I was at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Portland from Tuesday through today (Friday). However, I've had relatively little time accessing, and I've spent more time on the human sort of networking than on the computer sort. I'll catch up on e-mail and such over the next few days.

The technical program was interesting. Topics that I found particularly exciting included:

• Shear wave imaging

  When a doctor feels for lumps, she moves her fingers back and forth. A lump is a place where the subsurface tissue is more resistant to the shearing force that comes from rubbing across the surface. We already use ultrasound imaging, which involves compression waves traveling through tissue. Why not use the much more slowly-traveling shear waves, too?

• Splines and Boeing

  There was a keynote talk about computations done at Boeing using spline. The talk involved a lot of pretty pictures, and also a back of the envelope calculation in which the speaker estimated that there were probably about half a billion spline calculations done in Boeing systems every day.

  A half billion is a lot.

• Equation-free and multiscale models

  Mathematical modeling usually involves creatively fuzzy vision. If you want to model a weight hanging on a spring, you can try to model every atom in the system, and go nuts; you can do some averaging and model the spring by a set of partial differential equations, and keep people like me employed; or you can assume that the amount that the string stretches is roughly proportional to the amount of weight you hand on an end, do one experiment to find the constant of proportionality, and go for a walk.

  We have a lot of tools, both analytical and numerical, that work well for systems described by partial differential equations. But what about systems of particle interactions in which we're not smart enough to write down a continuous approximation? It turns out that it's sometimes enough to posit such an equation exists (and is continuous) -- without writing it down. You use your microscopic model to fill in what's happening in a few places, and then use the data at those points to fill in everywhere else. The idea is simple, the details are hard, and the whole effort is immensely interesting.

  It's also sort of astounding. How do you solve an equation without the equation? Equation-free modeling sounds like it ought to be the title of a Zen koan -- if Zen koans had titles and a flair for the technical -- but it was actually the title for one of the keynotes.

  A related area, less magical-sounding but equally profound, is multi-scale modeling. It's exactly what it sounds like: there are some things that happen very quickly and some things very fast, or there are some things that happen over a large area and some over a small area. If you looked at everything finely enough, you'd see the whole picture, but that's unbearably expensive. So you selectively put on glasses, and build some machinery to connect the very small to the very large.

• Implicit codes and software engineering

  We didn't want to tell the scientists they would have to change their codes a lot. The scientists hate that.

  Very true. I'm glad to see it recognized.

• Google

  We'll take Google as an example. Nobody knows quite what Google does, but we think it might be this.

  Web searching is a hard technical problem involving some very interesting ideas from numerical linear algebra. Marveling at the math is almost as much fun as marveling at Google.

• Eigenvalue problems

  I talked about one type of eigenvalue problem. Other people talked about different types of eigenvalue problems. I enjoyed the talks and the conversations.

More generally:

• Portland is impressive. There is a book store here that covers an entire city block, and a companion technical book store which is also extensive. Several of us went there this afternoon; we met others with the same idea. We should have just held the last session here.
• There are other impressive things about Portland, too, like the train system and the people. And did I mention the book store?
• Through Thursday, there were vendor booths with several major technical publishers and a handful of people selling software. I bought two books, a little monograph on Lanczos algorithms and Matrix Algorithms, Volume II: Eigensystems by Pete Stewart. I've intended to buy the latter since it came out -- a year ago? two? -- and I haven't finished gloating over it yet.
• I still find it astounding to watch human networks at work. I met a lot of people at the meeting -- that's much of the point, after all. Some of them I knew from reputation, some of them I didn't. In any case it usually took all of fifteen seconds of conversations to find someone we knew in common, and often a common research interest. Also, I'm always impressed by how friendly and approachable the people at these meetings are.
• I'm so glad that I took classes on fluid mechanics and finite element analysis. I cannot imagine enjoying this meeting half as much as I did if I knew nothing about those topics.
• My talk went well. I'm glad it's done.

While I'm finishing my coffee and waiting for clean socks from the drier, some notes on recent and moderately-recent reading.

• Henri Poincare. The Value of Science --

  Poincare was a luminary of mathematics and physics who contributed, among other things, to the study of dynamical systems (he won a prize for his work on the three-body problem) and topology (analysis situ, as it was known at the time). E.T. Bell called him the Last Univeralist for the breadth of his work. In addition to being a leading scientist, Poincare was a science writer, and The Value of Science is a translation of several of his popular science works from the end of his life, near the turn of the twentieth century.

  I've read some of The Value of Science, but I haven't exactly made rapid progress. I expect I would enjoy it more if I read French; while the translation is competent, it still has the odor of a translation about it. Also, while interesting, the topics covered are mostly familiar. The familiar topics and the slightly stilted translation together make my reading leisurely and sometimes drowsy.

• Patrick O'Brian. Post Captain and H.M.S. Surprise --

  I wish I read more books with lines in which one main character cries to the other You have debauched my sloth! The books are fun and easy to read, despite -- or perhaps even because of -- the frequent nautical jargon. The next two O'Brian books are in queue.

• Roger Zelazny. The Great Book of Amber --

  I bought this collection a while back while on a let's buy classic fantasy I haven't read kick. The Amber books are regarded as classic for a reason. There are some interesting premises, and the books move along smartly. I was glad to see the end of the last one, though. For all the plot twists -- and all the plotting -- the books seem to have an endlessly inconclusive quality to them, reminiscent of Neil Stephenson (but with a better editor).

• William Gibson. Pattern Recognition --

  One of my friends has commented that Stephenson's writing changes meaning completely if you don't pay attention to every word. I only half agree with him, but Pattern Recognition makes a persuasive argument for his case. Looking back, the plot seems a little off, but the writing is wry, witty, and dense in a way that makes it difficult to read some paragraphs only once. There are no cyber-cowboys or vat-grown ninjas, but the imagery is fully as developed and surrealistic as anything in Neuromancer and its successors.

• Bill Bryson. A Walk in the Woods --

  I'm only half done, but it's funny and fast-reading so far. If I like the second half as much as I liked the first, I'll probably check out some other things Bryson has written.

When Jim left last Tuesday for a week at home, he left behind a bag of donated zucchini. Eat it! I don't want to see it when I come back, he said.

So here are 2.5 ways to prepare zucchini if you're not the greatest zucchini fan. All were shared with and approved by Winnie, so there is at least one other person who thinks they're good ideas.

Zucchini stir fry:
I used baby bok choy, a green pepper, snap peas, and zucchini. It was seasoned with soy and served with a little beef (cooked separately).

Zucchini with eggs (1):
I used a small zucchini and a tomato, pan-cooked together with a little olive oil, black pepper, and salt. Then I added eggs, scrambled everything together, and added some cheese at the last minute.

Zucchini omelette (2):
This is a variant on zucchini and eggs. I pan-cooked zucchini, tomato, red onion, and green pepper in olive oil for the filling, with basil, black pepper, and salt for seasoning. The omelette was an ordinary omelette, with the some mozarella and some Munster added just before putting in the veggies and folding the entire thing.

Zucchini salsa:
I finely diced a small zucchini, lots of garlic, some tomatoes, some red onion, and some green pepper. I sauteed the zucchini and garlic in olive oil, which I used more generously than I sometimes do, and added black pepper and salt. Then I added the red onion, green pepper, and tomato, and cooked it all a little more. I think it would taste good without the second cooking, too. I mixed in a healthy dose of lime juice and served with the end of a two-day old baguette, which I sliced into thin rounds and toasted. I put the salsa in a bowl and arranged the toast in a double ring around the outside. It looked colorful and elegant -- at least to my eye -- and surely was one of the more appealing ways I've used up a zucchini, a fading pepper, and a slightly stale baguette end.

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime and honey

Two minutes before completion, I lost the network connection to my machine on campus. Since I foolishly ran my hour-and-a-half simulation in the foreground, it was terminated when my secure shell session was terminated.

Joy.

Let's try something different for the moment: a mostly-unrewritten entry.

Usually, I write with great pauses between sentences. Sometimes the pauses last so long that I forget what I was writing in the previous sentence, or that I abandon a paragraph -- or an entry -- entirely. At other times, I write the same sentence four or five times, and constantly delete and re-type. I'm picky, and half the time I can't even form something grammatically correct the first time it comes out. Or if I can form something grammatically correct, it's technically incorrect, which is nearly as bad.

I am procrastinating now, though, from -- what else? -- writing. So this seems like a good experiment.

I write here for three reasons, really. The first is the reason that has kept me writing to myself for many years: I forget things. More specifically, I forget the chronological order in which things occur. Well, I sometimes forget other things, too -- like birthdays and people's names and where I put my glasses. But in terms of remembering events, I'm pretty good at keeping odd little details in my memory. I just forget the matrix in which those details should be embedded. And so I have a few notebooks of terse recounts of my days and weeks, which I doubt would be of much use or interest to anyone but me.

