Inauguration Day Post

As of the beginning of the writing of this post, there were 17 minutes left of Inauguration Day, which means 17 minutes to post something before my thoughts on the day are hopelessly out of date (I'd have more time if I lived in, say, British Columbia, but then I would have just started this post three hours later). Truthfully, I don't have much to say on the matter itself. I did manage to catch maybe a half an hour of TV coverage, but it was in a noisy room and I was more focused on food. I haven't had much time to absorb what's been written on the event either. I'm fairly confident that Obama will make a fine president, eloquent speeches notwithstanding.

What did catch my eye, aside from the seemingly endless parade, were the facebook statuses of two of my facebook friends (with names changed to protect identities).

"Mademoiselle She kinda wishes she was American on a day like today."

"Mister He isn't used to being pro-Establishment."

Mademoiselle She is Canadian. Mister He is an American in Canada (no, not that American in Canada). Even before today's events, I could have told you that neither of these people are fans of George W. Bush specifically, or the Republican Party in general, or even conservative ideology (Mlle. She even suggested that there should only be a federal Liberal Party and a federal NDP party, and no more). Both of these express to me a sort of sentiment that I've never been able to identify with. Namely that they will like or dislike a political entity, not based on its inherent qualities, but rather because of the people who are leading it [1]. Mlle. She's sentiment is stronger than that of Mr. He, and I've heard stronger sentiments from others. One left leaning friend once asked another more left leaning friend (who describes Canada's federalist federal parties as centre (NDP), right (Liberal), and extreme right (Conservative)) what party his local MP was affiliated with. Thankfully for them, it was NDP [2]. I didn't quite get why it mattered.

I'm quite happy to be from Hamilton, despite the fact that most of the ridings in the Hamilton consistently elect MPs from parties I wouldn't vote for (and despite the fact that it looks terrible from the QEW, and other locations within). In my lifetime, the Province of Ontario has had Liberal, Progressive Conservative, and NDP governments. No matter which of these parties were in power, my preference for leaving the province or staying hasn't changed much. Or, more accurately, regardless of how much my desire to leave or stay has changed, the party in power has had little to no effect on that change. This is partly due to the fact that I'm from Ontario of course. Our provincial patriotism is low compared to every other province [4]. Even at that national level, though, the pride (or possibly lack thereof) that I have for my country, and my desire to be a citizen of it or any other country, doesn't change come election time. Finally, I don't recall that my preference for living in America, or being an American, has ever changed with the president. At the end of the day, though, it's largely a sideshow to me. I do find politics to be interesting, sometimes too much so, though I'd usually rather listen than discuss. If anything, my lack of patriotism to Canada stems not from the government of the day, but from the fact that Canadian self-identity seems to depend far too much, in my opinion, on what the government does or doesn't do.

None of this is to say that I don't think politics is important. It's just that they are more of a practical matter to me, like plumbing or wiring in my home. I hope some day that if you visit my house, both of these things are in good working order. More importantly, though, I hope that this wasn't the most impressive thing about your visit.

[1] I make an exception for political parties themselves.

[2] It just so happens, it's Pat Martin, the guy who's campaigning against the penny, so I admit to being a bit of a fan.

[3] It's now past midnight. I tried. At least it's still Inauguration Day in the next time zone. The actual location of this footnote got lost. It was intended to be somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph.

[4] Ontarians tend to identify themselves as Canadian, whereas, people from other provinces seem to identify themselves by that province. This has been pointed out to me by American observers and people from other provinces.

Ice by any other name

For a good three to four years, I managed to hit the gym on average about three times per week. That stopped last summer when I decided to put everything I had into finishing my PhD. I also gave up eating food that I either couldn't pour milk on, couldn't put on bread, or didn't contain caffeine. I did get into the gym fairly regularly during the month of July, but dropped it again in early August because of the defence, vacation, and moving.

Somehow, despite my sloth and substandard eating habits, I managed not to appear less healthy. I entertained the thought that my efforts of the preceding years were permanent, though I knew this wouldn't be the case. So I had every intention of picking it up again in September, but instead I picked up a bug that immobilized me on a bad day and would certainly have interfered with a workout of any kind on a good day.

Once classes had started, it became rare that I would actually have enough time to go over to the gym and get myself signed up. Even when I did, I thought that time would be better spend on research that I was getting behind on. One morning, I decided to stop by the gym to sign up on my way to the office. But, while my old student card was a suitable stand-in for a staff card at the library, it seems that the gym has higher standards. Something without a picture on it for identification purposes is preferred, I suppose. I went to the office in the math department to get things sorted out, but they didn't have any of the appropriate forms left. Come back later. I never did.

In retrospect, I'm not sure I could have managed a consistent enough exercise regimen. I probably could have made it there now and then, once a week maybe. But that's not enough to make a difference (I don't think), and other things certainly would have suffered. The costs would have outweighed the benefits.

The month of May should have been a good enough time to try starting again, except for the fact that I wrecked my toe so badly after moving again at the end of April that walking slowly was a challenge in and of itself[1]. Real exercise would have been impossible. For the rest of the summer, I was never in Kingston long enough, it seemed, to get into a good routine.

It took some time to settle into a work routine at RMC. I was ready to do some exercise. I asked around about membership fees. Things are different at the RMC gym (actually, CFB Kingston gym). Queen's gym offers laundry service [2]. You can walk in and get gym clothes in the size that you need, exercise, and hand back the clothes when you're done. It's not free, but not outrageous either, and it's very handy. I probably wouldn't have kept up with the exercise as long as I did if they didn't have that service. When I walked in to the RMC gym a few weeks ago to ask about prices, I also asked about laundry service, if they had anything like Queen's laundry service. No, they don't. Then I had the excuse that I didn't have anything to work out in.

Earlier tonight, I decided to take care of that excuse. I was surprised at how much you have to pay for clothes that you are buying to sweat in. I shouldn't have been, since the store I went to specialized not in sporting equipment in general, but specifically in running equipment [2]. I didn't feel like driving across the city to the nearest store that sells clothes of sufficiently low quality to make me happy. I scanned my brain for other stores nearby that might sell what I was looking for. I couldn't think of anything. I've been putting it off until the next day for long enough now, and I wasn't going to give myself another excuse. So I sucked it up, and bought the cheapest product they had that was appropriate to my needs, even though the quality is greater than what I need.

[At this point, you're probably thinking that this is supposed to be something along the lines of a motivational story. Keep reading.]

One thing that was always lacking at my workouts at Queen's was a water bottle. I could usually make it through the twenty minutes I'd spend doing one exercise without rehydrating. When I was done, I would walk over to the water fountain, drink up, and go exercise some more. It worked okay. It would have been better, though, if I had water with me the whole time. So, even though I was making every effort not to spend money on shorts, I ended up spending the difference between cheap and expensive shorts on a water bottle.

The brand name of the water bottle is Subzero. Which is a great name for the bottle, because you are NOT (all-caps theirs) supposed to put it in the freezer, where you actually find the temperatures that the bottle is named after. The bottle does not have any insulating properties either. Thus you cannot bring the contents of the bottle to subzero temperatures, nor can you maintain a subzero temperatures of anything you put in it. Of course, I did not buy it with the intention of doing either of those. I just want to keep the water from falling on the floor before I can drink it. Furthermore, the name of a product isn't required by law to be able to do what its name might suggest. If you saw a product with that name, though, wouldn't you think that it would be able to do at least one of these things?

Curiously, though the bottle is made entirely of stainless steel (the caps are plastic, but not fixed to the bottle), you are NOT (all-caps also theirs) to use it for hot beverages. Thus, if the name Subzero had been taken, names involving high temperatures would also have been appropriate.

I'm probably going to return it. Not because of the misleading name (though I never bought a Nalgene in part because the name reminds me of algae. I thought it was something you were supposed to use with your fish tank) but because when I looked around to find out why I can't put hot water in it, I found very little of use. There are many places selling them. Those sites just copied the information off of the tag. I found the distributors' site, which looks like it was designed by the kid who flunked his high school web-design project, contains no information about the product, and no link to the company that makes them. I don't ask for much in a water bottle, but I would like to buy one from a company that exists.

[Okay. So what was this post supposed to be? I'm not sure anymore. Not this long. That's one thing it was supposed to be.]

[1] I think the toe problem could have fixed itself sooner had the ER doctor I waited 3-4 hours to see spent more than 10 seconds looking at it, and realized that in order for it to heal, I needed to do more than keep my feet clean and change my socks. Oh well. Five and a half months later, and I'm still not dead. So I guess I can't complain too much.

[2] Actually, they offered "locker service". You paid for a locker or a basket. The laundry service was included. I opted for the basket, because it was cheaper, though it was entirely useless to me. They were too small to fit my shoes in, but I couldn't justify paying that extra few dollars a month, which seemed to matter more then than it does now, just so that I didn't have to carry my shoes around.

And there was much rejoicing

When I took my undergraduate math courses, almost everything was done on the blackboard. When I took my graduate math courses, almost everything was done on the blackboard. Almost every seminar presentation I've seen has been done on the blackboard.

