Had another go at taking photos of Athens from the department but the atmosphere wasn't much better and nor were the photos. Should have done it on Monday or Tuesday.
I got rained on this morning, for the first time in ages. Actually, it was more drizzle than rain but it was at least slightly wet and heading in a generally downward direction from the sky.
This graffito outside one of the lecture theatres has been amusing me for a little while. For those of you of a less mathematical bent, the bottom line means, ``for every value of x in 1, 2, 3, ... .'' For those of you of a less Greek-soccer-hooliganism bent, different groups of supporters/hooligans congregate in different areas of the stadium and, of course, each gang hates the other gangs at least as much as they hate all supporters of any other team. So you quite often find graffiti in support of or against various gates, with respect to various clubs.
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When I got home, I took a few pictures of my chessboard, which I promised I'd do about a year ago, when I bought it. Turns out that the kit lens works reasonably well close-up. Well enough, in fact, that I need to dust the board and set before taking any more pictures of it.
Oh, joy. The country that brought you mad cow disease now has an outbreak of sneezing poultry disease. Turkey twizzlers: now with H5N1. Or E5N1 as it is properly known when used as a food additive.
Photographic wanderings in the afternoon took me round the Acropolis. (``Took me round'' in the sense that the M25 takes one round London, you understand; I didn't fork out 12Eur or climb the hill.) The reflection is in the new Acropolis museum, which was supposed to be built in time for the Olympics. Perhaps it'll be ready the next time the Games come to Athens... My first attempt at the shot involved climbing on top of a sturdy rubbish bin; alas, the angle was all wrong and the one you see was taken leaning over the fence.
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This one was spotted while fiddling with the camera after dinner and I'm rather pleased with it. Straight from the camera, apart from the addition of very slight vignetting to draw the eye away from the corners. 1 1/3-second hand-held exposure. Tripods are for the weak.
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Went for drinks with Alla and some of her friends in the evening, which was nice.
This collared dove was sitting on the balcony opposite mine, looking cold. I don't blame it. The balcony used to belong to an old couple but I've not seen them for months.
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Sorted out yesterday's photos plus the ones from last Tuesday. Decided that the ones Thursday were all irretrievably crap. For reference, I've already taken 639 photos with the shiny new camera.
It was raining again, this morning, and doing it properly, this time. Also, there's snow on the slopes of Mount Hymettos, above the university. The campus is distinctly cold.
[Photo added 2007-02-07. I spotted this rather strange lighting on the way back from lunch.]
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In the evening, I became the king of Killer Su Doku: I did three puzzles, with a total estimated time a few minutes short of two hours, in fifty-nine minutes. The intense smugness generated by this feat went some way towards compensating me for realising that a proof I've had in my head for a few weeks doesn't actually work.
It's distinctly warmer, today, which was unfortunate, as I was wearing my heavy coat and scarf and nearly boiled to death on the way into work. There was still snow on Hymettos, though, and I took some photos with the shiny camera.
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Wheee!!! England won another ODI!!! The Cricinfo commentary is somewhat sarky, though. Just before the end of the match, they wrote, ``Vaughan flexing his left leg ... it's the thought of two more matches against Australia.'' Note that the series final is best-of-three.
Another productive chat with Dimitrios, which left me feeling rather mathed out. We're making good progress on the cops and robbers paper.
I'm no longer sure I'm the king of killer Su Doku, though. Tried another two tonight and went wrong on both: in one case after spending more than the recommended 45 minutes. Ouch. Update: went wrong on a third one, too; then sorted out today's and yesterday's photos.
Maybe I'm the king of easy killer Su Doku. I managed to do three tonight in about the suggested time but they were only suggesting about 20 minutes per puzzle. I also went wrong on another three harder ones. Maybe I'm just a rubbish king. The Charles I of killer Su Doku or something like that.
I nearly ran up the hill to get to the campus bus rather than spend fifteen minutes waiting for the next one. Of course, the two drivers just stood around outside the bus gassing for nearly fifteen minutes, at which point I made a cunning switch and got on the public bus instead. The other person who'd been waiting in the campus bus wasn't quite so sharp and, as the public bus passed, she could be seen asking the drivers if they intended doing their job any time soon.
The headline ``P&O man in court over Ouzo deaths'' turned out to be much less interesting once I realised it was about the collision last August between a P&O ferry and a yacht called Ouzo.
