I am a real person, approved by the bureaucracy

I do have my NetID now, which makes me a real person!

I also bought really waterproof boots. This is good, as it has snowed and melted several more times here. No skiing.

Getting back into the teaching/research groove -- getting to know a new group of students. Different universities and colleges have distinctly different cultures around attendance, classroom behavior, office hours, enrollment changes, and all sorts of things. It's interesting to see what's true here. At St. Olaf I taught a very liberal-arts style math class, mentioning many applications to biology or economics and bringing up interconnections with art and history in small projects. At the U of MN I taught a very straightforwardly engineering-calc type of class a few times, and then worked with UMTYMP with students who are delighted by pondering the intricacies of infinity just for fun. Cornell is different than either -- it's a big school so I can't do the class projects and tweaking of the curriculum I did at St. Olaf, but I'm working with architecture students and hoteliers instead of engineers. I'm certainly still feeling out how to most effectively engage with the classical material of calculus. We're working on limits this week: a great philosophical achievement and abstract idea. What do limits mean to us today, though? Why do we study them, other than the fact that they're in the definition of the derivative?

Continuing my experiments with R in my contracting free time -- I learned a lot about murder in Baltimore and some about hospital quality as related to size and ownership from my Coursera course, which just wrapped up. I really enjoyed the experience! The concrete nature of statistics is a fun contrast to the abstraction of, say, torus actions on moduli spaces of stable maps.....

Ithaca, NY

I have made it to Ithaca. I've more or less lost my camera (it's in St. Paul, probably in the third drawer in the built-in drawers in the dining room, and I am in New York) so there are no pictures to be had. I have found the place I'm living, my office in the math building, the local butcher shop and co-op, and the local Finns. Not too bad! Now it's time to pack my lunch for my first day of school at Cornell!

Thanks to friends in town I've had lunch and brunch at Cafe Dewitt and thanks to my spouse I know that Simeon Dewitt was a land surveyor and a big guy in Ithaca history, arriving in 1798 and establishing the town. Ithacans seem to be big on secret history references, as there's also a restaurant called Simeon's that I have not yet patronized. I have, however, already bought books at Buffalo Street Books and Autumn Leaves Books. This is probably a symptom of the same disorder that led to shipping 15 pounds of books back from Berkeley. I used to be a library-frequenter, and now I figure I can buy them -- but that is a bit dangerous, I suppose.

The same weather that prompted cancellation of the Sisu Ski Fest hit Ithaca, and so there is no snow at all. It melted. Then it fell (a few inches). Then on Friday it melted. Today it snowed. It didn't stick. I need to buy waterproof boots.

Other than that, I am preparing for classes to the extent that I can, as Cornell is rather slow in giving folks the NetID which is apparently vital for being considered a real person (bus pass, gym pass, library access, access to my own calculus course's website). Hopefully I will get that soon and be promoted from "Staff" to "Kaisa Taipale". Wish me luck.

Heading to Ithaca

Moving to Ithaca tomorrow (more or less). Time in the Twin Cities has flown past. Back to the monastic mathematical lifestyle!

Besides wrestling with Sage code and thinking a bit about polytopes and reconnecting with family and old friends, I spent some time learning about R, the statistics software I mentioned in an earlier course. I decided to take the quick introduction to R offered by Coursera, one of the major new forces in the MOOC movement. It is a nice way to structure my learning as well as learn about a potentially major competitor in the higher education landscape in coming years. Among other things, it's interesting to see how other professors teach: this is not something I experience much these days!

If/when I learn very cool new things from R, I will put some of them up here. For now, I have learned a very tiny amount about the growth of guinea pig teeth as related to vitamin C consumption, from a data set included with the standard distribution of R.

A day or two later

Preparing for New Year's Eve here: vacuuming rugs (again) and washing floors. We just did this for Christmas!

As far as my learning-about-computers streak, I learned a little bit more about numpy (just basics) and learned about APIs. In particular, I learned how to download info about all the Harry Potter movie reviews in the New York Times. Not deep, but interesting! There are a lot of projects on the web that use APIs to get data about many things. One favorite is Storyark, which lets you "see" the arc of a story. It's not yet phenomenal, as I looked up "mathematics" and got lots of stories about religious nuts and theater.

Back in MN... for a bit...

Back in Minnesota for a month. Priorities: socialize! and see people I only see in MN; write some things about quantum cohomology; play with data science. Heading for New York state in January...

Leaving Berkeley

Ok, I've been a bad blogger. Lots has happened but other than travel it's mostly been in my head, so I have not put it up on the blog. I guess I have to decide what kind of blogger to be!

I'm leaving Berkeley for MN in just four days. Spent some time packing today. Should find a scale to make sure my luggage is not overweight. At this point, it looks like it might all fit in the bags it came in (!). Even though I bought books and so acquired some stuff, I did try to bring summer clothes back to MN as summer ended here in California. The problem is that books are heavier than summer clothes, and overweight baggage fees are more expensive than book rate shipping.

Up to MSRI again -- last four visits to my office...

September begins

I've been in Berkeley two whole weeks now. The conferences at MSRI have been going on since I arrived, just about -- since August 22. That's a lot of lectures, tea-time conversations, dinners with mathematicians, and mingling. Good ideas and good experiences, but I am glad for a rest this Labor Day weekend! I am staying home to cook and do work and try not to get the illness that is making the rounds at the conference.

Almost every work day I have hiked up to MSRI and I thought I'd share some pictures from my walk. These are from sunny days:

Above is MSRI, where I work.

The second-to-last part of my walk there involves this trail.

If I turn around on that trail I can see this view on a clear day: the Bay Bridge to San Francisco.

We had a number of cloudy days earlier in the week. When cloudy, you can't see anything except cloud from where I live. I'll try to take a picture of that later.

Pluses for Berkeley: You can buy salmon at the farmer's market from a company that buys them from local fishers. You can buy avocados from local farms! You can eat fresh figs -- I really don't know much about fresh figs but they are really tasty. I am trying to eat out less and cook more this week -- I could go out to dinner every night with visiting mathematicians, but am trying not to do that all the time. It is good to cook and what you cook.

(Of course, I am missing the State Fair in MN and all the good apples available right now there... Tonight, though, I went out to dinner with my friend Greg and had a pretty good chicken liver on a stick, which will be as close as I get to the fair. It was at a very nice Japanese restaurant so I can't really compare it to the fair!)