rule for St Patrick’s day, as tempting as that was.. but you’ll have to wait for that.

Two weeks or so ago, during a meeting with Richard, I moved to the whiteboard to sketch out a new scheme I had in mind.  As I was about to start writing, he stopped me by pointing out that the marker I was holding was black-coloured, which meant it was permanent.

Then I realized that the whole board was covered in green permanent marker, most of which was my fault.

There are lots of ways to get rid of permanent marker (and nonpermanent that was left too long) but the one I decided I liked best was simply writing over the stuff with nonpermanent marker.  It’s easy — it just dissolves away underneath it — but it doesn’t scale well.   If you write a word and then notice that you’ve used the wrong marker, it’s quick to use the right marker as an eraser.  However, cleaning an entire board with it is awfully inefficient..

So of course that’s what I did, because all the other methods involved shopping.  It probably took me three hours, all told: I’ve been doing it when I’m bored and I’ve just finished it.  Feel like I’ve actually accomplished something!

I think doing it the slow way was just an excuse to take breaks now and then from coding, and listen to K-Os’ last album, Atlantis: Hymns for Disco, which I liked.  Not quite as brilliant as Joyful Rebellion, but still excellent.

I can sense it already: it’s going to be another exciting Monday.  Today’s physics seminar is on complexity and criticality, and the pure math talk is on mutually orthogonal terraces, so at least I’ll have something to break up the tedium.

After a meeting with the supervisor this morning I came back to the office, only to find it locked. My officemate had gone for lunch.

Problem: I couldn’t find my keys. Looking at my desk through the window I saw the green of my keychain. I leaned my forehead against the glass with its graph-paper squares and decided to wait until the boss came by — he’d said he was going to drop by the office. But he’d also mentioned he was hungry, so if he’d decided to get something to eat first, I’d have to wait until Arnaud got back..

Besides, I wasn’t sure if he had a key which was strong enough to open this door. Back in my grad student days pretty much anybody could get in and/or let me in to my office, but times have changed, and they’re pretty security-conscious around here as a result of lots of thefts. We have to carry around an ID card all the time (in principle we’re supposed to wear it visibly) or security guards will challenge our right to be on-campus.

In fact, in order to get into my office after hours, you have to first get through the outer doors which open only if you have the right code on your card. Admittedly you can often socially-engineer your way past it (i.e. look like you belong and walk through behind someone else, about the easiest kind of soc-eng imaginable). Then you have to get past another carded-door, which is much harder to sneak through because we know everyone who should be in this wing. And then you need an ordinary key to get into the office. Even after all that, when I’ve been working late, I’ve had guards come by, knock on the door, and ask to see my ID. Apparently I don’t look nonsuspicious enough for a pass.

In any event, miraculously, just as I was about to lose all hope, I glumly reached into my pocket.. and found the keys! The green on my desk wasn’t the green from the keychain, it was the green from the bottlecap on a Tropicana Go! orange and pear drink.

I think the moral of the story is that if you’re careless enough to forget your keys, then you may be equally capable of mistaking bottlecaps for your keys, and failing to find your keys even if you’re carrying them. So don’t give up too easily when all looks lost: it’s possible you’ve merely made more than one mistake and they’ll cancel out.

Hey, it’s a Tuesday. Not the most exciting day of my week.