Mind of Winter

Waste 10 minutes

2005-04-03T21:36:00.000-07:00

Watch a wikipedia page evolve. Yet another reason I need to see Spinal Tap.

(Via Collin)

UPDATE: I just noticed that now the above movie is linked to from the actual wikipedia article. I should say something pithy about self-reference here.

Stopgap

2005-04-02T20:42:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a few substantive posts about topology. If you're not familar with Asteroids, you should go play some in preparation. Really. Besides, it's part of your cultural heritage.

Also. I've always had a weird affinity for Sestinas - usually they're not particularly great, but the combinatorial aspect of it attracts me, I guess. McSweeney's accepts and publishes some on their website (read an interview with their editor. And incidentally, I've been somewhat obsessed with James Cummin's The Whole Truth, the book of Sestinas about Perry Mason, ever since DFW mentioned it in E Unibus Pluram, but I haven't read it - yet.), as I discovered last year, and the only one that stuck in my mind was this one. This of course brings up another little kernel of corn stuck in the teeth of my memory: John Barth's retelling of Anna Karenina, the one detail I remember from his short story Click (which I suppose I'll have to reread now), from The Atlantic Monthly:

"Anna train squish," is how Val claims Mark would render Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; indeed, given the man's Middle-challengedness, she suspects he might skip the train.

I love the random little details you remember.

... and three more

2005-03-31T17:15:00.000-08:00

Because of course there have to be three such posts...

1) About all this short little posts - I want blogging to make me think about things, which these don't do so much. But the 8 hours a day thing - foolhardy and not working, and then I spend time reading things like this, and where's the time to write? Besides, I like the short little comment exchanges as well.

2) While not at all succeding at the 8 hours bit, I am getting more done. I think I need to keep track of how much I do and figure out what is a productive, reasonable amount of time that isn't crazy, and then really focus and put in that time, all the time, and hopefully get excited about stuff again. That could start to happen soon, here - I'm reaching an end of the analysis appendices in the Big White Monster, and while there's still analysis in class, it's minimal surface type analysis and so is more topological and geometric and palatable to me.

3) The duck quacking at the ultimate frisbee players I passed while climbing up the hill just now sounded entirely too much like a car alarm for me to be comfortable with.

Three Points Revisited

2005-03-30T08:06:00.000-08:00

1) I didn't bring my jacket today. It's not cold, but clouds are coming in and there's going to be a thunderstorm this afternoon.

2) Swelling was just delayed (claritin?). I also got a bite on my forearm, apparently. While there's an odd pleasure in squeezing both earlobes and feeling a difference in size or sliding my fingers across my forearm and noticing a sudden raise in temperature over the bite, it really doesn't make up for the annoyance of the itching.

3) Another day stopped around 7 hours. But my advisor's daughter is sick, so no meeting today - hopefully I'll put my time in today and tomorrow and finish Appendix C of Dusa and Dietmar (we're on a first name basis now), and eventually get to do some topology again.

Three Quick Points

2005-03-29T13:14:00.000-08:00

1) It's been warm enough in Madison the last couple of nights that I've been sleeping with my window open, and feeling silly for bringing any kind of coat in to campus. But the minute I stop bringing my coat in, it will get cold again.

2) The downside of sleeping with the window open: being woken up at 5:45 when a wasp stings you on the back of your ear. Luckily it didn't swell up.

3) A reason this post is so short: I'm tired of thinking I don't work hard enough, and so am attempting to do 8 hours of math a day (sitting in classes included). This sounds entirely doable and completely and utterly insane. I got within half an hour or so of my goal yesterday, but still have hours and hours to go before I sleep today, so I'm rushing to get back to that.

42, for the 42nd time

2005-03-28T21:42:00.000-08:00

I didn't do any serious work or thinking over break, but for some reason I feel compelled to blog one small detail. I got into one of those pseudo-deep meaning (or at least what you want out) of life conversations the last night before I returned to Madison. It was ended rather early in the going, as we had to get up to catch our plane in the morning, but felt oddly compelling at the time.

Now what's that 'oddly' doing there? On the one hand, this conversation should be compelling. But it's kind of cliched, and usually gets mired in some kind of 'enjoy the moment/family/friends' camp squaring off against a 'strive to do something "great", whatever "great" means' faction. Our conversation was no exception (I was on the "great" side of things this go-round, if you must know), and from my vantage point a few days later, it seems like the kind of conversation I'm sure I've rolled my eyes or sighed at in the past. But I was deep into it that night. I don't have any well formed point or conclusion here, I'm just marvelling at how the same, well worn discussion can still seem captivating if you're in the right mood, or something.