I have been made aware of the Street Panthers. These are a bunch of guys on a self-appointed mission to superglue stickers to the windscreens of idiots who park in stupid places. The stickers, which can be seen on their website, read, ``I'm a donkey and I park wherever I want.'' The only real questions are, ``Where can I get me some stickers?'' and ``Is there enough superglue in Athens?''
Sent an E-mail to Jen gloating about the 17°C temperature, sunshine and clear blue sky. Then had to move my class into a different room because the usual one was too cold. Oops.
Alla and I are in no way sad, which is why we were still in the office at 11pm on a Friday night, watching Doctor Who on the internet.
So, Barack Obama has entered the race to become the Democratic US presidential candidate in 2008. CNN gave extensive coverage to his speech but reception in my flat was rather dodgy, which made him, in common with most men, sound like a Dalek. Afterwards, there was a quite extraordinary interview with Debra Dickerson, author of The End of Blackness. The interviewer started by suggesting that black people wouldn't automatically vote for Obama. As far as I can see, the correct way to answer this question would be to ask, ``If I were white, would you be asking me if white people would automatically vote for a white candidate?'' probably throwing in the word ``preposterous'' for good measure and maybe even walking out.
But no. Dickerson started explaining that Obama isn't properly black: indeed, she described him as having ``chosen to be black.'' Since his father was a Kenyan national, none of his ancestors were slaves so, she said, he hasn't gone through the same experiences as the average black American and, therefore, has little in common with them. Now, I cannot speak for Senator Obama but I imagine that, since slavery was abolished in 1865, he's experienced about as much of that as any other black American and that he's experienced his share of racism. And I don't imagine that pointing out to these racists that, thank you very much, there weren't any slaves in his family would have made a whole lot of difference. (I do hope somebody warned him about that before he chose to be black.)
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was saying that, if she'd been President in 2003, she wouldn't have started the war in Iraq. This is interesting, given that she voted in favour of it, back then. Of course, strictly speaking, there's no contradiction here: there's no reason to assume that she would act the same way in the hypothetical universe where she was President in 2003 as in the real universe where she was Senator for New York State. But, then, she was speaking at a political rally, not a conference of logicians.
Of course, Clinton isn't a logician, either, so her explanation of the apparent contradiction is that, if she'd known what she knows now, she wouldn't have voted for the war. She didn't offer any kind of explanation of how, if she'd been president in 2003, she'd have known these things then and she wouldn't admit that voting for the war had been a mistake.
CNN also tells me that a fully-laden Airbus A380 weighs 550 tonnes. The pilot said that, apart from the inertia, it's a very responsive plane.
Makedonia TV (which would, perhaps, be better known as North American TV with Subtitles) decided a few weeks ago that the best thing to put in the 11pm-midnight slot every day (apart from Monday, for some reason) would be a rather good Canadian documentary series called Mayday. It's mainly about air crashes and is, on the whole, rather reassuring. It turns out you can land a fully-laden Jumbo even after the cargo door blows open at 20,000 feet and the resulting explosive decompress rips a hole in the side of the plane you could drive a bus through and debris (including at least one passenger) knocks out both starboard engines. Nobody dies, except the ten or so people whose seats went out the hole. You can land a small jet in a field with no port engine and no undercarriage and only a few people die. Just don't have one fully-laden jumbo collide with another while trying to take off -- that gets messy. Anyway, tonight's episode was a rare excursion into the world of shipping. For reference, if you're ever sailing a ferry to Paros, don't spend your time watching the footy on the TV, don't leave all the bulkhead doors open and most certainly don't hit the Portes Islets (aka the Gates of Paros, visible in this photo). If you do all of these things, you will sink and eighty people will die, including the harbour controller (who will despatch as many fishing boats as he can to assist in rescue efforts and then have a heart attack) and one of your company's executives (who will leave his sixth floor office by the window, rather than the door, a few months later).
By the way, if one were to knock one's cactus off the window ledge and into the sink, would it be acceptable to sing to it, ``I didn't mean to hurt you / I didn't mean to make you fly?'' Just asking. No, no particular reason.
One of my students won't be able to attend the next lecture, when the current homework assignment is due in. So he (shock!) handed them in today. Doesn't he realise that the correct procedure is to mail me half way through the lecture saying that he's sorry he can't come and can he hand the exercises in next lecture (five days late)?
Meanwhile, some Pakistanis are protesting against the un-Islamic nature of St Velantine's day. (Eighth picture here.) I'm not exactly sure what that is so I can't comment.
