"I need a head to bang my wall against."
Aug. 10th, 2004 06:18 pmTitle quote from me, upon proving Minkowski, and realizing that I had spent hours trying every obvious thing except the right one.
So the first "Billy story" I saw this year. Billy asked what Lorelei's cellphone number, and ADan[0] says, "555..." Billy enters it into his phone and looks at ADan like he's waiting for the rest of it. Jenny goes, "5555", and Billy realizes that's not the actual number. Not that great, really.
Oh, the tale of my laundry. 2 days ago, I finally decided to go do my laundry. I drag my laundry bag downstairs. I put the money in the machine. It eats some of it and spits some of it back out. I try another machine. Same thing. I run out of money. I go upstairs and borrow money from Malcolm. I try another machine, it just spits it back out. I try the remaining machine (aside from the big one)... it works fine until there's just one quarter in it, then it starts eating my money. I try the other ones again... before long, I have to borrow some more money from Malcolm and some from Fergie. He gives me a dollar bill (which I still haven't paid back, come to think of it). The change machine is down, the vending machine returns dimes. Thankfully I can trade these to ADan for quarters. Anyway. Finally I try the big one, which works fine. (It also costs $2.) But what I forgot was that the big one starts as soon as you put all the money in, so it started going with no clothes in it. YAY. I give up for then.
...thankfully the machines were all working the next day.
As for the Illuminati game - I was slightly wrong in my listing of my restrictions. I was pretty close, though, and I don't know them exactly, so I won't bother to correct them. I do remember another one was no groups with more than 6 power.
...well, in short, Josh won.
Of course, as so many people have pointed out, including himself, he was playing against Ebay and Etienne. Ebay is simply the worst Illuminati player I've ever seen. She showed Etienne that she had Unmasked! And later used it for a privileged attack! And Etienne's not all that great either. He proposed he do the same thing again later this week, only against better players. We thought of a better restriction to put on him than all those: We won't show him any of our specials. "No! That's how I always win! I can't win like that!"
So last night I walk into the East Lounge and find a bunch of people sitting in a circle towards the other end of the room, and a bunch of them start looking at me strangely. "What exactly have I just walked into?"
Apparently, ADan and Fergie had had a contest to see which one of them was less likely to ever have a girlfriend, based on their answers to various questions, judged by Liz, Alex, and Jenny. "Guess who won?" ADan says to me. "Well... I would think Fergie... except... you just asked me, 'Guess who won?'... so I'm guessing... you did?"
He nods.
Or maybe he said "Guess who lost?" I'm not sure which way they considered to be winning. Probably it was actually "Guess who lost?" I say this because, later I decided, well, if ADan managed to beat Fergie at that, *I'm* going to go and challenge ADan. Now, I considered winning to be being judged *less* likely, but everyone else seemed to have it the other way, so we kept getting confused.
Anyway, I beat ADan, who beat Fergie, so I am currently local champion of "Least likely to ever have a girlfriend." So ha. Anybody want to challenge me? *g*
Apparently Issao's first name is actually "Guilherme". On the rational tangles pset he made, he put the name "Guilherme Issao Fujiwara".
Evan came up with these "Second-year number theory" problem sets, much harder number theory problems for second-years to work on, but of course these are things that should be done over the whole of PROMYS AIUI, and he just made them now. :P
Second-year presentations today! Some of them. Also Glenn completed the proof of QR, but as for second-year presentations...
First group. Polyominoes. Definitely the best. Also, they didn't say "Polynomials" once. Also, the 3 JCs all pretended to be different teachers. Jon Chu was supposed to be Glenn, with pulling examples out of your back pocket, Li-Mei was Rohrlich, with a comment about flipping the paths around "like jellyfish", and also writing "Punchline:" on one of the transparencies, and Connie was Rosenberg, with "I get to go first. I get to go second too." Although I might have gotten Connie and Li-Mei mixed up.
Second group. Continued fractions. Boring and confusing. It was unclear what they had proved and what they hadn't. It was also unclear exactly how the symmetry worked.
Third group. Ramanujan graphs. Good, not as good as Polyominoes. Didn't talk about their μ function/modular graphs conjecture, strangely enough.
Fourth group. Noncommutative units. Ack. Matt was not that bad, but Billy...
Billy was unclear all the time, assumed the first-years knew the geometric meanings of O(2,R) and SO(2,R), and didn't understand when people tried to point out errors to him, such as when he forgot to include anything he meant the order of some group G and just wrote down G=(formula), and people were confused, and some figured he meant |G|, and asked if he did, and he didn't see what they were referring to, even once he was looking at the right equation. Or when he wrote down that the determinant of a certain matrix was 1 when it didn't have to be, and people pointed that out, and again, he just didn't understand what they were referring to. Also I'm surprised they didn't present more; they only proved things already in their problem-statement-summary-thingy.
Completely irrelevantly, we've decided, to avoid confusion, that Eric Frackleton is "Eric the Red" while Eric Stansifer is "Eric the Pen".
...so I suppose that ends this entry.
-Sniffnoy
[0]Yes, Abandon Dan, like Oblivious Dan, has had his adjective shortened to just one letter.
