I maintain a flickr account,but I don't really do much to promote it, which is a shame since a lot of what I do regularly shows up there once I get around to updating it.
Hence, in the following post, a few highlights of things I've posted recently that I think people should see:
( Massive amounts of pictures! )
So, what have y'all been up to lately?
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| 2009-06-26 22:06 |
| Lida |
| Public |
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SpringMarchClaudia Prohaska was born on the 12th of March, 1981, in the Maternity ward of the Akademisches Krankenhaus in Wien. After a comparatively short stay, Claudia and her parents, Peter and Else, retreat to the family home in Winden am See. She was born a healthy girl, blond tufts of hair, and already deep blue colored eyes evident as soon as she emerged. Peter worked as clerical management at the UNIDO, and would commute in to Wien along the A4 every day. Else spent most of her time minding the home, and the rest organizing church volunteers, girl guides and any and all other club work in Neusiedl and Winden she could get involved in. AprilClaudia went through school leisurely. First in the Volksschule in Winden, and then once she turned 10, she continued in the Unterstufe and then Oberstufe at the Neusiedl Akademie der Wirtschaft. A quite acceptable, though not remarkable student, she spent her time dreaming about her future, toting unicorn-adorned backpacks, crushing on musicians and later on classmates, and aiming her career, by and by, through the Tourism and Economics programme at the Akademie. Outside school, Claudia participated in most of the activities that her mother was busy organizing, and a few on her own. She spent a few years in the Scouts and Guides, and many many summers working as ball-picker at the Donnerskirchen Golf Club driving range and as a tourist guide in the Neusiedler national parks. She skiied, did gymnastics, trained Aikido and danced. MayPuberty came. Claudia shaped up into a quite beautiful young Austrian girl. With her blond braids, bright blue eyes, and the dirndl she'd wear for the tourists, she almost looked like something out of a 3rd Reich propaganda poster. A few years in a row, she took fumbling, and not very well hidden lovers among the boys circulating through the area as the tourists flooded in during the late summer months. Her virginity was lost at an age of 16 to a Sicilian boy, Francisco, two years her senior, in a hay stack in an open air museum overlooking the lake. Outside the tourist season, Claudia was swept up in Else's increasing engagement in the peace movement. They marched in Wien against the NATO bombs in 1995, and on the Indian and Pakistani embassies in Wien in non-proliferation protests in 1998. Her 12th year of school, 1999-2000, Claudia went as an exchange student to Handelsgymnasiet in Skellefteå, northern Sweden. SummerJuneSkellefteå was just the same in many ways, and very different in others. Claudia had great problems adapting to the non-existent nights after her arrival in August, but the close access to nature, and the many avidly skiing friends she made both felt quite like home. She acquired, quickly, a clique of friends she counted as close, and with whom she spent all her weekends and most her evenings. JulyFirst, two weeks after arriving, the first of these friends - her class mate Maja - invited her along to eat crayfish with her family. Later on, the clique made more and more a point of pulling Claudia into the full width and depth of Swedish traditions and ceremonies. AugustDecember came. On the 6th, Claudia organized a Nikolaus-celebration with her clique. Cheap and trite gifts were exchanged, Glühwein was drunk and much joy was had by all. On the 12th, the clique gathered and gave Claudia a detailed rundown on the exact structure of St. Lucia celebrations in Sweden. They equipped her with a long white dress, a red silk ribbon to work as a belt, and an electric candlelit crown. Lisa's mother worked a kindergarten which was only a little bit of a detour getting to school that Monday morning. So she'd appear wearing her crown, and her gaggle'd be there with candles of their own, and they'd put on a good show for the kids. She got up in the morning. Dressed in the Lucia dress: thin white cotton dress hugging the ground, a long red ribbon tied around her waist and an electric candle crown on her blond hair - that for this day was let out unbraided. Above this, she took a large, long and heavily padded overcoat. Into her schoolbag was added more, and warmer clothes, to change into afterwards. And so, shivering slightly from her thin clothing, she set out, walking through the heavily snowclad streets of Skellefteå heading for the kindergarten Kolibrin. The way there went through a small park, and once in the park, the crossroad where she was supposed to walk right didn't actually have a right turn, so she walked the rightmost she could instead. Her path grew more winding. The forest darker. This being December, the days were pitch black up until the few dreary hours of almost light surrounding noon, but this was even darker than Claudia was used to. And then she turned a corner and almost ran into Him. Tall. Blindingly handsome. Radiating enough light to illuminate the small clearing he was standing in. "You have come," he remarked, in a voice made of honeyed wine and christmas spices. "To me. And bearing such beauty." At his smile, Claudia's legs all but folded on the spot. Just hearing him adress her made her weak, tingly, excited and completely mindless. And then his eyes dove into hers and he smiled. And at that the rest of the world faded away. She didn't even notice as a copy of herself sashayed out from the shadows, past the pair and back along the path she had come up. The stranger beckoned, and she followed. He took her by the hand, and she didn't even notice as they walked deeper into the forest and into stranger and stranger areas. AutumnSeptemberOut from the dark forest they entered a huge white snowy plain. Walking across this, they reached a walled ice garden, and progressed through it up to a tremendous Cinderella castle all in clear ice, lightly tinted in pastel tones. She was led on, into the castle, and her coat pulled off her shoulders and dispatched with some servant. She herself was brought into the dining hall. The stranger looked her over very carefully, critically, and then concluded that "No, you won't do as a courtier. I have quite enough of those right now. But you're already well equipped." His hand settled on her shoulder and she felt herself stiffen up. Glancing down, her skin took on a slightly silvery metallic tone, and then she was lifted up on the large table and put to stand in the middle of it. And once she was settled, a door opened, a draft entered, and the first splash of candle wax hit her nose. She winced slightly, but had stiffened enough already that she couldn't really do much other than suffer as more and more wax dribbled down on her, hot and burning. OctoberThe dining hall was drafty. The candles dribbled and sputtered. And before the dinner she was adorning was done, they burnt out, and snuffed out in small trickles of smoke. "Relight!" the command rung out from the Host. Nothing happened. "Honestly," he complained in an almost whiny voice to the chosen court-girl of the evening, a dark-skinned beauty with downcast eyes. "Even the simplest jobs just won't be done properly nowadays." Then suddenly, his voice flashed from whiny to ice cold wrath, and with a wild gesture he shouted "OUT! GET OUT!" And instead of the girl-shaped