Now that I've written this I have the urge to go reread the Tennis article from DFW's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (an awesome read, if you haven't), to beef up for the next time I'm in that argument, though now that I've said this I will undoubtedly take the 'moments' side of things the next time.

Clinging to the last weekend

2005-03-25T14:50:00.000-08:00

I'm back from break - which was much less sit-around-and-read than my breaks normally tend to be, which was fine, but now I feel that break needs to end and I need to get down to real work, as I always feel. But. Brother will be in town in an hour and a half or so. Brother left a comment on the last post - I had mentioned having him as a guest blogger, which would be interesting and in a totally different direction, but he didn't sound serious about it and I didn't have my act together, and it didn't happen. But it sounds like he wants to, so he'll get his chance sometime else. In any case, that means it will still be like I'm on break, but hopefully I'll be able to get some work done while he's sleeping in or wandering around state street.

And for some math: I'm going to have to put something together for Moebius Stripper's contest . I've only TAed various calculus sections so far, but I'm thinking I'll spend part of an afternoon getting officemates to help out. The only hard part will be convincing them that a crocheted hyperbolic plane really is the coolest prize.

Spring Break in Blogland

2005-03-17T12:49:00.000-08:00

You'll notice I've been a little lax in posting - Spring break is next week, and I've already caught the fever. So, you probably won't hear any more from me until next Friday or so. Until then.

Maybe discussion sections aren't so great after all...

2005-03-15T12:16:00.001-08:00

While I may have said that math classes could be more like a humanities discussion, there are some elements I'm glad I don't have to deal with. I just wasted (?) rather too long getting sucked up in this tense exchange between Michael Berube and Robert K.C. Johnson - there's more than those two posts, but I've spent enough time there already. For the local UW side of this problem Ann Althouse.

Northern Nerd Bands: The Bad Plus

2005-03-14T15:22:00.000-08:00

So, freshly returned from visiting my brother and parents in Minneapolis (and eating the best tuna I've had at Oddfellows), and have too much to blog about. I do want to continue the conversation about teaching, but that requires thinking, and I just want to type quickly and be done with it right now. So, I noticed recently that a large portion of the bands I particular right now could be described as North Nerd Bands, and thought that it would make a decent series of blog posts. Now, the fact that I'm into Northern Nerd Bands has an easy explanation: I live in the north, and, well...yeah. But also, I heard about most of them from my roommate, who is a much bigger music guy than I am, and even though he's from Missouri he went to college up north, and you could also call him a ... but I won't since I'm not blogging under a pseudonym. In any case, this had been floating around in my head, and then when Sean Carroll invites the Bad Plus to his new television show, (my favorite), I decided the time was right to start.

So, the series begins: The Bad Plus.

Short Summary: They're a Jazz trio (Ethan on Piano, Reid on Bass, Dave on Drums) who do covers of rock classics, but don't harp on this too much, because they'll think you forget they write their own songs as well.

Northern Cred: The band members are all from Minnesota/Wisconsin. I heard them live when they came through Madison. And Dave has a weird obsession with truckers (Layin' A Strip For The Higher-Self State Line, Keep The Bugs Off Your Glass And The Bears Off Your Ass) which, while not inherently northern, definitely bring up some Dakota associations, at least for me.

Nerd Cred: Jazz trio is a good start. And the fact that Ethan is classically trained helps out. And then if you read the liner notes to their first album it gets really good (I don't have it with me, so can't quote it directly, but...), because apparently after deciding to start a band, they realized they would need songs to play.

Reid and Dave: Rock Covers!
Ethan: that never really works
R&D: We could do Song X!
E: Never heard of it.
R&D: Song Y!
E: Not that either.
R&D: Smells like Teen Spirit!
E: Huh?
R&D: ...!?!?!

And apparently upon playing it for him, R&D discover that E hasn't even heard it. Thus is born the Bad Plus legend. Oh, and just for good measure, Labyrinth is dedicated to Borges.

Selected Close Reading: Among their rock covers is Blondie's Heart of Glass. From EPinions (they just finished praising Smells Like Teen Spirit, for context. Oh, and again, I can't quote directly, but in the liners they call the SLTS cover "lovingly deconstructed" while the HoG cover "Cruelly deconstructed", or some such):

Heart of Glass does not work quite as well, however. It's just too sloppy, whereas the original is smooth and friendly on the ears. The improvisation makes this version almost unrecognizable. This style works for Smells Like Teen Spirit because it is already such a dark, unpolished song. The Heart of Glass cover sounds good when they make it sound how it's supposed to - otherwise it's just another ad-libbed track.

