A-Mud-Ican Football

Once again, thanks to Melissa for organizing this shin-dig at LBA. Quite literal shin-dig. Just walking along the field, some guys planted their feet a good four inches in the mud, leaving craters in their wake, particularly by the sprinkler head.

So, the three people I knew there: Melissa, Cortni, and Shigs. I mean Nick. I have this weird thought process of referring to people as they refer to themselves online; I imagine I'll call Mr. Bayle reddeno one of these days. Actually, he seems to be an exception to the rule, as he is an exception to msot other things...uh...like some nice physical activity at LBA park. (See that circle around back to the topic? See that? Boo-yah.)

The rest of the people there were Melissa's sister Amy, and then a bunch of dudes who had muscle and/or hobbity statures. I'm glad we had things stay at touch football.

At the end of the day, we learned that:

• Pivoting was a bad idea, and nearly inevitably resulted in a slide tackle of the self.
• Gloves didn't help catching. Though, the one guy with gloves kept them on anyway; fair enough, since his team was winning. :)
• Melissa is almost laterally collapsible. Upon catching the ball, she does something...like, folding her shoulders in, so she becomes half her normal width. It's like trying to stop an arrow.
• When the ball is hiked, make sure your footing's sure before you run. One guy, at hike, took two steps but only got one and a half. As he picked his chest up out of the ground, we got ready for the do-over.
• I picked up the nickname "Mud Boy," much easier to remember (visual cues) than my actual name. I had three magnificent drops, one fumble from a wet ball, and almost all were done because I had the luckless ability to find myself in the muddiest patches whenever I was open. I did catch the ball too, but that also inevitably sent me into the mud — once, I caught it, ran forward, then tried to stop but my feet kept going, and my back soon followed. Quite the streak (on the field and my back). I've also mastered the flip-landing, ensuring I don't damage myself when landing on my shoulder. Yeah, that was good times.
• Similarly, Nick picked up the moniker "That guy who keeps catching it." Seriously, he's good at this stuff. I had to chase him down once, so I had to experience his glorious touchdown, while I got mud on my face from his high-steps-in-the-back running form. Not bad for a fencer. (Seriously, though, good job Nick! And good running form, too; people should be eating your dirt as you fly by.)

I look forward to the next time we do this in a muddy field. Not a dry field, because then falling isn't quite so glorious (nor so commonly happenstance). I'm hopin' to catch it more next time, too. I eagerly await.

How Car Commercials SHOULD Be Done

Shown to me by Oli Newsome.

This definitely one-ups that Cadillac commercial that has cars in a formal dance.

4 MB.

Beautiful.

If Banjos were Italian, they'd be Banji.

I had an idea earlier tonight: What would "Dueling Banjos" sound like on instruments without six strings? Like, a cello, or brass choir (or brass choir vs woodwind ensemble)? Would it even be possible to play? Not very likely, but I thought I'd poke around to see if it had been done. I stumbled across this entry linking, or rather un-linking, Dueling Banjos and Debian. That's fairly amusing by itself, but the link at the end of the article took the cake.

Does anybody have an .mp3 of Dueling Banjos (on any instrument) they'd be willing to send me? I hook up to file-trade services so rarely I can't justify having the software on my computer…

Upon finding an .mp3 of Dueling Banjos: I would be really impressed if somebody played an arrangement for something besides banjos. "Dueling Timpanos" would greatly amuse me if someone did it, but unfortunately it would probably require two rows of a dozen timpani to do right...along with 4-8 operators. Oh man, that would be hilarious pandemonium.

I feel quite sufficiently relaxed for tomorrow's test. Joy.

Joys of reading about math

"When I [Steven Krantz] was a graduate student at Princeton I once overheard D. C. Spencer telling an admiring group, "I just love sheaves. They have algebra this way (and he sliced his hand up and down) and topology this way (and he sliced his hand from left to right)." A the time I did not know what a sheaf was, so could not appreciate the wisdom of Spencer's remarks. Now I know that he was right."
— Mathematical Apocrypha, page 106

Looking up what a sheaf could be, I found it would take a little review of the topology I had last year. So, I went to the page on manifolds, and reached quite a bit of satisfaction at recalling the manifold concept. I believe I learned it first from a book called The Shape of Space, by Jeff Weeks. That book was a funny thing: The first few chapters could be read and understood by a seventh grader. That is, supposing the seventh grader had the intestinal fortitude to enjoy mathematics after that garbage in middle school math. (Ahem. Bias, anyone? Come get your heaping helping of bias!) But after a few chapters the topics jump to something you see about the junior year of college; the learning curve doesn't so much climb, as stab the sky, letting n dimensions spill non-Euclidean junk over everyone's head.