Sometimes overheads were used in my lectures, but their purpose was used to illustrate the main subject matter, and not to present it. There was one exception to this in a second year calculus course. It was a one term course created by merging two other one term courses, so there was a lot of material to be covered. Even then, it wasn't until the end of the course that the professor made use of overheads to present the main subject matter. In that case, though, we were being taught something that was a straightforward generalization of a concept that we had learned in first year, so even though it was impossible follow the details of the argument, it was possible to understand, if not to predict, the overall structure of the argument.

At some point in my undergrad, professors started wheeling laptops with projectors into classrooms, and by the time I was done, most of the larger classrooms had been equipped with their own permanent projectors. There were a number of courses that I took in my first year or second year whose classroom technology consisted entirely of pen, paper, and the human voice. In my third year, a number of my first or second year friends were taking many of these same courses. Every lecture was now accompanied by a set of downloadable PowerPoint slides summarizing the main topics of the day's lecture. These were not math courses, however. The portable projectors did make an appearance every once in a while, but just like for overheads, they were only used to illustrate the concept of the day, and thus were only used for a small portion of the small number of classes they appeared in.

I was sceptical that the PowerPoint slides were of any significant value in any class. I was even more sceptical that they would ever be worth using at all in math class. I never experienced it personally, and being finally finished with school, I likely never will. I have, however, been to a fair number of math seminar talks that used PowerPoint (or some variant thereof). Not many of them have used the technology effectively. After one seminar talk at RMC, one of their math profs was talking about pressure they were getting to use slides in their lectures. Everyone who said anything thought it was a bad idea. I agreed. In fact, most mathers that I talk to feel more or less the same way.

I taught one course in the Winter term of 2007. There were a few instances where I could've used the projector to demonstrate how to use computer software to solve certain problems, but never once did I feel that using slides instead of the blackboard would've been preferable.

This past fall, I started teaching another course. The only thing I inherited from the previous instructor was the topic schedule for the year, which I've tried to stick to as closely as possible. At first, I was using the blackboard exclusively. But according to schedule, before the end of the first chapter, I was already at least a week behind. I knew that the professor who designed the course did all of his lectures using an overhead projector. I don't know exactly how he did this. I assume he had some overheads with stuff already printed on them, and then wrote more on them in class. I didn't consider this an option for me, since my handwriting isn't that great to begin with (occasionally, though, it has garnered compliments, which mystifies me). It would be worse with my arm positioned awkwardly over the projector, while simultaneously trying to maintain visibility to the students. Not only that, but my fine motor skills seem to disappear when faced~ with the not-so-relaxing task of speaking in front 100 or so people.

On the first day of class, I made an attempt to use presentation slides to cover some administrative details of the class, such as office hours, tutorials, test and assignment dates, etc. It didn't work. My computer didn't appear to recognize the projector. So later in the term, when it was becoming clear that using using blackboard was taking too long, I decided put some of the material on overheads, which were nothing but printed out slides. Using overheads made some things worse, and other things better. I still relied heavily on the blackboard, which meant a lot of running back and forth between the overhead projector and the blackboard (the front of the classroom is 6 blackboards wide). There was also no way to adjust the lights (that I could figure out) so that both the blackboard and the screen were clearly visible to the students. On the other hand, since I intended to post my overheads to the course website, they didn't need to write as much down and could focus on what I was saying rather than just trying to write it down. Not only that, but having most computations completed on the overheads meant that I wasn't going to make copy errors. Aside from one student's request to post the completed overheads on the course website before I finish making them, I didn't get any feedback from my students. So perhaps I hadn't made things better, but at least I hadn't made things appreciably worse.

Near the end of the term, the instructor for the class that took place right before mine in the same classroom showed me how to get my laptop to work with the projector. It turns out I had taken a more complicated route than I needed to (which is necessary if I want to use a tv as the display) I decided to make use of my newfound abilities and delivered the last two lectures of the term with slides.

When the winter term started, I tried using the blackboard, but by the third week (Jan 21), I got to a point where I needed to project something onto a screen by some means. I decided I would use slides, and not wanting to deal with the hassles of transitioning between blackboard and projector, I decided to carry out the whole lecture that way. From my perspective, things seemed to go more smoothly. From the students, I heard one positive comment and one negative comment which included another request that I post the completed slides before I've completed them.

One of the most obvious mistakes in using slides is that the presenter tends to plough through the material too quickly. I'm reluctant to say that math is hard to understand (though I'm sure many in my audience don't share that reluctance). But it's certainly hard to understand a slide containing math in the brief amount of time that a careless presenter leaves the slide up. Writing on the blackboard, on the other hand, forces the presenter to pace himself. Leaving the slides up longer would mean talking longer than I need to, or else standing there silently (and feeling awkward) trying to guess the point at which a sufficient number of students have comprehended what I'm going on about.

To guard against the tendency go too fast, I tried to structure the slides, as much as it was possible, to resemble how I would write the same material on the blackboard. For example, if there was a calculation with many steps, each step would get its own line, and the lines would be displayed one at a time (with spoken explanations of how I got from one line to the next, as each line was being displayed). There were times, however, where I was forced to split something up into two slides when it would have been better if all it could have been put on one. This, I think, gets at to one of the other primary disadvantages of using them in math. In almost all classrooms there are at least two blackboards (or whiteboards in some newer classrooms). One could see how the material on the blackboard I'm writing on would relate to blackboard I've just written on. Being able to display only one screen at a time is analogous to having only one blackboard to write on. Since they would be able to download the slides later, though, they could go back and see for themselves how the different slides relate to each other (whether or not they would is an entirely different story). I weighed these and other factors, and decided to stick with slides.

I continued to deliver my lectures using slides for about a month, until I got to a point where I couldn't come up with a sensible way to make slides for a certain topic. I decided, at least for the time being, that I would go back to the blackboard. When the day came (Feb. 27) to present that material, there were still some slides that I didn't get through in the last class, so obviously I presented those first. When I finished with the slides I announced that I would be going back to the blackboard. At this point there was much rejoicing. Well, it wasn't quite rejoicing. It was more like a handful some scattered murmurs, though with a definite tone of approval. This is a math class, though. Aside from cancelling a class altogether, how much rejoicing do you expect?

Post Election Thoughts

This past Wednesday, the province of Ontario held its latest provincial election. I didn't vote. If my memory serves me correctly, this is the first provincial election that I have not voted in since I've been eligible to vote. The party I would normally vote for doesn't seem to do well in this riding, and, besides, most of the campaign seemed to pass me by with out my noticing. I've been busy [1] and didn't have time to register in this riding (since it's not my home riding). All in all, it didn't seem worth my while to seek out a local polling station for them to tell me to go to another polling station where I would then find out that I lack sufficient documentation to prove my residency. Anyway. Enough with the excuses.

As usual we--and by we, I mean everyone but me--voted on who would form the next Government of Ontario. We also voted on whether to maintain the current first past the post (FPTP) system of representation, or to implement a new mixed member proportional (MMP) system of representation.

The Election

Aside from one issue, as far as I could tell, the election was mostly a matter of The Dud We Know vs. The Dud We Don't. Perhaps Archie comics have had a more profound effect on my life than they should have, but I don't think I could vote for a party led by a guy named Dalton. Even the new and improved Dalton seems to be at least 50% weenie. The main features of John Tory are that is first name is not Dalton, and that his last name is also the nickname of the party he leads.

I don't recall much that Dalton's done during these last four years. Somewhere along the line he did one or two things that I thought were good ideas at the time. I can't even remember what those were. He might even have broken one of his promises in order to do one of the things that I liked. For the most part, however, I didn't care enough to vote against him. John Tory didn't have much to offer me to get me out to vote for his party. I think he campaigned against Dalton's broken promises. As you may have guessed, that wouldn't be enough to entice me to vote for his party. There was the usual talk about tax cuts that we expect from the PC's, but nothing really inspiring. Then there was the issue of extending public funding to faith based schools. I doubt that this was part of any grand philosophy, nor that he meant it to be an election issue like it was. My guess--I feel it's more like stating the obvious than guessing--is that the leader was trying to win some votes from religious conservatives.

The spectre of religious groups receiving public funding certainly frightens a lot of people, myself included. As a religious person, the spectre of having my faith based organization funded by--and ultimately controlled by--the government certainly frightens me.

It was rather amusing to witness the reactions of the not-so-religious to the proposal here in Canada, where separation of church and state seems much more like something we fell into--if we really do have it at all--than a founding principle, and especially in Ontario, where a large number of students attend Catholic schools, which I presume, by their name, are based on some sort faith that I've heard about once or twice called Catholicism. Correct me if I'm wrong. If it is fear of funding fundamentalism, then the opponents need only take look at these schools. Hardly hotbeds of extremism. If they were to become so, the government would likely step in and stop them, as they've done before. If the Catholic schools are any example, then extending funding to all faith based schools is likely a better antidote to extremism than not. If it is the grand principle of separation of church and state that concerns them, then they should be agitating to withhold funding from Catholic schools just as passionately as they are to keep it withheld from other nonCatholic faith based schools. It doesn't seem like those who are arguing against it know what they're really arguing against. Nor does their position seem all that consistent.

