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On Friday it was 6 degrees C ; crusts of dying snow leaked into puddles on black pavement, and all except the sunset times seemed to indicate it was March in Ottawa, not mid-January. Riding home after dance at ten-ish pm, I saw girls on Rideau St. in miniskirts and strappy sandals. Now, on Saturday, it is cold again, with driving sleet beating a stinging tattoo on my face. Rumour has it that on Monday it will be warm again. Is El Nino upon us once more? The Globe and Mail, which I read at the Starbucks, said that the Gulf Stream has weakened by over 30%, because of global warming, and that would mean that England would grow colder but Canada would grow warmer (because the cause of the Gulf Stream's deterioration is the weakened cold currents up north around Greenland and our home and native land). I do not think that this is the direct cause of this freak January meltdown - thaw, that is. Fire from the candle-ring, water from the thaw, as runs the Six Signs rhyme from Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising that is still cluttering up my head, triggered by the word thaw.
I read my newspapers at the Starbucks now, but I do not buy coffee. I made a quick assessment of my personal debts and obligations on My Precious during the Math History class I came in late to because I could not find the room (not that the class was boring, but...) Under the worst-case scenario, that we get not a cent for the Chicago trip, and that I take another summer course and pay for it myself, my expenses for now until May just barely fit into my current contract, with not even a cup of coffee I want to risk, not to speak of a pair of shoes. My options are to
(a) raise as much money as I can incite raising for the school Chicago trip - if anyone who reads this blog has connections with Ottawa-based corporate or private sponsors, who would like to donate to a very talented trivia team to help them be the first-ever Canadian representatives at the NAQT nationals - please, please, we need every cent, and the school can and will make you a tax receipt.
(b) file a tax return for once. Our wonderful customs and revenue people owe me money for a couple of years, and I should claim it.
(c) wheedle my parents. I hate doing that, though. They should wheedle me.
(d) write questions for Reach or other sources. They apparently pay a few cents a question.
(e) try to get my novel published. But that does require an investment - I would never deal with a vanity press, but printing and postage does cost some. I made a couple of significant corrections to Shilhak-Inshushinak's significant objections yesterday, and prior to that I tweaked the manuscript to approximately what it should look; god bless fancyhdr.sty ! I code the manuscript in LaTeX. Shilhak-Inshushinak's first reaction was "That way madness lies. I lost friends down that dark path," but I stubbornly kept to my choice, because I am a mathematician, and because I hate making title pages (a scar from grade seven and eight science, where I put so much work in making a collage title page and a cell diagram, respectively, and then got docked marks because of glue showing and a smudge, respectively). Anyhow, robotics and later CSI 1100-1101 Intro to Computer Science I and II got me addicted to the sweet rush I get when something successfully compiles. Wysiwyg editors like WordPerfect and OpenOffice.org just aren't the same, and don't get me started on Word. I wouldn't use it if they paid me - and they did pay me. And I didn't use it. I may use OpenOffice.org for fast editing and spreadsheet work, but I am now a TeXnician to the core.
Anyhow, after that sweet digression, anyone else know of any ways I can make money, other than the traditional three B's: blackmail, bludgeoning, and bed? I lack clear candidates for all three, and experience in two out of the three.
To return to the preceding discussion, the word thaw triggered a poem that I had not recalled in a long time. That is actually connected to my chosen research topic for Math History, which is (of course, this is the Tourmaline you all know and love, after all) the history of coding theory. I am a maze of contradictions: I like the idea of codes, yet neither solve cryptograms nor have taken any steps to study coding software; I am a mathlinguist, yet I would rather be a starving artist than work for CSIS or the CSE (our Canadian equivalents of the CIA and the NSA, respectively).
I was late to Math History on Thursday, since the room I had written down in my planner was incorrect, and all the public Infoweb stations connecting to the university's Internet network did not work. I had to go back to the lab - I love, love, love having a lab/office with a key to it - and turn on the computer, and get on the Internet, and check there. All that searching made me half an hour late for class, which was perhaps good because up to that Pestov seemed to pretty much be doing review. Then we spoke of the ordinal number w (omega, that is), which is bigger than any natural number - and then we took w to the power of w to the power of w all w times. Cute. Then we found w is actually equal to aleph-naught, the cardinality (size) of the set of natural numbers, and integers, and rational numbers too. Then to prove that any set is smaller than its power set, we invoked the Barber's Paradox:
"A certain town has a barber who shaves all those who do not shave themselves. Who shaves him?"
"The easy answer to this is that the barber is a woman," I spoke up.
Come to think of it, it isn't the easy answer in this phrasing of the question, since a woman is one of those who do not shave themselves (or do); but if we understand the question that way, it is overextended. Does the barber shave children? Pigs? Sofas? Subsets of the natural numbers? All those do not shave themselves, for sure; well, I cannot account for what subsets of the natural numbers do when we are not looking. If we assume that the barber's sign says "This barber shaves all men in this town who do not shave themselves," then I think the barber being a woman would let us out of our difficulty.