candlestick on the table, surrounded by spluttered wax, there was a very confused and very small hummingbird. Azure coloration, shimmering in the green of polished emeralds. It cocked its head at the furious host, and then darted up in the air and out one window before it could elicit another outburst. This was the last Lida ever saw of the inside of the castle. NovemberA hummingbird in an ice garden is a pretty pathetic existence. Nevertheless, the Host kept quite a number of them. The ice flowers were mostly orchid-like in appearance, with very deep trumpet-like flowers. A few of them would contain a few drops of sugared water, and subsequently the hummingbird population would be flitting in almost panic-like urgency from flower to flower hoping to find one of the sugarer flowers before any of their competitors. Lida spent most of her waking hours starving and shivering, flying around, hunting the elusive bits and pieces of food scattered around. Nights were spent in the few places one could possibly find heat. One of the rare places she'd find heat would be with the dark-skinned courtier whom the Host spent his attentions on Lida's short visit to the Castle. She'd flutter up to her, occasionally, settle down on her finger, and allow herself to be lifted into her fur coat where she'd press herself, cold and shivering against her bosom until she was no longer neither cold nor shivering. WinterDecemberThe first time Lida felt that things had to change was when she saw the Keeper and his entourage one day. The entire entourage, but one. The dark skinned, warm coated, generous woman was suddenly no longer with the crowd she usually always appeared in. No longer finding her old bosom to warm in, Lida grew more miserable, and ever colder. It all got worse as in the evening an icy breeze started wafting through the garden, picking up air speed through the evening. JanuaryEscape. Running through endless snowy plains. Hunted by wolves. Snowy plains turn to snowy forests that turn to: FebruaryLida and Daina emerged together, frost-bitten, shivering and exhausted into the snowy drifts of the triangular clearing in the Untere Prater just north of the Hauptallee. Once a wind and a bird, they have grown more solid, and more humanoid their entire flight, and emerge out into the snowy clearing humans. Naked and freezing humans, nonetheless. Lida's bright blue feathers have been retracting to the top of her head as the influences of Arcadia waned, and now only remains as a wild bunch of bright blue hairs exploding from her scalp. Getting clothes. Getting into central Wien. Lida steals an overcoat from the Humana charitable second hand clothes shop. Both deciding on meeting their respective families. Having said her adieu to Daina, Lida boards the REX towards Fertöszentmiklos, and - hiding from the conductors on the on-board toilet - makes it to Neusiedl am See undetected. Curling herself deep into her coat, she trudges through the snowy walkways down to Winden. As she closes in on her old home, her feet take over, and she walks on autopilot. Up the driveway, up to the front door. Her hand shivers and her mind races as she reaches out, and then pushes the door bell. "Will you answer the door, dear?" "I'm going, I'm going!" The door rattles and then opens, and Peter, still wearing his undershirt from the day's work, and grey sweatpants stands outside, mustering Lida. "Yes?" The sight overpowers Lida, and she breaks down and starts crying in long, powerful sobs, her entire body shaking with each of them. "Oh, for goodness sake. Come in out of the cold. What on earth is the matter!?" Peter ushers her in, and pulls the door close behind her shutting the cold outside. Lida is led to a chair in the kitchen, and sinks down into it thankfully. As she sits, Else comes sweeping into the kitchen. "Oh my goodness, whatever is the matter!?" She immediately sets the electric kettle to work, then comes over to Lida and Peter, and crouches in front of her. "Who are you? Where are you from? What are you DOING here?!" - the questions abound, and with each one, Lida just gets more and more distressed and less and less communicable. Finally, the tide of questions, all unanswered, stems somewhat, and Else goes to pour a peppermint tea, and Peter pulls out a loaf of bread. At that, Claudia comes down the stairs and looks into the kitchen. Upon seeing Lida, her eyes narrow, and then flash. "Oh my GOD, what are you DOING!?" she shouts. "Mom, dad, who is this?! What is she doing in our kitchen!? Why did she .. You STOLE the silver knife off of that table! I saw you!" she splutters. Both parents turn around. "You WHAT!?" they exclaim in unison. Else puts down the peppermint tea in front of Lida, and musters her with a hard glare. "Let's see those pockets, dear. Give it all back, now." Peter walks over to the house phone and dials. "Yes, hi. We have apprehended a thief in our home. Yes. Yes. Waldblick 5, Winden. How soon? Yes, alright." Now, all family member hold Lida fixed in glares. Following orders, she roots through her coat pockets, and somehow - completely without her notice, indeed a single silver knife is now present in her left pocket. Not that Lida has any recollection of having seen the knife, much less having put it there. She shrinks back, and curls up in a little coat-covered hulking ball on the chair. She is allowed to drink the tea though - "Look at the poor girl, she's shivering!" Else exclaims and hands her the cup. The ten minutes following feel like an eternity. Lida still cries, and the rest of the family glare angrily. Then two police officers, Hr. Winzler and Fr. Taubeier, arrive and interview, briefly, all family members. "Na, kleine. You're coming with us," Hr. Winzler says, and shoves the still crying little girl out the door. The car ride into the police station in Neusiedl is swift and silent. Once arrived, Lida gets placed in an interrogation cell, and Fr. Taubeier sits down across the table. "Name?" "Lida. Lida. Lida is my name. My name. My name is Lida. Not anything else. Nobody else. Me. Just me." "Lida who?" "Lida. Noone else. You have to have a name. My name is Lida." "Where are you from?" "Here. Right here. Over there. Winden. I lived there. Then I didn't. Now I don't. Do I? I don't think so. I might not." "What are you doing here?" "Home. Coming home. Wanting to come home. Tried coming home. Didn't work. Ghastly. " "Where is home?" "Here. Winden. Close to the golf course. I could walk in the summers. I could work in the summers. I used to. I don't anymore. It's all gone. Lost it all. Nothing left. Nothing here. All gone." and the interview continued in a similar non-informative fashion for a while. Finally, as it turned out that Lida, according to her own information, was still not of age, still not able to state a home, or the existence of a family, nor any identifying information that actually could be checked against any records, the Social Services were called. And Lida, since the family Prohaska, having received their possessions back again, chose not to press charges, was relased from Police custody into the custody of the Neusiedl Sozialdienst. And at the Sozialdienst, the same questions were asked. Over again. And Lida tried answering. She described the Castle. And the Ice Garden. And the Sozialdienst called in a psychiatrist. Who declared Lida probably schizoid. Possibly paranoic. And far outside the realms of what Neusiedl could deal with. A few hours wait, and then she got driven to the psychiatric ward of the Wien Akademisches Krankenhaus. She gets deemed a low risk patient, and transferred to a group living community close to Baumgartner Höhe.