--
"The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in
this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live
in this century."
-Dan Quayle
So the first "Billy story" I saw this year. Billy asked what Lorelei's cellphone number, and ADan[0] says, "555..." Billy enters it into his phone and looks at ADan like he's waiting for the rest of it. Jenny goes, "5555", and Billy realizes that's not the actual number. Not that great, really.
Oh, the tale of my laundry. 2 days ago, I finally decided to go do my laundry. I drag my laundry bag downstairs. I put the money in the machine. It eats some of it and spits some of it back out. I try another machine. Same thing. I run out of money. I go upstairs and borrow money from Malcolm. I try another machine, it just spits it back out. I try the remaining machine (aside from the big one)... it works fine until there's just one quarter in it, then it starts eating my money. I try the other ones again... before long, I have to borrow some more money from Malcolm and some from Fergie. He gives me a dollar bill (which I still haven't paid back, come to think of it). The change machine is down, the vending machine returns dimes. Thankfully I can trade these to ADan for quarters. Anyway. Finally I try the big one, which works fine. (It also costs $2.) But what I forgot was that the big one starts as soon as you put all the money in, so it started going with no clothes in it. YAY. I give up for then.
...thankfully the machines were all working the next day.
As for the Illuminati game - I was slightly wrong in my listing of my restrictions. I was pretty close, though, and I don't know them exactly, so I won't bother to correct them. I do remember another one was no groups with more than 6 power.
...well, in short, Josh won.
Of course, as so many people have pointed out, including himself, he was playing against Ebay and Etienne. Ebay is simply the worst Illuminati player I've ever seen. She showed Etienne that she had Unmasked! And later used it for a privileged attack! And Etienne's not all that great either. He proposed he do the same thing again later this week, only against better players. We thought of a better restriction to put on him than all those: We won't show him any of our specials. "No! That's how I always win! I can't win like that!"
So last night I walk into the East Lounge and find a bunch of people sitting in a circle towards the other end of the room, and a bunch of them start looking at me strangely. "What exactly have I just walked into?"
Apparently, ADan and Fergie had had a contest to see which one of them was less likely to ever have a girlfriend, based on their answers to various questions, judged by Liz, Alex, and Jenny. "Guess who won?" ADan says to me. "Well... I would think Fergie... except... you just asked me, 'Guess who won?'... so I'm guessing... you did?"
He nods.
Or maybe he said "Guess who lost?" I'm not sure which way they considered to be winning. Probably it was actually "Guess who lost?" I say this because, later I decided, well, if ADan managed to beat Fergie at that, *I'm* going to go and challenge ADan. Now, I considered winning to be being judged *less* likely, but everyone else seemed to have it the other way, so we kept getting confused.
Anyway, I beat ADan, who beat Fergie, so I am currently local champion of "Least likely to ever have a girlfriend." So ha. Anybody want to challenge me? *g*
Apparently Issao's first name is actually "Guilherme". On the rational tangles pset he made, he put the name "Guilherme Issao Fujiwara".
Evan came up with these "Second-year number theory" problem sets, much harder number theory problems for second-years to work on, but of course these are things that should be done over the whole of PROMYS AIUI, and he just made them now. :P
Second-year presentations today! Some of them. Also Glenn completed the proof of QR, but as for second-year presentations...
First group. Polyominoes. Definitely the best. Also, they didn't say "Polynomials" once. Also, the 3 JCs all pretended to be different teachers. Jon Chu was supposed to be Glenn, with pulling examples out of your back pocket, Li-Mei was Rohrlich, with a comment about flipping the paths around "like jellyfish", and also writing "Punchline:" on one of the transparencies, and Connie was Rosenberg, with "I get to go first. I get to go second too." Although I might have gotten Connie and Li-Mei mixed up.
Second group. Continued fractions. Boring and confusing. It was unclear what they had proved and what they hadn't. It was also unclear exactly how the symmetry worked.
Third group. Ramanujan graphs. Good, not as good as Polyominoes. Didn't talk about their μ function/modular graphs conjecture, strangely enough.
Fourth group. Noncommutative units. Ack. Matt was not that bad, but Billy...
Billy was unclear all the time, assumed the first-years knew the geometric meanings of O(2,R) and SO(2,R), and didn't understand when people tried to point out errors to him, such as when he forgot to include anything he meant the order of some group G and just wrote down G=(formula), and people were confused, and some figured he meant |G|, and asked if he did, and he didn't see what they were referring to, even once he was looking at the right equation. Or when he wrote down that the determinant of a certain matrix was 1 when it didn't have to be, and people pointed that out, and again, he just didn't understand what they were referring to. Also I'm surprised they didn't present more; they only proved things already in their problem-statement-summary-thingy.
Completely irrelevantly, we've decided, to avoid confusion, that Eric Frackleton is "Eric the Red" while Eric Stansifer is "Eric the Pen".
...so I suppose that ends this entry.
-Sniffnoy
[0]Yes, Abandon Dan, like Oblivious Dan, has had his adjective shortened to just one letter.
--
"The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in
this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live
in this century."
-Dan Quayle