Which is a fair first listen - the first huge chunk is very free and chaotic sounding, with snippets of recognizable stuff thrown in, and then at the end they loop the chorus around a whole lot, nice and uptempo and cheerful. My roommate offered this reading: like they half-ass it and mock it for a while, and then at the end decide they finally need to put their heart into it. Which, I was pretty impressed by the first time I heard it, as I am for the most part an unobservant listener. But I am also a math guy, and a big, okay, I'll admit it, nerd (though please note the distinction between these two categories), and I have an unhealthy devotion to odd meters (more on this in the future, surely, but perhaps I'll chalk this up an early exposure to anBrubeck's Take Five), and so I couldn't help but notice that in the final, cheerful, rocking "they make it sound like it's supposed to" section, they are not playing all 8 beats of the real chorus in 4/4. They've ripped out the last beat and are playing in 7/4. And, as document, people don't even notice. Rather than finally showing respect for the song, they're tearing it further to pieces, radically altering a supposed classic, and the dagger is driven evem deeper by the fact that they fake playing it nicely, and people buy into the fake. Now go listen.

UPDATE: So after writing this I've been browsing for more Bad Plus info, and have found some goodies as far as this post is concerned.

More Northern Cred from Glide Magazine "The three of us are all from a Minnesota/Wisconsin sort of axis of the world, and we feel like we have our little Midwestern dialect going on as players. Not really a ‘New York cool’ thing,” explains the now Brooklyn-based Iverson, “but more of a ‘Midwestern friendly’ thing. I assure you, if I could do ‘New York cool,’ I would do it, but it just hasn’t really worked out for us that way” he adds acidulously."

More "Heart of Glass" Misreading from Pop Matters "These Are the Vistas's best joke is the band's playing the final verse from "Heart of Glass"'s straight (after having mangled it for the first three minutes)"

And Pitchfork, which seems respected: "Their version of Blondie's "Heart of Glass" is probably the most ambitious song on the entire record, if only because they try out about three completely different moods before arriving at the song proper."

And a correct reading (on another blog, of course)

Flirting with English

2005-03-10T11:28:00.000-08:00

Is it a bad sign that the story that pops into my head while thinking about this teaching stuff is about an English class? I started out at the U of C with a dedicated relationship with math, but wanted to flirt with English a while before we really got serious. I guess I still flirt with English, but for a while I thought it could actually win me away, whereas now its more the flirting between old friends.

In any case, my Hum sequence was only two quarters long, so I had an extra slot the third quarter, and so I took English 101. An intro to theory type course. Talked some about historicism, psych stuff, New Critics, the Paul de Man story. The one English course all English majors had to take, it was supposed to give you a little taste of all the different techniques you could use. You were supposed to take it early, but it turns out most of my class was 3rd and 4th years.

My section was taught by Samuel Baker - he was a grad student, looks like he's at Austin now, so good deal. He was fun in section, made it interesting, but it's not anything particular he did in class that made me think of it. Rather, it's the couple of times I ran into him outside of class. There was a visiting speaker, some kind of sociologist? giving one of those big deal talks that has someone's name attached to it, and he encouraged us to go listen. I dropped by, and Sam popped up behind my shoulder before it started and kidded me about taking notes, so I did, and they're still floating around somewhere. The talk was broken up into short numbered snippets that didn't obviously all relate to each other, and weren't in order - kind of like blog posts.

The other time is what I think about more. In class we had done some structural-ish reading of stuff, I can't remember what, but I like that kind of stuff, and that had evidently come across some in some of the discussion. As an example of what I mean, take The Snowman. I always wonder, reading poems like this, without a rhyme scheme, without an obvious meter, why put the line breaks where they are? Why group it into threes? I like to think that in The Snowman, we're seeing a snowman, the three lines of the stanza being the head, torso, and base of your typical snowman. So, what the structure of the piece has to do with the meaning, that's what I'm interested in. Anyway, I run across Sam on the quad, and he asks "How's the Keats paper going? I hope you're doing yours on structure." or something to that extent. I'm not sure if I was planning on writing it that way or not, but after running into Sam, I was excited about it, and set on writing it with that structural bent. And rather than just writing it because I had to, I was really into it, and cared about it. I don't remember the arguments of most of the papers I wrote in college, but I remember this paper pretty well - I wrote Sonnet to Sleep, which doesn't have your traditional English or Italian structure, and I argued that the poem was all about the transition of easing into sleep, and that the break between the body/turn or octet/sestet was too abrupt, and the structure he chose was more transitional (Sorry for the English analysis - but I can't keep from flirting).

So, the point - well, this is getting long already, and I think you see. I've got to go work now, but there'll be more later...

Conspiracies, Education, and Sputnik

2005-03-09T13:38:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Educational Conspiracy Theories, I came across one here at Scrivenings, which also links to a series of posts at Musey Me ( Here's One of Them ) about education and Sputnik. Check it out!