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A companion character to Daina.
Leander Achim auf der Weide, born 1985, grew up to Austrian parents in the southern reaches of the area surrounding Wien. Bright kid, liked sports, liked computers, grew up passionate in a loving home with activist parents who still remembered the 1968 revolts.
As above: grew active in hard core pacifist movements, took part in many demonstration and even a few sabotage actions before he decided that the sabotage, in itself, placed too large culpability on himself, whereupon he simply stopped.
For his 18th birthday, in 2003, combined with an exam gift, he got a trip to Goa from his parents. He went with friends, got involved in a particularly western-tourist-trappy Guru-centered cult in Goa, and stayed on for longer than was planned.
Stolen while out in the forests outside Goa high as houses on shrooms and going through an initiation rite step for his host cult.
Set to show fight by Their Keeper. Wouldn't. Went through deconstruction, debugging and reconstruction as above. This was all followed by a long sequence of tweaks and supposed improvements through the time he was gone.
Once they managed to escape, Leander has been broken into what can most easily be described as smush, mentally. Physically, he is gnarly, every single cube inch of his body having been rebuilt more times than he could remember. Arms reach long - so that he gets a better reach for sword fights. Legs are comically short - to keep him from running circles around opponents instead of fighting them. His face was never a high priority during the reconstructions, and is looked in a toothy grimace, with ridges and welts covering everything.
Very high physical. Okay mental, low social. Mental concentrated away from Intelligence.
Bitter, vitriolic, deformed antisocial asshole. He'll have a strong affinity for the violent far left: punkers, AntiFA et.c. for their positions combining the World Peace embracing ideals with an Action Now and Damn The Consequences attitude mirroring his own highly conflicted internal remains. He remains a flock animal, looking to his peers primarily for instructions and directions.
1. How was your family life before your abduction? Were your parents kind or cruel? Were you spoiled or impoverished?
Family life before the abduction were good. Leander grew up with loving, politically active and harmonious parents, a sister 2 years younger, and all his life ahead of him.
2. Where did you live? Did you live in Vienna, or did you live elsewhere?
The Achim auf der Weide family lived in the small village of Mauerbach, to the west of Wien, on the border of the Eichenhahn national park and the Baumgartner forest. Close enough to Wien for his parents to be able to commute to work in Wien proper, but still far away enough that they had a basically rural, idyllicized childhood.
3. How were you viewed amongst your peers, both in school(if you went) and in your social life. Were you cited as a bully or ruffian, were you kind and charitable?
Leander was popular in school: throughout one of the pretty boys, sporty enough to be in the high school in groups, good looking enough that he would always have a cluster of girls pining for him. At that, he had a tendency to be somewhat insufferable in his own awareness of his good standing in the school culture; but was kind and generous to most.
4. What was your occupation prior to your abduction? How did this play a role in your personality (if it did)?
Leander had just finished Gymnasium and was about to start university studies as he got abducted.
1. How did your former master claim you? What methods did he establish to get you into the Hedge?
The master appeared in front of him in the shape of the God Ganesha during his initiation rites in Goa, while he was high on shrooms. Ganesha then told him that the next step he needed to take was to follow Ganesha to be guided through the upcoming tribulations. Believing this apparent God, Leander simply followed along.
2. How did your Master treat you during this time? Was he forceful? Or was he friendly?
During this time, the Master was friendly, occasionally insistent, but essentially friendly.
3. Give us a small description of how your character felt upon entering the Hedge, and when he officially captured you?
Religious ecstasy at first. Once they arrived at their destination, and Leander was thrown into the Gladiator Holding Cells, and his trip wore down, the extent to which everything had gone wrong started sinking in, and Leander fell into a deepening feeling of despair.
1. What tasks did your Master use you for? (This is an important note for Seeming as well as Kith selection)
Gladiator battles. He would be sent out, regularly, to fight in a classical arena to the amusement of various spectators, against opponents of many shapes and sorts, and also many varying degrees of balanced or imbalanced armament.
2. Were other stolen people working with you? How did you view them?
All the Gladiators, and many other functions in the world around the arena were fulfilled by stolen people. A wary camaraderie developed among the Gladiators - where the awareness was absolute that anyone would be forced to kill anyone else at any point in the future.
3. What urged you to escape?
Escapes were planned basically from the point Leander arrived. However, the retooling his Master subjected him to severely impaired his capability for planning, and so it was the meeting with Daina that set things in motion.