Dalton disallowed all forms of religious arbitration, including Catholic, when Sharia courts were proposed a few years ago. He wasn't going to pick and choose which religious groups should be allowed arbitration, so he banned them all from doing it, even if they had already been doing it. If he is so opposed to other religious groups receiving public funds, why hasn't he taken the same position he did with religious funding as he did with religious arbitration? It's not like he hasn't taken a position on continued funding of Catholic schools. A quick google search will yield quotes from the man himself assuring the schools that they will continue to be publicly funded. So much for consistency. Sure there's the issue of the constitution. Damn the constitution, I say. This is important! Other provinces have gotten over this hurdle. I don't see why we can't.[2]

The Referendum

As I predicted, the No vote won. I'm surprised at how much it won by, however. I was expecting popular support for MMP to be at least 50%, but it didn't even make 40%. The number of ridings with more than 50% support was much smaller than I expected, too. Only 5 riding had more than 50% support for MMP.

Initially, I was opposed to any form of proportional representation (PR). There were primarily two parties who advocated it. These parties, of course, were the ones who had the most to gain if some form of PR was adopted. Much of their advocacy came across as thinly veiled self-interest, clothed in the rhetoric of fairness. Not only that but telling me "If Ontario had PR, then we would have more seats/at least one seat" was certainly not the way to advertise PR to me. I was happy with the number of seats those parties had, and wouldn't be upset if they had less. But to have more of them? I'll pass, thank you.

After hearing more about it from less self-interested parties, though, I warmed up to more. Not enough that I wanted it, but enough that I was disappointed that it didn't receive more support. If I could have voted "maybe", I'm might have been passionate enough about that option to have registered and gone out and voted.

There were a number of other objections that I raised to PR before I was told about any specific form of PR (there seem to be many). The MMP system seemed to take care of a lot of them. I wasn't crazy about the fact that there would be two types of MPP's. Don't ask me why, though. I don't know. Perhaps the hordes of objections to two tier health care that I've heard have instilled in me a latent dislike for two tiered anything, including MPP's.

I did like the possibility that I would be able to vote for the party and the local candidate separately. When I was back in Hamilton on Thanksgiving weekend, for example, I saw that there was candidate who I thought would be a good MPP, but who wasn't running for a party that I would normally support If we had MMP, I could have voted for him, but some other party. (Well, actually, I wouldn't have been able to vote for him, even I were voting in Hamilton. He was in the wrong riding.)

There are other things that MMP would have left unfixed, and might actually have made worse. For example, even under FPTP, MPP's are often elected with considerably less than 50% of the vote in their ridings. In that case, it is not so much that the MPP's are the best representatives, but rather they are the least-bad representatives. This is in part a function of the size of the ridings. Under the proposed MMP system, there would have been fewer ridings than now, so they would be larger, exacerbating the problem.

One of the strangest criticisms of the referendum that I've read in the wake of its outcome is that the material given out by the government was presented neutrally and without bias. How terrible that they would give me only the facts and let me think for myself and make up my own mind. Fascists the lot of them. Is it too late to vote out the bums? What? It is? Dammit!

I wonder why electoral reform has to go to referendum, as it just did in Ontario, and as it has previously in BC. What's to stop a (purportedly ill-gotten majority) government from simply legislating it. I wonder if McGuinty comes off as a hero to PR advocates for putting it to referendum, or if he comes off as a coward for doing so rather than just legislating it. If 60+% of the voters are happy with the system through which he obtained his ill-gotten majority, could that mean that it is not so ill-gotten? If the ill-gotten majority government did legislate some form of PR, would that new system be illegitimate because the government that legislated it had a majority of seats with less than 50% of the popular vote?

I've heard that some PR advocates are saying that MMP is the wrong form of PR to use. I wonder what they think is wrong with MMP and what they think would be better.

The issue of PR vs. FPTP reminds me of an example of a "paradox" in statistics that I heard about last year. There was an issue of whether Maori were represented adequately on juries in New Zealand. Statistics on Maori representation were presented in two different ways. In one presentation, only local statistics were given. In each jurisdiction, Maori's were underrepresented [3] on juries. In another presentation, only national statistics were given. In this case, Maori's were overrepresented [4]. Arguing that Maori's are underrepresented by the first presentation is analogous to choosing governments by FPTP. Arguing that Maori's are overrepresented based on the second is analogous to choosing governments by PR. It is not clear to me which statistics are relevant in determining whether the Maori are adequately represented on juries. Assuming that the analogy is legitimate, is it any clearer whether we should choose FPTP or PR?

[1] Read "lazy". But really. I didn't even use what spare time I had to do stuff for myself, such as grocery shopping. I'm so lazy, in fact, that I'm not going to bother hyperlinking my footnotes today.

[2] I once read that Ontario Catholics (and not Catholics in other provinces) have a strong tendency to support the Liberal Party. I wish I had a reference. I don't remember if this support was for the federal party, the provincial party, or both. If this support holds for the provincial party, then I doubt that the Liberals will be advocating this solution the the funding issue any time soon. I could get into conspiracies about McGuinty's own Catholicism, but I won't. Surely it's a coincidence. Surely.

[3] Under suitable definition of underrepresented.

[4] Under suitable definition of overrepresented.

Google Democracy

I wrote a post on this topic some time ago, but then decided to abandon it. However, a few days ago I received a brochure from some branch of the Ontario Government regarding the upcoming referendum on whether to replace the current First Past the Post system of representation with the Mixed Member Proportional system. In light of that, I decided to rewrite the post.

About a year and a half ago, I did a presentation in a math seminar on the PageRank algorithm that Google uses to rank pages on the web. They came up with a clever, though simple, idea to rank websites based on links between pages which greatly improved the quality of searches over search engines that predate Google. The algorithm is also resistant to abuse (though not completely abuse proof).

When I was researching the presentation, one of the things I read from Google itself was that it "relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web". My first instinct when reading that is to groan. Thinking about it a little more, I realized that Google's algorithm really doesn't much resemble any democratic system that I've ever heard of. Later on, I asked myself what if? What if a country were to adopt a system modelled after the PageRank algorithm? How would/could that work?

The main idea behind Google's algorithm is the assumption that a link from webpage A to webpage B means that the author of page A thinks page B is good (of course, the author of A might link to B because of how bad B is, but, to imitateChandler Bing, perhaps the author of A thinks B is a good bad-website.) The term often used is authority. Thus, by linking to B, the author of A confers authority on B. The authority of web page B is then calculated based on the number of links pointing to B from some other website, but in a recursive way, which I'll try to explain now. Using the recursion, their algorithm calculates a score for each page as follows.

1. Give each page a score of 1.
   
2. For each page A, add up the points of the pages that link to A to get a new number. (This will be the number of pages that link to A).
   
3. Replace A's score by this new number.
   
4. For each page A, add up the points of the pages that link to A to get another new number
   
5. Replace A's score by this new number.
   
6. Go back to step 4.
   

At each step, each page gets assigned a new number. The numbers are going to get very large, so at each step they are also "normalized". That is, the numbers are all divided by one number to keep things from getting too large. (The number chosen may differ at each step). This is okay since it is the ranking of scores that is most important, and not so much the score itself, since we want to know the which websites are better than others, and not necessarily how good each site is. The process is repeated until the scores do not differ too much from one step to the next, so that each page has a ``final'' score.

There are a few other steps that are taken to prevent undesirable things from happening. For example if one page has a large number of links to other pages, then that page could have a strong influence on the algorithm and thus the overall ranking, so the "strengths" of links are scaled so that each page (or the author of each page) has the same amount of influence. For example, if there are 10 links from site A, then each of those links counts as one tenth of a link. If there are 2 links from site A, then each of those links counts as a half of a link. If there are n links from site A, then each of those links counts as one n-th of a link.

So why does this work? A rough measure of the authority of a page is the number of other pages that link to it. This is the score after the Step 3. Two pages, call them page A and page B, could have the same number of pages linking to them. At first we might think that the authority of A and B is the same. However, we could look at the pages that link to each of these, and count the total of the number of links into each of those pages instead. That is, we are counting the number of links to pages that link to each of A and B. These will be the new scores for A and B after we do Step 5 the first time (I'm fudging a little bit here). If there are many links to pages that link to A, while there are few links to pages that link to B, then intuitively, we feel A is better than B. So Even though A and B receive the same number of links, A is linked to by sites with more authority than those that link to B. We could go one step further back and count the numbers of sites that link to sites that link to sites that link to A and B and compare them (same fudge as before, but more of it). These numbers are the scores after we do Step 5 the second time. At each stage, the scores of A and B are updated in terms of the scores of the pages that link to them, so that the authorities of A and B are reinforced by the authority of the pages linking to them. A website that is linked to by many sites with a high authority score at each step will end up with a high authority score in the next step. Repeated enough times, the scores stabilize. That is, the scores don't change much from one step to the next. I illustrated this using two sites with the same number of links in, but it is possible that A could have a small number of links in, while B has a large number, but A's authority is higher than B after the process is repeated enough times.