Barber, barber, shave a pig,
How many hairs will make a wig?
Four and twenty, that's enough.
Give the poor barber a pinch of snuff.
Morphology on Wednesday was cancelled after half an hour of us sitting there, when someone came in and told us Professor Scott is cancelling classes; her daughter had been in an accident that freezing-rain day. We all hope nothing is seriously wrong.
English Syntax, though, was interesting. We started Head-to-Head movement, for sentences in French which violate standard word order. So over the underlying form, the order changes so... "Am I the only one who has the gut feeling this is more complicated than it needs to be?" I asked. "And if you have a highly synthetic languages, with any word order you like, would you have movement all over the place, just to adhere it to an English syntax tree? This makes less sense to me. The tree has got to be more general to work that way; there must be something wrong with the tree model we are using now."
I do not think Prof. Foley was prepared for an angered math-linguist, who speaks a polysynthetic language herself, in her class. We have not yet gotten to Minimalist trees; maybe they will solve my problem. I cannot say how to fix the problem right now; I just know there is a problem, and we had just gotten to French, which is like a first cousin to English where syntax is concerned. What would you do with Inuktitut syntax?
Maybe someday I will use my knowledge of math to revolutionise syntax. I am deeply dissatisfied with most current linguistic theory - barely half a century old, formal linguistics is still a science in its infancy. Like math was before the nineteenth century. Hehe.
The year's first math help featured three people - one of whom was the p-adically challenged gentleman. He seems to have an uncanny facility with financial math; maybe he is suited to be an accountant. However, his efforts to transform a graph using various coloured pens drove me crazy. So crazy that when he asked for another colour, having run out of his, I pulled out my batch of coloured pens for my colour-coded notes, and said, "Here, use pink." He squealed in embarrassment, and I told him of Lord Praetor's quote when the latter gave us history assignments copied on pink paper: "I am secure in my masculinity; I can use pink stuff."
I have a new necklace.
It is now freezing cold again. And one good thing about biking home from dance is that your feet are warmed up. When I rode there, my toes were froze; when I rode back, almost all of my leg was cold under three pants layers - except my toes. I love my feet.
At Friday's rehearsal, just before Saturday's Ukrainian New Year concert, I was as much use as a turn signal to a rabbit. The other dancers nudged me into a part of the "towel bit"; however, Lord Pencilturn overruled. "She doesn't know it. As far as I've seen." Heck, I know it best of any dancer on earth who had not either choreographed or performed it. However, I had a conversation with a returning male dancer about his Political Science master's thesis. What does it tell you about yourself if you go to dance rehearsal to admire the men?
I come to dance rehearsal, though, because if I did not, no one would cry except me. Just like for my grades, no matter how bad the prof might be, no one would cry at the end except me.
I read my newspapers at the Starbucks now, but I do not buy coffee. I made a quick assessment of my personal debts and obligations on My Precious during the Math History class I came in late to because I could not find the room (not that the class was boring, but...) Under the worst-case scenario, that we get not a cent for the Chicago trip, and that I take another summer course and pay for it myself, my expenses for now until May just barely fit into my current contract, with not even a cup of coffee I want to risk, not to speak of a pair of shoes. My options are to
(a) raise as much money as I can incite raising for the school Chicago trip - if anyone who reads this blog has connections with Ottawa-based corporate or private sponsors, who would like to donate to a very talented trivia team to help them be the first-ever Canadian representatives at the NAQT nationals - please, please, we need every cent, and the school can and will make you a tax receipt.
(b) file a tax return for once. Our wonderful customs and revenue people owe me money for a couple of years, and I should claim it.
(c) wheedle my parents. I hate doing that, though. They should wheedle me.
(d) write questions for Reach or other sources. They apparently pay a few cents a question.
(e) try to get my novel published. But that does require an investment - I would never deal with a vanity press, but printing and postage does cost some. I made a couple of significant corrections to Shilhak-Inshushinak's significant objections yesterday, and prior to that I tweaked the manuscript to approximately what it should look; god bless fancyhdr.sty ! I code the manuscript in LaTeX. Shilhak-Inshushinak's first reaction was "That way madness lies. I lost friends down that dark path," but I stubbornly kept to my choice, because I am a mathematician, and because I hate making title pages (a scar from grade seven and eight science, where I put so much work in making a collage title page and a cell diagram, respectively, and then got docked marks because of glue showing and a smudge, respectively). Anyhow, robotics and later CSI 1100-1101 Intro to Computer Science I and II got me addicted to the sweet rush I get when something successfully compiles. Wysiwyg editors like WordPerfect and OpenOffice.org just aren't the same, and don't get me started on Word. I wouldn't use it if they paid me - and they did pay me. And I didn't use it. I may use OpenOffice.org for fast editing and spreadsheet work, but I am now a TeXnician to the core.