The Shape of Space became a bit laborious, and quite hand-wavey in , to read after a while. It doesn't satisfy one of my during-school-year-Literature axioms: Let it be Short. Mathematical Apocrypha has stories that last sometimes two paragraphs. That's more like it. Oliver Sacks (I thought I'd try typing it right for once) also falls under that. Novels have to wait their turn.

I think next year, in lieu of a novel or two, I'll pick a random Topology exercise from my skinny Dover text and publish its answer, recursively defining every necessary term in the FE wiki. That sounds refreshing. I could have a whole year of undergraduate-level topology if I did all the exercises in that book. For a mere 200 pages and half-printer-paper size, it has enough exercises per chapter, hard exercises too, to slow any student down to the rate of 1 chapter per month if he/she were to endeavor solutions to all the problems. I think I'll stick with occupying myself for a week on two or three.

I think I need to focus this curiosity of mine onto probability theory, before I do something dumb and end up with a Ph.D. in pure mathematics and end up scrubbing toilets and combing beaches for a decade. Though, I suppose it'd be fun scrawling theorems on bathroom stalls, accompanying other graphical endeavors. I think my first bathroom graffiti would be something from graph theory, a "Hamiltonian Circle" joke: two nodes, two edges, one circular cycle, one stick figure with a label 'H' walking the path, much dander from people scratching their heads trying to figure what the hell that yahoo was thinking when he drew that on a bathroom stall. Ah, yes.

Journal entry, 20041109

I've had a few SOGO concerts recently. Two Mondays ago was the annual Student Tour/Petting Zoo, where the Conservatory & Brass Choir groups played concerts in Elma and Montesano. The gym at Elma (or whichever we played 2nd at) had this damnable flourescent lighting that made flash photography lose all background elements, but let photos without flash capture everything extremely well, if not for the slow shutter speed. Thankfully the camera was digital; unthankfully, less than 10 of 40 shots turned out well enough to publish anywhere without editing of some sort. Fah. Photography wasn't my strong suit, anyway.

I had lunch at the Beehive in Montesano that day. That restaurant is the town's "Greasy Spoon;" the French dip wasn't that great, but that could've been partially because half an orchestra descended upon it, making for a busier-than-bees lunch hour. That seems to be the first place I've been in quite a while where the au jus wasn't some substitute au jus that I could drink straight. They get kudos for that.

The other SOGO event was the season's first concert. It has been a while since I managed to not plug a concert, but lo and behold; it was Sunday. Oh well, midterms were last week, and I now know when the Evergreen computer labs close (heh). Anyways, about how good the cocnert went: We moved from Oly High to the Washington Center, and rolled all of the groups' concerts into one. So, for $10-$15 tickets, the audience got a real classical concert, in a professional performing venue. We opened up the Orchestra level and the Loge, thinking we'd maybe fill those up with parents; the front rows of the Mezzanine was dedicated to orchestra members' seating.

There was such a huge turnout, we had to open the other parts of the Mezzanine, and it was filled. There were almost 200 more than we thought would come. Unfortunately, at least 50 of those people missed the Debut Winds' performance, because they were stuck in line outside and the concert couldn't be postponed much longer than it already was. In some senses, that ain't a bad problem to have. I hope it encourages people to preorder tickets.

As for the actual performances: The sound & size all of our groups had was incredible. The Debut and Academy orchestras (youngest and middle group, respectively) filled the whole stage, and played well as units. They were quite the impressive sight; they're groups of 70-strong kids. The Conservatory will be one packed orchestra in a few years if they all stay with SOGO; we could use more strings now, but I think we still sounded well enough to give the concert a great ending – Schumann's First Symphony, minus the Scherzo. I would've liked to play the creepy dance movement, but alas. No creep.

I now wonder how CAYSA is doing. I've heard (and just looking at this, seen, (warning: CAYSA site won't work in FireFox)) that they've diminished to two groups. (There is a String Philharmonic that rehearses as well, but I didn't see them on the concert info.) I want to go to their next concert and see how they're doing, now that I've heard all the levels of SOGO. I could never compare the two organizations' orchestras before, because I hadn't heard Academy and Debut. I had heard the String and Junior Symphonies (CAYSA groups) last spring, and...well, it wasn't good. The performance those kids gave did not seem like a performance that should've happened in Spring; Fall, perhaps, if they had shakedown issues, but not something for the end of the year. The younger CAYSA groups weren't too big, either. It looks like SOGO is taking over Olympia-area youth music. With only two groups this year, this could be CAYSA's throes. We'll see, at their concert.

