Sunday, February 24, 2013

New news

Since February 11th, when I last posted, I have:

  • been miserably sick for a week and a half with a sinus and upper-respiratory infection that caused me to lose my voice completely for two days (viral laryngitis -- it was like a miracle -- went away and then came back!)
  • traveled to Philadelphia with the spouse, partly during my lost-voice days
  • encouraged the spouse to engage in all the most button-pushing, inflammatory discussions possible while my voice was gone, so I would not be able to argue back (but he didn't have the heart! even though it might have been amusing!)
  • had the best pretzel in my entire life at Reading Terminal Market and the best American Italian dinner of my life at Villa di Roma
  • visited the ruins of George Washington's house on Presidents' Day (and lots of other historic sites too)
  • thought about liberty and the American dream, and who is realizing that dream and who is not, and why
  • written and graded the first midterm exam of Math 1110 here at the university
  • slept a lot, then stayed up to grade, then relapsed into sickness, then slept some more
  • and thought and written about polygon space, the space of n-sided polygons in 3-dimensional space up to rotation. This is a rather weird space to me so I've had to think a lot to understand even the basics.
A few other things have happened (for instance, I read Victor Kreiman's paper about using skew barred tableaux for Littlewood-Richardson computations, and then did some calculations that way!) but the highlights and lowlights really are the food of Philadelphia, illness, liberty, and the midterm. 

How's that for a crazy two weeks? Now it's time to catch up on my email...

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