4. How do you view your Master now?
Leander nurtures a hope that one day he will be able to confront his Master, in battle, and defeat him, ridding the world of that horror. He doesn't really know how this is supposed to happen, but he keeps half an eye out for any opportunity leading towards such a resolution.
1. How much time has passed since your abduction and return from the Hedge?
Thoughts on this?
2. Are you just stepping out of the Hedge into Vienna, or coming from elsewhere?
It seems as if just stepping out into Wien is at least mildly discouraged. We should probably try and get clarification on how well-established new characters already are...
3. If you are in a Court, how did you get brought in?
I'm thinking:
Int 1 (used to be 3 or even 4, but then he got rebuilt...)
Virtue: Charity
Vice: Wrath (instilled)
Court: Spring or Summer, probably Spring.
Generic feeling: frustrated, seething, boiling unwelcome wrath. He needs someone else - preferably Daina - to tell him what to do. If nobody does, he grows frustrated and confused. Alas, he also has a temper worth fleeing from. And when his Wrath kicks in, so does his penchant for violence.
His frustrations do certainly not grow any less urgent by his fleeting memories of a time when he was not ... so clumsy. So .. BIG. So .. stupid. He can still remember what it felt like to be young, high, happy, intelligent, but he cannot reach any of these feelings. It's as if it all was caged in, put in a glass box and locked away for ever.
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If The next time someone asks me what group theory is good for, I should get them the following story / problem.
There was this prison once, with 100 prisoners on death row. Out of a whim, the warden (with support from the judicial system - and let's not get into the sociologics of this!) decides on a game for the prisoners to try to get their freedom.
The warden assigns to each prisoner one of the numbers 1-100, writes the same numbers on pieces of paper, and distributes them at random among 100 covered compartments in a desk drawer in his office.
The prisoners are then summoned into the office, one after another, and get to choose and look at the numbers contained in 50 of the 100 compartments.
The prisoners are allowed to come up with a strategy before the game starts, but once the whole thing starts, they are kept in isolation, and also not allowed to change the drawer contents, or otherwise try to communicate.
If all prisoners manage to pick their own number among the papers they find, then they all go free.
If but one single prisoner fails to find their own number, then all prisoners are executed.
Note that if every prisoner picks 50 compartments at random, then the probability that all go free is 1/2100, or about 10-30.
Can you figure out a strategy that will perform better? The best I know of has a freedom rate of about 30/100.
ETA: The key here is in recognizing that the way the Warden arranges the numbers is in fact a permutation. And there are some damn useful facts about permutation floating about that will help this problem immensely. One really nice fact about permutations is that any permutation can be broken down into a composition of disjoint cycles. And one (kinda tricky) combinatorial thing one could figure out is the following: Given some n and some k < n, how many of the n! permutations of n things have no cycles longer than k? If this proportion could be figured out, or at least bounded, it might shed some light on how to make a really neat strategy for our beloved death row prisoners.
Now, the number of permutations of 100 elements that have a cycle of length 100 are precisely 99!: We can order the images within that cycle in 100! ways, but it is cyclically invariant, so we get each element 100 times that way. Alternatively, we can argue that by cyclical invariance, we can write the smallest element in a cycle first, so only the remaining elements get permuted, yielding 99!. The number of permutations of 100 elements that have a cycle of length 99 are given by first choosing the elements in that cycle and then ordering them - so we get (100 C 99) * 98!. The number of permutations of 100 elements that have a cycle of length 98 are given by first choosing these elements, then ordering them in the cycle, and then permuting the rest, so we get (100 C 98) * 97! * 2. And this entry gives the pattern for all the elements. Hence, the total number of long permutations is given by the sum Σ k=51100 (100 C k) * (k-1)! * (100-k)! which we can rewrite, by using the expression for the binomial coefficient in factorials, to Σ k=51100 (100!/(100-k)!k!) * (k-1)! * (100-k)! = Σ k=51100 100!/k So the proportion of these among all the 100! permutations is exactly Σ k=51100 1/k which we can easily compute using your favourite calculator program to be
> sum . map (1.0/) $ [51..100]
0.6881721793101949
Hence, the proportion of short permutations the complement of this, working out to about 0.31. Now, in order to USE this knowledge, the prisoners should agree on the following strategy: Each, in turn, goes in to the office and picks the box with his own number. In it, he will find another number, so he follows the instruction on the paper bit, and goes to that box. Continuing in the same manner, he will follow the paper trail, as it were, until he reaches his own number. Since the numbers are permuted, doing this will ALWAYS get you back to your own number, since you are in your own cycle by definition. The only issue is whether your cycle will be short enough - all cycles have to be shorter than 50 for this to work. However, the probability of THIS occurring, we computed above - and it comes out to about 0.31. So this strategy would drastically improve on any more independent strategy.
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(English summary: I just voted in the election to the European Parliament. Of course, I voted Pirate. Also, the Pirate Party has some small issues with their interactions with the surrounding world.)
Som del av skjutsen av min kära ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) amerikabrev till Dublin och hennes flyg hem till Svärjet så passade vi på att glida förbi svenska ambassaden och rösta.
Givetvis så röstade jag Pirat.
Tyvärr, dock, har det visat sig att funktionärerna på PP är måttligt kompetenta att hantera förfrågningar till info@. Jag mailade med ungefär 10 dagar till godo och bad om ett par tre valsedlar - vi är åtminstone två svenskar i Galway som tänker rösta pirat - och fick svaret från någon att jag skulle maila någon annan med begäran. Email-adress skickades med.
Så jag mailar den angivna adressen. Och det studsar! Enligt piratpartiets mailserver finns inte den adress jag förväntas maila till.
Så jag mailar tillbaka till person 1 och påpekar detta, och ber honom skicka vidare min förfrågan till relevant person själv.