Anyhow, after that sweet digression, anyone else know of any ways I can make money, other than the traditional three B's: blackmail, bludgeoning, and bed? I lack clear candidates for all three, and experience in two out of the three.
To return to the preceding discussion, the word thaw triggered a poem that I had not recalled in a long time. That is actually connected to my chosen research topic for Math History, which is (of course, this is the Tourmaline you all know and love, after all) the history of coding theory. I am a maze of contradictions: I like the idea of codes, yet neither solve cryptograms nor have taken any steps to study coding software; I am a mathlinguist, yet I would rather be a starving artist than work for CSIS or the CSE (our Canadian equivalents of the CIA and the NSA, respectively).
I was late to Math History on Thursday, since the room I had written down in my planner was incorrect, and all the public Infoweb stations connecting to the university's Internet network did not work. I had to go back to the lab - I love, love, love having a lab/office with a key to it - and turn on the computer, and get on the Internet, and check there. All that searching made me half an hour late for class, which was perhaps good because up to that Pestov seemed to pretty much be doing review. Then we spoke of the ordinal number w (omega, that is), which is bigger than any natural number - and then we took w to the power of w to the power of w all w times. Cute. Then we found w is actually equal to aleph-naught, the cardinality (size) of the set of natural numbers, and integers, and rational numbers too. Then to prove that any set is smaller than its power set, we invoked the Barber's Paradox:
"A certain town has a barber who shaves all those who do not shave themselves. Who shaves him?"
"The easy answer to this is that the barber is a woman," I spoke up.
Come to think of it, it isn't the easy answer in this phrasing of the question, since a woman is one of those who do not shave themselves (or do); but if we understand the question that way, it is overextended. Does the barber shave children? Pigs? Sofas? Subsets of the natural numbers? All those do not shave themselves, for sure; well, I cannot account for what subsets of the natural numbers do when we are not looking. If we assume that the barber's sign says "This barber shaves all men in this town who do not shave themselves," then I think the barber being a woman would let us out of our difficulty.
Barber, barber, shave a pig,
How many hairs will make a wig?
Four and twenty, that's enough.
Give the poor barber a pinch of snuff.
Morphology on Wednesday was cancelled after half an hour of us sitting there, when someone came in and told us Professor Scott is cancelling classes; her daughter had been in an accident that freezing-rain day. We all hope nothing is seriously wrong.
English Syntax, though, was interesting. We started Head-to-Head movement, for sentences in French which violate standard word order. So over the underlying form, the order changes so... "Am I the only one who has the gut feeling this is more complicated than it needs to be?" I asked. "And if you have a highly synthetic languages, with any word order you like, would you have movement all over the place, just to adhere it to an English syntax tree? This makes less sense to me. The tree has got to be more general to work that way; there must be something wrong with the tree model we are using now."
I do not think Prof. Foley was prepared for an angered math-linguist, who speaks a polysynthetic language herself, in her class. We have not yet gotten to Minimalist trees; maybe they will solve my problem. I cannot say how to fix the problem right now; I just know there is a problem, and we had just gotten to French, which is like a first cousin to English where syntax is concerned. What would you do with Inuktitut syntax?
Maybe someday I will use my knowledge of math to revolutionise syntax. I am deeply dissatisfied with most current linguistic theory - barely half a century old, formal linguistics is still a science in its infancy. Like math was before the nineteenth century. Hehe.
The year's first math help featured three people - one of whom was the p-adically challenged gentleman. He seems to have an uncanny facility with financial math; maybe he is suited to be an accountant. However, his efforts to transform a graph using various coloured pens drove me crazy. So crazy that when he asked for another colour, having run out of his, I pulled out my batch of coloured pens for my colour-coded notes, and said, "Here, use pink." He squealed in embarrassment, and I told him of Lord Praetor's quote when the latter gave us history assignments copied on pink paper: "I am secure in my masculinity; I can use pink stuff."
I have a new necklace.
It is now freezing cold again. And one good thing about biking home from dance is that your feet are warmed up. When I rode there, my toes were froze; when I rode back, almost all of my leg was cold under three pants layers - except my toes. I love my feet.
At Friday's rehearsal, just before Saturday's Ukrainian New Year concert, I was as much use as a turn signal to a rabbit. The other dancers nudged me into a part of the "towel bit"; however, Lord Pencilturn overruled. "She doesn't know it. As far as I've seen." Heck, I know it best of any dancer on earth who had not either choreographed or performed it. However, I had a conversation with a returning male dancer about his Political Science master's thesis. What does it tell you about yourself if you go to dance rehearsal to admire the men?
I come to dance rehearsal, though, because if I did not, no one would cry except me. Just like for my grades, no matter how bad the prof might be, no one would cry at the end except me.
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