So how would we use Google's idea to decide our elections? Suppose that we were to allow eligible voters to defer all or a portion of their voting rights to someone else. In such a system, I could retain all of my voting rights if I wanted. Otherwise I can defer my voting rights to someone else. In the language of the internet, I have linked to that person. Linking to that person implies voting authority. In the case that I retain my vote, I link back to myself. In between these two extremes, I could retain retain a portion of my voting rights, one half, while deferring the other half of my vote to you. I have linked to myself with a link of weight 1/2 and linked to you also with a link of weight 1/2. Perhaps I could split the remaining half of my vote between you and someone else, so that there is a link to myself with weight 1/2, and a links from me to you and someone else, each of weight 1/4. Otherwise, I could split my voting rights between the three of us evenly, or.... I could divide my vote any number of ways between any number of people, so long as the portions of my vote that I've given to everyone else adds up to 1, in line with the principle of "one person, one vote".

Then a "vote-authority" score would be calculated by a process similar to that described above. The process will be slightly different, because the "weigths" of the links from me to each person can be different, but I won't get into that here. The vote-authority score of person A is reinforced by the vote-authority score of the people that defer a portion of their voting rights to A. On election day, the weight of each persons vote is their vote-authority score. Instead of adding up the number of votes that a candidate gets, the scores of the people that voted for that candidate are added up. Whichever candidate has the highest score wins the riding (or whatever is at stake in the election), rather than the candidate with the largest number of votes.

You might ask why I would want to defer my voting rights to anyone at all besides myself. On election day, I am required to choose one of the candidates in my local riding who I think would best represent the constituents that riding in the legislature, which of course is the one that best represents my own political preferences. Usually, I don't know much about the candidates (though some are easy write-offs). Finding out is a lot of work, and what information I do find may not be reliable. Somebody else might know the candidates better than I do, or else they might know somebody who does. In the first case, they can make a more informed decision than I can. In the second case, they can choose to defer their judgement to a person who knows more about the candidates. Perhaps I just trust that person's judgement on political matters more than I trust my own. Perhaps I'm just lazy, and I want you to vote for me.

The idea that one person's vote could be worth more than another on election day is probably offensive to some. Those people shouldn't get too worked up. I'm not seriously proposing that we implement such a system, or any variation of it (it would probably be hard to implement). I am, however, curious to see how different things would turn out if such a system were implemented. Would the election results be more or less the same as they've always been? Would one party end up dominating? Would the major parties parties receive a larger or smaller share of the "popular vote" than they do now? Even if I were serious, however, I don't think that there would be that much to object to. We would each get one vote. The main difference is that how we use that one vote. Instead of using that one vote to decide on politicians, we use it to decide on who is qualified to decide on politicians. One of the claimed benefits of proportional representation is that it would increase participation in elections. If my crazy system is implemented, people can exercise their right merely by deferring all of their voting rights to someone else, and then staying home at night enjoying the election coverage on tv. How could the privilege to vote without leaving the comfort of your armchair nothing fail to increase participation?

If you think this idea is dumb, by the way, blame it on Google. They're the ones who connected the notion of hyperlinks to democracy in the first place. If you think it's a good idea, however, I expect full credit.

Since the referendum is on MMP, you might be wondering what my thoughts are on that. I think it probably won't pass, since, in order for to pass, it must receive the support of 60% of the population, as well as 50% of the vote in at least 60% of the ridings. Those seem like pretty strict conditions to me. So who cares.

I have my own idea for a system of proportional representation. See, a lot of people criticize the first-past-the-post system on the basis that voters are misrepresented, especially those in less popular parties, since the percentage of province wide (or nation wide) vote share does not translate into the same percentage of seats. MMP would still have 90 of the MPPs chosen by the first-past-the-post system to represent ridings. Of course, as is often the case now, someone could get elected to a riding with less than 50% of the vote in that riding. That means that more than half of the people there are misrepresented. This is simply unfair. In fact, it would be unfair even if the winner received more than 50% of the vote in that riding, since those who voted for other parties get no local representation by their preferred party. Second place candidates often get support in the 20-30% range, and sometimes even higher. If it's unfair that roughly 10% of the population votes Green, yet the party receives no representation, then it is most certainly unfair that an even higher percentage of voters in a riding receives no local representation by their preferred party. Since each voter in a riding should be fairly represented in the legislature, I propose that each candidate be appointed as the MPP of the riding for a time proportional to the vote share. Thus if a candidate gets 40% of the vote, then they are appointed MPP for 40% of the term. The candidate with the highest percentage would go first, followed be the next highest, and so on, until the end of the term. (Thank you McGuinty for fixed election dates, without which this entirely rational scheme could not be implemented.) This would solve both province wide and local discrepancies between voter preference and representation. It would also take care of the fact that we get tired of hearing the same politicians talking for four years straight. Queen's park would be a mad house by the end of the four years, what with the Libertarians picking fights with both Marxist-Leninists and Communists, while latter two parties fight vehemently with each other over policies that are indistinguishable to any unenlightened onlookers. But I'm willing to pay that price for the sake of fairness. What about you?

Copper Stop

A proposal to scrap the penny. It's not the first. It probably won't be the last, as long as that crimson coin continues to circulate.

The mint itself is clearly not nearly as enthusiastic about the penny as they are about other coins. The only special reverse that it's ever had was in 1967, to commemorate Canada's centennial, and that was quite a while ago, long before the current binge.

I myself rarely use pennies. They might get tossed in with the tip on one of those rare occasions when I pay for my meal at a restaurant with cash and one comes with my change. Even then, it seems kind of rude. I feel like I'm just offloading an unwanted encumbrance. "Here. In exchange for your exquisite service, may I offer you the burden of carting around some copper discs that may be worth more in copper than their value as currency." Plus, I like nice round numbers, even when giving tips, and if I'm getting pennies with change, my bill wasn't round, so neither would be the tip. If I happen to have one or two of them in my pocket, they might get used to make giving change easier for a cashier. Otherwise they get tossed in a container with the rest of my change, unlikely ever to be used. So, while my change wouldn't be quite as colourful, from a practical standpoint, I wouldn't miss it much.

Australia gave up their penny in 1992. Our currency and theirs are often fairly close, relative to the US Dollar. If they can live without it, why should we be so attached? They also melted down the copper to make bronze medals for the 2000 Olympics. We've got some Olympics coming up here in a few years, of which we know the mint is aware. Perhaps, if our legislators get on it quickly enough, the mint can make a more sensible contribution to the Olympics.

If we actually went through with it, those evil people who run businesses could round up to the nearest nickel, thereby increasing their ill-gotten gains up to four cents (not four pennies, for they would be no longer) at a time. Certainly this could be cause for revolt! (Why revolt? Why wouldn't we just protest the legislation before it passes. One quote says it all: "I moved here from Canada, and they think I'm slow, eh?") Then again, before or during 1973, when our precious penny was worth what a nickel is now, there weren't pleas for the production of a 1/5th of a cent coin on the basis that those shady shopkeepers were rounding up to the nearest penny. In fact, that would have been absurd! So really, rounding up is immaterial.

Of course, in contrast to Australia, our penny does bear our national symbol, the maple leaf, which might make it tough to sell (or not to sell, as the case may be). Theirs only had the feathertail glider. Is that even a real animal? Probably not! Surely the coin must stay on this basis alone, even beyond the point at which the nickel has diminished in value so much as to warrant its abolishment!

According to the article, it's not like it would save the mint a mint, though. $30,000,000.00 is quite a lot for you and me, and even quite a lot for the Liberal Party of Canada to launder. But it's peanuts in comparison the national budget. So even the purportedly penny pinching party presently in power may not be persuaded on the premise of pecuniary prudence. If it is a good idea, it probably won't happen since, just like annexing the Turks and Caicos Islands, it's just not a priority.

Some other facts about pennies:

• I have $2.12 in Canadian pennies. Or, better, I have 212 Canadian pennies. Giving them a dollar value is misleading, since I am unlikely ever to spend them (except perhaps to a copper depot in exchange for twice their face value). One of these pennies is a centennial penny, featuring the rock dove.
  
• When I was in high school, one of my classmates would chase after pennies if someone rolled them down the hallway. This was discovered when some of my other classmates, having discovered already then that pennies were more or less worthless, would flick them at people. After people noticed this, they would bring bags of pennies to school for the sole purpose of throwing them down the hallway to watch my classmate chase them. It seems cruel now, but still I don't think he minded all that much. I think he really enjoyed the candy that he would purchase with his hard earned money.
• In Canada, a penny was known as a copper. It is not surprising that a penny would be called, but it is surprising that only Canadians would call it that. But perhaps I am inferring too much from my source. I discovered this after I chose the title for this post, while looking for an archaic sounding phrase involving the terms "two bits" and "fortnight", neither of which have anything to do with copper or pennies, aside from the fact that 25 pennies, all of which contain at least some copper, are worth two bits.
  