The second reason is to communicate with friends and family, which is really most of the set of people reading, I think. If someone else finds it amusing, that's fine, too. And for those arriving at these pages through a search engine: the proper spelling is teetotal, the conventional definition is to abstain completely from alcoholic beverages, and dictionary sites will probably serve you better than this search.

The third reason is to think. I do mathematics with pen or pencil in hand, and the pen is often moving, even when I'm staring into space. I take notes in classes that I find particularly difficult, even if I never look at the notes later. I write summaries of problems that I work on, even if I have no intention of sharing the summaries with anyone else. The act of writing forces ideas into a more concrete form, filters the mental fuzz, and enhances the memory. I can write some pretty incomprehensible garbage when I'm not thinking straight, but it's easy to recognize it as garbage once it's on paper.

This is not to say that I'm deliberately spending my time filling this page full of garbage. It is to say that some of the things I write have more to do with me writing than with you reading.

Even if there are no real meaty thoughts behind them, it's a joy to run fingers over the keyboard. It's almost as much fun as writing with a pen, though the two activities are different and suit different moods. I imagine I might get the same joy from playing a musical instrument, if there were any musical instruments that I played competently.

I'm listening to the radio. I'm waiting for a simulation to finish; it has about forty minutes left, which means that it's more than half finished. Sitting beside me is A Walk in the Woods, with the cover picture of a green forest and a bear's head peeking up over the subtitle bar at the bottom. On the other side is a pile of pages of scrap, intermixed with the marked-up pages of an old draft of the report I'm currently working on -- or avoiding working on, as the case may be. There are so many marks on the borders of the draft that it is hard to tell those pages from the pages of scrap paper. The pile is relatively neat, but I doubt the pages are in the right order, and I'm sure that the pages of the draft are mixed together with the pages of notes. And since I've processed most of the comments in the draft that actually meant anything for more than a minute after I wrote them, the state of disarray is just fine.

I don't think I had a face-to-face conversation for all of the day, unless you count the interaction with the clerk at Barnes and Noble. I talked to Winnie on the phone, of course, but beyond that, I don't think I had any conversations today. For that matter, I haven't had many conversations since the start of the past week. People are out of town, at home and at the office, and so days have been quiet. Suits my mood, it does. Still, I'm glad Winnie visited on Friday, and I'm looking forward to having dinner with her again tomorrow night.

And I'm actually really looking forward to my trip this coming week, even if it's a little bewildering to travel again so soon after I returned from Copenhagen. Well, perhaps it isn't that short a break.

Tap, tip, tap. Perhaps I should return to reading. Or perhaps I should return to editing.

I felt like a walk this afternoon. So I went to Barnes and Noble, where I got the next two Patrick O'Brian books and Bill Bryson's Walk in the Woods. After laughing so hard at the inebriated sloth in O'Brian's H.M.S. Surprise, I thought I would probably read the next in that series first. Instead, I read about the Applachian Trail for a while.

I opened all the windows and both the doors when I returned. It's a fine day, and the breeze passing through feels good.

• Currently drinking: Osymanthus black tea

During a break a little while ago, I found this article on the Bookshelf as Identity. I was reminded of an article a friend sent a while back, entitled The Library of Congress Comes Home. Both articles are about bookshelf organization, though from very different takes. And both concentrate on the topics of the books.

My bookshelves are topically organized only in very broad strokes. Books that have something to do with religion or philosophy mostly go on one shelf -- though that shelf also has my copy of The Smithsonian Book of Books and The Complete Guide to Calligraphy. I would say that this indicates something about my personal pantheon, except that the same shelf has Fermat's Enigma, Stairway Walks in San Francisco, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, and Worms Eat My Garbage. Further down is a shelf which houses a few history books: From Dawn to Decadence, Africa in History, and The Soong Dynasty are there. So is Autumn Lightning, which is half history (the other half is autobiography). But wedged right next to those books are Kay's Tigana (fantasy), Zinnser's On Writing Well (what it sounds like), Brooks' The Mythical Man Month (software project management), Icke's Force of Symmetry (physics), Asimov's Azazel (humor), and an odd copy of SIAM Review (an applied math journal). Furthermore, Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples and Lewis's The Middle East are a couple shelves down; and Herotodus is again on the shelf with philosophy and religion, two books down from the Tao Te Ching and three from Marcus Aurelius.

So what's the correlation? Well, if you took all the books from one of my shelf and put them into a cardboard box, you'd probably find that they packed together pretty well. The philosophy shelf also happens to have a lot of books that are shaped oddly, and didn't fit that well with anything else -- the Book of Books in particular is very tall, and doesn't fit at all onto some shelves. Most of my science fiction fits neatly on the bookshelf by my bed, simply because those books are all paperbacks of roughly the same height, and taller books don't fit well on those shelves.

There's some shuffling over time, of course, as I take a book down for reading or simply for reference, and as I put back books that begin to clutter my desk. And the books in my office are a little more topically organized: mathematical analysis in one place, computer systems in another, mechanics in another, and linear algebra -- well, linear algebra moves about the shelves and about the office, but there's some sort of concentration between the books on technical writing and the books on analysis. Even there, though, I organize by physical shape and by the frequency with which I refer to things before I organize by topic. And it shows: there is no topical reason for the top-shelf mixture of books on statistics, asymptotics, special functions, and other amusements, except that a lot of them are Dover paperbacks with sort of similar shapes.

It's fortunate that my spatial memory is better than my temporal memory, or I'd lose all sense of where my books live. But if you spoke no English and were somehow tasked with finding a place for a stray tome from my collection, I suspect you would manage to find a good place for it. Just be careful if that place is the shelf o' philosophy. You might knock over the origami cat.

Still looking for an old bookmark to a technical paper, I found a bookmark to Nature's debate on open access. Alas, my opinions on the topic are not sufficiently well formulated that I care to write anything about them.

Going through my bookmarks in search of something else, I stumbled across this page of photos of skills found only in China. I think I might be able to sleep atop a chain link fence, too, if sufficiently motivated.

• Currently drinking: Black coffee

As a youngster, I often responded to inquiries about my day with I ate lunch; I had recess; and... um... I've changed in many ways, but my response to such pleasantries has changed little. I know people who can reply smoothly and quickly to such inquiries, and to other social pleasantries; I have not decided if the smoothness of their response comes from some quickness of thought that I lack, or whether some habit or reflex allows these people to handle such routine interactions without any thought.

When I spend a day writing and revising, re-reading papers I've cited, and generally chewing over the presentation of a few technical ideas, I have an even harder time answering social questions. Writing code, sketching calculations, and related pursuits can be wordless things, difficult to express even to someone who asks about them with more than a perfunctory social curiosity. But a day of wordsmithing, perhaps, engenders the opposite problem. It's all too easy to express the words I've been thinking about all day. Do you want to hear why local moment-matching approximations are so attractive for producing reduced models of RF resonators with anchor losses taken into account? Or would you like to hear how to formulate the analogue of Sommerfeld's radiation condition for linear time-harmonic elasticity problems? The answer, of course, is likely a resounding no: the question what's up? is an invitation to a smile and a nod, perhaps, but not to an impromptu lecture, let alone an impromptu research presentation. So I smile, I nod, and these days -- usually -- I keep my impulses in check and stick to safe topics of conversation, like what I had for lunch; at least, that's what I'll do until my mind has had time to warm to some more mutually entertaining topic.

I had New England clam chowder for lunch, and a cup of Russian Caravan tea afterward. And dinner was a scramble of leftovers, combined in a way that called for no particular culinary skill, with some spiced black tea later. Oh, and I spent some time writing, and some time managing my recipes. Or managing my references. Um...

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime

On my way to a meeting on Thursday afternoon, I was caught in a river of capoieristas walking along Shattuck. I was late, and in a grim temper, and I was not well pleased by the slowness of the crowd. But two women in front of me were practicing samba as they walked, and when one of them stopped so suddenly that I nearly ran into her, she grinned such a cheerful apology that I couldn't help but grin back. I was tempted to skip the meeting altogether, and walk with the crowd to their final destination, to hear the merimbau played and perhaps to see a roda. But I resisted the temptation, and went to my meeting.

On Friday, I walked to school to receive a call from a collaborator. As I walked by the park near my home, I saw two men practicing forms. More specifically, they were practicing one of the forms of a style from southern China which a college acquaintance of mine practiced. I slowed for a moment, watching. The Chinese martial arts can be very graceful, and one of the men was quite smooth; the other had problems with his elbow. While I watched, the more experienced man turned to his neighbor and corrected the position of his elbow, showing how to set it up to cover against a strike to the ribs even as the hand parried a strike toward the head.