Minor Revelation

2005-03-09T13:00:00.000-08:00

I've been at once not particularly happy with my longer posts on education and excited about them - I like thinking about this stuff, and posting about them is a good way to do it, but it eats up a bunch of time, and I wind up not being very happy with the end result. Part of this is because my thoughts on this are all over the place and head in different directions, and it's not easy to form them into a coherent whole. But what's the hurry? I'll burn out trying to write all this long stuff out in essay type stuff, and nobody would want to read it anyway, because it wouldn't be edited and well planned out like an essay. But also, the structure of the blog format (and thinking about structures of works of literature was always one of my favorite parts, more on that tomorrow) really favors short little bits, anyway. Like serialization, kind of, but it doesn't even have to have such a coherent order. Plus it's less stress thinking about what to write about - you've always got that little piece left over from the last post that you couldn't fit in. And you roll that little piece around in your head in between posts, so by the time you go to post again you've subconsciously thought through half your post. So, I've still got energy to burn in writing about how math is taught, but expect to see it doled out in little bite sized morsels, that you can piece together yourself, or I imagine if this works well after laying out some of the pieces in my head in little posts, things will snap together in my head, and then we can have gluing together posts. Tomorrow we'll start off with the story of one of my undergraduate English classes that I find keeps resurfacing in my thoughts about this.

Speaking of little snapping together posts: on the walk in to campus today, after I had had this minor revelation, two blog posts talking about the whole blogging thing in terms of little ideas surfaced at the same time, continuing the Aha! experience. They probably had something to do with the original revelation as well.

Argh, and now I'm not sure I've found the right thing, or that they didn't fit together like I thought. In any case, John Holbo talks somewhere about downgrading papers into blog posts, I don't want to track that down, but he also talks about Feuilletons here , which is the post that I was thinking about this morning. And at Notional Slurry, On trivia and details and miscellanea . Neither says exactly what I'm saying here, but I did enjoy both, though I did find it humorous that these posts that in my mind are connected for praising the small should be so large.

East Coast Invasion

2005-03-08T20:03:00.000-08:00

The New Yorker is in town for their college tour, which involves bringing some of their writers to talk, a They Might Be Giants concert, giving out free hot chocolate, and attempts to sell magazines. I'm not sure where they got the college tour idea - my initial thought that was that they decided they needed to do their part to maintain the stranglehold of the left on academia in these trying times, but my dad pointed out that their subscriber base is presumably fairly old, and offered the more prosaic hypothesis that they're just after some of that tasty young person market share. I prefer to hang on to my conspiracy theory. Malcolm Gladwell is talking tomorrow - if I get any work done I'll go listen to him.

Great Timing

2005-03-07T12:59:00.000-08:00

My last post took a lot of time and energy and I'm still not very happy with it. It did make me think about my teaching and learning, though, and part of why I'm doing this blog is to make me think through things like this. While the last post wasn't a failure, I was dreading taking that thread back up today. So I was ecstatic to see Sean Carroll discuss a topic closely related to my proposal to try teaching math courses like a humanities course: the fact that humanities profs read their papers aloud at conferences, while scienties speak from notes. Read the comments, too, I found them quite useful.

There's discussion raised in the comments, and at Pharyngula, about slides and powerpoint presentation, and this is the biggest math talk difference I've seen, as most math talks are chalk talks, but occasionally there are slide or powerpoint talks. Personally, I vastly prefer listening to chalk talks. Slide talks always seem to wind up moving faster than chalk talks to me (Granted, if you're good, you fight this, but its just something else to worry about), and chalk talks usually move to fast to begin with. If you had a subfield (applied?) where there was a complicated picture or graph or two that you wanted to have drawn out before, that makes sense. I have more experience and less patience for the defense of having big, long messy equations or definitions or something prewritten. If it takes too long for you to write up, or is to crazy to do it from memory/notes without making a mistake, the audience isn't going to follow it in real time anyway. I think you'd be better off giving a talk like Paul W. says Robert Fefferman taught analysis: wave your hands a lot, give an overview, and say: "now if you read my paper you will understand it".

The point is also made in the comments at P.U. (and I'm not linking, because you should really read them all) that most of the real work and good conversations happen in the corridors, not the actual talks. Which is a point I was going to talk about in regards to my unhappiness with math teaching anyway, because there you could say, and it has been in the comments here, that the real learning doesn't happen in the classroom, but while you're working on your own. My response to that is: Yes, you have something of a point here. But that doesn't mean your talks, or your lectures in class should be crap, rather, they should have this in mind and be set up to encourage and guide along the work at home and the hallway conversations.

Naturality vs. "D.E.T.P."