Varpå ingenting överhuvudtaget har hänt, och valsedlarna inte nått mig i tid för min röst.
Mailet jag skickade innehöll redan all relevant info! Ett par valsedlar, till följande adress *adressblobb*. Det hade gått ALLDELES utmärkt att hantera en sådan förfrågan organisationsinternt - man skickar vidare mailet till ansvarig person med en rad innan:
"Tja Pelle, du har ju hand om valsedelutskick. Tar du det här?"
Att be väljaren som kommer med en artig och rimlig förfrågan till info@ att göra allt jobb själv är bara patetiskt.
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Wow.
I cannot believe I haven't seen this movie before.
It is spectacularly good. Amazing. I just watched it (the 1957, Henry Fonda, one - not the 1997 TV remake) with my wife, and .... wow.
At several points along the way I found myself thinking "Dang, it would be good playing in a theatre production of this one!"
I don't quite I have the acting skills to make the movie justice, but .... it just swept me away.
At times like this, I wish I had the patience to produce the eloquence of, say, silmaril or turnberryknkn, since I have a strong feeling that this particular post does not appropriately reflect my feelings after watching the movie - however, I also have a wife in the bed next to me waiting for me to get off the computer, so this will have to do.
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So, googling a bit it turns out that the Galway city buses do not have an online route map of any kind.
Well - almost. There are a couple of photos from the Bus Éireann map flyer, which make a pretty unreadable end product.
So, in the spirit of Web 2.0, I sat down and tried to create a Google Map version
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=104347257607331306094.00046994f5264ebc123a4&z=12
However, this has been created without any _actual_ knowledge of the bus routes. Hence, if any locals happen to see this, I would very warmly appreciate any contribution to the google map that'll make it more accurate and helpful as a Galway bus routes map.
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Things to remember for the future, part $BIGNUM from $MAXNUM:
If we are booking flights for my wife to come and visit me, it migh be important to note that Galway and Glasgow are not the same place. Failure to do so will incur high ticketing costs and annoying last minute plan changes.
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Homemade Crème Brûlée.
Homemade meringues. (well, we had all these eggwhites left over after the Crème....)
Random good liqueurs - I really liked rose leaf.
Good friends.
WiFi on the airport shuttle bus.
Conferences suddenly deciding that they do have support funding for me anyway. ("Oh, wait. You're $PI's postdoc? Here, have €1000. Sorry about the negative answer we gave earlier....")
And my beautiful wife, due to arrive here and join me in 6 days.
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I'll be blogging about this in more detail, later, when I've had some time writing things up.
I'm currently in Luminy, just outside Marseille, at a stretch of two week-long meetings of mathematicians interested in Operads.
Operads, in one way to look at them, (over Vectk if you want to be picky about it), are essentially types of systems of multilinear operations with some relations added. Some of the easiest and most obvious are operads that codify various sorts of algebras: Associative, Commutative, Lie, et.c. In these cases, you take as a basis all trees that can be built out of just a single vertex with two edges connecting to it, and you interpret this tree as the multiplication. Having done this, any laws in your algebra type (associativity, commutativity, anti-commutativity, the Jacobi rule, ...) can be rephrased as some equation of these trees.
Now, last December there was a paper released on the arXiv, which defined what a Gröbner basis for Operads should mean. Having a Gröbner basis means, strictly, that computer algebra systems become possible. And with that comes a whole lot of cool things. We can start building calculators for these things. We can build systems that compute stuff and then recognize important properties. Whole vistas open up once Gröbner bases are around.
And also, I've been interested in figuring this out myself since before I graduated from Stockholm University, some 5 years back....
So, when I heard that there was a paper, I got myself a copy, and set to work. Now, one week later, and after very many very long sessions with one of the authors of the paper, and one guy who proved that one could, essentially, use Gröbner bases for recognizing Koszularity, I have a piece of software that will compute Gröbner bases, and that hopefully will be easily extensible to do more things.
Once I've polished the documentation and preferably written up a decent test suite, I will release this to the general public.
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Yeah ... you all remember back a week or so ago when I posted about all my projects?
At the meeting I'm at right now, it turns out that people present have been spending time working on some of the pie-in-the-sky dream projects I've been wanting to deal with since I was a lowly undergrad. And they seem to be making progress!!!
If it seems easy enough, I'm going to try these coming 2 weeks to build an implementation of Gröbner bases for Operads (this was what I used to propose as a PhD project back when I was out applying for student positions) - since the theory is present but implementations are not.
And I've also run into some survey papers by one of the speakers here, dealing with the history and present state of homotopical computation models, and homotopy theory for computation, using computads. Another subject I _really_ would want to grok!
How am I supposed to diet when there's manna and crême brulée raining from heaven!?
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Twice now since she installed Mozy, my beloved amerikabrev has turned on her laptop only to discover that she couldn't locate any of her documents any longer.
Mozy has a sufficiently non-intuitive way of dealing with its backups that she got blindsided by it; and just now, I call to talk to her, to hear her almost in tears over that her last 8 hours of work seem utterly lost.
Backups are a good idea. But try and shoot for something that will help more than it hurts. And Amazon S3 is surprisingly cheap - I'm running my backups now with JungleDisk with Amazon S3 backend storage. It clocks in at $2/month for the JungleDisk full service, and another $0.15/month and GIG for the Amazon storage. All in all, for less than $5/month I can backup all my own files AND all my wife's files (once we get her setup with this) at a service that won't blindside her.
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My life, in the span of a few weeks, just went from leisurely plodding along to ZOMGWTF!!!!!
These are the more or less fixed deadlines I have ahead of me, for papers for which there is still research to be done:
- July 1, 2009
- Discrete and Computational Geometry. The Journal paper to accompany our SoCG paper.
