My teeny little thoughts all lined up in a row

At a party last weekend I bumped into haute_kitten, my first ever friend from highschool who I haven't seen since like 1998. (partly because she moved to England, where she lives in a co-op and is training to make corsets, because she's just that cool :) ) Anyway, after looking at her lj I had a look at my blog, thinking about how it would look to someone who doesn't know me-as-I-am-now very well and came to the conclusion that I have been influenced by spending so much time around teenagers and use a smidgeon too many smileys.(*) The fact that I care about what my smiley-usage stats say about me got me contemplating the way I put a lot of effort into not being an unsuccessful try-hard and what that says about me, and all in all I got so self-concious about what I do and why I couldn't post anything!(**)

So..*cough* for no especially deep or significant reason, another list of things.

• Still not depressed (oh noes!), but the fact I'm letting myself do all the stuff I avoided during my phd becuase it made me sleepy (chocolate, late nights etc) is making me, suprise surprise, sleepy.
• "Y the last man" is a brilliant graphic novel you should all read. I nearly recomended it to my mum and then remembered what happened the last time she read something of mine where someone dies horribly in the first scene. Anyway, the first issue is online so..go!
• Garden state is a pretty good movie.
• I love the new Pride and Predjudice becuase it is a thing of beauty. Well, in terms of actual physical prettiness and swooniness of leads the BBC version wins hands down, but the movie makes it feel like they're actually real people instead of pretty Romantic Archetypes.
• I have given up on Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrel. However I did read "Peace" by Gene Wolfe, which is absolutely nothing like the book I remember reading in highschool. I wonder what book it was, I know it was from the W section and had a tree on the cover. Oh well.
• My loyalties are somewhat divided between White Dwarf Books and Fantastic Planet. On the one hand Tim was friends with Cam in highschool (and gave me a free romance novel to give Cam's mum), on the other hand I've known Stephen much longer and he's written some pretty funky books. Also he doesn't swap "horrible child abuse stories from when I was in ER" with Mandragora :) Of course it's not like I spend any money on new books anyway.

(*)The footnotes, italics and brackets are juuuust right.
(**)Also I've been kind of sleepy, see the first entry on the list :) ....oh no! A smiley! I lose at the internet!

Paaaarty!!

Yes! To celebrate me entering my late twenties and the handing in of my Phd, a party. Since my house is teeny, it's at Jocelyn's.

• What: Sophie's 26th Birthday Party
• Where: Jocelyn's house. Email/comment etc for the address (I forgot to ask her if it was ok to put it online :))
• When: Saturday 19th November at 7pm (I may change the time)
• Who: Joc is a little paranoid about her house getting full and exploding, so I'd prefer people who actually know me to a a reasonable extent and are coming because it's my birthday, rather than because they're bored and want to go to a party.
• Theme: Things you never get a chance to wear. Clothes/accessories that have been sitting in your cupboard forever and you can't bear to get rid of. Anything from ball dresses to that hat your grandma made you :)
• What to bring: A present. It's not set up completely yet, but I'm trying out a gift registry Cam wrote for the wedding. Please use the registry, there will be lots of Very Cheap gifts.

If you have this marvelous idea for the perfect present that's not on the list, that's ok :) But if you buy something on the list without registering for it, so I get two, well that's not so good :P

My email address is sqbr, and the registry one (for getting an account) is account, both at distantwisdom dot net.

Behold the tiny chickens!

I've been having fun fiddling with my blog layout. Since anything I design from scratch is likely to

• look crap
• not work

I used the "Scribe" template and fiddled with things a little bit at a time. Hopefully I can eventually make it mainly original content with only the basic layout stolen :) It doesn't work on low resolution IE but as far as I can tell that's becuase of the big comic a few posts down, not the template. So, if it doesn't work for you/is unreadable let me know! I'm super proud of the little chickens. Next step: replace the "Links" etc pictures with a better font.