2005-03-06T15:10:00.000-08:00

Here's some more thoughts about my post about wanting discussion in math:

The first semester of TAing here at Madison we have a more experienced TA as a coordinator. The coordinator helps with some training before class starts, is a contact point for questions, and comes and observes us teach once or twice. I don't remember what I taught the day my coordinator (who's an awesome guy) came to visit, or exactly what he said, but I do remember is that he called my teaching style "natural." I remember this because I was puzzled at first by what this meant, but then I thought about it, or asked him, and then I liked the description. Because I don't really see that much difference between teaching a class formally, and explaining the concept to a friend in a coffee shop, or helping your next door neighbor with a problem set Freshman year. I mean, there's clearly a difference between these scenarios, but in the way I run class, it doesn't enter in that much. I like to just say "here's the kind of problem we're dealing with. Here's the general way we think about it. Here's where the tricky stuff is that you have to be careful with." Just work stuff through, trying to show how I think about it. I don't feel I'm explaining it well at all, but I really like the word "natural."

I think this style is easy to come to as a TA - I'm not really presenting new material, but just explaining what the professor covered in class. I'm not on a stage in front of 250 students, but on the floor in front of twenty. The TA's job IS much closer to the helpful math guy in the dorm than that of a lecturer is.

I like the natural style a lot, and really I think that more of this naturality is what I was looking for in the first post. But it also has its problems, though maybe some of these are just problems I have. It's harder to do the larger your class gets. Related to this is that there's something of a clarity problem - if you're lecturing from notes, or from carefully laid-out notes in your head, you work everything out to be clear before you put it on the board, or say it out. In the natural approach, or at least the way I teach, I know that it has a tendency to come out muddled more often. You're trying to walk through the thought process you go through in the subject, and you get swallowed up in that process, while to present something very clearly, you need a certain distance from it. That's all really vague, but the point is, natural is a little rough around the edges, a little sloppy. When you're helping your friend from down the hall, this isn't such a problem - it's just you and them, they'll ask you to clarify. But in larger settings you can't ask all those questions, and these rough edges can become a problem, because even if the students are comfortable asking questions (which the natural approach helps with), some of them will still steep through.

So. I'm seeing the "Definition. Example. Theorem. Proof." method as being rather unnatural. Or rather, it IS natural when viewed from a certain direction, because that's what math is: definitions, examples, theorems, proofs (I'm feeling more and more that this statement needs to get argued with - some other post). It's a math lecture, it should BE math. But it's not natural in the sense I was discussing before, and I think that's part of what I'm really missing. I'm also seeing the good things that professors throw into the "D.E.T.P." method as being natural type stuff. And classroom discussion, that seems natural. Okay, I admit - sometimes it feels really awkward and unnatural. But the version I was proposing, I meant it to feel natural.

Now - I'm not proposing doing this for lower-level classes like calculus or the first few classes where proofs are done. Rudbeckia mentions trying to teach multivariable calculus in something of this manner, and having difficulties, and I think she's really brave for having tried it, because the thought is almost enough to give me nightmares. But by upper level undergraduate courses, or graduate courses, you don't have people just there because they need to be for their engineering degree, and they've got a decent handle on abstract thought in general, and it doesn't seem so bad.

Another problem I have with the way my courses now are being taught, and to a lesser extent "D.E.T.P." method, is of motivation. Because to really get it, you've got to work on it and think about it on your own, not just watch people. Now, the typical way of getting people to do this in math is to give them problem sets and tests, and grade them. The whole grade as motivation debate is more of a mess than I need to talk about right now, but I'll make the claim that if you work out a well designed problem set (now what this should look like...?) it does a pretty good job of getting you to think about stuff on your own. The graduate courses here as a rule don't have assigned problem sets, and if they do they're small, so that's where some of my frustration is coming from - that I don't have a very clear outline of what I have to do to really get understanding, and so it's harder to motivate yourself to work. And what I want to argue is that the "D.E.T.P." method, and problem sets in general, don't motivate you to work like the natural method does, but I've been going on too long already, and am also maybe starting to question that a little more. So being the naturalist that I am, I'm just going to drop this thread in the middle here, and come back to it. I'd like to think about the Moore Method some, too, eventually.

Local Blogs

2005-03-05T15:01:00.000-08:00

Part of what hastened added the local blogs to the list before I was writing about Madison stuff is this Ann Althouse post. Her list surprised me, given the little I've read of her, but what really got me was the news that DFW (David Foster Wallace, for those of you not already as stricken by fan-dom as I am) has an article in the April Atlantic Monthly - I ran by the UW bookstore, but alas they still had the March issue, so that will have to wait.

