Yeah, 3 entries today... I do that sometimes. This is interesting, though.

You may recall that my second cousin, Jeff Beals, works for the state department, and is currently over in Baghdad. So a few days ago, we got the following email from him:

---

Subject: Re: recommendation letter
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 00:13:12 +0000
From: Jeffrey Beals <(email address removed)>
To: (My parents' email address)

Harry sounds like he's in great shape. Let me know how things have turned
out! Here's a letter I've sent out to friends and family on my time in
Baghdad so far. It's a long, hard slog of a note, so I won't be offended if
you never make it through. Here it is, though. All the best to all of you
over there!


December 6, 2004

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...well, I really shouldn't just go putting the rest of the email out on the web like that. If anyone wants to see it though, I can send you a copy.

-Sniffnoy

--
"Caution! Under no circumstances confuse the mesh with the interleave
operator, except under confusing circumstances!"
-The Intercal Manual

The entry I originally meant to write

May as well keep it separate, seeing as there's nowhere good to add it to the previous one.

Saturday is Columbia, and our A team will be me, Chris, Noam, and...?

Idea #1: Mark.
Who I was really assuming it would be, really, until Noam suggested that we might want someone else. Why? We've already got me and Chris. Science redundancy.
Pros: Probably the overall best QBer of our choices.
Cons: Science redundancy.

Idea #2: Emi.
A suggestion of Noam's.
Pros: Noam insists, she's actually pretty good.
Cons: She is? Always looks to me like she's just sitting there...

Idea #3: Andrew.
Noam's other suggestion.
Pros: Possibly less science-focused than Mark? I don't really know.
Cons: Not as good as Mark.

Idea #4: Vlad.
Pros: Our replacement for Czolacz! Finally, someone with a good knowledge of the humanities!
Cons: Totally untested. He's not come to a practice yet.
OTOH: Hey, we won Columbia 2 years ago with James on our team.

So I'm thinking Mark or Vlad. I think I'll want to see what Chris and Noam think about which one...

-Sniffnoy

--
"I have opinions of my own--strong opinions--but I don't always agre
with them."
-George W. Bush

*Soy* sauce?!

So today as I was standing in the senior breezeway, two people came out of the freshman hallway, and one of them said to the other, "Soy sauce?!" So I went around saying that at people today.

Great, the one day I actually plan to do my math homework, my Apostol goes missing. And I still haven't done that CS assignment, because first I lose the assignment sheet, then I lose my graphing calculator and I don't want to double-differentiate this stuff by hand (the assignment is put these integrals in a form such that you can Romberg them)... but yay, we proved Γ(½) in math today.

Jayme gave me a cabbagehat! He had a cabbage, which I think he gave to Shannon, but he gave one layer to me to wear as a cabbagehat! But this was at the end of the day, so I didn't keep it very long. I did wear it home, though.

Some Galitskiy quotes:
On a rubberband: "Does it expand, or does it stretch?"
On a steel cable: "It doesn't made out of rubber."

And nearly finally, a link from koloth: A guy who claims to have refuted the whole theory of infinite cardinals. http://descmath.com/diag/refute.html. Truly awful stuff. He claims that "Transfinite Theory", as he calls it, is controversial... no clue where he got that idea.

"Unfortunately, refuting Transfinite Theory is as difficult a task as refuting its kissing cousins: Marxism, Fascism, Nazism and all the other impressive isms built on the dialectics of the German Transcendental Idealistic movements."

Wow. Set theorists are Marxists and Fascists and Nazis. Just wow.

Try and actually read his refutation of the diagonal method. He's trying to deny the distinction between countable and uncountable by failing to notice the distinction between finite and infinite! "You lose! Good *day*, sir!" And yes, infinite sets *do* act a bit unintuitively; it's because they're *infinite*. Things do that in math. It's not a hole in mathematics.

We have a half day Thursday. I don't know why, so I'm claiming it's because Thursday is Afflux. All hail Eris!

EDIT: Oh whoops. *Tomorrow* is Afflux, not Thursday. Oh well.

Another edit: Rather than make a 4th entry for today, I'll add here that, application to Brandeis sent out, that's 4/10...

Random number I looked up of the day: The cycle of year-lengths is 689,472 years long in the Hebrew calendar.

-Sniffnoy

--
"Heisenberg Airlines: we don't know where we are, but we're making
good time!"
-Ian Davis, rhod