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Dimitrios has found a proof. I have found an elegant way of writing it. It is a beautiful, warm, sunny day. Any of these things on its own would have sufficed to make me very happy.
Paper proof-read and submitted. Man, that's a relief. Dimitrios bought us a celebratory lunch at one of the local cafés. (Technically, that was before the paper had been submitted.)
Turns out the killer Su Doku wasn't insoluble. I'd used the ``fact'' that the only way to make 16 is 9+7 which is only true if the two numbers are in the same row or column and, since they weren't, 8+8 was an option.
Also, there is a volcano called La Grande Marmite on L'Île Amsterdam in the middle of the Indian Ocean. How cool is that?
The end of February was rather cold (in the Greek sense -- several consecutive days where the temperature didn't get above 10°C) but this month has been warm and sunny, so far. So, for the first time in a while, I wasn't stressing about anything and had the chance to take some photos while wandering around the Ancient Agora.
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By the way, could I ask you a favour? The next time I see a stunningly beautiful woman of about my own age and we check each other out and then check each other's cameras out (nice body! *cough* and a serious lens on it), could you send me a text message to remind me to say, ``Hello''? 'Cos, left to my own devices, that part only occurs to me about five minutes later. And that's not much use, really, is it? Ta.
Celebratory post-paper dinner with Dimitrios, Maria and her friend Sandra, at a very nice little Taverna that turned out to be only about fifteen minutes' walk from my flat, though we went by car. The food was excellent, as was the house wine was excellent. Thence, to Glyfada for ice cream. For some reason, the ice cream place, along with the usual selection of women's magazines, men's magazines and Mobile Phone Magazine, also had Ship-Owner Magazine. We leafed through a copy and found the most wonderful photograph: the Minister for Shipping and a collection of dignitaries, all neatly arranged by the photographer so that something on the wall behind the Minister made him look like he was wearing a party hat. I can only imagine it was deliberate: instinctive avoidance of that kind of accident is one of the many things that sets the professional photographer apart from the rest of us.
There was also a small amount of eclipse-viewing. Alas, by totality, it had clouded over so here's one I prepared earlier: 8/9th November, 2003, to be precise. I don't imagine the moon's changed too much since then, big ol' rock in the sky that it is.
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I've posted the backlog since last Saturday. Man, that was a stressful week.
Maria was dropping Dimitrios off as I arrived at the office and remarked that I seem to be seeing more of him than she is at the moment. I think weekends give her an unfair advantage. But Dimitrios and I agreed to take the day off from our joint work -- we're both exhausted by it.
Just been looking at the games of one of my online opponents, who's won only 25 of his 90 games -- soon to be 25/91 as I have mate in one. Of those, one is an inexplicable resignation of his opponent who was a queen up, two appear to have a guy resigning all his games (including one where he had a one-move checkmate against my opponent) and leaving the site, one was an actual win and the rest were won on time, often several pieces down. I'd find that really depressing.
Barclaycard have written to inform me that, in the spirit of responsible lending, they'll now only allow me to withdraw half my credit limit from cash machines. I'm not at all sure how this is any more responsible than letting me spend my whole credit limit over the internet, particularly when they've gradually increased that limit by over a thousand pounds from its original value without ever asking me.
Dimitrios and I have come up with a significant strengthening of one of our intermediate results, which has an immediate corollary, a very nice result about path-width of k-connected graphs. The corollary would probably be worth a paper on its own if it was the first thing we'd done but it's too closely linked to the other stuff to legitimately separate them.
While I was waiting at the bus stop to come home, a man on a moped tried to turn into the nearby side-street at a very oblique angle, got railroaded by the centimetre-or-so kerb and landed in a heap, bouncing his crash helmet off the tarmac. At least he wasn't going much above walking pace. And he'd been carrying the helmet between his knees rather than on his head. I helped him to his feet and picked up his various belongings and he went on his way, back up the main road -- he'd been trying to make a U-turn. Twenty yards up the road is a car park entrance, with a very similar level change and he drifted into that and very nearly came off again. This is the sort of idiot one has to deal with every time one crosses a road in Greece.
Message to all Greek men aged over fifty: ``Leather baseball caps. No. Don't do that. Thank you.''
Message to the Athens Metro: ``Panpipe versions of Simon and Garfunkel's greatest hits. They fill me with rage. Don't do that. Thank you.''
I've just seen Oprah claim that an American high-school drop-out earns, on average, $10,000 a year less than somebody who doesn't drop out and that, over a lifetime, this gives a difference in earnings of a million dollars. I wonder how many American high-school drop-outs it took to write that bit of script.