Last night, I was deep in H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O'Brian, and came to a passage involving an inebriated sloth. I laughed until I had to put the book down to catch my breath. In time I recovered, and as I reached to pick up the book, I thought Wouldn't a drunken sloth school of martial arts be grand? Practitioners would learn how to plod slowly along tree branches for a few feet, then fall asleep with one arm and one leg wrapped around a branch, half-dangling from their perch. Advanced exponents would learn to miss their footing and fall artfully in a way that squashed opponents passing below.

I think that the Drunken Sloth style, along with the style of Bread Do, would be a wonderful addition to the mix of Hong Kong action movies. But for longer lasting interest, I'll keep watching the parks and the streets on my way to work.

Death is a conservative sort of fellow. He still rides a pale horse, and does his work with an old-fashioned hand scythe. But with the world as crowded as it is, Death needs some assistance with his busy rounds. Something so that he can quickly be reached if needed, wherever he may be.

Thus, the Grim Beeper.

This afternoon when I tired of writing, I decided I would spend some time figuring out how to get my little 5 dB antenna to work a little better. I've seen designs for antennas made from Pringles cans, tin foil, and Chinese mesh cookware. I know something about RF waveguides, though my training is not as an electrical engineer. And I only need a little boost, since I know that I can get the signal I want; I just kept losing it.

After some reading online, a trip to Barnes and Noble to read the O'Reilly Wireless Hacks book, and a trip to the local hardware store, I thought I would be ready. But the book told me little that I didn't know, and at the hardware store I forgot what I wanted, and just bought some more clothes hangars and a roll of tape. Still, I came home filled with the notion of my own cleverness, ready to build a parabolic antenna from tin foil and start scanning it about.

That's when I rediscovered the wonder of binder clips. It turns out that the signal I get is just fine, so long as the pigtail connector from my wireless card to the external antenna is held firmly in place. A binder clip does that trick. With the binder clip in place and a little piece of cardboard to keep the antenna from falling over, I'm all set.

I retrieved my photos of Copenhagen from Long's Drugs this afternoon. I usually go through a roll of film every year or two, which means the next post in which I announce an entire roll of photos should probably occur some time after I graduate. I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether that is an optimistic or a pessimistic statement.

• Currently drinking: Russian caravan blend

I ate dinner with Dave this evening, and afterward we visited Barnes and Noble for dessert. Then we wandered over to the music section.

I buy CDs rarely. But I've thought for some time now that I would like to buy some of the Verve jazz collection CDs, and the music section stocked the CDs that I wanted. So I bought the Verve Unmixed 2 CD, a collection of classic jazz pieces which was released as an accompaniement to Verve Remixed 2, a collection of remixes of those same tunes. I also bought the Verve Remixed CD.

I listened to the remix CD and read for a while this evening. Now I'm listening to the first few tracks of the Unmixed CD, long-time favorites: Manteca, Sinnerman, and Whatever Lola Wants. And the remix CD includes Summertime, which I think has been my favorite jazz tune since I first heard it as a youngster.

Books often keep me up past my bed time. Music keeps me up less often, but there are nights I stay up late listening. This is one of them.

Winnie visited today. We went to the Cheeseboard after she arrived, and bought a loaf of provolone-olive bread. Together with slices of good tomatoes -- heirloom tomatoes bought from the Berkeley farmer's market -- and a little salt, it was good. Actually, if you can't imagine that it was delicious just given the description, then you have less imagination than I'd credit to you... or perhaps your lactose intolerant, hate olives, and break out in hives near tomato plants, in which case I'm very sorry, and hope that you at least like garlic or chocolate.

The loaf of bread is gone now. So are the tomatoes.

I just returned yesterday afternoon from the conference in Copenhagen. I slept some ten hours last night, but even with that, I'm sufficiently out of it that I'm about useless for any technical work. So this seems like a good time to write about the trip.

The route from SFO to Copenhagen consisted of a long flight over the pole from SFO to Paris, a mad dash across Charles de Gaulle airport, and a shorter flight from Paris to Copenhagen. We made it across the airport in time, but our luggage did not. Other American travelers we ran into had the same problem; I guess the heightened security at de Gaulle caused some issues. Air France gave us a kit of toiletries and a t-shirt (with the Air France logo on the sleeve). After we checked in at the hotel, we wandered around central Copenhagen looking for places that sell socks. There were many of them, but none were open. The closest we got was a 7-11, which was open but which (oddly enough) didn't sell socks.

I saw a lot of 7-11 stores in Copenhagen, actually. They were more tightly concentrated than I'd ever have imagined -- coming out of the Copenhagen central train station, for instances, there are two 7-11s visible, spaced a short city block apart. There are at least two others in an additional two block radius. One of the ones next to the train station saved me on the trip back: I needed 25 kroners to pay the station fare, but only had a 20 kroner coin. It was around 4:30 am, but one of the 7-11 stores was open. So I'm willing to forgive them for not having socks.

A lot of things about the city reminded me of New England -- of Boston, perhaps. The plant life was similar in color and shape, and there were a lot of brick buildings in a reasonably familiar architectural style. Of course, the Danish train system (the DSB) is much nicer than the T, and Copenhagen is much more bike-oriented than any place here. Many of the roads have three height levels: there is the road for motor vehicles, a step, the road for bicycles, another step, and the sidewalk. There is a system of bikes for free use around the city center, and other bikes are parked everywhere. Of course, the bikes are often not locked to anything; I suppose cycle theft is less of a problem there.

All the Danes I encountered spoke fluent English. One of the conference speakers, a Scot, joked that he spoke with a heavier accent than any of the Danes he'd met -- and he was right. At least half the television stations played English-language programming: mostly American programs, though some were from the BBC. I only had language trouble in Denmark at the train ticket vending machine the one time I tried to use it, though when I was alone I was sometimes addressed in Danish initially (it never happened when I was walking with Rajesh, the other Berkeley grad student at the conference). The Danish greeting hej sounds the same as the English hi, so in at least one exchange (where I was buying a magazine), I don't think the gentleman behind the counter didn't realize I spoke no Danish until I said thank you at the end. At dinner one evening, one of the gentleman with whom I was eating, a professor from the Netherlands, pointed out that there are only a few million speakers of Danish, and that the total combined population of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark is somewhat less than the population of New York. So a lot of the entertainment media is never translated from English (and American English, at that).

The Eurocup 2004 competition was everywhere. The Denmark-Sweden match took place on the night of the conference dinner, and as we walked from the train station to our hotel before the dinner, we passed many people in red Danish soccer shirts heading the other way. There was also one brave soul dressed in Sweden's blue and yellow, with Swedish flags painted on each cheek. They were all going to see the game projected on the side of one of the buildings in central Copenhagen. Those of us in the dinner were kept posted, too -- people had their cell phones set to receive bulletins every time there was a goal, and they kept running to the microphone on the stage to let us know about it (the final score was 2-2). We also heard the scores from the Italy-vs-Bulgaria game from representatives of those countries. And in the insomniac hours when we watched a little television, the commercials constantly referred to soccer. There was also a really catchy music video for the Danish team, which I wish I could find now.

Night lasted from around 10:30 at night to around 3:30 in the morning, and between the daylight and the jet lag, I didn't sleep much. I was also hungry a lot. Danish bread and cheese are outstanding, and I ate a lot of bread, cheese, and meat (and sometimes fish). I didn't live exclusively on a diet of bread, meat, and cheese, but in retrospect it seems pretty close. Otherwise, I had French food a couple times (and was impressed), a pizza-and-salad buffet once (much like Pizza Hut), and a Turkish buffet once (which was warm, filling, and otherwise mediocre). But I probably ate fewer fruits and vegetables during my entire stay than I sometimes eat in a single day here. When I came back, the first thing I did after showering and getting my hair cut was to walk to the Berkeley farmer's market and buy fresh produce: heirloom tomatoes, a cucumber, string beans, and a lettuce mix. Winnie visited yesterday evening, and while she was here, she poked at my ribs and said You lost weight! Maybe Atkins does work. I thought she was exaggerating, but while walking around Berkeley today, I noticed that my pants were a little on the loose side, and my shirt kept coming untucked. So perhaps she was right.

The cheese-slicer at the hotel's morning buffet was a marvelous thing. The cheese sat on a horizontal platform, alongside a bar that served as a stop. Through the center of the platform was a threaded post, and from the top of the post there extended a long crank handle, with a slicing wire stretched below it. Turning the handle pushed the wire through the block of cheese, and simultaneously turned the threaded post so that the platform -- and thus the cheese -- moved up a notch. So the slices came out at just the right thickness. And there were several different varieties of bread to go with the cheese, from a soft, nutty multi-grain bread to a dense pumpernickel loaf. It was good.