For my programming midterm, I wrote a 400-line program in Curry (maybe even in Haskell, I didn't use logic variables) that schedules final exams for a school. A very small school. For those of you unfamiliar with the problem of scheduling exams (or games in youth soccer groups, or similar things), this is the problem of coloring a graph, where the vertices of the graph are classes, and two vertices are connected if they have a conflict, meaning they can't be scheduled at the same time. Conflicts usually arise from students being registered in both classes.

I'd give a short treatise on graph coloring, but I just tried and realized I don't have quite the technical grace of some. Suffice it to say that finding the minimal number of exam times necessary is a neat goal to achieve, but so far can only be done with the brutest of force in computations. To schedule finals for six classes in a minimal number of time slots, there are 720 (=6!) possible exam time configurations, many of which are duplicates, that need to be generated. Scheduling exams for 7 courses means 5040 (=7!) possible exam time configurations that need to be generated. As for a college with umpteen dozen classes...well, everything's done in a week there anyway, so they avoid the inherent inefficiency of scheduling an efficient exam schedule.

That program I wrote is so fun to watch in action. It generates list after list of courses, spewing them onto the terminal output screen. Kilobytes by the dozen make the screen wildly scroll, and often the whitespace in the output forms fun patterns to follow. Sure, it's a memory drain, but it puts on a good show.

I miss the fun math. I stumbled on Quaternions earlier tonight on Wikipedia, and am itching to bone up on those. Of course, the math GRE demands more banal topics, and its daunting date has me practicing those. I'm starting to think I don't like Calculus, because it rolls into DiffEQ, which I know I don't like, and has things that otherwise approach the "Applied" fields. Oh well. After Saturday, and after catching up in classes, I'll get back to doing the fun maths, if XSLery 2.0 doesn't entice me first.

OHS Band Concert

This is really a quick note to myself, else I'd forget: Tomorrow night at 7:00 (or 7:30? not sure), Oly High will have a band concert. $4 seating for adults ("Students" means high school, $3 for students). I'm going solely to hear "Powerhouse" from the jazz band, regardless of how good I hear it is or isn't from anyone. If anybody wants to come with, lemme know, but I have no idea what else is going to be played.

In lieu of real work

With every passing day, it grows harder to do work at home. Often, there's a binder sitting not five feet away from me, and I can't exert the force to pick it up and open it. Sometimes, that's because I'm sitting there and stressing about work; not healthy. Or, it's because there is a turf war on the computer table that would ensue between my binder and my bowl of ice cream. We all know who wins that one; also not healthy, but at least that only affects the body.

Right now, there's a binder sitting to my left. I need but to pick it up and I can finish the night's homework. But I have other things I'm somewhat, sorta morbidly, enjoying thinking about. Long live the Crastinator's Credo.

The GRE's in two Saturdays. My review for it has been horrendous. I think once again, I've bitten off more than I could chew in scheduling. The last time I did this, it was the same end result, in that nothing truly suffered except the capital-EX EXam (AP Physics, Mechanics). I'd rather my history not repeat itself, but if it does, no worries. I'll take the test next fall, after a summer of relaxed math reading. My Complex Analysis book is actually quite charming — a pocket- and weight-friendly Dover paperback (EVERY math student's best friend), fairly well-written, a non-miniscule font size; and, at least two planar regions resemble smiley faces. I wouldn't mind reading through it again. As for the other topics, they're either easy to relearn in a week (convergence tests du calcul), or already pathetically vanished from my mind anyway (Linear Algebra and DiffEQ).

It's going to be important that I relax going into this test. Ease of mind is so important for tests.

And now to foil my plans, I'm getting midterms for Curry and Math Logic tomorrow. And my Discrete Math exercises are in a state of w∅e. OCO starts rehearsals for the Beethoven Birthday Bash tomorrow, too.

I plan to celebrate taking he first GRE by spending the week afterwards catching up on a lot of things. The main things will be homework and office work, but I also plan to dance that Wednesday! The logic homework due the next day looks to be a big doozy assignment, the last before Thanksgiving Break (whole week's off! JOY!), but I've put the dancing off for way too long. The dust on my shoes is pathetic.

I should resume working. I need to spend more time at Evergreen, I'm definitely more productive in the computer lab (read: I blog and check e-mail much less). Gonna spend quite a while there this week. Meanwhile, here's to screwing off in the face of homework.