This week in review

[unedited for your proofreading enjoyment]

Well the 168 hour period that began a couple hours from now last week is almost up, so I should get to posting, before it's too late and this is old news. The weekend started like any other. I was sitting at home doing nothing on a Friday night, in anticipation of doing something on a Saturday. Well, not completely nothing. I typed up an email in order to make sure I didn't show up late for Saturday's early afternoon of mayhem. Then I sat glued to my computer waiting for the reply. Actually, I don't remember what I did. Maybe I wrote another email. Who knows?

Anyway. I was told to show up at 10:30. I was planning on showing up late, but decided not to, since one of the participants is rather quite punctual, and seems to get visibly irate in the presence of minor delays which could turn out to be very inconsequential even in the short term. I had forgotten about his girlfriend, however, who isn't quite as punctual. In fact, before the early afternoon of mayhem, I hadn't met her. I showed up a minute late, and was worried that the car would have left without me. It turns out that 3 out of 5 of us weren't even there yet. Sooner or later everyone showed up and we were on our way. Three of us were jammed in the back seat of a Honda Civic, and I got stuck in the middle, which meant that my legs were squeezed tightly against each other. In a way that was a blessing, since I had consumed a large coffee in my way there.

We arrived at Sandbanks at around 12:00. We sat around for a bit, and then threw the football around, until such time is a tried to catch the football with the tip of my finger rather than the palm of my hand (well hands, I guess). I decided that throwing the football around wasn't fun anymore. My friends decided the same. What power I wield, I never knew! We sat around a bit more, absorbed some sun, and then decided to toss the frisbee around for a while. This I could do with one hand, mostly. It was rather windy, however, and after some time, I was having a difficult time getting the frisbee to go where I wanted it to (other than that, they were great shots). The person that I was playing had very good aim, though pretty much all of his throws were on the ground, and rolling sideways by the time they reached me. We decided to switch positions, and magically, we also switched errors. Moments later, we decided that playing frisbee was also boring. We sat around some more, and headed for home at about 3:00. Perhaps 15 minutes into the ride, it began to rain quite heavily, so we had picked a good time to end the mayhem.

The rest of the day was spent doing not much at all. I started a blog post, but my finger got the better of me, so I saved the draft, and haven't touched it since.

On Sunday, I went to Ottawa with an old roommate (who is from Ottawa) to celebrate Canada Day. Among the things I did to celebrate was drinking enough beer so that I could bend my finger without it hurting, and also enough that that seemed like a good idea. Other things included taking a ridiculous number of photos with my recently acquired digital camera, walking around listening to a friend of the roommate complain about what clearly appeared to him as some sort of fascism regarding the manner in which Ottawans were expected to celebrate the initialization of their country, and watching the fireworks under the watchful eye of our apparently fascist overlord's servants, the RCMP. We killed a bit of time, and eventually made it back to my roommates house. I think I lost five dollars somewhere in there.

The next day we headed back to downtown to do some touristy stuff. We had intended to go to the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, but it was closed, so we went to the Modern Photography exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada instead. Highlights of the Gallery included a giant sculpture of a spider (which was inspired by sculptor's mother. How flattering.) and a number of photographs that were similar in style and content to some of my own (not that I'm trying to draw any comparisons about my photo skills). Also amusing was the fact that taking photographs was not allowed at the photography exhibit, while it was elsewhere in the museum (not everywhere else mind you). We ate lunch, made our way back to his house, and eventually drove back to Kingston, mostly taking back roads.

On Tuesday, the swelling in my finger had gone down enough that I was getting some movement back. Accompanying that movement, however, was a clicking feeling that I'm pretty sure wasn't there last week. I decide that this warranted a visit to the doctor. She decided that it warranted a visit to the X-ray department at the local hospital, and so I spent a good part of Tuesday afternoon waiting around for X-rays. I also finally made it back into the gym.

Not much happened on Wednesday, except that I weighed myself for the first time since April, which is also the last time that I went to the gym before Tuesday. Turns out that, after all that laziness and bad eating, I actually lost weight.

Thursday, nothing really to report.

Today, while walking to school to run some errands, I ran into a Japanese friend. She didn't think much of Kingston's 10 minute Canada Day fireworks display. I told her that Ottawa's was 20 minutes. You could tell that she didn't want to hurt my feelings by telling me what she thought of that. She told me that they're usually an hour in Japan. Oh I see. Come to think of it, 20 minutes is kind of lame for a fireworks display in the nation's capital on the day which is supposed to celebrate the birth of the nation. Municipal governments can't necessarily afford to put on huge displays, but if the city of Hamilton (yes, it's my hometown, but I'm under no illusions) on it's own can afford a comparable display, then I would think the feds could have given us a whole lot more than a local government could. In any case. I had to main orders of business on campus today, both of which involved paying fines of some kind. The library's fine extraction system was malfunctioning, so I didn't pay that one. I was going to pay a fine at the doctor's office, but I decided to try dispute it instead. It was a pretty hard sell too. First off, the women didn't come across as someone who was easy to bargain with. I blamed it on a dead watch battery. I showed up for the appointment when my watch said that I was supposed to. According to their records, though, I was on time for another appointment earlier on the same day as the missed appointment. Why was the watch a factor for the second and not the first? Not only that, but the appointment was a long time ago. Why didn't I come in within a week or two to dispute it? Nevertheless, in the end, I was successful.

I returned home, and kept myself busy trying to gain some insight into an open problem from my thesis. I looked at a related paper that I had picked up quite some time ago, and realized that, even though the main result of the paper is rather complicated, parts of it are simple enough to cover almost everything in a special case of the open problem, the few things that it doesn't cover can be dealt with separately (vague enough for you?). It doesn't actually solve the open problem, though it does make another more central open problem "easier" to solve. And that's not nothing.

And, to end the excitement of the day, I got a call from the doctor's office regarding X-rays. It turns out that I fractured my finger. I've been instructed to splint the finger, or else tape it to the one beside it (or is that the same thing?) for at least 3 weeks. Currently I'm doing the latter, which means that two of my left hand fingers are pretty much useless for typing, which makes typing a bit difficult (though clearly I'm getting a lot of practice with 6 finger typing). So, until this thing fixes itself, blog posts will be short, if they happen at all. I'll save my typing energy for electronic forms of communications that are more interactive.

A Snapshot of my Weekend

[Please forgive any stylistic, grammatical, or factual errors. I just spent about twice as long writing this as I had intended, and don't feel like proofreading carefully.]

Just returned from Victoria day weekend back home.

My weekend adventures began on Thursday evening, even though I didn't actually leave for the H-bomb until Friday. On a typical trip home, I'll take passengers. I had a call from one potential passenger who had a rather large piece of luggage, and she wanted to know if it would fit in my rather small car. I was pretty sure that it would, but she asked me to drop by her place to see for sure if it would fit. My usual evening activity these days consists of sitting in Coffee and Company for about as long as it takes to drink two large coffees. For those of you who know my issues with sleep, yes, this practice is having its usual effect, but at this point, I'm not at liberty to care. Given this effect, I was eager to get there as soon as possible, so I drove to my potential client's place so as to spend as little time as possible on this. Plus, if I wasn't sure whether the luggage would fit, I'd have my car there to check it out directly. This wasn't necessary. I could see just by looking that the fit would be no problem. After settling some details with the passenger, I left for the coffee shop in my car. Now fast forward to 2:00 Friday afternoon. I was in a meeting with my supervisor, and, as usual, not always focusing on what he was talking about, when it dawned on me that when I had left the night before, I walked home. My car had been sitting out all night. When I realized this, it appeared to David that I had an insight of some kind, and what an insight at that. How disappointed he must have been when he found out that I did not, and that I was thinking about something entiriely nonmathematical. The meeting ended, perhaps too soon because of this realization, and I left to check on my car. It was still where I had left it. Had I done that on a Wednesday night, however, who knows what would have happened? Parking is not allowed from 1 am to 7 am on Thursday mornings, or something silly like that. I then ran home, picked up my car keys, ran back, drove my car back to my place, and packed.

The ride home was, for the most part, uneventful. I dropped off one passenger in the bustling metropolis of Ajax (population 90,000. Looks even smaller on a map.), and then another in Richmond Hill.

It's a good thing I remembered to bring the key to my mom's building this time (forgot last time), as I didn't get home until about 1:30. I would have hated to have to get her up at that time to let me in.

Saturday morning was mostly lazy. I didn't get out of bed until around 10, and sat around drinking coffee for most of the morning, until I got a phone call from a Kingston friend who I haven't had time to talk to lately, and spent an hour on the phone with him (I do recognize the irony, or "irony" as the case may be, of not having time to talk to a Kingston friend until I'm out of Kingston). I then lazed around until about 4:30-5:00 when my brother showed up. We entertained our mother, and each other, joking around and whatnot until about midnight when he left. (My brother and I have similar enough senses of humour that we can make each other laugh (what? you mean there are two of us?), yet different enough that it's not annoying.) Part of the time we spent sitting on my mom's balcony watching neighbourhood fireworks. Backyard fireworks seem to have come a long way since I was a kid, or even since I was in my mid-twenties, and most of them consisted of coloured flaming projectiles shooting more or less straight up into the air, possibly accompanied by a loud bang (which is fun for some reason). Some of the fireworks that we saw Saturday night were like that, but there were a bunch that looked like the more professional variety that the city might get, except at a smaller scale. I was impressed.