The conference itself was quite interesting. I'm glad I spoke on the first day, when everyone was fresh. The technical sessions started early (~9) and ended late (~7), so even the most enthusiastic were starting to flag by the end. There were a few outstanding presentations, a few terrible presentations, and a lot of interesting presentations somewhere between. The very worst presenters spoke in a mumbling monotone and used foils with print that would try those with the best of eyesight. I've decided that I'm not one of those with the best of eyesight, even with my glasses taken into account. I believe I ought to get my prescription updated. Rajesh and I skipped out on the morning sessions during the last day, in order to see Copenhagen, but otherwise I did go to the presentations, even if I ended up scribbling observations about my own favorite equations during some of the not-so-good presentations.

The conference dinner on Tuesday took place at Det Ny Teater, which I imagine means something like the new theatre. The meal was very good, with an appetizer, main course, dessert, and coffee with cookies, all spread out over five hours. There were also five wine courses: champagne with strawberries while we milled around in the foyer, a white wine with the appetizer, a red wine with the main meal, a dessert wine, and cognac after the coffee. I tried a sip of the white wine, but that was about as far as I got -- I'm told all the wines were quite good (and that Danish beer is justifiably famous as well), but I still can't seem to make it past the scent. Ah, well. The food was good, and so was the coffee. Also, there were performances of some violin pieces and songs from some German operettas, and I enjoyed both -- somewhat to my surprise, since I usually don't care for opera music.

I've lost much of the rest of the chronology of the trip already. I have mental snapshots of the Buddha Bar, which shared a wall with a church; of American Indians performing in one of the main square; of looking across another square to see a street flanked by a 7-11 on one side and a Chinese restaurant on the other, with old brick buildings rising above each and a spire rising in the background; of getting lost on a walk from the DTU campus back to the Lyngby train station; and of many interesting conversations. But those snapshots are already all out of order.

The trip back felt much like the trip there. I left the hotel early, so that even after back-tracking to a 7-11 so I could get change for the train -- thank heaven for 7-11 -- I was at the airport in plenty of time. I again rushed through Charles de Gaulle, this time accompanied by a Danish tourist also going to San Francisco, who asked if he could tag along since he was unfamiliar with the airport. We made it across the airport quickly enough, but spent a long time in the line for security. Everyone else was in the same boat, though, so the flight departed late. There was additional confusion from several families who had arranged to sit together, but were accidentally reseated apart. The flight attendants did what they could -- I exchanged my seat for another aisle seat so that a mother and child could sit together -- but I still think a few of the passengers came away very unhappy with Air France. Still the winds were favorable, and so we arrived in SFO nearly on time. My baggage made it back with me this time, and the rest of the trip was mostly uneventful.

Somewhat to my surprise, I wasn't ever initially addressed in English while I was in Charles de Gaulle, or while I was between Paris and the States. I surely felt like a confused American, and I'm told that the gait, garb, and mannerisms make Americans easy to identify. But the Air France check-in attendant, the stewardesses, the security attendants, the guy I sat next to, and one pour soul who seemed to be lost in the airport, all addressed me in French (at least at first), and gave me French-language forms to fill out. I was also addressed twice in German, once in passing through the airport, and once by the woman sitting next to me on the plane (naturally enough, since she spoke but little English, and knew even less French than I). I helped her fill out the customs form -- they'd given me the French version and her the English version, much to our respective confusion -- and the visa exemption form, which was written in French, but was simple enough for me to interpret. Her English was only slightly better than my German, but we were able to communicate well enough by a combination of the two languages, and she was grateful for the help.

And now I'm sitting in familiar surroundings, sipping tea and looking at a pair of plants. I think I probably ought to water them now, poor things.

• Currently drinking: Jasmine downy pearl green tea

I leave for Copenhagen tomorrow afternoon, and will be gone for about a week. This is not my first conference talk, but it is my first trip out of the States. I look forward to the conference, even to giving my talk -- I'm just not looking forward to the plane ride, or to the jet lag, or to the pranks of Murphy. Also, I notice that the weather forecast predicts rain for most of the time I'll be there. Fortunately, I have both an umbrella and a rain coat.

Also fortunately, I can happily sit and stare off into the rain for hours on end. I can sit and stare into the distance on a sunny day, too, but it doesn't have quite the same charm. Regardless, I'm easily amused by just watching the world go by. It's entertaining, educational, inexpensive, and relaxing.

Time to rest now, I think.

• Currently drinking: Water

I think I should read Ulysses at some point.

In an article on Bloomday, a reporter copied Joyce's description of Bloom's talkativeness -- how we could see a straw on the floor and talk just about that straw for an hour, without taking a break. I could not do that. I rarely speak more than a few sentences in an ordinary conversation without pausing to think and sort my words. And I rarely write even a single sentence without first pausing to chew the words over in my mind. That doesn't mean I never speak a thoughtless word or write a careless sentence, but it does mean that I spend a lot of time staring into space when I write, or even sometimes when I talk.

Sometimes I think a lot and don't write at all. Silence and white space can both be beautiful; there's no need to fill them without purpose. Pensive moments often sound more foolish than thoughtful, once they're recorded; and, as Samuel Clemens wrote, it's better to remain silent and appear a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

I wonder if I could sell the visual variant of John Cage's music -- 4.33, a blank sheet of white paper 4.33 cm in length. It has probably already been done. I prefer landscapes.

A week in conversations ...

What's new with you?
Oh, I'm working on slides for a talk.
Another one? You give more talks than just about anyone I know.
It comes in bursts.
Yeah, I guess I had a time when I was speaking every month or two. I kept revising the same slides. I was sick of them by the time I was through
Well, that's my blessing and curse -- I only give the same talk once every several months. I cycle through topics.
Hunh. You're like a professor talking about all the work his grad students have done, except that there's only one grad student involved.
Something like that.

...

Ha! And another detailed description of the character's main meal.
Yeah, he Modesitt does do that, doesn't he?
It's like an obsession. He must have read a series of books that really bothered him, once upon a time, in which none of the characters ever ate or used the facilities. So now he makes a point of describing all the characters' meals.
Oh, it's not so bad as all that.
No? I just think it's funny that I flipped to a page arbitrarily, and that's what I found.

...

So which of you wants to be the first subject for this user study?
Uh?
Too late. Jason just volunteered you.

...

Have you actually ever been to Moscow?
No...
That is the Moscow subway on your shirt, right? Look, the zoo!
It is, but I got it from my dad.
Ah. Well, it's a wonderful city.

...

The language of this standard is so broken! At least there aren't any implementations of this part.
Yes, there are. There's ATLAS.
It's not a complete implementation.
I think it is. And Intel has one, too.
Really? And they didn't complain?
I'm sure they have one. I caught a bug in one of the routines a while back.
Huh. I remember that. Are you sure those are complete implementations?
Pretty sure. Besides, there's a reference implementation.
I'm sure there's not.
I'm sure there is. Check Netlib.
Oh. There it is. That's too bad; we'll never get the standard fixed, now.

...

Do you think I should bring her cookies? What's your favorite dessert that I've made?
I've only had the cookies.
That's true...
Cookies are always good, though.
Do you think she would like cookies?
I think so. I mean, I have trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of someone who doesn't like cookies. I see!

...

• Currently drinking: Spiced black tea

I finished the last of my loose vanilla-flavored black tea this morning. I carefully tapped the leaves into the tea ball and shook a bit of dust away. Then I put my nose into the tea tin, inhaled the scent of vanilla, and lapsed into thought. A minute or two later, I realized I was still idly waving the tea tin back and forth below my nose.

In high school Spanish, I saw a film about a Spanish sherry maker nicknamed El Nariz (The Nose). He had an enormously long nose, under which he would wave a glass of wine which he was judging. My nose is long and bony, though not so magnificent as his; but this tea tin is rather smaller than a wine glass, and the similarity struck me as I continued to absent-mindedly sniff at the smell of vanilla.

Then I put the tea tin away and went to get hot water.

I'm right in the middle of my mid-afternoon slump, which is why I'm writing here rather than revising slides. I'm listening to an episode To the Best of Our Knowledge; this time the topic is Shades of Color. The first segment was on color in poetry, and I wondered as I listened -- is it the color images or the color words that make a difference? You don't have to be able to see red to associate it with blood, luck, or tomatoes (depending on your cultural biases), and color words are often the short, sharp, old words that work so well in poems.

On a completely unrelated note, I was amused by this comment on correspondence, particularly after recent conversations on the topic of letter-writing with Vince, and on the topic of scientific correspondence with -- drat. Well, I think I had a conversation about scientific correspondence with someone recently.