I've gotten very sleepy all of a sudden (why I stopped cssing) so my deepest apologies if this entry makes no sense. Assuming you can read it at all :)

What I had for breakfast

I'm not normally into public introspection, but since I've been wondering how I would feel once it was All Over I thought I'd share my thoughts, briefly. I feel... like the mental equivalent of when you do a bunch of exercize and then stop, so your muscles ache and you want to rest, but at the same time you feel like you should be doing something. "Luckily" we have a rent inspection on Tuesday, so I've been cleaning which is easy but keeps me busy. My brain basically said "That's it!" around mid-Thursday, I'm hoping it recovers soon, there's Stuff I Want To Do. Still, I've not yet fallen to the dreaded Post-Thesis-Depression people keep talking about. Maybe this is beause we bought a playstation yesterday. I feel more joy about getting it than I do about finishing, since the former has a definite benefit but the second has yet to really sink in.

Planning on organising a birthday party around the 26th of November, unless people have Strong Objections I haven't thought of. I'm actually quite busy this week (probably a good thing) but come next week I'll almost certainly be Utterly Bored so anyone who wants to hang out is free to give me a buzz. Hmm..the main side-effect of not being a student seems to be an Excess of Capitals.

One of the things on my List Of Things To Do In My Holidays which I've actually done is to go through my "Unsorted links" folder. So, here's a list of interesting links I've collected since the last time I sorted through it which are too cool to delete but not cool enough for my links page. Apologies if I've linked to some of these before.

• Longmore does Romance Novels Very amusing retitling of romance novel covers.
• Purple dots Stare at the centre cross. Really, it's cool :)
• Baby name wizard plots popularity of names in real time.
• Warptera Models little machines made from levers and spinning thingies.
• Intelligent falling With apologies to any creatoinists :)
• Gallery Serpentine A sydney shop that sells coats and stuff which are Very Pretty.
• The Foglios draw the begining of "Good Omens" Found when I was about to draw it myself then went "I wonder if this has been done.."
• The Gravity Discovery Centre A new museum! Just a bit far away...

Oh, given the title I geuss I should add that to celebrate I bought "Crunchy Nut Clusters" cereal and made some Cadbury Brownies, both of which sounded like they should have been great but were actually pretty dissapointing. Also watched Solaris which was somewhat interesting and Very Slow. Oh! And thanks to all the people who gave congratulations :) even the ones who commented on the lj-feed. BAD people, you know lj doesn't allow email notification of comments to feeds. (Or at least you do now)

Unemployed at last!

You know, if someone told me they gave you a mug when you submitted I'd have been done ages ago.

I'd do a shot of me in the matching shirt I got from Phlebas and Enforced Equanamity but Cam isn't home yet.

Woot! *Does happy dance* *is.....speechless* :)

Things I declare to be cool

• Porco Rossi (just got round to watching the tape I made when it was on tv) and Miyazaki in general.
• Daria (finally got to see "Is it College yet" thanks to theducks)
• The Kate Beckinsale "Emma", if only because it's not the Gwyneth Paltrow one. Any Austenophiles who wish to watch it are welcome to borrow it.
• Being nearly done on my Phd.
• Energy. Thus it would be nice if I had any. Stupid body, there's like a week to go, then you can nap all you like!!
• Phlebas/Asphodel, for ringing me up and having a good old chinwag.
• the_riviera_kid, for giving heaps of helpful advice on my thesis. Also Oliver for offering, though I didn't get round to organising him a copy so I'm not sure if he's had a chance to read it.
• The latest Bob the Angry Flower. teehee.
• Me, because I'm a genius.
• Cam, for hugs.

The end!

So close!

This Is My Life. Yes, that's right, a little over two weeks to go and all three of my supervisors are out of the country leaving me with noone to sign my submission of thesis form. Guh!

Rather than forgery I went for emailing the form to the closest (in New Zealand), hopefully she can send it back to me in time. The lesson being be organised early.