On Sunday my mom and I were invited to my cousin's house by my ex-girlfriend's little sister [1]. While there, I met two relatives (second cousins) whose existence I was only vaguely aware of until that day, while my mom got caught up with her niece (earlier referred to as my cousin) who I don't think she had seen in quite some time.

When we got home around 5:00, there was a message waiting on the answering machine from my brother-in-law, and a voicemail on my cell from my sister-in-law. I called back my brother-in-law first. He invited us to come over for a campfire. I then returned my sister-in-law's call. My brother (different brother) answered. I told him the unfortunate news that we had been invited to my sister's and brother-in-law's place, and that therefore I would not be able to grace him with my company. There was some weeping, and then, once he got over it, we chatted for a while about nothing in particular, until he had to go. Shortly after, my mom and I left for my sister's house. Once there, I talked to my sister for a bit while my mom talked to my brother-in-law until my mom came to talk to my sister and I went to talk to my brother-in-law and get started on the fire (tag team or something like that).

I was asked to take a picture of my mom and my sister framed by two bleading heart bushes (plants, flowers, shrubs?). My sister told me that these bleeding hearts were made from cuttings off of one of my mom's bleading hearts, which was made from a cutting off of the bleading hearts from my Aunt Shirley, who passed away almost 10 years ago, which was made from a cutting off of the bleading hearts from my grandmother, who died when I was 7. I've got a hoya with the same story, but it doesn't look quite as nice. These facts make these plants extra special to both of us [2]. The rest of the evening was a simple affair, sitting around the campfire, roasting hotdogs and eating fresh cantaloupe, watermelon, and other fruits.

I had every intention this morning of getting to some work on my thesis. I certainly got up in time to do it, but instead I decided to call my sister (different sister). While I was on the phone, her younger daughter pleaded with her to get off the phone for no particular reason except that something might come up while my sister was on the phone that could only be properly attended to if my sister was off the phone. The purpose of my call was to inform my sister that, the next time her kids went to grandma's (their grandma) house, there was a package of Shrek themed M&M's waiting for them. That took an hour and half. Hopefully my niece will forgive the long phone call when she gets the M&M's.

After that I packed, ate lunch [3], managed to finish off the index of notation for my thesis (as a bonus, I got the list of figures and list of tables done too, though each of those involved only one line of ``code''). Around 5:00 I brought most of my stuff to the car, and then ate dinner when I got back. For most of the day, I had anticipated a call from anybody who happened to read my ad for a ride from Toronto to Kingston, but in the end nobody called [4]. So I only had one passenger on the way back. Truth be told, though, I didn't mind one bit.

[1] To be honest, I just said it that way for dramatic effect, or some such thing. It was so long ago that we dated it seems strange to refer to her as anything but a friend, and her little sister is all growed up now and deserves to be recognized as a friend independent of the relationship of her older sister to me. For added dramatic effect, I'll mention that there is a third sister who is getting married to one of my cousin's sons in less than two months. This third sister is responsible for introducing this relative to me. Apparently this relative also has a similar sense of humour to me (what? you mean there are three of us?)

[2] Anybody who talks to me for a little while will realize that horticulture is an important theme in my family. Each one of my siblings and myself have at one point or another worked in horticulture (not too special, actually, since we're Dutch, and the Dutch seem to run that business in the Hamilton area, aside from a handful of Italian operations), and my older sister and older brother both still do. It's often a topic of conversation in our family, even among the not-so-green thumbs. For that reason, to me, and I think moreso to my sister, these plants are one of the most important heirlooms, even though the original plants from which the cuttings were made are no longer around.

[3] While I was eating lunch, a rather noteworthy event occured on the road in front of my mom's apartment, but that is fodder for another blog post on another day. Remind me in a week if nothing appears on the matter.

[4] When I got back, however, my inbox was loaded with emails asking about a ride from Toronto to Kingston. Too bad I was netless the whole weekend. Well. Maybe not.

Out of the frying pan...

It's been a while. I'm sorry.

Conference preparations and teaching got in the way of regular blogging for most of this past term. It also got in the way of the more important (to me at least) activity of thesis editing. Once I got back from the conference, I took a few days to catch my breath. I didn't do much of anything important, aside from tying up the last loose end with my course, between the time that I got back to the time I posted about the conference. The next day, I started getting ready to move and working on the thesis.

Everything aside from a few odds and ends was moved out on 29th of April. I picked up the the odds and ends the next day when I went back to help (now former) housemate number 1 clean up the old place--(now former) housemate number 2 had packed and left a few days earlier--and deliver a carload of her stuff to their new place that the movers, who were already behind schedule when they arrived, didn't have time to deliver. By the time that was done, I barely had enough strength left to lift my fingers to type.

The boxes were mostly left unmoved during the first week in my new place, except to find this or that item that I happened to need, since most of that week was spent working on the thesis, either making corrections or discussing them with my supervisor. Needless to say, after spending that much time thinking about corrections and typing them into the computer, the ideal break-time activity was not sitting at my computer thinking about and typing up blog posts. Besides that, blogging is usually a spontaneous activity, writing posts when things come to mind. There isn't much room for that to happen when my thoughts are focused on my thesis.

On top of moving and editing, I was asked a few weeks ago to give a talk. I couldn't think of an excuse on the spot, so I had to give a talk in the Queen's/RMC discrete math seminar on Thursday. Most of the talk was spent discussing known results, so preparing the talk wasn't difficult, but it was still quite time consuming, and it was yet another thing to do amidst being quite busy already. My supervisor said that it went well, which I take to mean that it went well.

Instead of handwriting the corrections onto a paper copy of Chapters 4, as my supervisor has done so far for Chapters 0-3, he made a nonpaper copy of the file and typed his own corrections to that file. So today the roles were reversed, and I spent the evening reading his corrected version of my file and making my own corrections to his work. It's the first day in about two weeks where a substantial part of the day was not spent typing, so here I am blogging... about why I haven't been blogging.

Hopefully soon I can get back to blogging about things other what I've been up to lately.

99 Red Balloons

This past weekend, I went to the conference in Tucson that I had anounced a while ago.

My biggest worry about the whole thing, once I had secured my passport, was getting there. This turned out to be not much of an issue. That is not to say that it wasn't. It just turns out that it was no worse than the most common triggers of the dreaded effect. There was a moment in the ascent where the plane seemed to suddenly but briefly drop in altitude, which caused some discomfort, and things were fine until the plane began to descend in Phoenix four hours later. Here, it was definitely worse than at the beginning, but still not as unbearable as I had been expecting. The worst case seemed to be on the return trip from Tucson to Phoenix. Aside from this, the whole travelling portion trip went off without a hitch. I would have preferred not to leave at 2:00 am from Kingston, but no luggage was lost, there were no problems with tickets or customs, and all flights left on time. I was warned about problems with the ears popping, or not popping. I can't remember what exactly was supposed to cause the problems that never happened. As we changed altitude, I could certainly feel that there was a pressure difference building up, but it was nowhere close to uncomfortable. On may way out of the airport, I was also lucky enough to run into a friend who was waiting for his dad at the airport. Or rather, he was lucky enough for me to run into him. It was around 8:00 pm when I met him, and his dad's flight was supposed to arrive around 5:00 pm. I talked to him for at least a half an hour before he saw his dad.

The conference was good, but much lower key than I was expecting. All but one of the talks that I went to were those in the Special Session on Graph Theory and Combinatorics. Most of them were well presented and interesting, though they were quick. I'm used to going seeing one hour talks in seminars, whereas these talks were only twenty minutes each [1]. I haven't had much luck with Power Point (or related formats) talks, especially in math, though the ones given here were mostly well done. The one talk that I did go to outside of the special session was the second of three by invited speakers. The talk was not in my research area, and went from zero to incomprehensible in 60 seconds. I left after about 10 minutes, and I wasn't the first. Apparently the first talk by an invited speaker wasn't much better. We all decided not to go to the third. I had a chance to speak with most of the people who came to the session on graph theory and combinatorics, and, based on what I overheard from Saturday night's dinner conversation, I've now met pretty much every graph theorist and combinatorialist in the western United States. Yep. All ten of them.