I think I should make another cup of tea and work on my slides, now.

I took off around 5:00 this evening. I took a break at home, ate a pear, showered, and listened to the radio for a while before I left the apartment again. This evening, the program for Fresh Air included an archived interview with Ray Charles. As I walked to Safeway, and then to the office, I found myself humming Georgia on My Mind.

I was young during Reagan's presidency, and at that age I was usually more interested in the letter Q than in politics. My priorities have changed since then -- except in my saner moments, when I still think the letter Q is far more interesting than the latest shenanigans of our elected officials -- but Reagan remains a vague figure in my memory, colored more by reading history than by living through it. Ray Charles is different. I remember him for myself.

Patxi had a going-away party at the Basque cultural center last night. It was a good meal and good company. There was butternut soup, fresh pepper on the salad, a savory dish of lamb shank with beans, and a sort of Basque cake (gateu Basque) for dessert. And there was at least one person who expressed keen interest when I joked about Gateux and Frechet derivatives after hearing about the cake.

On a completely unrelated note, I've discovered the reason that I like salty flavors so. It's because I'm secretly part porcupine:

The porcupine feeds on leaves, twigs and green plants and has a ravenous appetite for salt (it will chew on any salt stained tools or clothes it comes across) and also it relishes plywood because of the glue between the layers.

I think the butternut soup was much better than plywood would be.

• Currently drinking: Loose black tea flavored with caramel bits

I've decided to cut back on coffee, from a cup or two a day to a cup or two a week. When the ratio of coffee to food is too high, my stomach starts to complain. And early this week, my stomach complained bitterly, if mercifully briefly.

Tea is different. I had a cup of osymanthus fancy (a black tea blend flavored with osymanthus flowers) last night, and a cup of Earl Grey this afternoon. And now the apartment smells of masala from the lentils cooking, of lychee from the tea brewing, and of bleach from the still-drying kitchen floor.

• Currently drinking: Black tea with lychee

Hey Dave?
Mmm?
I'm your roommate, I can ask prying questions, right?
And I can refuse to answer. Go ahead.
Are you always this out of it?
Only when I'm thinking about a problem.
And that is...
... almost always, yes.
Okay. Just checking.

Even though I took yesterday off, I spent today in Friday mode. I spent some time this morning sitting in a cafe and reading further chapters from the Feynmann lectures. I spent the afternoon reading something else given to me for my consideration which was considerably less lucid, and which I think is fundamentally flawed. Still, perhaps the afternoon reading was as instructive in its own way as the morning reading was.

I came home early. Dave came over, and after we visited for a bit, I loaned him some books for his flight. Then I went to the south bay to have dinner with Winnie. We ate at a Mexican restaurant called Ancestros, a very pleasant place with good food, and then took a little walk. The walk ended at Borders, where there was a live band playing, and where we both got distracted by books. Well, perhaps I was more distracted, but Winnie knows me well enough by now to understand and forgive the quirks in my character that come out when I'm near large collections of books.

On the train ride home, I finished reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I turned the last page near Macarthur station, and chewed on the ideas through the Macarthur, Ashby, Berkeley, and North Berkeley BART stops, and on the walk from the North Berkeley BART to home. It's an interesting, well-written book, and I recommend it.

While at Borders, I picked up a copy of The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian. I enjoyed Master and Commander, and hope this will be as good. I also think it will suit my reading mood: I want a well-written narrative which is neither too deep nor too pulpy.

Some things are easy to repeat. I bring the same sweatshirt to the office most days; I cycle through the same web sites when I'm procrastinating; sometimes I'll even write the same sentence repeatedly (usually with increasing frustration as I fail to find better words). But it's impossible to cook lentils or fall in love the same way twice. I had lentils and rice this evening for dinner, and now I'm feeling immensely benevolent. Oh, brave new world that has such spices in it! And spinach and tomatoes -- those were good additions, too.

I didn't work through the entire weekend. Winnie came here to visit on Saturday, and on Sunday, I went to the south bay, and we swam and watched Shrek 2 (not at the same time). Still, I made it into the office Sunday morning, and again on Monday. I was running simulations and making movies to be used in a presentation and sales pitch at a workshop this week. Sanjay is giving the presentation, but no few of the visuals will be things that I produced. I also finally did a preliminary study of the effects of film thickness on the predicted quality of resonance, and discovered a secondary effect that I think is most interesting. Suffice it to say that the number I care about (call it Q) seems to vary by about five orders of magnitude over a small range of film thicknesses. It seems relatively stable outside that range. Now, I think this is immensely excititing for two reasons. First, it means I have a testable hypothesis: a qualitative behavior predicted by the model which I believe will occur somewhere in the range of fabricateable devices, even if I don't know the material properties precisely enough to predict exactly where. Second, it may be something that I can exploit -- or, rather, that I can tell my engineering colleagues how to exploit -- to build a system which blows our current prototypes out of the water (not to mention all but the most expensive of the existing alternatives).

Whee!

Somehow, though, even that excitement hasn't been enough to keep me crunching. Yesterday afternoon, I set up a long-running computation and then went outside to read from the Feynmann lectures, sip coffee, and munch on a biscotti. It was a pleasant break, but even with that break, I felt grouchy and tired by five or six, when I left the office. So I came home, showered, and went for a walk.

So -- books! My stroll ended in the nonfiction section of Black Oak Books. I'm now the proud owner of Wave Motion in Elastic Solids (Graff); Perturbation Methods (Nayfeh); and Mathematical Models in the Applied Sciences (Fowler). There were lots of other interesting-looking books, too, but I'd been thinking about getting those three for a few months (Graff, Nayfeh) to a few years (Fowler). Besides, some of the other books looked more interesting than they actually were -- and some of the books which were probably most interesting were also incomprehensible

There was a slim volume of classic papers from the mathematical masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, which looked immensely interesting. I opened it, read the introduction (in English), and then turned to the first paper -- only to be forcibly reminded that English was not the prefered language of technical communication at that time. There were papers written in French, German, and Russian, all with authors whose names most any engineer, scientist, or mathematician would recognize immediately. I know no French, precious little Russian, and just enough technical German to decipher the descriptions of the equations when needed.

So much for that. I walked home almost chortling aloud in glee, and my mood hasn't dimmed appreciably since. Whee! Books! This makes up for the ending to This Rough Magic, which was a fun book with a very mediocre conclusion. I finished it late Monday night. Perhaps that's why I felt so wiped out by Tuesday evening. It may have been a mediocre ending, but I did stay up past my bed time.

I had a cup of herbal tea and then went to bed at a reasonable hour, but I wasn't much more motivated today than I was yesterday. So I think I will take a day or two regrouping: walking, reading, doing laundry, enjoying the sun, and avoiding the office. Maybe I'll read some more from the Feynmann lectures, or maybe I'll go to the library and read from the work of E.B. White.

And, of course, I'll drink plenty of tea, cook good things to eat, and enjoy the leftover lentils.

• Currently drinking: Black tea with lychees

Bread from the Cheeseboard is one reason the Atkin's diet would be considered cruel and unusual punishment if anyone were ever subjected to it involuntarily (fads can be cruel and unusual, but perhaps don't count as punishment). I went there yesterday during a scheduled computer outage, and today when Winnie came to visit. I shared in a cheese-and-olive roll, a spicy roll laced with a less strong cheese, and a brioche. I also got a twist bread laced with nuts and raisins to go with dinner. It was all very good.

Plain yogurt with honey and fresh strawberries is good, too. So was the dish of red lentils with cilantro and tomato, and flavored with salt, paprika, curry powder, garam masala, turmeric, and jalapenu. So was the egg scramble with spinach, onion, pepper, and tomato for dinner this evening, or the almost-French onion soup for an appetizer (almost-French because I inherited extra chicken stock from a friend who moved recently, so I used that instead of the usual beef stock).

I sometimes miss meals. I sometimes live on rice and beans for a week, or on bread and cabbage (and salt). I'm not sure what to do with more than one fork, and even if I could stomach wine and ate meat regularly, I'd probably be largely indifferent to what vintage is supposed to complement what type of meat. But when I take the time to plan a meal, it's good.

The OpenDX visualization program is a new favorite in my software toolchest. I spent most of the day fiddling with it, but I don't think it was wasted time. I got some pretty pictures for my efforts -- and more importantly, I built the infrastructure that I'll need to generate lots more pretty pictures with much less effort.

• Currently drinking: Twinings Russian caravan blend

I went home in the late afternoon (around 5), showered and ate, and came back to the office in the early evening. The evening was full of tea (lemon-flavored black tea), good cheer, and only rarely a fit of mumbling confusion.

