August 2007 Archives
Some people pointed out in comments that the following two phrases were annoying. I wholeheartedly concur.
"I could care less" for "I couldn't care less." [This usage is pervasive. It just doesn't make any sense!]
"Each and every..." [A memo from the Department of Redundancy Department.]
And the latest one that has been annoying me intensely:
"blah, blah, blah... doll." [In this modern day and age, who refers to other people as dolls? Well, sadly, some people still do, and it really annoys me. Talk about an insult! I mean, think of what a doll actually is. It's a small, inanimate object, usually with grotesquely misproportioned body parts (think of Barbie dolls!), that is either collected by old ladies or used by little girls to play idiotic games like "house" or "tea time". If that is how others think of me, I should just shoot myself in the face immediately.]
Elias Stein wrote a series of wonderful books on analysis, the Princeton lectures in analysis. I read the first book, on Fourier analysis, in the spring, and I'm currently reading the second, on complex analysis. Complex analysis is fun! It feels as remarkable as learning calculus for the first time did. It's really hard to imagine that the simple condition of holomorphicity could produce such an enormous number of totally nonobvious results. Granted, holomorphicity is a strong condition, but it seems like such a simple one to have so many interesting consequences. It has rekindled my interest in analysis.
You can really tell that French labor laws are messed up when we have to schedule our conference calls with France at 7 or 8 AM CDT because their government makes everyone go home at 5 PM.
I may be anal retentive, but several phrases and words that people say bother me intensely. I won't go into the fine details, but I will say that the king of them all is the use of "I feel like" instead of "I think that". How on earth did this substitution arise? When one says "I think that..." one is usually communicating information or stating an opinion. Saying "I feel like..." hardly lends any air of credibility or strength to the information or opinion. Given that "feeling" tends to involve nonrational thought, and this act of opining ought to be entirely rational, the weakness that the phrase conveys is almost paradoxical. Moreover, it just sounds idiotic. Imagine some respectable person saying something like: "I feel like Iranian defiance of international nuclear standards will undermine the very existence of the standards, because they lack a tangible enforcement mechanism." That must be quite a feeling.
I have noticed this trend most prominently in individuals between the age of 15 and 25. College professors have been known to publically denounce people who say this phrase. And rightfully so. It should be stricken from our parlance. And if you hear me say it, please beat me very forcefully.
When I awoke today and sipped my tea at the kitchen table, I noticed a strange sight. My avacado that had been sitting on the table was now on the windowsill, sitting mangled and half-eaten upon a heap of shards of its skin. Additionally, I noticed a small hole in the window screen. It appears that our nighttime visitor couldn't quite fit the avacado through his hole, tried eating it, and became dissatisfied--or extremely full. My best guess is that it was one of these strangely aggressive squirrels that scamper around Hyde Park, or perhaps a very strong pack of rats. After all, it (or they) managed to transport an entire avacado from the table to the window despite the four-foot drop in between.
I received another life lesson today: never trust old and decrepit electronics to not shock you during normal operation.
Today I tried to connect a terminator to the BNC output (NOT the high voltage line) of a very old muon counter. As I was putting it on, I was watching the oscilloscope very intently. Suddenly the occasional calm pulses from muons jolted into a chaotic mess of squiggles, which seemed somewhat strange to me. That is, it seemed strange until I realized that 1500V (at low current, thankfully) was shocking me rather forcefully. Finally, the usual seizure-like impulse kicked in, and everything flew completely out of my hands and onto the floor. Within a few minutes I was fine, except for my pinky, which lost a few square millimeters of epidermis, vaporized by the shock.
I suppose there is a reason why my door has a big sign that says: "DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE". Incidentally, my door also has another sign that says: "CAUTION: Radioactivity!". Things do not bode well.
Is it just me, or is the stock market self-destructing these days? Theoretically it would be a good time to buy, assuming I had money that wasn't already tied up in tanking stocks...
"Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 31--32"
The mathematics REU is officially over! After two nights of talks and good (and free) food and a short party, it ended. I know much more mathematics, and I continued my ongoing trend of feeling less and less intelligent. I'm also $1500, minus about $350 of tax, wealthier. So it was basically a fantastic time. I could recite an endless string of gripping results and definitions, but I'd rather mention one brief "life lesson" that I found to be pretty important.
There is a general trend particularly in physics, and to a lesser extent in mathematics, in which higher levels of abstraction and generality are considered more attractive, profound, and interesting. There are legitimate reasons why this is so. Abstract notions explain or are applicable to a wider range of particular situations. Physicists usually call this feature "profundity". They are absolutely correct: consider Maxwell's equations, for example. These four short equations express all the features of classical electromagnetism. If that isn't profound, useful, and possessing a high degree of explanatory power, then I don't know what is.
But the observation that generality tends to be better often morphs into the belief that generality is better. Under this illusion, I dragged myself into the study of category theory. Category theory is so general that it is practically meaningless by itself. I'm not quite sure how to describe this, but it just is. This is not to say that category theory is useless. On the contrary, it is used everywhere, but mostly as a sort of language rather than a piece of actual mathematics. Moreover, it's applications are primarily in algebra, of which I have little knowledge. So I spent my recent weeks regretting my choice as I labored writing my paper on categories, regretting my mistaken assumption that generality for its own sake has any value whatsoever.
According to a friend of mine on Facebook, human blood is worth more per mL than vodka and bottled water, but less than HP #45 black ink... probably says something about society's priorities.
One manifestation of Chicago's backwardness is the stunning lack of decent recycling facilities. The University barely recycles at all, and the city's recycling program is painfully limited and underused. So I accumulate a lot of plastic bags from the grocery store because I can't recycle them. In response, I try to reuse them.
Grocery stores often give discounts of 10 cents for people who bring their own shopping bags. Despite being an evil institution, the Hyde Park Co-Op is no exception to this rule. It's obvious that most people don't do this, however. People forget, or don't really care about getting a 30-cent discount each week.
Nevertheless, the average shopping bag is good for at least 3 uses, so we could potentially be using 1/3 the number of bags. This would clearly be economically and environmentally beneficial.
So my idea is this: why not charge people for their bags, instead of giving them a discount for not using them? When the price of the bag is implicit in the cost of groceries rather than explicit, people forget that they are actually paying for their bags when they buy groceries. Hence they don't care about it. But suppose you were to charge someone a quarter for each bag that he uses. The higher monetary value placed on the bag helps, but the individual is also consciously aware that he is buying the bag.
The grocery-bagging-boys might become the object of the stingy shopper's ire for using one too many bags, but it would probably rationalize consumer behavior a little.