I wish that I could have stayed in Tucson longer. I don't know how much longer, but longer. Looking out the window of my sixth floor hotel room, I could see mountains (real mountains, not Hamilton mountains) in almost every direction. The same would be true had my room been at the front instead of the back the hotel. If I had more time, I would have like to explore at least one of these mountains. The city seemed rather large in terms of area, though most of that consisted of low density housing, commercial, etc. There were very few highrise towers. I don't know if this has to do with the fact that such things are hard to build in the desert, or if it has do with the fact that sand is not a proctected species, and so sprawl isn't an issue. Most of the houses were, I think, stucco, or something that looks like stucco, or something that looks like what I think stucco looks like. Whatever it is, they looked a lot like stereotypical Mexican houses (the ones you see in TV shows, movies, etc.), which isn't surprising, since Tucson is only 60 miles from Mexico. Besides this, there were quite a lot of red brick houses. Most houses didn't have grass lawns, but rather sandy lots dotted by various sorts of cacti, or else trees that a Canadian would only have in potted form, and kept inside, such as palm trees (I think). The downtown, where most of the few highrise towers are located, was unimpressive, and, like my hometown of Hamilton, the area near the university (of Arizona) was more impressive and looked more like what you would expect (or hope) the downtown of a city to look like. The university campus was attractive. The University of Arizona is as enthusiastic about its red brick as Queen's is of its limestone. Perhaps moreso, since, unlike Queen's, they seem to have escaped the 60's lust for cold and forboding concrete structures. This was about as much of an impression of the city as I could get without use of a car.

Some other things:

• I finally understand the phrase "It's a dry heat." I've heard this phrase many times, but I've never actually experienced one. It was 27 C on the Sunday. I spent about an hour and a half walking around in direct sunlight, I barely broke a sweat, and never once did it feel uncomfortable. None of those things would be true on a 27 C day in Southern Ontario. Being in Toronto for no more than 10 minutes, I could already feel the higher levels of humidity.
• Among the weirdest things that I saw in Tucson was a firefighting supply store, I suppose in case anyone wants to start up their own firefighting company. Of course, fire departments need to get their supplies from somewhere, but I wouldn't expect to find them being sold amidst shops selling hemp and incense.
• Tucson has a brew pub. Partial answer to "How much longer could I have stayed in Tucson?": Long enough to be able to sample each of their potent potables (to borrow a phrase from Kingston's brew pub). The pub had an automatic 18% gratuity for parties of 10 or more, which we were. This was a tad grating to me. My tips almost always fall into the 15-20% range, and this would have been no exception. But when you're forced to pay a gratuity, it's not a gratuity, but rather a fee for having been waited on. I hear this is common in Europe.
  

Finally, to answer everyone's favourite question. I didn't bring you anything. Don't take it personally, though. I didn't even bring myself anything.

[1] I'm told by one of my colleagues at RMC that this was long for a conference talk.

I has a passport!

As title says.

Rawr!

Passport Absolutionals[1]

Yesterday, or perhaps two days ago if I do not write this fast enough, I made the trek to Ottawa for a second time. Even though I knew that the lineups were going to be shorter and didn't need to leave as early, I decided to leave early anyway, in order to accomodate a passenger, who would cover at least part of the gas expenses. At 6:28 I was scrambling to be out of the apartment by 6:30, when I received a phone call from my passenger telling me the she misread the time (due to daylight savings) and was not ready yet. She estimated she would need at least another hour to pack. So about an hour later, I left to pick her up. I waited in my car for about 15 minutes until I decided eventually to go knock on the door. It was another 15 minutes before she was ready, so it was around 8:00, the time I had originally planned to leave, before we got on the road.

As with last week, the traffic was pretty good, though there were more cars on the road this time around, unsurprisingly. The traffic was more consistent on the 417 than last week, though slower on average. This reminds me of the rule that we learned in driving lessons... right lane is fer drivin', left lane is fer passin'. This is one of those things that makes sense in theory, but rarely pans out in practice, and when it does, it really doesn't matter what lane you drive in. I don't recall ever being told what to do when there are more than 2 lanes, as in the case of the 417, where there are 4 for most of the length that I drove on. What are the right and left lanes? I see that most drivers pick the rightmost lane, which is fine and makes the most sense when they're near their exit, but they seem to stay put despite the fact that the average speed has slowed to lower than the speed limit, while the average speed in the centre and left lanes is higher [2]. Yeah, it can get a bit dicey when my exit is coming up, but I like to spend as much of my time as possible in any lane that allows me to drive at least the speed limit.

This week I chose to park in the underground parking of the C.D. Howe Building (the building that holds the passport offices). The hourly rate is quite a bit steeper than that of last week's parking lot, but I paid less ($6.00), since customers pay when they leave based on how long they stayed.

For some odd reason, my passenger decided to wait out the whole passport business with me. It was nice, since she offered to get me a coffee and a muffin, which she paid for (in the end, she also paid more for gas than I was expecting too), while I went to get in line. The lineup was quite a bit longer this week than last week, but still nothing compared to what it was reported to be like last week. The people standing in front of me and behind me were much more talkative than those from last week, and quite agreeable too, which made the time go faster. We were standing in line for at least an hour and a half, but it felt like no more than a half an hour. As with last week, once I got into the passport office, because I had filled out my forms online, I was served very quickly. Lucky for me too. Unlike last week, the chairs were all taken, and I had to stand. This time everything went through. I noticed the passport agent filling in one entry on the application that I must have forgotten to fill out myself, though this did not turn out to be a problem. Five minutes or so and I was out.

My passenger then offered to serve me some lunch at her sister's place. I wouldn't make that offer to anyone on the first day that I met them [3], but she was at least harmless enough that it was worth the risk for free food.

After I finished lunch I called a friend that I made some somewhat open ended plans with the previous week. They weren't as open as I had taken them to be. I got her voicemail, left a message, waited around for a while in case she called back, and then left Ottawa.

Some other things to mention:

• It's not what you know, it's who happens to be standing two spots in front of you at the passport office. While I was waiting in line, it came up that I was almost finish a Ph.D. The man two spots ahead of me overheard this and asked me what in, and if it was related to computer science. I responded that it was math, but in an area with a lot in common with computer science. He gave me his business card and told me to send him my CV when I'm finished.
• If you're applying for a passport during a busy time, fill in your application online if you can. I know I said this last week, but I'm saying it again this week. I was in and out in about five minutes, while those who didn't fill in online had another wait of up to an hour and a half.
• You can learn as much, if not more, from the Passport Canada employee standing just outside the door of the offices (he has an official title, though I don't recall what it is at the moment) by overhearing what he says to other people. Many of the questions I had before I went were answered by him while I was waiting in line. The guy must have a lot of patience. He always seemed rather calm. I'm sure he spends most of the day answering the same set of questions over and over again. I'd be tempted to punch the third person to ask a question that had already been asked twice.
• Expect nothing and you will never be dissappointed.
• It's 11:20 at night and I feel like a coffee. I think I'll pass.
• Speaking of Coffee. I won a coffee with roll up the rim from a coffee that I bought on the way home. It's only my third cup this year too. Beats last year, where I must have had 15 or 16 cups of coffee before I got a winning cup. If that happened this year, you could have counted on an angry post with the title "Roll up the Rim to Whine". I'm sad that this title has to get stuck at the bottom of a post, but I'm not going to wait until the next string of bad roll up the rim luck happens before I use it. So here it is.
• I need the passport so that I can go to Tucson (Arizona, not to be confused with Tuscany Italy *sigh*) for a conference. I didn't realize that I had neglected to mention this until my sister pointed it out to me in an email.
• Despite the fact that this time around I actually finished what I went to Ottawa to do, I got a potential lead on a job, got a chunk of my gas paid for, and won a coffee, I think I had a better time last week than this week.
  
• I should hyperlink my footnotes.
• This post hasn't been thouroughly proofread, but I'm posting it anyway so that I get it in before midnight.
  

[1] Absolutionals is not a word according to the worldmind.

[2] There's a quote from the movie Driving Miss Daisy, when Miss Daisy says something like "Just because the speed limit is 30 miles per hour doesn't mean you have to drive that fast" that seems fitting here. The worldmind doesn't know it, or I'm not asking nicely enough.

[3] To tell you the truth, I'm not sure I've ever made that offer.

As Promised

At 4:00 today, after a harrowing defeat in an online game of 7 hand poker, I left for the gym, and then went to Loblaws to go grocery shopping. I chose the worst possible route to drive to the gym. I hit every light red. I seriously could have walked faster. Driving to the Loblaws from the gym, however, went smoothly, and the parking lot was easier to navigate than usual. I was even lucky enough to get a drive through spot (technically there are no drive through spots, but that only matters on a road test). The walk from my car to the store was uneventful.

I usually follow a set route through the grocery store. This week was no exception. First I hit the produce section. I grabbed the usual apples and bananas. I wanted to visit the leafy green section, but passed the tomato section first, where I picked up three plum tomatoes. In the leafy green section, I looked around for the spinach. While I was looking, I came across something called "Mache", with a hat over the "a". The box said it's pronounced like "mosh". I don't believe the box. Maybe the box has another dialect of English in mind. Eventually I found the spinach. I've never bought fresh spinach before. The only thing I needed now was an onion. I picked a white onion. I usually pick white onions. It's easier to tell when they've been bruised or otherwise damaged. Sometimes I wonder, though, if I would be better served by one of my other onion options.