I'm comparing my simulated data to some measurements. I can run my simulations to convergence in order to feel some confidence that I'm getting the numbers appropriate for my model; but it is a model, and I know that I have the geometry slightly wrong and the material properties slightly wrong. And then there's the measured data -- which lacks any error bars. Being well aware of Murphy's laws, I expect that there are errors in the simulation from model simplifications, and also issues with the measurements that might have shown up if the number of measurements per device type was greater than one.

If science is a blind man exploring the world by vigorously poking with a stick, engineering sometimes seems like what happens when the blind man is handed a spear.

Friday went by in a blur. I met Sanjay at the coffee shop in the morning, where we talked about anchor losses and Earnshaw's theorem for a bit. Then we went to a dissertation talk, and from there to the SUGAR meeting. I dropped off stuff at the office, went to help Elaine move, ate dinner, and then walked back to campus -- to encounter Sanjay going the other way. His class had a final exam on Friday evening. We had a brief conversation about some ways in which electric filters can go awry, at the end of which he shook his head and said There's too much out there to learn. Then I walked the rest of the way to the office, and if I did anything with the rest of the evening, it wasn't sufficiently inspired that I remember it through the general bemusement of a tired end-of-week evening.

I briefly visited the office on Saturday morning to have a cup of coffee and do a little editing. Then I wandered back home, where I cleaned while I waited for Winnie. I find household cleaning very satisfying. It's so simple: scrubbing goes in, shine comes out. Then Winnie came, and we spent the day walking and reading and eating some fish chowder that I made for dinner. I thought I might read a while after she left, but I fell asleep before I even opened the book.

Winnie brought with her a collection of stackable plastic drawers, and this morning I moved the drawers into my room and my clothes into the drawers. I'd say that I moved my drawers into the drawers, but they're actually in a separate box at the foot of my bed -- alas! a pun wasted. After a flurry of rearrangement, one of my small black shelves was free, and I moved it to the kitchen, where it accomodated the piles of stuff -- flour, sugar, corn starch, spices, and the like -- which previously occupied one end of the dining table and threatened to take over all available eating space. If the Thing from the Swamp ever does come to devour us all, it would do well to disguise itself as such random clutter. Nobody would be wise to its existence until it was too late.

And so a wave of reorganization rippled through the apartment, and left things looking tidier in its wake. I rearranged my tea collection on the shelf, and moved my little porcelain figurine of the old sage so that he looks like he's beatifically pondering life from a cave in a cliffside of tea tins. The Old Man of the Tea and the Bookshelf Buddha -- we could build myths of such things, if the whim took us.

My whim for the afternoon took me to the office, though, where I spent an idle our finding out about various visualization tools for scientific data. Huzzah for pretty pictures! Learning how IBM's Data Explorer tool works is not exactly a high-priority item, but it's a weekend, and I'm willing to forgive myself a little wandering. Besides, without substantial wandering, most of the ideas I've had would have come to naught. Sometimes it's good to follow an outline, and sometimes it's good to follow where my wierd may lead.

And now the outline says I should go home and make dinner.

This afternoon, I walked to Andronico's and back with my nose in a book. I bought bread, cheese, milk, and some ice cream, and dined on French onion soup -- with my nose still in a book. I finished the book a little while ago, and the first thing that caught my eye was my copy of volume 2 of the Feynmann lectures, sitting unread at the end of my bed where I'd put it after I took it out of my backpack.

I read a little from Feynmann today, and a lot of Flynn this evening. I enjoyed Flynn's second book as much as I enjoyed the first, but I'll probably read those books just once. Okay, maybe I'll read them two or three times -- old books, like old friends, both need to a visit now and then. But in all, I'll spend more time with the Feynmann lectures, and that's as it should be.

Feynmann would have been quite a novelist if he'd ever turned his hand to it. He lived a sufficiently novel life that his autobiographical books come close. But I'm more impressed by those lecture notes than ever I'd be by novels. He chose his genre well.

Moving is unsettling not because of a change of locations, but because of a change of habits. I walk to work now, rather than bike. I keep my technical library at the office, rather than at home. I'm eating simpler meals, now, and fewer of them. I go to sleep earlier and wake earlier. In subtle ways and not-so-subtle ways, life here is different than it was in El Cerrito. It's not better or worse, on the mean -- just different.

When I moved here, I thought I might resume some of the habits of my first year of graduate school, before I moved to El Cerrito for four years. In a way I was right, but the habits I'm resuming are different than the habits I thought I'd resume. I've yet to visit Black Oaks, for instance, though I've been taking an hour or two off in the evenings to read fiction. But I do spend more time at the office or around campus, and I do enjoy some of my old walking routes around Berkeley.

I've fallen back to my old decorating style, too. My room is small, and the wall space is limited, so I haven't been tempted to put up my world map, or the print of the Japanese harbor. I've hung my scrolls and the placard of the frog claiming time's fun when you're having flies, but otherwise I've left the walls undecorated. But the wooden Buddha, the porcelain sage figurine, and Webster the Duck all observe benignly from their respective corners of the room, and the crazy-patch quilt is on my bed, so the room has color and character.

I put up more decorations after a time of turmoil a couple years ago. At the time, I felt like I needed the change in my surroundings. Then the decorations faded into the mental background, and I didn't change them for a long time. Now, simple seems attractive.

I've written little for this blog since I moved, though I've written letters and e-mails and text to go into papers. There has been plenty to tickle my fancy and make me think of writing, though. I thought to write when I read about the engineering design of the jogging bra on Mark Zimmermann's blog; and again when a bird sat just a few inches from my foot and examined me for most of a miute in that twitchy way birds have, turning its head to and fro to keep one eye on me, then the other. And I thought to write after I sat on the lawn outside the theological school, and listened to the organ playing for the graduation inside -- and then a few minutes later to a group practicing jazz on their saxophones across the lawn. The saxophonists were rather more talented than the organist was. But the urge to write lost to the urge to spend time away from the computer, and that's probably all for the better.

I had an e-mail conversation today with Vince about procrastinon scattering. What if procrastination was carried on particles or waves that reflected and refracted off various household objects? You could build procrastination isolation zones, or waveguides to channel procrastination toward your competitors! Perhaps I could write a simple code to calculate scattering of plane waves of procrastination entering a 2D room? I'd call it FSC2D -- Feng Shui CAD 2D. I wonder if I could sell it?

I've learned some things about wave scattering recently, which is why the topic surfaces in my idle thoughts. I've also been reading about waveguides and antennaes and cavity resonators, filter design, compressible flow calculations, magnetic levitation, Lambert's W function, and some fine points of Hamiltonian mechanics. I could tell you why I read about each of these things, and in what references, but at this point I'm a little unclear about when I read them. Memory is a curious thing. I can tell you that I drank one and a half glasses of orange juice from my tall tan plastic cup with the heel end of the last loaf of bread I bought -- but I can't remember what day I finished the loaf. And I can tell you exactly where in the library stacks I found each of the books I checked out on Monday, but I only know I checked them out on Monday by a process of elimination (it was some time this week, and it wasn't today).

Why do I remember this way? The best answer I can think of involves space aliens -- the googly-eyed ones that used to appear on Sesame Street and get excited over the noises the telephone made. It's probably as well that I never considered psychology as a major.

• Currently drinking: Water

The bouncing cow in my screensaver is eerily in time with the station to which I'm listening. And Blogger has completely changed.

I think I should put a blank look on my face and say Whoa now.

I left the office at 7:00 and did no work for the rest of the evening.

I'm looking forward to hitting it again tomorrow, though. This stuff is just so slick!

I am finally and truly moved out of the apartment in El Cerrito. We walked through the apartment with our landlords this evening, verified that everything was present as it should be, and turned in our keys. I moved my kitchen stuff to my neighbor's place on Tuesday night, but I forgot the stuff in our junk drawer. That's okay. It was easy to move.

At the other place I lived in El Cerrito -- now two moves ago -- I had my bed propped on cinder blocks. I liked having my bed propped up, both because it was at a more comfortable height for me, and because it opened the space beneath the bed for storage. After the walkthrough, Patxi and I took the cinder blocks out of the storage space where I put them two years ago. Patxi gave me a ride to my place and helped me carry the blocks upstairs, and I used them to prop up my bed here. The room now looks less cluttered, and feels more like home. Little changes make big differences in the feel to the room, and I've always disliked feeling crowded in. A cozy room is fine; a room crowded with mess is not.

Part of the reason I've written little this week is that I've been particularly excited about my work. I have an immensely ingenious peer in the civil engineering department whose ideas I'm using and extending, and those ideas work truly marvelously. More than once, though, I've thought to myself how difficult I would have found this a few years ago. Everything comes together easily now in part because of Matlab graphics features that only appeared in the past couple years; in part because of features of the C99 language standard which has only recently seen wide support; and in part because I now have the experience of writing lots and lots of finite element codes for a variety of problems.

