sniffnoy | The Council of Doom is hereby called to chaos!

Somewhere along the way, someone (ie Matt) decided to start referring to those of us who tend to hang out in the 5th floor lounge as the Council of Doom. We don't have a plan for world domination yet, but we're working on it. Yesterday we made the Official Gavel of the Council of Doom by using a nail clipper to make a slit in a bottle of Mountain Dew and sticking a ruler in it (and out a slit on the other side). We had planned to duct tape it on once we got some duct tape, but when we went to CVS today to get the markers for our Council of Doom sign, we forgot to get it. That's OK, though, since when we started working on our psets this morning we noticed that the Official Gavel had apparently been disassembled, with the Mountain Dew half nowhere to be found. We also found out that CVS does not sell big squishy globes you can stick pushpins in, though it does sell pushpins that are shaped remarkably like mushroom clouds. On a sidetrack, the day before Dan, who we already considered part of the Council, seeing as how he fits the definition above, made himself very officially part of it by banging the Official Gavel on the table and announcing that he did not want to be part of anything called the "Council of Doom". This is obviously nonsensical, so, by creating more chaos (and with the Official Gavel), he made himself very definitely in it. We also made a sign saying "The Council of Doom is IN" (where "IN" is in big, fiery letters (this is what we needed the markers for)). If no-one's currently there, there's a little tilde that folds out from behind it to go in front of it. The official counselor of the Council of Doom is Justin.

Also, there is the matter of the poem. Somehow the topic of Lord of the Rings came up, or maybe it didn't - the point is that somebody struck upon the idea of taking the "Three rings for the elf kings under the sky..." poem and changing it using the idea of *mathematical* rings. It took us about an hour to bang out a first draft, after which we went down to Franklin Lounge, giggling insanely, and showing it to every PROMYS person we could find. Some thought it was really funny, some thought it was just horrible (one said that we're already at PROMYS, do we have to go and make ourselves even *more* of complete losers?), and strangely enough, a few actually didn't get it. We really hope we can get them to put it on the T-shirt, but it is very much a work in progress, especially since we forgot about the "In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie" lines the first time. The poem, in its current state, leaving out those two lines, is:

Three rings - well, fields - which are not discrete
Seven for the integers whose properties we've shown [Well, at the end of PROMYS, this will be true]
Nine for the mortal mods, doomed to repeat
One for the zero ring, one element alone
[In the land of Mordor line]

The zero ring to rule them all, the zero ring to define them
The zero ring to bring them all, and in the dorkness bind them [We originally had "darkness", then Matt came up with this idea]
[In the land of Mordor line]

The first line was supposed to mean the rationals, reals, and complexes.

Pasha also suggested that we stick ∃ before each line of the first verse, and that we replace all instances of "them all" with ∀.

As for the land of Mordor line, one obvious suggestion was "In the land of PROMYS, where the problems lie," but people really don't seem to like that. Neither do I. Suggestions?

Today's problem set is surprisingly easy - although for some problems that may depend on what defintion you use for GCD and LCM... and I get the distinct feeling that the definition I'm using for both is not the correct one (although it does define the same thing, so I'll continue to use it so long as Josh doesn't say I can't - but then again, past today's pset, it won't matter which one we use anyway).