Apart from occasionally helping Glenn Reynolds out, Ann is also part of a little circle of mostly law professor bloggers in Madison, who get together and have dinner and blog it occasionally. If any of you law bloggers should stumble by, I should say that I walk past your building nearly every day and often find myself envious, especially of the library, which I have yet to actually visit in person, though the huge windows look nice. I'm not sure I'd trade in Van Vleck's ninth floor lounge, though.

In any case, I'd be amiss if I did not point out Project Bozzo, in which Tom Bozzo, Oscar Madison, Jeremy Freese (a post of pure beauty), and occasionally (out of amusement?) others, link each other in a quest to raise their rank in the TTLB ecosystem. After feeling stressed from a few hundred visitors from Crooked Timber (it WAS a post about math, after all), I can't say I'd want the same, but applaud their experiment, even if I'm too late to really help, as it appears Marginal Utility is now a primate.

Their game reminds me of Bill Tozier's Erdos Number auction experiment. While visiting his site for the link I find that he has linked to my discussion of the Crooked Timber visitors. I'm sure he knows how it feels on much higher level. It all moves too fast!

Housekeeping

2005-03-05T13:10:00.000-08:00

I think I'm over the shock now, but I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking. One minute I'm half complaining about how my blog was discovered too quickly and then I'm tracking back both B. and Pharyngula on my first substantive post, somehow thinking that a good method of toiling in obscurity while I find my voice and internet savvy. But Uncertain Principles and Crooked Timber linked to me, and I woke up to a couple of hundred people visiting, which I did not really feel ready for. Though I should admit that I didn't figure out where everyone was coming from until the next day, and that the quotes from Crooked Timber were all stuff I had myself quoted (though indirectly reminding someone of Borges made me blush a bit, and it's an angle I'd never seen it in, and I had forgotten how awesome Pierre Menard was). So, I was feeling a little overwhelmed about the whole thing this week, and got to thinking some about why I was blogging (other than Ben thinking it funny that I read a lot of them but didn't have my own), and what I wanted out of it. This post is already becoming too unwieldy to address that point fully, but part of what I was imagining blogging about was local stuff. So, there's a Madison area blog section in the links now, which I wanted to add now so that I'll remember to read them occasionally. I'll introduce some of them in another post in a minute or two. Other things to expect in the future:

An apple pie (though the person I lost the bet to is telling me I don't have to go through with it, though I think I'm stubborn enough that I will)

A post with more thoughts about how upper level math should be taught. Hopefully this is tomorrow. This excites me, because I've decided that getting me to think about things like this and working at expressing it clearly (hopefully) is a good reason to continue this, but also depresses me, because the thinking and especially the expressing is hard work. I don't know how Timothy Burke does it.

Hopefully, some discussion about where this site is going (suggestions?)

A subtitle (Again, suggestions? What can I say, I'm lazy.)

P.S. Ick. I need to edit. "Find my voice?"

Cruel and Unusual

2005-03-03T19:06:00.000-08:00

With all the death penalty blogging going on after Roper, I offer you this, from the introduction to Alperin and Bell's Groups and Representations:

We have included close to 200 exercises, and they form an integral part of the book. We have divided these problems into "exercises" and "further exercises;" the latter category is generally reserved for problems that introduce and develop theoretical concepts not included in the text. The level of the problems varies from routine to difficult, and there are a few that we do not expect any student to be able to handle. We give no indication of the degree of difficulty of each exercise, for in mathematical research one does not know in advance what amount of work will be required to complete any step!

Maybe that gets some people to work hard, but it wasn't so effective for me.

Annoyances

2005-03-02T16:41:00.000-08:00

1) The passenger side window of my car was shattered in last night. Nothing seems to have been stolen, and a random vandalism but someone drunk fits in better with my view of the Madison crime scene, but still - it's annoying.

2) Had an allergist appointment today - the doctor was rather impressed with how allergic to grass I seem to be, and there's some chance my swelling was caused by that getting activated through some mechanism I haven't tried to understand yet, which would be relatively good. But now I have to go get bloodwork done and have another appointment scheduled when we'll do with food stuff.

3) Matt may have not been so impressed by their latest EP, but I've had the opening few bars to the Postal Service's "Brand New Colony" going through my head on or off since I woke up this morning.

Work now. Really.

So am I just an elitist?