The network tomography paper that I co-authored with Yan got into the SIGCOMM conference. I'm excited about that. SIGCOMM is a very good conference, and I think the work is solid. I also have some ideas for extensions that I think are very, very slick, both mathematically and practically. I have not yet tested those ideas in actual code, though; for the moment, what free time I have has been dedicated to other tasks.

Last Monday, we had to turn in first drafts of our fluids class project papers. In lecture that Tuesday, each of us was given papers by two of our peers. Our reviews of those papers were due on Monday, and each of us received the reviews for our papers in lecture on Tuesday. I went to our professor's office on Tuesday afternoon, and he commented that, though the reviews were anonymous, he knew the class sufficiently well that he was still able to match each review with the reviewer. I picked the first review off the stack, he said, and I thought, 'Dave Bindel wrote this.' Then I realized that I could identify the reviewers for the other papers, too; but yours was the one that set the thought. I was amused by that. I didn't think until later to ask which of my two reviews sparked that thought. I'd be curious to know, since the two reviews were very different -- I was impressed by one of the papers and unimpressed by the other, and it showed.

Deadlines focus the mind wonderfully. Had it not been for the deadline for my class paper -- which was on something called a perfectly matched layer for acoustics problems -- I probably would never have been so productive in the work with perfectly matched layers for elasticity which has taken so much of the past few days.

Fortunately, I have had relatively little need for network access in the past few days. The wireless network at Soda Hall has become a stumbling thing, sometimes dropping connections only a minute or two after they have been established. Of course, thus far I have not bothered to set up a network at my new place. I did get a wireless antenna that is supposed to boost the gain on my network card by about 5 dB; perhaps I'll be able to pick up an open nearby wireless network from my apartment using that. I don't expect to use it much, but it would be nice to be able to check e-mail on the weekends without going to the office. If nothing else, that would spread over three days the pain that I feel on Monday morning when I go into the office and throw away a weekend's worth of spam that the filters did not catch.

I wore a shirt today with Eschew Obfuscation written on the front. I've observed three reactions to this shirt: delight, despair, and incomprehension. Of course, some people ignore or don't notice the shirt, but that can hardly be counted as a reaction. In any case, I've noticed that English-speaking computer scientists tend to be amused by the shirt if they notice it at all. Friends from other engineering disciplines have more mixed reactions. I would tell you about the reactions of all my local friends in humanities and social sciences, but alas, there are very few.

Enough rambling. I think I'll spend a moment or two more admiring my newly-straightened room, and then perhaps sleep in the newly-lifted bed.

I've moved. Except for my dishes, all my stuff is at the new place. For the most part, I've packed everything away into my new space. The new space is smaller, and so I got rid of some of my stuff. With Winnie's help, I sorted through my clothes, and picked some to turn into rags and some to take to Goodwill. I also took the television to Goodwill -- I got it for free a year and a half ago, and only took it out of my closet when I moved. I will probably get rid of my old computer as well, and try to sell some of my fiction collection. If I feel particularly Spartan, I may choose to get rid of more stuff.

Moving and organizing is tiring, though. I was exhausted by the time I came home from dinner last night, and I ran out of enthusiasm today by the middle of the afternoon. So I came to the office, and here I still am, listening to the end of To the Best of Our Knowledge. I did my last fluids homework, caught up with my e-mail, and did a little programming. It was a nice break.

And now I'm going to walk home.

If my room seemed a little different yesterday, it seems much different today. I picked up keys this morning, and a friend and I moved all the furniture except my lamp and my chair, along with most of the miscellaney around my room. Tomorrow morning, I'll put the remaining odds and ends in bags, and tomorrow evening, I'll finish moving those odds and ends, and I'll spend some time vacuuming. For as often as I vacuumed around the room, there were a lot of bits of junk under the bed and behind the shelves.

Books! Books! I finished moving my technical library to the office last night. For the moment, there are about 175 books, and another four shelf-feet of papers and journals, shelved, piled, and otherwise packed into a space meant for a more modest collection. The tall wood bookshelf at home is empty, though the smaller bookshelves where I keep my fiction collection are still neatly packed. My room feels different without that mass of references; and the office feels different with them. Part of it, I think, is the colors: the Springer books with their bright yellow covers, SIAM books garbed in green, Dover texts in a rainbow of hues, and other covers in more muted tones. In any case, I notice the bright colors when they move that far, even when I took them for granted as they slowly diffused between my shelves and my desk.

On KQED's Forum program yesterday, a panel discussed writer's block. I missed the panel's response to the caller who wanted to bring poetry to academic writing. How sad.

I feel I should write something profound about the rest of the show, but I lack the right words. Or, more accurately, I find I'm more interested in doing other things. Such is life.

I have Serre's book on my shelf, actually. He is as terse as some Russian analysts. We spent a month on representation theory in the second semester of my graduate algebra course at Maryland, and covered about twenty pages of Serre's book.

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be J.-P. Serre's Linear Representations of Finite Groups. My creator is a Professor at the College de France. He has previously published a number of books, including Groupes Algebriques et Corps de Classes, Corps Locaux, and Cours d'Arithmetique (A Course in Arithmetic, published by Springer-Verlag as Vol. 7 in the Graduate Texts in Mathematics). Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test

I spent some time at play this weekend. On Friday night, I ate with Winnie at Nizza La Bella, a little French/Italian restaurant on San Pablo Ave, near the intersection with Solano. We had an excellent meal, which cost roughly the same amount that admission to the spring ball would have cost. I visited Barnes and Noble briefly on Saturday afternoon, and walked in the sun to Solano Avenue for brunch late this morning. Dave invited Patxi, Esther, and I over for dinner this evening, too. There is something very satisfying about sharing a meal with friends; even on the days when I'm feeling hermit-like, I usually feel better after meal shared (though perhaps in companionable silence).

The rest of the time, I worked on the fluids class paper. I finished around 11 this evening. I managed to fit what I wanted to say into five pages, but I had not a centimeter of space left over. Of course, it took me longer to figure out what I wanted to say than it did to write. It seems as though for every sentence I write, I erase at least two sentences -- and that's when I construct a first draft! Of course, for each sentence I speak, there are usually two or three that I decide are best left unspoken. Any edged tool deserves to be used with care; words are no different.

I'm glad I was able to spend the weekend with this work, though. I needed to teach myself something about this topic, and the class deadline was a good excuse to do it now. The ideal is simple enough: time runs in one direction, but the wave equations of mathematical physics allow solutions which go either forward or backward in time. For computer simulations, as for analytical calculations, there needs to be some way to pick out the solution that goes in the right direction. The details, of course, are more complicated. At this point in my career, though, they are manageably more complicated, and I was able to set up the theory, numerically and analytically solve several test problems to illustrate the point, and write everything up in the course of about three days.

And now I will read iaijutsu for half an hour before I sleep.

The course project for my fluids class is due Monday, and I have work yet to do. I forget who wrote in a letter that he was sorry to be so rushed, and the letter would be shorter if he had more time. I should look up that quote, since I refer to it once every month or two, and I always forget the source. Whoever said it, he was spot on. My project paper can be at most five pages, and while I have the time to say what I need in that space, I do not think I have the time to say all I want. Since at least two of my classmates will be forced to review what I write, perhaps it's just as well that I haven't the time to pack the information as densely as I might wish to.

Despite time pressure from the project and from my work, I took time yesterday and today to take care of mundane tasks like grocery shopping and laundry. I also took a little time to relax. After class today, I turned on my radio and listened to news while I walked home. It was clear, warm, and breezy, a wonderful day for walking. Yesterday, I ate Mexican food with my office mates for lunch, and sipped tea and chatted with a friend in the evening after my grocery trip. Tomorrow night, I'll go to the spring ball with Winnie. It's good to have distractions from work.

I've been re-reading Autumn Lightning, Dave Lowry's book about the history of one of the Japanese schools of swordsmanship, and his education in that style as a young man. Lowry writes well, and I enjoy reading his work now as much as I did when I read it four years ago, or again four years before that. I'll soon go back to my pile of books that I have yet to read; but for now, it's comforting to read an old favorite.

I spent this evening listening to Kupo Beat (a weekly program of music from Africa and the African diaspora) and puzzling over a code that wasn't behaving as I thought it should. My problem was simple, and I wanted to use it as the example for my class project, but I couldn't seem to get the same answer from my program and my hand analysis. After an hour of puzzling, I discovered a sign error. Now it works beautifully, and the only trouble is choosing which of my figures I should include in the paper.