Laziest day ever. Partly because my next door neighbour was having a party until 3am. It wasn't a noisy party (and they're usually very quiet so I didn't complain) but it kept me up.
From my weekend's spam harvest: ``The best price for impotence'' (aren't we all sick of those quack pharmacists who overcharge when you ask them to make you impotent?) and ``I wee a unesco'' (sounds painful).
Why does software do that? Fritz has mysteriously forgotten all my settings, including the key bindings I've set. At least it forgets my window layout often enough that I've saved that in a file for easy recovery. The best part is that it won't let me switch off the chess engine until I insert the CD to prove that I have a legitimate copy.
On Friday, I posted a link to Hasselblad's new 39 megapixel medium-format DSLR to a newsgroup. Today, I find a response that says just, ``Holy crap.'' This seems to me to be an entirely appropriate reaction: try zooming in to the girl's fingers. Yours for approximately $25,000. The camera, I mean. You can probably hire the model for less than that.
Still on the subject of cameras, here's the lens hood I downloaded from the internet. If you're rich enough to own both Canon's 400mm F/2.8 image-stabilized tele (about £6000) and an A2 printer, you can make a cardboard lens hood for that, too.
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(Yes, I know a white lens hood will do more harm than good. But did you really think I'd be seen in public with it on my camera?)
CNN have just presented a wonderful piece about Italian efforts against counterfeit wine. Their big idea is to put a hologram, a serial number and a phone number on the bottle. When you see a bottle in a wine shop, you can phone the number and give them the serial number to check that it's a genuine bottle. Oh, great. So, you're not prepared to trust the bottle when it tells you ``Vino Plonko Spectacularo 2001'' but you do trust it when it tells you to call some random number in Italy and you do trust whoever that is when they tell you, ``But of course it's genuine.'' And, hey, if you're going to counterfeit the wine, why not make even more money on the side by advertising your premium rate number on the bottle?
Tuesday 13th is unlucky in Greece. This seems a much better choice than Friday 13th, since in every 400-year cycle of the Gregorian calendar, the 13th of the month falls on a Friday 688 times (more than any other day of the week) and on a Tuesday only 685. Of course, globalization means they're starting to consider Friday 13th unlucky as well, so they get the worst of both worlds.
In the news, the Chinese construction industry would like to say, ``Screw you.'' In other news, during last week's demonstrations against the Greek government's planned education reforms (yes, the students are still on strike), the Gay Guards decided that running away was the better part of valourand made a hasty exit before one of their little huts was petrol-bombed. In other, other news, I see that Baroness Corston wants to close all Britain's women's prisons. Frances Crook, the wonderfully named director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, says that ``prison simply doesn't work'' for women. An interesting assertion, given that it clearly doesn't work for men, either -- according to Home Office figures (page 7), only an estimated 15% of people in prison are serving their first custodial sentence. And why should only women be ``held in units near their families''?
Is the author of xkcd reading my blog?
OK, why am I getting all the asshole bus drivers? On Tuesday night, there were no buses at all. Last night, the driver had a real go at me because I (the only passenger at the time) stood up to close a window and he thought I wanted to get off. He later had a good yell at a woman who dawdled for all of a second while getting on. Tonight, as I was walking through the campus, an empty bus came past and didn't stop for me when I held my hand out. Admittedly, I wasn't at a stop but, late at night, on the campus, that often doesn't matter. So, I walked a couple of hundred yards down the hill and waited at the stop for him to come back round the loop. This time, he did stop but very late and suddenly, giving the impression that he'd thought twice about it. At the next stop, a dozen or so probably-students got on, got shouted at, got sent off and were finally allowed back on again. Frankly, it would have been faster for me to have walked.
Wheeee! Ireland tied with Zimbabwe in the Cricket World Cup. Go, Ireland!
Meanwhile, England's strategy for the early part of their innings against New Zealand seems to have been to bore the opposition to sleep in the hope of gaining the element of surprise. I'm not staying in the office for the New Zealand innings (kinda tempting, though, with them on 8/2 in the third over); knowing CNN, I'll probably have to wait until Monday to get a clear idea of what happened.
Hrmmm... Saw nine police riot buses on my way home...
Dear CNN, when Rahul Dravid says that his team respects Bangladesh and expects a tough match because they're the tenth best side in the world, he's just being polite. As such, your reporter is allowed, nay encouraged, to contradict Dravid in his summary. In fact, there are at least ten sides in England better than Bangladesh.