- CfP not yet posted, but expected deadline: end of June
- ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA09). The "4-corners" paper on dualities in persistence
- July 15, 2009
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). The applications side of the circular coordinates project.
In addition to these, I also have a sequence of projects running, but without actual paper deadlines set yet:
- The Topology of Politics. I recently got hold of a potential data source for the European Parliament vote data, which makes this active again.
- A-infinity algorithmics. This has been receiving WAY too little attention from me lately...
- Curve reconstruction, 0,1-stratified spaces and recovering group actions. People are doing stuff based on my ideas and without me having to work for it. Almost kinda scary!
- New release for jPlex. Should happen before the fall hits...
- CULT - jPlex replacement library in collaboration with the team that brought us CGAL.
- Periodic dynamical systems analysis with persistence tools.
- Data clustering using geometric simplicial complexes.
- Book project: Introduction to Homotopy Theory
Soooo, yeah, anyone have any good ideas for massively parallel project management? :-P ETA: the book project joint with Gunnar Carlsson
10 Musings | Muse | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
There was an email recently on one discussion list I'm on, discussing the Pirate Bay verdict.
They were indeed the founders. (2 of them at least, I think the other 2 were support and financial)
They also have to pay nearly 900k each in fines.
I will be interested to see if they appeal and get a higher court (don't know how their court system works), this outcome is honestly and obviously a "message".
And I felt obliged to offer what I know of Swedish law and judicial stuff. It's not much - I have friends who are infinitely more knowledgeable than I am - but it at least keeps track of some of the more salient and potentially surprising details:
Knowing a tad more about the Swedish judicial system:
* They have already declared that they will appeal. Their lawyers have until May 8 to get their paperwork together.
* There are three levels of public courts in Sweden: Tingsrätt, Hovrätt and Högsta Domstolen (county jurisdiction, courtly jurisdiction and the Highest Court - vague attempts at literal translations). This was tried in the Stockholm Tingsrätt, and thus the appeal will go to the corresponding Svea Hovrätt.
And regardless of outcome there - several of my juristically inclined friends tend to describe Hovrätten as a source of incomprehensible randomness at times - it will get appealed to Högsta Domstolen, which should end up hearing the case, since there is a lack of precedent and a high level of disagreement as to what the code of law actually says.
It's worth pointing out at this point that Swedish law is codified as opposed to precedent based - the mission of the courts is to interpret existing law texts and find basis for judgement in those. When doing this, they are certainly expected to take existing precedents into account in shaping their decisions; but as opposed to, say, US and UK law, the rulings do not acquire full force of law.
The central issue HERE really is how to interpret the actions of the Pirate Bay crowd with respect to the letter of Swedish copyright law; and this is essentially what the courts have to decide on...
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I should start writing food reviews. I really should.
The past two weeks in Paris has had me (and Vin to a large extent) find very many surprisingly fantastic restaurants. I'll write about a few of them here.
For reference, the € signs indicate how many 10€ you can expect to spend to get an entree. So € is 0-10, €€ is 10-20 et.c.
Lao Douang Chan€ Vin was given an inside tip from a friend of his, a girl from Hong Kong who now lived in France. There was to be one Laotian restaurant on Avenue de Choisy that was to die for. So we went. We found the place on 161 Avenue de Choisy. And it was. This is probably the best restaurant (price/quality-wise) in Paris. Hands down. Had I been in Paris any longer, I would have returned over and over - and this goes onto my list of Places To Return To. I had a dried beef with 5 different seasonings, and the waitress recommended a sticky rice to it. Vin had some sort of glaced pieces of pork, that came with a yellow steamed rice. Both were absolutely spectacular. Mondol Kiri€€ Right next to the Laotian, on 159 A d C, there was a Cambodian restaurant. Hence, when we had reason to look for food in the same area a few days later, I suggested we let our adventurous side take over. So the three of us: me, Vin and Primoz, went for Cambodian at Mondol Kiri. Their Beef with a Whisky sauce comes sizzling in a cast iron pan and is one of the absolutely best meat preparations I've had in a long long time. Their various other preparations - we had one beef and one pork, though I cannot remember the particulars - come as simmering sauces, almost like thin soups, with lots of vegetables and pieces of meat in a very tasty and aromatic broth, that you ladle out of cast iron serving pots onto your rice and enjoy deeply. Aux Pétits Chandeliers€ Along Rue Daguerre, this small restaurant lies with a relatively unassuming signage. Once inside - if you can get one of the maybe 20 seats in the dining room - you'll be treated to island cuisine from the French island Réunion. The main course was, as I recalled it, really good; the dessert - I had a fruit salad with a spoonful of vanilla icecream in a sweet baked crust of some sort - was odd and interesting; and then there was the alcohol. They stock a selection of rums from La Réunion. I tried a 15 year old one. And ... wow. I now have encountered not one but two decent rums: Zapaca Centenario and which ever one they served me. Both have in common that they are aged - 23 and 15 years respectively - and destilled according to old French methods instead of, say, Cuban methods. Côté cour€€ Enter an unassuming back-alley off of Rue de la Gaîté, close to where it joins with Rue Maine. It goes by the name Impasse de la Gaîté, and contains a travel agency, a restaurant specializing in food from Réunion, and Côté Cour. The latter is a very small restaurant - I counted 32 chairs - specializing in traditional french cuisine. The appetizers have foie gras and chèvre in appropriate places, and most of the entrees sound like out of a archetypical haute cuisine menu. I had the Cuisse de Canard and the Crême Brulée au parfum violettes. And it was sublime. I didn't think it was possible making duck this tender. The wild mushrooms and seared potatoes rounded the dish to a truly wonderful experience that I still relish. And the sweetness from the honey caramelization of the skin was just a shadow, a smidge below what could actually be individually savoured, but made the whole dish all so much more tender. And the Crême Brulée was just as spectacular. A thin burnt sugar shell that burst easily when attacked with my spoon gave way to a soft and enticing custard. I professed myself to be so impressed, having devoured this meal, that I offered to re-translate their menu for them for free; it had some turns of phrase that made it almost difficult to understand - one of the more egregious being the translation of au parfum violettes into purple. Especially since in no way was the actual dish _purple_. The owner, upon hearing this, happily agreed - providing I'll translate their NEXT menu, as they'd change it in three weeks time - and then poured me a glass of Cognac (about 3x as large as I would have poured myself given an open bar....) and hung around chatting about Russia, Mathematics, North Carolina and Paris.
