Clocky: an alarm clock that runs (well, rolls) and hides when you hit the snooze button. Then you have to get up and find it when it goes off again. Brought to you by the clever folks at the MIT Media Lab.

In a world all too full of suckiness, it heartens me considerably that people put time and effort into shiny things like this.

In the "you learn something new every day" file: It seems that sending mail through my university is cheaper if the address is typed on to the envelope, rather than being handwritten. Given that the letter in question is being sent air-mail to Brisbane, I suppose every little bit helps.

I have, for the first time ever that I can remember, devised and proved a totally new result of the form: "The following are equivalent..." At least I hope it's totally new. And I sort of hope it's correct, as well.

The conference last week was good, as I've written elsewhere. The weekend since was mostly devoted to trying to reclaim lost sleep ( Read more... )

Yes, I've been grading again.

The thing I hate most about grading isn't the assortment of plain old wrong answers. Students get questions wrong; I certainly got my share wrong back in The Day. It's the answers that not only aren't right, but couldn't possibly be right.

In this collection one finds phenomena such as:

• Answers written in sentences ( Read more... )

(Dedicated to thetamermaid, who pointed out that I haven't been updating much lately ( Read more... )

I suppose I should take it as a good thing when I come up with an idea, only to discover that Euler was there first. I mean, Euler. He's cool, right?

But still. Damn you, Euler!

( Ten moments from four days )

In case you happen to be in Atlanta for the Meetings next week, and are looking for me, here are the most likely possibilities:

• At the Mathematics of Equity minicourse on Thursday and Saturday just after lunch, because I'm paying for the privilege.
• At the Special Sessions for Graph & Design Theory on Wednesday, 'cause it'll be cool and I need to ( Read more... )

mglizak has complained to me that no one's been updating the group blog that we share (with others) except him recently, which I'm taking as a backhanded way of saying that I've not been updating my various places recently. And so ( Read more... )

Actually, by USSR I mean Kanata and my parents' house. Not that either of these locales shows any particular Leninist tendencies. In fact, the only thing around that might even be considered nearly Russian is the snow in the backyard. There's a lot of that, though, so maybe that'll do ( Read more... )