the comforts of home.

in case it wasn't clear, i've been away for 2¹/₂ weeks.

first it was a short "holiday" [1] to see my family and a few friends, then essentially [2] a week in paris for a conference and a little more time off .. though you might remember how that turned out; certainly, i still do.

my visit to the louvre went well enough, though. i amused myself by watching the constant-but-shifting crowds in front of the mona lisa.

as for what i missed most, during all these travels?

mildly mathematical: re-imagining cities.

i have no idea how exactly they sorted the pieces, but these are really cool graphics:

~ from "Odd Things Happen When You Chop Up Cities And Stack Them Sideways" @npr

i guess new york really is a grid!

a quick look at the arXiv today ..

i don't know why .. but i'm just a sucker for papers with short and snappy titles. for example ..

• what is a cube? (hytönen-kaιrema)
• on weighted pοincaré inequalities (dγda-kassmann)

now i really want to know what a cube is ..! q-;

in media res: losing sleep, dilemmas, bad decisions.

so i woke up last night but couldn't go back to sleep. one reason [1] was that, upon reflecting on the last day of the conference, i was suddenly struck with an idea ..

say, what if you combine this one recently announced theorem of csörnyei and jοnes ..
with this other announced result by albertι, csörnyei, and preιss ..?

so even though i kept weighing it in my mind,
i couldn't convince myself to get up and actually work it out. [2]

jotting down a few details this morning, drawing a diagram, i think it works. the logical consequence from these two results has been exactly what i've needed, all these years, for this one claim that i couldn't quite prove.

excellent!
so now i should follow τerry taο's suggestion,
write a quick prototype/outline ..
..
wait: fvck ..!
i already bought my ticket to visit the louvre today!
i'm seeing an old friend tonight,
and i'm leaving tomorrow ..!

*sighs*

so i guess this idea and prototype have to wait.

oh well: maybe it's for the best. i have this absurdly early morning flight, it takes 3 hours to get from paris to helsinki, and when fully charged, my laptop battery lasts all day ..

all right, then: to the louvre! (-:



[1] the other reason was that i was staying in a mixed dorm at a cheap hostel. as it happens, one guy walks in late .. which wasn't the problem. instead, another dorm-mate yells at him that it's 2:30am and that he should be more considerate, which is good advice that should be more often taken .. especially by the speaker at the time. \-:

as for why i was staying at a hostel: the conference ended yesterday, i'm staying the weekend in paris, and it seemed unethical to use my travel funds for purely personal gain.

[2] it wasn't that i was lazy, but .. well, see [1] ..

in medias res: "The fault, dear Βrutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves .."

there's something really charming about sitting out of doors at a cafe, sipping strong coffee.  life unfolds with abandon in the streets and sidewalks of paris:

well-coiffed men and women stroll the streets,
mopeds and trucks make their deliveries,
storefronts of many specialties advertise their wares ..

.. and i cannot concentrate on a single damned thing!

i don't know why i didn't just think to sit inside and be left alone.  it's day one of a conference and already i like what i see .. but there's a slight part of me, wondering:

would it have been better had i just stayed at home and worked?

.

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.

there's more to my indignations, i guess.

one project is essentially done, even the write-up. the count is 23 pages, including introduction, title, abstract, and references. as for why i've not submitted it yet, it's probably because i'm trying to sabotage myself.

i don't mean that i'm unconsciously doing so, but actively.

mildly relevant: i say one fight, others say one balloon.

i'm glad that i'm not the only one who feels like attacking a research problem is like following rule #5 of fight club: one fight at a time.

so: as passed to me from my colleague greggο ..

(courtesy of xkcd, by randall munroe)

a backdoor, but not quite home yet.

odd.

at chicago o'hare their airport wifi has a paywall if i try to log into facebook or my university email .. but not when i log into a google-affiliated site like blogger .. which explains why you can this post [1].

it makes for a very odd web surfing experience:

for instance, i might be able to read a g+ blurb from a L's matt bοelkιns's blog post on textbook inflation, but boingo wireless starts asking me for money once i try to open the full post in a new tab.

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at any rate, i'm on my way back to helsinki and perhaps to normal life again .. but not right away.  this week is a conference in paris, where i'll listen to experts talk about gmt, one of my favorite topics.

i'm quite excited, as the scope of this world is expanding noticeably for me:

last fall i commuted to uni helsinki a few times per week and sat in one of perttι mattιla's courses.  the lectures were really cool, a good balance of details and intuition.  i dare say that it even inspired some new ideas i've had in metric geometry, recently.

who knows?  maybe i'll learn something about flat chains this fall and try my hand at the same field.  i've been meaning to try something different, and this subject has always piqued my interest ..