All in all, all these places are absolutely spectacular, and I would very warmly recommend them to you if ever you come by Paris.
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... the clerk looked half annoyed, half apologetic at me, and demanded to see some ID. I had stepped out of my hotel room to get some late hour snacks, and wanted to pay with my Visa card. Their 15 Euro minimal purchase for cards was alleviated by my buying some of my favorite liquor, and a few pieces I had been thinking about buying but first avoided...
I got up to over 15 Euro, handed my card over, it got swiped, I signed. Now, my normal signature is about 3-4 centimeters high, flourishing and bouncy. However, on the visa card, the signature strip is not even 1 centimeter, so I had to somehow squeeze it in to that space.
And the clerk got suspicious upon seeing the subdued signature on the card, and the flourished on the receipt.
I should be really happy that they're paying attention, but somehow it mainly rattled me. Especially since I couldn't really muster the french to explain the subtle differences in different signature areas...
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My bags are here.
They are both wrapped with some sort of thin plastic band, giving them both a kinda funky waist, but they're both here now.
And I just broke into them. Everything is here that I expected. Life is good again!
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So, I'm in Paris now.
Getting here was an adventure, and staying here turns out to be an adventure as well.
Getting hereTurned out, when I started looking over ways to get to the airport, that the entire northeastern US was battered by thunderstorms. Specifically, this meant that nothing flew into or out of New York, Philadelphia, Washington or anything inbetween these. Alas, my tickets were for Raleigh - Philadelphia - Paris. Originally, I had a 3-hour layover in Philadelphia. As the delay estimates got gradually more and more revised, this shrunk to 2, then 1, then 1/2 hour. Just before it got down to the 15-minute mark, I got the attention of the gate agent, and pointed out that this trend wasn't promising in terms of getting me OUT of Philadelphia again on time. So I got rerouted. Delta flying me Raleigh - Atlanta - Paris. Raleigh - Atlanta got delayed, so in Atlanta, I kept a steady, fast pace toward my gate, stopping at Arby's in the food court to grab more substantial dinner than airplane fare, and just carried that onboard with me. As such this trip was pleasant and nice. However - and this qualifies as a decent sized however - once in Paris (not having slept any, since I never can seem to manage to do that on planes), it turned out that my bags had not quite kept up with me. They'll get driven over to my hotel for me once they DO show up at all, and in the mean time I get to spend €100 of Air France's money on the essentials. This might sound like quite a bit of money. But since I saw this figure, I've been realizing things. Such as - I don't have the European connector for my laptop charger. I don't have my cellphone charger. I don't have my iPod charger. There is, in fact, pretty few cables that made it with me. Also, I don't have ANY clean clothes either. And my first few attempts at finding clothes I'd be happy with has been not only unsuccessful, but pretty humiliating. Entering a cheap everything-and-more chain, looking over men's pants, I try with my broken french to ask one of the clerks how to figure out my size. Instead of answering my question, she looks me over and says something I've managed to translate into "We don't carry Maxi sizes here. Our sizes stop at 50." She was completely disinclined to tell me anything other than those two sentences. At Zara's, I tried on a pair of 48s. My _thighs_ didn't fit in those pants. My current best hope is to walk over - or take a subway or something - to the H&M Google found for me close to Saint Placide, and hope that THEY have clothes I could possibly wear.
12 Musings | Muse | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
culfinriel, you did the right thing yesterday. I will not, will NOT, recommend the Loafer's Beach Club to anyone ever again.
Mean age? 50. Amil was this >----< close to walking out again as soon as we had entered the club.
Dance? Yeah, it looked like some sort of laid back version of Lindy alright.
Music? All I have to say is that ./~ It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing ./~, and BOY did this music not have that swing!? They were playing rock and pop songs. Constantly. Sure, they're all 4/4 time, but do they swing? Nooooo!
We braved it through for half an hour, and joined in one line dance, and then packed up and tried to find a bar all three of us would like. After failing at that, too, (I really didn't feel like loud college-y ale-houses) I got driven back home to a hotel room where the internet - apparently - was shut off for the evening.
All in all? NOT a favourable impression.
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So, while packing my stuff up to either check in to an airplane or put in storage, I rifle through the pockets of my various formal dresswear, and in one of them, I find a plastic bag containing a small old medal.
I can no longer remember whether the medal was in the coat I've owned myself, or the one I inherited from my late grandfather. One of them.
And I cannot figure out what it is. From the looks of it, it shares many features with some of the Swedish royal orders - such as the crowns and the white Malteser cross.
( Piccies below )
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Today from my mailbox!
Mikael,
My name is [NAME REDACTED] and I own a small recruiting agency called [COMPANY REDACTED]. I came across your information on the Stanford Mathematics site and wanted to touch base to see if, by chance, you might currently be interested in hearing about Quantitative/Mathematical Research and Software Development positions with a client of mine in NYC (and with another office in Silicon Valley) which is a highly innovative organization which runs a premier hedge fund. Based upon your background, I am fairly certain that you’d be familiar with this organization. I don’t know if I happened to have caught you at a time when you might have an interest in hearing more, but let me know… your background seems like a very nice potential match.