2005-03-02T16:14:00.000-08:00

Read the title of this article in the times: The Next Einstein? Applicants Welcome. Snorting derisively? I was. But the author had me pegged, admitting that "No question is more likely to infuriate or simply leave a scientist nonplussed." After I read that, I felt a little sheepish. I wasn't wowed by the article, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I feared it was. But I'm wondering about the motivation of the "this article is going to be a piece of crap" alarm I had going off, about why such a question leaves scienties so infuriated. It does seem a little simplistic, and gives you worry that someone asking that question is just looking for some scientist they can pass off as the brilliant but eccentric and rebellious, going to revolutionize the world wunderkind stereotype. So, it's a little overly romantic, but why do we hate that stereotype so much? Just fear that it will mislead people about what science is like? Or is there something else? Because it seems like a pretty positive, attractive spin on the science life, and if it gets people interested, should we hate it so much? I'm not phrasing this right, or know where I'm going with this, and should run and eat and do some work. But. Perhaps I'll come back to it.

Viva La Revolucion!

2005-03-01T20:31:00.000-08:00

The Bitch and Pharyngula well, bitch about student evaluations. I don't have any particular beef with student evaluations, which for me have been entirely positive except for the complete and deserved ravaging of my handwriting (but it's improving!). While they are a seriously flawed way of evaluating teaching, they are much more practical than any other system I can immediately imagine, so as long as they don't take too large a roll in hiring/tenure type decisions, I say why not, especially after I've added Rudbeckia's Jedi Mind Trick to my repertoire.

What interests me more is what Pharyngula terms the lecture vs. discussion dichotomy. In high level math really all you see is the lectures, and I'm a little sick of it. The "Definition. Example. Theorem. Proof. Corollary." style of lecturing is the basic foundation of just about every single lecture in most math courses. Which, hey, it's math. You need this stuff. But lecturers often wind up becoming walking, talking, chalking math books. Sometimes they stand at the chalkboard with the book open in front of them lecturing, even. That's not what bugs me, though - you can be just as bad about this and lecture straight from your head.

Now, this is certainly the extreme. Almost everybody adds a little spice to the lecture - gives you a rough overview, makes a little eye contact, the occasional anecdote, sometimes telling you how to think about things. But almost every math lecturer uses the "write out a textbook on the board" - method as their basic model, and the rest are just accessories. But what's the point? I can go read the textbook myself, at my own pace, in a comfortable chair in a coffee shop downtown, and do much better. In digesting a proof, you can't just listen to it once, or read it a couple of times, but you have to actively think about everything, and I don't know that you can do this in real time in a lecture.

Now, maybe I'm being too hard on the system here. After all, my own preferred method of learning math rather resembles the process I've just been fulminating against: I sit down the book and a piece of paper, and copy down the proofs and definitions in my own words, filling out the details. I have a binder that contains basically an entire book, rewritten in my own hand and words. What's the difference between this and the binders full of notes I have taken in courses? I'm not entirely sure, but part of it is I can't listen to a lecturer, copy down what they say, and think about it all at once. In any case, my style isn't optimal anyway, and if I was really good I'd be more like Calderon:

... Zygmund posed Calderón a question and the puzzled Calderón replied that the answer was contained in Zygmund's own book Trigonometric Series. Zygmund disagreed: what transpired was that Calderón only ever read the statements of the results, preferring to give his own reasoning and proofs... . One of these proofs gave a highly original answer to Zygmund's question. This originality was to be the hallmark of Calderón's work in the years to follow.

In any case, here's what I'd like to see: a math course run like a humanities discussion course. Assign a reading (or a problem set) for everyone to have completed before class. Say, read this proof, or this section of this long proof, or work out these examples. Then, during class, pull up a semicircle of desks around the chalkboard. Give a short, introductury spiel sketching the main outline of the proof (or maybe you did this at the end of the last class) in an intuitive, heuristic manner. Then, open the floor to questions, or asking some leading questions of your own. Why did the proof do this out seeming little dance here instead of going this seemingly more straight forward route? Why did we need this assumption? Hey, I could follow each step of the argument, but what's really going on? How'd anyone come up with this in the first place? Have students stand at the board and sketch out what they're discussing. If there's a twisty part of the proof that people didn't understand, work it out in detail. I don't have the full model, but would it work? Has anyone seen a course like it? The neuroscience course P.Z. Meyer took as an undergrad sounds like a good start. It sounds kind of radical, but this is basically how one on one reading courses get taught, anyway (this or the student presenting to the professor, which works well in my experience, but with more than one student you'd run into the same problem, but with students presenting it gets even worse). Why shouldn't it scale up to class of 10 or 15?

Haloscan

2005-03-01T16:14:00.000-08:00

I switched the commenting to Haloscan, partly from a desire to add trackbacks, but mostly as an exercise in html, or, in the running "blog as home" trope, furniture rearrangement. The small ads are a little annoying, but I'm not going to pay the twelve dollars to upgrade until I've tinkered a little more. Thoughts?

Even less photogenic than usual!