A few of piles of good photographs: Fred Miranda, Barry Wakelin, Nori Ravi.
[Posted 2007-07-16. And one I took myself.]
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There've been lots of caterpillars around the university in the last couple of weeks. They're about 3cm long. Usually, they're in little trains of anything between half a dozen and forty-odd. Usually, they get squished when they try to cross roads.
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Various commentators have suggested that offering North Korea oil as an incentive to give up its nuclear programme sets a bad precedent. Have they considered that Iran already has all the oil it needs and then some?
Meh. One of those days. Missed a bus because it was five minutes early; the campus bus wasn't running (drivers sitting gassing again) and the next public bus was five minutes late. Dave arrives late for meeting with Dimitrios. Student was late for lecture; when I went back to my office to wait for him there, the door to the corridor was locked; when he arrived, it was locked. Wasted trip for him; wasted time preparing for me. (This is not a complaint against him, by the way: he has a job and, when the traffic's bad, there's nothing he can do.)
On the up side, somebody on a newsgroup mentioned the thoroughly crazy programming language Piet. I'm disappointed that there's no proof of Turing-completeness, though.
Spent the whole morning and, er, some of the afternoon sleeping. Then had a late brunch, did some food shopping, pottered around with my chess board and, finally set of on a rather optimistic photography trip up Philopappou Hill. Optimistic, in the sense that the city was covered by a blanket of dark grey cloud, the light was indifferent to poor and, as it was already 5pm, seemed likely only to get worse. It didn't seem that I was going to get anything other than a bunch of these:
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The situation was rescued somewhat by the rather pleasant coincidence of the edge of the cloud being somewhere to the west and the sun being somewhat low on the horizon (sunset is around 6pm). This lead to a bunch of these:
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Turning the camera eastwards over the city was also worthwhile. Tourist guides like to say that the Acropolis glows orange at sunset. Personally, I think they over-state it but it is true. (And my tourist map is a complete con: the cover picture is of the Caryatids at sunrise and they're practically crimson -- one of the world's more transparent bits of Photoshopping. Er, I'm sorry. I mean `enhancing images with Adobe Photoshop software' as their trademark lawyers would have me say. OK, so the Philopappou Monument has been edited somewhat to bring out the orange colour and make the sky more dramatic; the Acropolis shots are pretty-much straight from the camera, colour-wise, at least.)
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In fact, pretty much the whole city glows orange if you catch it right.
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Learnt a bit about bishop and pawn endgames, since I'm in one of them in one of my internet chess games (currently contemplating my 28th move, playing black). It'll probably be drawn unless one of us makes a critical mistake: I have an extra pawn and most of my pawns are on the right-coloured squares but that probably won't be enough to secure a win.
Spent the day at home as the university's closed today: it's, er, Shrove Monday, for want of a better term. It's unclear to me why, given that Lent is the forty days (minus the Sundays; otherwise it'd be forty-six) leading up to Easter, the Orthodox Lent starts on a Tuesday and the Western one on a Wednesday.
Didn't actually get much work done, even though I'd intended to do some paper-reading and investigation of a graph-theoretic problem that may be graspable.
Dimitrios called in the early evening, which made me worry he'd found something wrong with our paper. In fact, he said that he was going to take a walk around the Acropolis with Maria, his wife, and Marco, his son, and asked if I wanted to come, too. So I did and a fine time was had by all. Marco's adventures with candy-floss have prompted the provisional definition of `happiness' as `the emotional state caused by having a piece of food bigger than one's head'.
I'm a little more optimistic about the bishop endgame: looks like I've found the right move, which was eluding me yesterday. I was applying the wrong rule of thumb: `push the candidate passed pawn first' rather than `activate the king!'
[Photo posted 2007-07-16. Another one of the flowers growing outside the department. This time, in freaky 3D.]
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Turns out that my effort on the bishop endgame was either well-spent or wasted, depending on how you look at it. I played two moves today and my opponent resigned with both the bishops and thirteen pawns on the board. Now, I believe that the position is objectively won, as White has to either give up the f-pawn or allow my king into his camp, but it would surely be worth playing a few more moves just to check?
Further random photography links: Yoav Galai (whom I found after seeing some of his work on the BBC) and Sean McHugh (who has lots of good pictures of Cambridge and more technical tutorials than you could ever need -- and I mean that in both senses of `a greater number of technical tutorials' and `tutorials that are more technical').
