blogwaffe

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apparent horizons – NEW!

Status:
A fully armed and operational zulu word for general relativistic double entendre.

#1 Fan:
Marc Broussard

I gave a talk at group meeting yesterday, and it went reasonably well; I was able to answer not one but two Sergey questions, and Preskill seemed to think the question Andrew and I are asking is fairly interesting. It’s nothing monumental, but there may be a clever answer to it nonetheless.

In other news, it seems likely (it used to seem unlikely) that I’m being funded by IQI over the summer. Not a sure thing, though.

Haskell and Joanna introduced me this summer to a fantastic board game called Carolus Magnus. I’ve looked for it off and on since then, and finally found it at Game Zone on Colorado. By the way, that’s a pretty cool store. The proprietor really knows his stuff, and it’s pretty well stocked. Plus, there’s a ten percent discount for Caltech students. Props to Dixie of the reference.

Anyway, Carolus Magnus is the best three person game I’ve ever played (and it’s supposed to be awesome for four as well). I’ve never seen a game with similar game play. For starters, there is one and only one moving game piece: Charlemagne. And all players have split control over where Charlemagne moves.

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Holly got me to join bebo.com. It’s… not evil. I was really impressed. A nice change from Friendster, which is truly awful (slow, ugly, bloated beast that it is). It’s an interesting idea, but, man, Friendster did not pull it off well. orkut is pretty nice, but, sadly, I never really put any effort into it and then, one day, everyone seemed to be using Friendster (Oh, Sarah, why?).

But back to bebo. Both Friendster and orkut are about connections. Bebo is much simpler; it’s an address book first and foremost with a journal and a photo archive as secondary features. The idea is that you shouldn’t have to send out mass emails when you update your contact information (and shouldn’t have to deal with mass emails when someone else does). Everybody’s info is stored centrally and, as long as people keep their own information updated, is always up to date. It’s a nice idea, and it’s implemented really cleanly. Their privacy policy even seems pretty good.

Pretty slick. You should check it out.

After six months of residence, Greg, Paul.za and I are finally listed on the apartment directory. And we’ve got an official label on our post box. Guess that means they finally think our money’s good enough for them.

On the whole, the SLR’s been good to us, or at least to me. The obvious benefit our place offers is the space, but beyond that, we’ve never had any big problems with the management, the rest of the residents are all pretty nice, and the voting station is directly across the street.

Sure, real bike racks would be nice, and it’d be awesome if we could have one more garage clicker. I suppose, while I’m at it, I might as well mention how rockin’ it’d be if all the bathrooms had showers.

Now if Greg would only stop smelling my sheets all the time. Come on, dude. Creepy.

We arrived at the Paseo at six thirty: precisely the time we were told by our invitation would be the appropriate one. We found ahead of us some several hundred people. People who had cheated. They had read the invitation as well, surely; yet there they were. All queued up and looking behind them (at us) with smug little grins and knowledge that they, certainly, would get in, but we… well it would be best not to harp on it.

But that was all right. We tried to tell ourselves we were having a fine time chatting amongst ourselves (Paul.za, Mom.za, Greg, Heidi, BJ and Adam), and that we might even get free passes to see something else if we were refused entrance. Plus, many more people lined up behind us, so we got to assume smug little grins of our own.

I am, of course, referring to our chance to see a screening of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And we were, of course, wrong; we did not get free passes to see something else when we were refused entrance.

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Somebody out there is having an excellent time and doesn’t even know it yet.

Greg got a nifty puzzle contraption for Christmas which has been sitting out on the coffee table since he got back. If you could combine one of those giant expanding/collapsing geodesic spheres you see all the time (but can never ignore – they just look too cool) in science museums with a seagull, this puzzle and that Frankenstein monstrosity would move in exactly the same way. And if it were a very colorful seagull, it would look about right too.

Anyway, I was spending a good chunk of time poking at it this evening (the puzzle, not the above affront to God’s creation). I was getting annoyed; the puzzle just wouldn’t line up in the way I expected (or should I say “wanted”). I could not figure out what I was doing incorrectly. As it happens, some evil sadist out there (and it was probably one of you) took advantage of a slight breach of the puzzle’s structural integrity to either swap two pieces or flip one. So whomever you were, congratulate yourself; you got me.

Fourty-five minutes of my life gone, and I want them back.

Moral of the story: parity checks are good.