Dear pigeons, it is not necessary for you to shit on my shoulder. I already hate you -- except when you are roasted -- and shitting on me from a height isn't going to make me hate you any more.
Dear Paintshop Pro, when I tell you to open upwards of a hundred ten-megapixel JPEGs, you may assume one of the following (in decreasing order of likelihood): (1) I had a bit of a spasm on the mouse button and double-clicked when I didn't mean to; (2) I was, in some other way, mistaken; (3) I was only joking; (4) I was being somehow postmodern, ironic or otherwise insane; or (5) I've gone out and bought another four gigs of RAM so you should just go ahead. If it turns out that (1) is the cause and I should take you up on your offer to ``Press ESC to abort,'' I want you to abort the whole damned thing, not just the file you're opening at the moment. Further, when I abort the loading of a file, it is not appropriate for you to pop up a dialog box informing me ``An error occurred while reading the file'' because the error occurred before you started reading the file and, when I pressed escape, I was being deadly serious, having (1) ceased to spasm; (2) discovered my mistake; (3) realised the joke has stopped being funny; (4) stopped being postmodern or ironic, or otherwise returned to sanity; or (5) realised that I in fact bought magic beans and not 4GB of RAM.
Dear Windows XP, when I give Paintshop Pro the three-fingered salute, I expect you to kill it dead. I don't want to have to sit around for several minutes while you explain that you love it very much but that it's time to let go. It's only a goldfish, for chrissakes. Flush it down the toilet and pretend the cat ate it or something.
Anyway, I took some photos. I'll put them up here when I've had chance to edit them.
[Photos posted *mumble* 2007-07-11.] The first is just a random apartment building near the cathedral.
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The first three of these are a statue of General Georgios Karaïskakis, who was a hero of the Greek War of Independence. The Olympiacos stadium is named after him. I think the fourth one is Georgios Averof, who paid for the restoration of the Stadiou.
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The Stadiou is a nineteenth-century reconstruction, paid for by the aforepictured Averof, of the stadium used for the Panatheniac games in ancient times. It hosted the 2004 Olympic archery competition and the finish of the marathon. You can't really tell from the photo but the athletics track is very long and narrow, with tight bends at each end. The long, gentle curves are a relatively modern invention.
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Some flowers in the Zappeion gardens.
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And some nearby sculpture. The first is, I think, Cupid breaking his bow; the others are Greece crowning Lord Byron (or Vyronas, as he's known over here).
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These are the remains of the Temple of Olympian Zeus.
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[Last three posted 2007-07-13.]
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OK, so maybe Dravid wasn't just being polite. And go, Ireland! Such a shame about Bob Woolmer.
According to CNN, Australia's government is currently being rocked by scandal. The latest scandal is that the foreign minister spent $30,000 on Chinese lessons. These are probably Australian dollars (the report was from an Australian network and referred to Australian forces in Iraq as `our troops') so we're talking about £13,000. Expensive: but scandalous?
Dave presents Gained in Translation, part five in an occasional series on the dangers of speaking a foreign language. Many of the world's road cranes are made by a Japanese company called Kato. Kato (admittedly, spelt with an omega rather than an omicron) is Greek for ``down''.
Lord Turnbull is announced winner of this week's gratuitous hyperbole award for accusing Gordon Brown of ``Stalinist ruthlessness''. Unless Brown has killed ten million Britons while I've been away. In which case, I'd appreciate a warning before I come back. By the way, if Brown does become Prime Minister, he'll be the first since Chamberlain to have gone to a university other than Oxford (Chamberlain was at what is now part of the University of Birmingham; Callaghan appears to have been offered a place at Oxford but couldn't afford to go; Churchill and Major didn't go to university).
The weather seemed determined to try a bit of everything today. In the morning, it was very windy (sustained winds of 56kph, according to CNN) with intermittent sunshine; at lunch time, it rained hard; then the wind died and it settled on overcast.
When I turned CNN on, the headline swoosher appeared to say, something about Angolan ninjas. So I watched through a full cycle and it did! ``Angolan `ninjas' to deploy to support Mugabe,'' says The Times. The Guardian's correspondent in Jo'burg casts doubt on the story, pointing out that Angolan state radio has denied the story, that the Zimbabwean state media hasn't made any announcement and that for Mugabe to bring in foreign paramilitaries would be a fairly explicit admission that he's ruling by force and not by popular consent.
Things that happen in Athens when it rains all day.
Surprisingly, the city didn't flood, though what must be the marginally downhill end of Plateia Monastiraki turned into a mini-lake a couple of metres wide by a couple of tens of metres long.