That was it for the produce section. Yet, something didn't feel right. It felt like I had forgotten something. I looked around, and looked at the little grocery list that I had written for myself. I had everything I needed. I moved on.

I picked up a loaf of bread, then headed for the meat section. I needed some chicken. I always feel like I'm getting hosed when I buy chicken at Loblaws. I suck it up, and figure that it would cost even more at A&P nearby[1].

I grabbed the smallest carton of cream that they sold. The recipe I'm using it for called for 1/4 of the amount that I bought. I guess I'll have cream in my coffee this week. I feel like such a spoiled brat.

Now it was time to buy yogourt. I ended up buying the cheapest stuff they had, which cost about half as much as everything else. Yeah, sure, it's No Name brand, but it's an ingredient in a recipe, and again I only needed a fraction of the amount that I bought. I won't be putting the extra in my coffee.

I bought a jar of jam. I thought I had enough jam for this week, but I wasn't sure, and I'm going to need it next week anyway, so I bought some. It was strawberry jam, by the way.

That was it for groceries.

In terms of the usual route through the grocery store, I finished rather early. Nevertheless, I proceeded through the remaining four aisles of my usual route, in case I had forgotten something. I did not see anything that I had forgotten, so I proceeded to check out.

There was only one checkout lane open other than the 8 items or less lane, and the lineup seemed rather long, so I decided to use one of the check yourself out machines. I think I would have spent less time in line at the one checkout lane, mainly because the product code for the plum tomatoes was nowhere to be found in the menu options, and I eventually needed the help of the attendant. The total cost of this week's groceries was $29.79.

The traffic on the trip home was not as smooth, in part due to the chosen route. This way used higher traffic streets, with more stoplights, although it's a more direct route. There was an especially bad (relative to Kingston) blockage at one point because someone decided to stop their car in the left lane of the road (the lane that I had chosen). Someone driving in the right lane decided to slow down to let me in, although this only became apparent after she had been driving slowly for a while. She probably would have saved us both time if she had just exercised her right of way, and made me wait until she had passed[2].

When I got home I realized that I had bought cracked wheat bread instead of whole wheat. I'll get over that. But I also noticed that the yogourt is fat free. What does that mean? Was it specially produced to have no fat, or is yogourt naturally fat free, like pretzels? Now I could be stuck with a much too large quantity of some low quality yogourt that has been made even worse by removing the fat. I also realized that I forgot to buy pasta. This could have been found somewhere in one of the last four aisles that I walked through without getting anything from them.

[1] Why don't I go to A&P if it's closer? Because I have a car, and I can go to Loblaws, and the prices are lower at Loblaws, and the selection is much better.

[2] Giving up your right of way to do somebody a favour usually has this effect, mainly because it's not clear to the intended recipient that a favour is being done until a fair amount of time has elapsed.

Passport Confessionals

At about 6:30 this morning I embarked on a trip to Ottawa to finish the application process for my passport. Traffic was smooth sailing, aside from wasting about 1 minute pulling into a gas station that hadn't opened yet (I was trying to get gas, of course) and a 5 minute traffic slow down on the 417 (my velocity never approached zero, which is enough to keep me satisfied in slow traffic, unlike driving through another unmentioned capital city located in Ontario).

After reading reports from as late as the beginning of this week that people were spending 4-5 hours lined up at the passport offices waiting to be served, I had planned to be standing or sitting in line until some time between 12:00 and 1:00 in the afternoon. When I arrived at the office, the lineup outside of the office seemed to be rather short. Everyone must be inside, I figured. As I got closer to the office, I found out that this was not the case, as most of the people were actually outside the office. All told, I don't think I spent more than an hour in line before I got to speak to a Passport Canada employee. Certainly no more than an hour and a half. Not bad, I thought. The employee looked at my application, made sure that I had the relevant documentation with me, gave me a number, and told me to have a seat in the chairs. I sat down, looked up, and realized that my number was next, looked down, looked up again, and saw that it was my turn already. It was going way better than I expected. I went to the appropriate wicket and handed the agent my application. She told me that the passport would be ready by April 4, more than two weeks before my travel date of April 20. Well this just keeps getting better and better. After reading and hearing the stories of other people who applied by mail months ago and still haven't received theirs, I thought that I would be lucky to get it on time, unless I forked out some extra dough. There was one last bit of information that needed to be entered into the computers, namely the info about my guarantor, which I had chosen to be my supervisor. And then... the computer made a beep. It was not a happy beep. It was a beep of disapproval. You see, my supervisor is a professor emeritus. Emeritus in university speak means retired. Retired folks don't qualify, perhaps on the basis that they might too senile to reliably identify the ones they are the guarantors for. You don't find this information on the application form, however. You have to go to the FAQs on the Passport Canada's website. It never crossed my mind to A that Q. It might have, if he weren't active (he still comes in to work most days). But if he weren't active, he wouldn't be my supervisor, and I wouldn't have asked him to be my guarantor. (Proving that it would not have crossed my mind under any circumstances. QED).

Now I need to find someone else to agree to be a guarantor for me. And make another trip.

I'm surprised at how angry I wasn't after all that. I'm not pleased. But I wasn't really angry. On my way there, I imagined myself cursing and swearing, if not out loud, then in my head, at some unfortunate agent as she told me that something was wrong, especially since I got up about two hours earlier than usual and assumed I would be tired and irritable. Yet I felt no such impulse. Perhaps it was the fact that everything else up to that point had proceeded better than expected, even though it amounted to nothing. Though I would have preferred for everything to go as expected, even if it would have meant a lot of unpleasantness simply because I don't feel like paying for gas to make the second trip. Then I wouldn't have to go back get a passport.

If I had wanted to, I could have left right away and been home by noon. Instead, I descended to the lowest level of the building containing the passport offices, found a Timothy's coffee stand, ordered the largest possible coffee they offered, sat down, drank my coffee, and tried to understand the relationship between the fractional chromatic number and the vector chromatic number. I didn't figure it out completely; the coffee ran out before I could. But I understand the relationship enough to satisfy myself for the time being. I don't think I would have totally figured it out anyway.

At some point before the coffee was done, I turned on my cell phone, which made more noise than I expected and attracted the attention of a young woman sitting nearby. I smiled, more out of embarrassment than anything else. After that, she seemed to be looking at me quite a lot. Perhaps she misinterpreted my smile.

When the coffee was done, 11ish, I guess, I took a stroll around Ottawa for about an hour and a half, then headed back to my car and drove home.

Some other things to mention:

• I needed to pay for the parking up front. I paid for much more parking time than I needed to. Part of the reason I didn't just leave right away. If I wanted to, I could have parked my car there until 6:00. Or, as the ticket said, until 18:00. Stupid 24 hours clocks. As I was leaving, someone else was pulling in. I gave her my parking slip. She gave me $3.00. It didn't pay for all of the extra time that I paid for, but it's $3.00 more than I was going to ask for.
  
• There are certain establishments in Ottawa that I've only ever read about. Upon seeing some of them for the first time, I realized that in my mind these places were virtually fictional. In fact, the people who write about the places, mostly journalists are also, in my mind, fictional characters who are written by real people. Anonymous people, but real.
  
• Timothy's coffee is celebrating its 30th year. 30 years! I hadn't even heard of this place until 3, maybe 4, years ago. What was it doing for the last 27, maybe 26, years? Why didn't I notice? The nominal similarity with another popular coffee chain is also curious.
• If you want your passport to be processed in a timely manner, use the online application process if you are eligible. Don't just download the pdf (I could link to this, but why would I?) of the application form that Passport Canada has on its website. Fill in the application online, etc. Doing this is why my passport was going to be ready so much more quickly than I expected. You have to submit in person, however, and there are other restrictions.
  
• I had visions of a on office that opened into the street and a lineup that spilled out into said street. The passport office is located inside the C.D. Howe building, in a portion of the building that resembles a small enclosed mall. My visions inspired me to dress warmly. This was unnecessary. Mind you I didn't overheat until I was driving home, and the sun was beating down on me while the heat was on. I turned down the heat and all was well. In any case, if I ever offer you advice based on one of my visions, it's probably not a good idea to follow it.
  
• I parked in a municipal lot. But the municipal parking lots are only part of the parking story. For example, the C.D. Howe building has underground parking. I wonder if this is the kind of parking lot where you pay when you leave, based on how long you've been there. If so, I'll park there next time to avoid paying for parking until 18:00 hours. It's also closer. Can't get any closer, really , unless I drive through the front doors, and then I've got other problems on my hands.
• Express highways have personalities.
• You get what you pay for/fill in warranty cards. I bought a car stereo last year with lots of features for little money. It seems to have a hard time playing CDs these days. I think it has something to do with the weather (it's worse when it's cold). It's still within the warranty period, but I didn't fill in the warranty card soon enough, so I can't get them to fix/replace it.
  

Well now. I've really gone on haven't I? I'll bet you're looking forward to tomorrow's blog post where I give a detailed run down of my trip to the grocery store. Don't worry though. I won't tell you about doing my laundry. That would be boring.