One evening Rene Descartes was relaxing at a local tavern. The bartender approached and said, “Ah, good evening Monsieur Descartes! The usual tonight?” Descartes replied, “I think not,” and promptly vanished.

Math Humor from Platonic Realms

A lot of the jokes on that site are pretty lame, but I liked this one- even though it doesn’t really have to do with math. If you ever have any really good math jokes, or even bad ones, make sure to tell me.

This week’s Boston Globe Magazine has a short piece written by a woman, Norah Burch, who was fired because of what her employer read on her blog. She was an “administrative assistant” at Harvard’s social science department until her boss followed a link in her email sig to her personal website and from there to her blog.* She used it to vent about her job, writing things like “I’m two nasty emails from professors away from bombing the entire Harvard campus” and “I was seriously livid today. I was ready to get a shotgun and declare open season on all faculty members and students who dared cross me.” Her posts were labeled as “extreme misconduct,” and she was fired. Of course, the issue is that instead of just complaining, the woman in question threatened violence. And in our paranoid society, we don’t allow that.

True, there have been many occasions in which irritated employees have pulled guns. There have been bombings. Still, it seems like people overreact- but that’s beside the point.

So the moral of the story, boys and girls, is that you don’t put links to your personal sites in your work email. And it might be a good idea to do your venting on paper- and then burn it. Public blogs, believe it or not, are just that- PUBLIC. I can be reasonably sure that my boss doesn’t read either of my blogs because the man is all but computer illiterate and has no way of finding out the URL. I don’t indirectly email it to him every day.

*The blog was hosted on Blogging.com, a small site I had never heard of. It’s one of the first personal blogging sites I’ve ever seen that is neither a manifestation of LiveJournal nor Blogger.

The new layout is up! I don’t think there’s anything left undone- let me know if you see anything that doesn’t match.

I’m rather proud of this layout. It’s one of my favorites. I especially like the comment popups. You won’t really be able to see what they do until you leave a comment, though, because there aren’t any comments on this front page.

Now, I need to sleep. Very tired after doing the layout all night.

I recently finished a reread of the fifth Harry Potter book, and it was amazing. In the three years between the publishing of the fourth and fifth books, I read the first four so many times that a lot of the magic was gone. My cousin Kathy and I used to have insane trivia contests, with questions like “What kinds of ice cream cones did Hagrid buy when he and Harry first went to Diagon Alley?” and “Which brick do you hit to gain access to said alley?” I knew all the books so well that they weren’t exciting anymore. The first time I read the fifth book, sleep deprivation limited my enjoyment. We got the books at midnight the day they came out, and didn’t sleep until they were read. It took until three the next afternoon, mostly because the words kept swimming in front of our eyes.

This time, though, it was great. It reminded me why I love Harry Potter. The creativity of the author, the romance,* the subtle hints of Ron/Hermione… it was just so good. And it’s probably just because I’m 17 (and I don’t know many 17-year-olds that don’t want to rebel against the establishment), but there’s something about the fight against Umbridge that I just love. Everyone’s coming together, risking probation, expulsion, possibly even arrest, to stand up to her. I can’t put it into words. The way McGonagall comforted Madame Trelawny, the way the faculty almost encouraged Fred and George, the way Hermione was willing to risk expulsion to get the DA going… It’s an uprising of the masses, and it’s beautiful.

*Not romantic love, but the kind of romance you see in glorified wars.

My father gets the shaft in our family. He’s the only male (I have one sister), the only non-vegetarian, and the only big sports fan (though my mother sometimes watches football with him). He’s the most-ridiculed member of the family as well. He takes all this very, very well. Thus, we tried to have a very nice father’s day in his honor.
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Will I ever be happy? I switched from Greymatter to Movable Type a little bit ago, and now I’m eyeing Wordpress. It has everything that I like about MT, and then some. Categories, TrackBack, and popup comments- all the reasons I switched from GM to MT. It also has an unlimited number of link lists built into the application. Plus, it’s open source and you don’t have to pay $70 to get more than one author. I like using open source applications, when I can. MT seems very commercial, much more so that GM was.

But do I really want to switch again? I just went through all that. It messed the site up for a while, too. I’ll have to think about it.

Because it bothers me to have things spread around all over the place, I’ve imported all of the entries from Synthesis, my old blog, into this one. They’re in the archives with the rest of the entries.

All the entries aren’t exact copies of the old ones. I had to go through and assign categories to them, and I also fixed a few typos and deleted things here and there. I used Synthesis in place of my livejournal for a while, which means that some of the entries are really boring.

The Synthesis site is a wreck right now. I may just delete the whole thing, since I have the entries here now. I doubt anyone is hanging on to a link to one of those posts. I’ll think about it tomorrow.

I would like to say that my favorite things to see in other people’s blogs are links to pertinent news articles and clever analysis of The World Around Us. However, this is untrue. In reality, my favorite thing to read about is other people’s love lives. If I come across a blog that looks interesting and they archive by category, I immediately look for a category called “Love” or “Women” or “Men,” or named after the blogger’s signifigant other.

Posts about the people themselves usually more interesting than anything else. I don’t know if this is a universal opinion or not, but I’d definitely like to see more personal details in blogs. I suppose people are entitled to their privacy, though. If was involved with someone, I wouldn’t post every detail. I probably wouldn’t post any details at all. Not here, at least, where I wouldn’t have control over who could read them.

So, to everyone out there who has someone to write about- do it! Everyone’s interested.

Robots can protest, too.

That site amused me way too much, especially since I can see people I know doing it.

First, let it be said that I love Monopoly. I love buying property and building it up, I love that there’s real skill involved, I love how every game’s different, I love that it’s about more than just the role of the dice.

One of the things people always talk about it how it’s strange that some spaces seem to get landed on more than others. St. Charles Place gets tons of business, but Boardwalk hardly seems to get any. Tonight I was motivated enough to see if anyone had ever done a frequency count, and found some interesting results.

It turns out that Illinois is the most frequently landed on space (other than In Jail, which is fairly obvious because you get there by actually going to jail just as often as you do by landing on it), and the Chance between Oriental Ave and Vermont Ave comes up the least often. Park Place is pretty low, too- only 33 out of 41. Very interesting that numbers 41-37 are all Chance or Community Chest- probably because the cards often direct you to another space, so you don’t actually “land” on the original space. Mediterranean Ave. is the least frequently landed upon property- also the cheapest.

Another interesting observation: I noticed that for the yellow spaces, the most expensive property (Marvin Gardens) is ranked signifigantly lower than the other two. It’s 22, the others are 14 and 16. I wonder if this holds true for any of the other colors- I forget which are the most expensive and my board is at school, so I can’t check. I must remember this chart for the next time I play.

Apparently there were some articles about this in Scientific American a few years back. Unfortunately, you have to pay to download them. Alas.