I've reached a print-this-draft-and-check-for-errors stage (after a super fun day of wrestling with ispell and making sure all my references match) and would be greatly appreciative of any mathsy people (and to make it clear: Asphodel, this Does Not Mean You. Read at your own risk :)) who had a bit of a read to give an outsiders perspective, mainly on the flow/clarity etc. I'll understand if the prospect sounds way too much like hard work! Given that both Adam and Rae found errors by just glancing at earlier drafts briefly even a vague skim is plenty helpful :) Less mathsy people may enjoy critiquing the awful title. (Try as I might I can't think of a better one that fits the content)

I would try to say something interesting and non-mathsy but I'm not sure I have it in me :) Wait! I saw a teapot exhibition today. It was fun. EDIT: Since the mysterious SP (my best geuss is fallimar) does not consider this to be interesting, some other facts:

• Ski Smoothie balls are like maltesers made with fruity yogurt instead of chocolate.
• I found an interesting (imho :P) photo of my mum at my age. Yes, that's me next to her :)
• Asphodel thinks A circle of stars needs more hacking up of hairballs.

And that will just have to do.

Time Scales

This is going to be a very, very mathsy post though hopefully not too hard to understand for anyone who's done "proper" first year maths. I've screwed around with notation and am pretty ignorant about this sort of stuff, so knowing too much maths might be more of a problem :)

I just finished attending the Australian Mathematical Society Annual Conference. Becuase it's all of maths there were many talks on areas I know nothing about, and when I felt like stretching my brain would go to talks on Logic (which was fascinating and made me think I may have chosen the wrong area to study) or "Unstable non-corpuscular nodes of a scalar quantum field in an expanding accelerating universe" (which utterly broke my brain and made me glad I changed out of Physics). Anyway, I went to one Applied talk (Dynamic Equations on Time Scales) and I thought the ideas were so cool, and simple, I'm going to natter about them here :)

This is a differential equation:
x'(t)=3x(t)+t^2, x(0)=0

This is a difference equation:
x(n+1)-x(n)=3x(n)+n^2, x(0)=0
In a sense these equations are "equivalent", but they are not the same.

There is a large area of mathematics devoted to solving differential equations, but as far as I can tell the way difference equations are generally solved is by treating them as if they were differential equations and hoping for the best. The problem being that not only do the solutions differ but there are equations which, say, have infinitely many solutions in the differential case and none in the difference case. For this reason we (by which I mean the guy giving the talk) define dynamic equations.

In this sort of equation (which covers both difference and differential equations) you have:

• A time scale T. This is a closed subset of the real numbers, usually just all the real numbers or the positive integers.
• A function x(t) defined over T.
• For any t in T you define s(t) to be the "next" point, ie in the real numbers s(t)=t and in the integers s(t)=t+1.
• A "derivative" x*(t) where
  • if s(t)=t (ie in a differential equation) then x*(t) is just the derivative x'(t).
  • if s(t)>t (ie in a difference equation) then
    x*(t)=[ x(s(t))-x(t) ]/[ s(t)-t ]. Note that if s(t)=t+1 you just get x*(t)=x(t+1)-x(t).

A simple dynamic equation would then be
x*(t)=3x(t)+t^2, x(0)=0.
If you substitute in s(t)=t or s(t)=t+1 you get the equations we had to begin with. Which all seems a bit pointless except you can define things like the product rule to work for x*(t) regardless of T (you just get some funny [ s(t)-t ] terms which vanish when T is the real numbers) and so come up with results which work for any dynamic equation. Also, and I think this is super cool, you don't have to have a boring old time scale like the integers. Pretty much ANY closed subset of the real numbers will work, including things like

• A collection of continuous intervals ie T={ t: 1<=t<=2 or 4<=t<=5} so you have s(t)=t for most t, but s(2)=4.
• Bounded infinite sequences like {0, 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, ...} (plus the number 1 so it has an upper boundary)
• Crazy sets like the cantor set. Can you imagine differentiating a function which is only defined on the Cantor set? Craaazy!

If you got this far and aren't bored out of your skull, you can read the first chapter of a book on this stuff for free. Also I should mention that the "sort of derivative" x* is actually denoted by x with a superscript delta, but that was too hard to type :)

The Adventures of Tom and Max

Went to Tom and Max's wedding yesterday, it was great. They were utterly adorably happy :) Anyway, here are some photos, taken by Cam except for a few after the ceremony where a bunch of technogeeks enviously played with his new camera for a while. (I mention it since otherwise people might think I actually managed to take a decent photo of Cam :) ) It was really nice to talk to people other than mathamatitians and students for a change. Also, Tina is annoyingly photogenic :)