Much nicer weather today than the last two days. The rain has stopped but, after a day of solid rain and two days of strong winds, the atmosphere is beautifully clear. No dust, no smog, no nothing. I've taken another sixty-one photos but you'll have to wait a bit before I post them, since I've not finished last weekend's, yet.
Until then, you can make do with this Greek photography website which Eleni found. The site's entirely in Greek but I'm sure you'll work out how to navigate it: it's just like any other site. Click on a photo to see a bigger version; click on the next number in the ``1 2 [Greek] 3 [Greek] 4 5 6'' box towards the bottom of the page to see the next screen. Pay attention and you'll work out the Greek words for ``previous'' and ``next'', assuming you have the right fonts installed.
[Photos posted 2007-03-27. The first two are views you've seen before: Lykavettos Hill and Mount Hymettos. The flowers are all over the university campus and the last two are the Zoology Department (next door to Maths) and the inside of the Maths Department. The windows face south and the ceramic baffles outside stop the corridor being a greenhouse.]
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How many world chess champions does it take to spot a draw by repetition? The answer, it seems, is ``More than three.'' In 1921, José Raúl Capablanca won a match for the world championship against incumbent Emanuel Lasker. In 2001, Garry Kasparov wrote a book about the first four world champions, including Capablanca and Lasker, in which he annotates the fifth game of this match, among others. What he doesn't remark is that the same position occurs after Black's 34th, 36th and 38th moves, which entitled Lasker to claim a draw, rather than continuing and losing. Capablanca clearly didn't notice this, either (he was deliberately repeating the position to get to the 40th move, where time is added to the clocks).
Spent most of the afternoon editing photos.
Oops. Took another pile of photos. I've finished editing last Friday's, at least, but still not last Saturday's.
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I'm very pleased with the middle one: the mesh wasn't really visible when I took the photo and the structure behind appeared only during (extensive) editing.
[2007-07-16. And a couple more that I missed.]
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A mainly crappy day. It started when I got up. At 1:30am. Staring at the ceiling had become boring after half an hour. One of the TV channels was showing Sidewalks of New York, a rather amusing movie about the sex lives of a bunch of neurotic New Yorkers, which is well worth the time. At 3:30, I did another half hour's ceiling-staring.
Needless to say, I only got into the University at lunch time. Lunch was crap, consisting of tough cow-meat and tasteless potatoes. I'd not had much breakfast because I knew I'd be eating again. I got rained on walking back to the office. One of the secretaries was waiting for me to ask what I'd be teaching this semester (if it ever happens), obliging me to spend much of the afternoon trying to work out what I'll be teaching, beyond the course title. It pissed with rain until about 5pm.
Er, I'm disappearing off to Ireland for a week for Tim's stag. Updates when I get back.
Up at 3:30am EEST. Out the house at 4:45am. I cannot tell you what I did between these two times. Seriously. I packed last night. I showered last night. I didn't even make a cup of coffee as I've run out of sugar and I'm not sure whether it's worse to fall asleep again and miss the plane or not be able to sleep again once on the thing. 5:00am bus from Syntagma to the airport. Check in late enough that, when I turn away from my gate to get a coffee and a cheese pie, the guy checking boarding passes at the entry to duty free points out that my gate is the other way. Drink coffee. Eat pie. Quaff 750ml bottle of water. Buy newspaper. Float through security. (Queue? Who else would be crazy enough to be here at this time?).
7:00am EEST. Offer silent thanks to the nice lady at the checkin desk who's put me in an emergency exit row without even telling me. Not sure if I should worry that at no point in the flight does the little red light come on that tells me that the cabin pressure makes it a bad idea to open the door. Sleep? How could I sleep when The Times is telling me that Tony Blair wants to monitor schoolchildren for criminal tendencies? (I notice that The Times calls them ``schoolchildren'', rather than the currently trendy ``students'', to make this sound extra bad.) Swiss have leather seats throughout and give you a muffin and a yoghurt for breakfast.
08:50 CEST. Zurich (arrive). 09:45 CEST. Zurich (depart). A little late because a man with a spanner was lying under the port engine of the plane. Swiss give you a second muffin and a second yoghurt for second breakfast. And a third muffin because you're sitting on the back row of the plane and they've got spares.