Mega-stressed bus driver this morning had to stop because of a little old lady crossing the road so he opened the door and spent a good couple of minutes hurling abuse at her. I've no idea if she was at fault or not but surely she knows that whatever she did was dangerous, surely she didn't do it deliberately and surely the best interests of the passengers are not served by waiting for him to finish haranguing her? (Some levity was provided by my listening to part of the Usual Suspects soundtrack at the time and recalling the line, ``That guy is tense. Tension is a killer. I used to be in a barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois. The baritone was this guy named Kip Diskin. Big fat guy, I mean, like, Orca fat. He was so stressed in the morning...''. Not, I admit, perfectly recalling the line.)
[Photo posted 2007-07-16. This is what Athens looks like on a hazy, polluted day. Can you see the Acropolis?]
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Rethpec'! Chrith Eubank hath been arrethted for protethting in Whitehall. Slightly less respec' since he seems to be more worried about Prince Harry going to Iraq than anyone else.
I'm no longer so sure that endgame is won... 31.Kf2 fxg3+ 32.hxg3 and then what? (Fritz gives a reasonable advantage to Black but the win isn't clear to me.) My opponent's nickname was ``technicaldraw'': I think he might have just missed one...
[Posted 2007-03-03. Sorry for the lack of updates but things have been rather stressful.]
Got up a little earlier than last Saturday (in the morning, even!) and spent most of the day working on the paper I'm writing with Dimitrios and going through a few chess games.
Alla printed off a few killer Su Doku puzzles for me during the
week; today, I tried to solve some of them and got one right and two
wrong. You know you've been watching too much
I am the saddest man on the planet. I know this because, last night, I had a dream in which I met a hot woman at a party and we made out for a bit, made our excuses, went back to her place and spent the whole night browsing the web and posting to Usenet. What is wrong with me?
The rest of the day was much the same as yesterday, to be honest. In real life, I mean. Got another two killer Su Dokus wrong.
Mayday not at all reassuring today. The pilots tried to land a plane in a serious thunderstorm, with visibility less than half the airline's regulation minimum. With the stress of a very difficult, windy approach and wanting to land quickly to avoid breaching working time regulations, they forgot to deploy the wing-top spoilers on landing. That (i.e., that the wings were still generating lift) and the torrential rain meant that the brakes did absolutely nothing and the plane went off the end of the runway at 100mph. Captain killed instantly in a collision with a gangway; ten more die in the subsequent fire.
Dimitrios asked if I'd help him invigilate an exam so I did. At the scheduled start time, three students had arrived but the building was locked. They were given copies of the paper. Shortly afterwards, it became apparent that most of the students had gone to a different building (which may, in fact, have been the right place), about five minutes' walk away. Ten or so minutes later, they arrived where we were and were given question papers. Five or so minutes after that, it was decided that we would go back to the maths department and have the exam there so everyone got into cars and went up the hill.
Still trying to sort out this paper with Dimitrios. Talking to him in the afternoon, I thought I had the right definition for something but, at home in the evening, I couldn't prove anything with it.
Was ready for bed at 1am but foolishly switched on the TV to see if anything had happened in the world and ended up watching Mayday again for an hour. Swiss Air flight 111 from New York to Geneva crashed into the sea off Canada in September 1998 on the way to an unscheduled landing in Halifax to deal with smoke in the cockpit. 55m under water, the largest of the three million pieces of wreckage is an engine. $40M worth of investigation later, they work out that a wiring fire in the first-class entertainment system ignited the plane's insulation and that gradually knocked out most of the plane's electrics. Incidentally, a few minutes before the crash, the co-pilot turned off the number two engine after receiving an erroneous report that it was on fire. (Isn't that how jet engines work? -- ed.)
Three lengthy chats with Dimitrios have confirmed that I wasn't just being stupid last night. We have some alternative ideas for the proof but it's all looking a bit shaky. Even though this proof won't appear in the version of the paper that'll be submitted on Friday (space constraints often keep most of the proofs out of the conference version of papers), we can't very well submit the paper without knowing for sure that the result is true. This is somewhat stressful.
Got home at about 9pm and just vegged. Got another of Alla's killer Su Dokus wrong and then proved within five minutes that the next one was impossible. Maybe I didn't go wrong with the other ones after all...
Copyright © David Richerby, 2007.