2005-02-28T14:09:00.000-08:00

The small plastic piece that would hold the battery into my camera has been broken for some time, and I don't really miss it that much. Even when it was working I would rarely take pictures, and so other people wind up using it, which means I wind up being in the pictures, and that's not good. On the other hand, will it be sad twenty years from now when I have absolutely zero pictures of college?

I bring this up because my friends were quite upset with me for not having a camera last Friday, while I'm feeling a more ambivalent about it. A large crowd of the Mathies wound up having dinner at Pizzeria Uno. In the best of times would only make me nostalgic for Giardano's spinach delivered to the U of C dorms. This night the service was bad enough to make me forget this - the "vegetarian" pizza came with sausage instead of black olives, and someone's chicken was undercooked. They were very apolegetic and gave us some free food, but still. After the dinner debacle a group of us headed back to my place and my eyes started itching right as we arrived. Soon the conversation becomes monopolized about me commenting on how itchy my whole face was, and the friends laughing as my lips start to look more and more like Angelina Jolie's, but after a collagen injection. The winkles on my forehead all jumped out, those lines you get under your checks when you smile (do they have a name?) were permanent, and my nose felt twice its normal size. When my voice dropped an octave our worries over what would happen next became serious enough to go to the emergency room, where I got a shot of epinephren and an IV full of Benadryl and some steroid type thing (I got (got?) to see half an episode of Numb3rz while it was draining, though I was out of it enough not to have anything meaningful to say about it), but no photographic evidence. I never had any problem breathing, though the ER staff was reassuringly impressed with the swelling and removed any doubt that I was wasting their time. The rest of the weekend was spent either drugged out on some benadryl-like pill they'd given me, or whizzing around at 90 miles an hour after I had slept 12 hours, stopped taking the benadryl stuff, and rather underestimated my caffeine consumption.

I have no clue what caused this (some bizzare spice in the Chicken Fajita pizza? something in the Irish beer?) though I did have a similar reaction once when a bee or wasp stung me in the hand, which in short order looked more like an inflated latex glove than I felt comfortable with. Wednesday I have an appointment with an allergist, so we'll see what turns up, although I don't really have my hopes up as to figuring this out. Also, I now have an Epipen, with which I can administer myself epinephrin through my jeans, which I find way cool, if a little scary. And on the whole, a picture would have been a nice.

I should have known I'd leave this blank....

2005-02-27T19:36:00.000-08:00

So what does it say about the sanity of this having a blog idea that I'm stressing about it already? Not too seriously, mind you, but I'm not exactly the most html-savvy person out there (check my other webpage for proof, all you doubters), and was hoping I could slowly build it up and tinker with it. But in another demonstration of my internet wizardry, I failed to realize that those of you I well-meaningly linked to on the right there would immediately become aware of this and check out the humble digs. Leaving me feeling as though I just moved in to town and invited everyone over for dinner without first unpacking the kitchen, and am trying to pass off the fast food I hastily purchased as homecooked goodness.

Speaking of which, I lost a rather dorky bet (apparently '\twiddle' is not an acceptable tex command. I figured it had to be a bastardization of 'tilde', but it was too near and dear to my heart to imagine a world in which tex doesn't recognize it. Sigh.) and so have to bake an apple pie for the office. And while I'm not entirely out of place in my kitchen, I fall rather closer to the ramen eating grad student side of the spectrum than certain other grad student bloggers I read. In short, it'll be an adventure, and you'll hear more about it (though I don't imagine I'll have the pictures. That's at least like Blogging 103, right?) And perhaps all of this finding me through I link I made stuff will continue and a Crescat foodie will drop by with like, a recipe or advice or something.

There. I've at least set the chairs up around the table now, and eased my hosting anxiety enough so that I can concentrate I what I'm going to say to my advisor tomorrow. But I am glad you've found me, although I don't think I will be adding any more links until I've finished decorating.

Too many Fortune Cookies, not enough Math

2005-02-25T12:21:00.000-08:00

Whenever the math grad posse winds up at a Chinese restaurant, we spice the fortune cookies up by adding some combination of "in bed", "with a stick", and "In accordance with the prophecy" (Anybody use any others?). It seemed rather benign until I was delving into McDuff and Salamon's massive tome (a decent overview, for those so inclined) in a coffee shop, and crack up on the third page, where a line ends with "In accordance with the". It continued on as "terminology of complex geometry ...", but not before I got hungry for some Gyoza.

And so it begins

2005-02-21T12:58:00.000-08:00

About the name:

"Mind of Winter" comes from the first line of Wallace Steven's "The Snow Man". It's been my favorite poem for a while, partly because it's hard to say the only poem you have memorized isn't your favorite (though I'm sure someone has a great story to the contrary...). In any case, it seemed apt, given my roots in North Dakota and the kind of responses I get when I tell people I'm a math graduate student.