[1] probably the airport allowed some sort of google search option on their welcome website, which left a backdoor open for google users.

literally, seeing an idea through.

some people can just work out ideas in their head; i can't.

i need paper .. at least for the amount of certainty that i want out of an idea. i have to be able to see it, see the words and the diagrams, and my mind's eye just isn't clear enough.

maybe i even need to feel them.

there's a common analogy [1] with mathematical discovery being like exploring a room in the dark, feeling one object at a time, remembering its location, and upon finding the light switch, seeing things as they really are.

i don't care if the light switch is on or not: if my back is turned, i want to know whether the remote is where i left it when i turn back towards the table ..!

[1] i think the description is due to andrew wiles, when asked about mathematics and the proof of fermat's last theorem.

on math ed: a not immodest proposal?

probably this kind of practice will become standard.  in a few years' time, re-reading this will almost certainly make me sound like an academic dinosaur ..

.. but still: WTF?

Mr. Thomas was taking the course with his then-fiancée (now wife), so he hoped to buy just one textbook they could share. The trick, though, was that each student in the course needed his or her own access code to get to the online discussion board and homework-submission system. And Mr. Thomas was told by the professor and by officials at the campus bookstore that the textbook and code came only as a package deal, meaning the couple would have to pay $300 to get the two access codes and an extra book they didn't need.

// from "what is an access code worth?" @ the chronicle.

this is the kind of thing that makes me want to just tell the students:

screw it: we're not going to have a textbook for this course.

i'll just scan my lecture notes, post them online,
and write up my own homework problem sets with solutions.

if you really want a professional-looking textbook,
then i'll put one on reserve in the library. [1]

i don't think this is too much to ask.  for example, this is standard practice at finnish and german universities.

besides, i always write out my own notes for class anyway; many of my colleagues do the same. it's not too much to scan them, if the department has a fancy new fax/scan/printer. [2]

as an instructor, it's never been clear to me how regularly my students read the assigned textbook .. and when i was a student, if the course was taught without much abstraction, i'd just skip buying the textbook entirely and use the reserved one in the campus library [3].

i believe that students should read mathematics in addition to performing the computations. if the students attend my lectures, then maybe they would be more inclined to read notes that were written specifically for them.



[1] this has the additional benefit that students can't (easily) look up the solutions to your problems. for those instructors that are worried about cheating, then this might make it simpler to curtail it.

[2] .. and for those of you with illegible handwriting, (A) shame on you, and/or (B) there's always latex. for those others who say that this is a lot of work .. well, how often do you re-teach the same courses? write a good set of notes once, and you have you own kind of textbook. i bet that's how most textbooks are written.

[3] now that i think about it, i really like libraries. apart from a handful of cafes and museums around the world, most of my favorite places are libraries. i'll visit the local one if i'm attending a friend's wedding in a town that i've never visited before. it's also fun to talk to librarians, those fellow lovers of wisdom, wit, and lore ..

it's a shame that many of them in the states are constantly facing budget cuts .. which is suggestive that politicians don't quite understand their constituents: a library is more than a collection of physically manifested copyrights. it is a manifestation of a community and its ideals. when you tell a kid that (s)he must buy a laptop in order to learn, that's like saying that democracy takes second place to money.

mildly relevant: sometimes we are too smart for our own good.

the following article sounds paradoxical, but i think it's true. for the same reason(s), it's why i like getting up in the morning, making a cup of coffee, and while i'm waking up, start to do maths.

it's a brand new day;
i'm ready to work out the details now!

// from "why programmers work at night" @swizec

Why then do we perform our most mentally complex work when the brain wants to sleep and we do simpler tasks when our brain is at its sharpest and brightest?

Because being tired makes us better coders.

.. You’d think I’d work better – so much energy, so much infinite overclocked brainpower. But instead I keep tripping over myself because I can’t focus for more than two seconds at a time.

.. We have too much brainpower for ~80% of the tasks we work on – face it, writing that one juicy algorithm, requires ten times as much code to produce an environment in which it can run. Even if you’re doing the most advanced machine learning (or something) imaginable, a lot of the work is simply cleaning up the data and presenting results in a lovely manner.

And when your brain isn’t working at full capacity it looks for something to do. Being tired makes you dumb enough that the task at hand is enough.