11:00 WEST. Dublin (arrive). On the bus into Dublin, I foolishly put my sunglasses on, causing the sun to disappear behind a cloud which, before long, fills most of the sky. While I'm waiting at the stop for Tiarnan to collect me, there's a guy selling his books at the other side of the street. He has two signs: something like ``The loveliest poems you were ever in too much of a hurry to read'' and ``Great Irish writer. Not dead yet. (Sorry.)'' Dublin traffic is marginally more impatient with people who don't set off the microsecond the lights turn green even than Athens traffic and about as dense.
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Ate lunch, pottered, took above poor photo of Ha'penny Bridge in rain, ate dinner (at a very nice veggie place). Went to the pub with Tiarnan, Tiarnan's flatmate (whose name I won't try to write down because it's Irish) and Jon. Drinks are drunk. Keith arrives. Jon departs (staying with rellies). More drinks are drunk. Tiarnan manages to throw a nearly-full pint of Guinness in the air, half-catch it once, horizontal, and once more, upside-down, and somehow return the glass to the table without breaking it. Flatmate goes to the gents' to try to mop most of a pint of Guinness out of his trousers. More drinks are drunk. Home time.
01:15WEST. Crash in my sleeping bag on Tiarnan's floor after a twenty-three and three-quarter hour day. If anyone can explain why, whenever I sleep on the cushions of a sofa on the floor, the one under my head runs away, I'd love to know.
The stag itself is at Clomantagh Castle, near Kilkenny. Jon very kindly drove me down, as Tiarnan was going with Keith and a carful of guitars, electric piano, booze and miscellaneous other useful things. We were first on the scene, followed almost immediately by Stephen, and were thus entrusted with The Keys and The Knowledge of How the House Works. Then other people arrived. After a bit, we started drinking and this we continued to do (with a brief detour into the world of eating an enormous pot of stew, some time around 9:30pm, and a second into the world of the abandoned church next door, some time around midnight) until, er, we stopped. At least, I think we stopped. I don't really remember much by then. But I didn't take any photos after 3:06am.
Tim very kindly allowed me to have a new lens for my camera (Canon 50mm f/1.8 II) posted to his place and he brought it along for me. It has taken no time at all to fall in love with it. It's actually Canon's cheapest lens but the optics are excellent and the ability to open it to f/1.8 has meant that I've been able to take lots of photos of the party in dimly-lit rooms without using flash. It rocks in all possible ways, apart from being a bit plasticky in construction.
[Photos posted 2007-04-23. The lightbulb is there partly to show off the lens (see -- the glass is visible!) and partly to indicate that the castle is quite dimly lit (ditto). And, therefore, to demonstrate that most of the other pictures also show off the lens. *cough*]
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People drinking, in roughly chronological order, though with a little rearrangement to make the pictures tile better. (Note to anyone who's being observant: I forgot to reset my camera's clock so the times in the EXIF tags are EEST, two hours ahead of Ireland.)
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Exploring the spooky graveyard at midnight.
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[Photos posted 2007-05-02.]
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Ben and Tiarnan in conversation. At least, I think it was Tiarnan Ben was talking to.
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The wrong side of 3am.
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[Photos posted 2007-05-28. More photos posted 2007-06-04.]
The intrepid people got up before me and set off for a walk. I think it was supposed to be fairly short but they didn't come back for about four hours and, when they did, there were tales of great adventure. The less intrepid people went for a stroll to the church and down the road a bit. Here are some photos of the castle and the church.
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And then we went off to Kilkenny to buy food and more booze to replace the twenty-seven bottles of wine and sundry beer and spirits that the sixteen of us drank our way through last night. The trip was notable mainly for the cement truck we followed along a quietish country road for about ten miles in about ten minutes and the fact that, in Kilkenny on a Saturday afternoon, ten metres in ten minutes is pretty good going. This is Kilkenny Castle, which is where people tend to imagine you're staying if you say that you're at ``a castle in Kilkenny.''
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We got back to our little castle to find the intrepid people playing Cheapass Games.
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We drank. We ate. We drank some more. Rather more cautiously than last night, mind you. The photos stopped at 3:07.
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For reference, this is what Mort looks like if you've just come in from the cold outdoors and your glasses have steamed up (left), what he looks like when you've had far too much to drink (centre), and what he looks like when he's feeling slightly cubist (right).
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![Mort (in DrunkVision[TM])](pics/2007-03/IMG_6326.jpg) |
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Ivor is able to look evil and scary (left) or not (right).
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And some black and white. I'm not sure who was drinking mustard or, even, if I posed it myself.
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And this is the Staircase of Doom, down which nobody fell. I've no idea how that (didn't) happen: it was easy enough stone-cold sober, let alone with a skinful of alcohol.
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Copyright © David Richerby, 2007.