Thanks for your time,
[CONTACT DATA]
I responded, asking why on EARTH he thought I'd be a good match for the financial mathematics industry. It turns out he'd looked over my Stanford webpage, and spotted my interests in computation and in Haskell, and then checked out my blog and noticed my tendency to jump between subjects. I pointed him to the early blog posts in which I detail my devotion and dedication to an academic career, at which point he signed off the conversation politely. But it sure is ... flattering that I have ended up being headhunting material!
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I recently got a free give-away first intro adventure, with all the relevant rules for that particular adventure embedded, for Changeling: the Lost. I've read it through now, and have some thoughts on it.
First off, I used to be very interested in Changeling: the Dreaming, and played it in tabletop and MUSH groups for quite some time. I have been slightly wary of C:tL since the World of Darkness reboot, and thus was curious and critical going in to this adventure.
First reaction: this is a completely different game with completely different worldview. However, this new worldview DOES make some things more sensible than C:tD does:
The basic backstory of C:tL is that everyone plays a Changeling. A human being who once was stolen away from this world by one of the True Fae, and enslaved in The Land of Faerie. At some point, this person managed to break free from slavery, and return to this world, where they no longer belong and no longer can feel at rest. Many have been cut loose - declared dead; and all their old friends and family have moved on. Consequently, they clump together in the Changeling society; with all the magic, story influence that we expect from a fae game.
This gives things like oaths a more solid underpinning - if you break your Oath, then a magic ripple is sent out that your former slave master can pick up on and locate you by.
Another really neat side effect of this is that people can be stolen at all ages. Gone are the days when Changeling was originally only about Child's Play Gone Dark. Now, it's perfectly natural with Changelings of all ages.
There are significant other changes too. We have four courts - summer, autumn, winter and spring; and we have a COMPLETE revamp of the Kiths. I couldn't recognize any of the Kiths used in the freebie adventure, and they didn't bother explaining them much.
I'm not yet sold enough on the game to acquire the source book. But I am interested enough that I'd like to try it out, read the source book, or play a one-shot or two.
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Apparently, I'm a winged unicorn pony. In black and blue.
1 Musing | Muse | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Just for the heck of it, I generated a few new keys, just to see what IDs came up. This was kinda sorta caused by Jake Appelbaum's key ID 9D0FACE4.
And just as I was giving up, I noticed the last key I had generated had the ID of C07CCCCD.
So ... I have a new keypair.
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2 Musings | Muse | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
I have now for the first time been asked to review a paper for a peer-reviewed publication venue.
7 Musings | Muse | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Two questions:
1) Do you have cats?
2) Would you be willing to house me April 1-4?
3) You live reasonably close to Duke, right?
5 Musings | Muse | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
And turnberryknkn headed without damage to the first of his 16 (!) on campus interviews today. I for one wish him good luck in his job search.
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For Christmas, my wife gave me a cookbook, Infused. This book provides recipes for your own flavour infused vodkas, your own liqueurs, and cocktails based on these.
It's a really nice and inspiring read.
Now, a few weeks back I bought really cheap vanilla beans off of Quinn, who had ordered them from eBay on my recommendation and my pledge to buy. Yesterday I bought some cheap vodka ($10 for a 1.75l bottle) from Trader Joe's, and so it was time to do Stuff(tm).
As a first experiment, we'll try to infuse vodka with
* Saffron and Vanilla: One bean split lengthwise and about 1g of saffron to about 1 pint/500ml of Vodka.
* Chocolate and Vanilla: One bean split lengthwise and about 1dl of cocoa powder to about 1 pint/500ml of Vodka.
We first portion it up in containers:
Then we pour the vodka over it all, stirring slightly to mix it all in
Finally, we cover it all up, as anaerobically as we care to, and stow it away for a month.
I'll be back to tell you how it all turns out.
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The Calabiyau Chronicles. Who knew that Calabi and Yau (Calabi at UPenn, Yau previously at Stanford, now at Harvard) are really a faerie fantasy setting? And here I thought their relevancy was in Kähler Manifolds!
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On request from my dear amerikabrev, here is an overview of things I've acquired for my wardrobe lately. From the bottom and upwards: * Pants. Black chinos, bought today at Target. * Shirt. Eterna light blue shirt, bought during Christmas for gift money from various relatives. * Cufflinks. Christmas gift from my brother. They are built from pink and grey Lego pieces. * Vest. First I've ever come across that even vaguely fits me. Bought today at Target. * Tie. The one oldie goldie in this picture. Honestly stolen from my father when I first started wearing ties at all. * Hat. Bought in Georgetown, Washington DC during this years Joint Mathematics Meetings. I needed a new Fedora, having left all of my old ones on various airport shuttle buses.
4 Musings | Muse | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
I've spoken about my research for a DARPA crowd. People actually got quite interested. Wow!
I've seen Vegas. I wasn't impressed. In fact, I was intimidated, annoyed, overwhelmed and so stressed out I started crashing.
I will see turnberryknkn tomorrow. He'll descend late night from SJC, crash on my floor, and go to his interview on Stanford campus very early Tuesday morning. This is good: it gives me an incentive to get down to my office early on to do work, and us a few hours in which to actually establish face identification and suchlike. :-)
There should be pictures, later. In fact - I should do a picture post about Christmas and another with Stuff I've Seen Lately, but not now...
1 Musing | Muse | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
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| 2009-01-23 17:42 |
| Meme! |
| Public |
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From culfinriel
The first five (5) people to respond to this post will get something made by me. It will be about or tailored to those five who respond first (or not).
This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:
⇒ I make no guarantees that you will like what I make.
⇒ What I create will be just for you.
⇒ It'll be done this year.
⇒ You have no clue what it's going to be (but feel free to use your imagination)!
⇒ I reserve the right to do something extremely strange (or not).
The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to put this in your journal as well, if you expect me to do something for you!
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amazed