I move in eight days, and I have not yet begun to pack. I'm glad I don't have much stuff to move. Even so, I foresee another busy week ahead.

Since Patxi and Esther moved, I have not had network access from home. I know others in the complex have wireless networks, and I could probably get an acceptable signal from one of them. I have not tried to do so. I'm sure I could make good use of the network, just as I would probably enjoy watching television if we had one, or as I would use a cell phone if I had one. I don't have anything against those things -- but as it is, it's nice to be spend some time free of such distractions. I have enough to do with books and baking, radio and reading papers, computing and contemplating. And when I feel like writing a blog entry, I can record it on my local drive and post it in the morning.

For the first few days after Patxi and Esther left, the apartment felt eerie. I still forget that the living room lamps are gone, and get confused when flipping the light switch has no effect. But otherwise, the empty space is starting to feel just about right. I'm certainly no longer bothered by the mess; it's probably best that Patxi and Esther took the cleaning supplies on Saturday morning, or I'd still be cleaning every morning.

I made some lima beans and tomatoes late this afternoon. Mike and Tracy were kind enough to give me a can of tomatoes, and for dinner we shared both my lima beans and the vegetable dish Tracy had made. My larder is running low, but I didn't feel like fighting through weekend grocery lines. So I'm baking bread now; it's a perfect day for it, and bread, lima beans, and fresh green peppers with a little salt will be enough food for a day or two, until I get to the grocery store.

Patxi and Esther had a barbeque yesterday. I thought to get them some spices as a housewarming gift. But the lines at the grocery stores dissuaded me; and it turned out to be just as well, since they already bought spices for themselves. Instead of getting spices, I went to Barnes and Noble and bought a copy of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook for them. It was a better choice, and I enjoyed wandering around the bookstore for a bit better than I would have enjoyed the same time in the grocery store.

I spent more time on leisure reading this weekend than I have in many weeks. I finished Alistair Cooke's book of biographical sketches (Memories of the Great and the Good), and Winnie and I finished another chapter in Cooke's America. I also read a few hundred pages of Moon's Legacy of Gird; I read more of it than I intended, actually. But today was a rainy weekend day of the type that's perfect for reading.

This evening, though, is a time for writing. I spent some time on Friday afternoon to do the homework I'd hoped to do by Friday morning (for a meeting with collaborators, not for a class). I may spend some more time working through that this evening. Or perhaps I'll work on the fluids homework that's due on Tuesday, or spend some time working through the derivation in one of the papers on drum acoustics sitting in my paper pile. Of course, all this is just a distraction meant to kill the time until the bread is ready. I have to keep my priorities straight, after all.

• Currently drinking: Chamomile tea with lemon

I'm glad weeks like this don't come often. I was productive, but I'm very tired.

Today was a day of near misses, the type that make me irritable and panicky while they happen, and then grateful afterward. It could have been so much worse.

• I figured out this morning that I'd never received my W2 forms. Fortunately, the university payroll office can produce duplicates in a matter of seconds. Everyone I asked for help along the way was able to point me in the right direction, promptly and courteously. It's hard to complain about that. My taxes are done now.
• The Thursday deadline for the extended abstract is soft. I don't intend to stretch it, but that's still reassuring.
• The power went off for ten minutes in the middle of the afternoon. When it came back up, a few of the file servers were gone. It turns out that there's something screwy with the uninterruptible power supply (it appears to interrupt itself), but they were able to restore the file servers by late in the afternoon. The server with my directory on it was one of the last to be recovered, but since I spent the mid-afternoon working in a coffee shop and the late afternoon buying toilet paper -- have I mentioned everything in the apartment was Patxi's? -- it made little difference to me.
• I got home and checked e-mail just before Patxi unplugged the cable modem and took it to his new apartment. There was an alarming mail from Sanjay saying that a funding agency needed something from us by tomorrow. I came into the office, since I thought I might need the network resources, and I might end up burning the midnight oil for his request. It turned out that what they needed was one paragraph, and he just wanted a sounding board.
• The microwave was gone, so I didn't heat the enchiladas I'd planned to have for dinner. But I had a slice of olive bread, some cheese, an orange, and some apricots, so that was fine.
• I couldn't find a hot water pot in the grocery store, but the hot water spigot in the kitchenette has finally been repaired, and so I still had my evening tea.

The day turned out well. I can't complain.

It has been almost a year since I started writing this blog. It has been about a year since Saddam Hussein's downfall. And it has been about a year since I organized my personal papers. It seems like I always organize under the same impetus: I need to make sure I have all the information I need for taxes. And, as always, I think the task of organizing all my papers, which I spent the past few hours doing, will prove far more tedious than actually filling out the tax forms.

Patxi and Esther will take the cable modem with them tomorrow. I expect I'll spend more time in the office after that.

Patxi and Esther are finishing their packing. They've reserved a truck, and will move tomorrow. I helped classify kitchen items for a while earlier. Tea, tea cups, tea pots, electric kettle -- those are mine. Coffee items and most of the mugs (except the black ones and the Dilbert ones) -- those are Patxi's. The baking sheets and pans, the spices, the cheap beat-up frying pans without nonstick -- those are mine. The wok, the good skillet, and almost all the utensils (except two forks, two spoons, and two butter knives) -- Patxi's. And everything outside my kitchen, the bedroom, and one half of the bathroom cabinet is Patxi's.

In a couple more weeks, I'll move back to Berkeley. I'll miss El Cerrito, but at the same time, I'm starting to look forward to the move. I lived in Berkeley for my first year of graduate school; it was miserable in some ways, but it was pleasant in others. I'll be able to walk home late at night without waiting twenty minutes for a train. I'll be close to Black Oak Books again, and to Shattuck Avenue, and to interesting parks. I'll be closer to my favorite cafes.

I remember my weekend routine from my first year, when I lived in Berkeley. I would buy a book from Black Oaks on a Saturday walk, and bring it home with me. After making dinner, I'd retreat to my room, sit in my inflatable chair next to my floor lamp, and alternate between reading and radio listening. On Saturday, I'd listen to Prairie Home Companion and Beyond 2000, a show of science fiction stories turned into radio drama. On Sunday, I'd listen to To the Best of Our Knowledge -- the same show I'm listening to now. Between programs, I'd read. My roommate was rarely home for most of those weekend evenings, and the quiet was undisturbed. I never quite went back to that routine after my move to El Cerrito.

The EECS department at Berkeley will hire a few new faculty members next year, and so we've had several interesting job talks. Earlier this week, I heard a candidate talk that touched problems from combinatorics, PDE-constrained optimization, and quantum computation -- and was still comprehensible. At least, I thought he was comprehensible. A job talk is an odd balancing act: there's always too much material to cover, but it must be presented in a way that is still accessible and interesting. There's an edge of tension to a job talk that's missing in an ordinary seminar talk. The matrix computations seminar today interested me just as much as the candidate talk, drew from nearly as many disciplines, and similarly balanced the completeness and accessibility of the presentation; but it was much more relaxed, and I think that contributed to my enjoyment and understanding. Besides, today's speaker spoke with a Dutch accent which I found easy to listen to.

I gave a talk yesterday to a group of MEMS engineers. It turned out to be a very small group; everyone who would normally attend was busy, including the guy who originally invited me to speak. Such is life. I figured out some interesting things in the process of preparing the talk, and I may have convinced someone to use my software, so I can hardly complain.

In a way, classes are a pleasant break from preparing and hearing talks, not to mention from coding and writing. We're studying stability in my fluids course. The material so far is elementary, or at least familiar, but I've still remained entertained. How do you tell if your roommate is stable? asked the professor. Wait until he's at equilibrium -- asleep on the sofa, say -- and then make a loud noise to perturb him. If he quickly goes back to sleep, he's very stable. If he runs to the kitchen, grabs a knife, and chases you around the apartment, he's probably unstable.

I also amused myself for half an hour this morning solving a question asked by a colleague: what does this series sum to?

∞ ∑ n = 0

sin((2n+1)y) ⁄ (2n+1)

The answer is π/4 -- independent of y. It's simple if you remember the appropriate calculus tricks. I'm still unsure why Jason cared about this sum, though I assume it was probably for some sort of series solution to a differential equation. Still, I was grateful for the brief distraction. Short, easy problems are a boon. I have spent too much focus on work recently, and it's starting to show; my eating and sleeping patterns are both off.

A fellow student in my graduate algebra class at Maryland once claimed that Gauss went clean-shaven when he worked on algebra, but went scruffy when he did analysis. I expect the story was apocryphal, but if it was not, I seem to be mimicking Gauss in at least one trivial way. Yesterday and today were full of analysis, leading to satisfactory ends in some cases (I have a perturbation-based method for thermoelastic loss calculations which runs way faster than the straightforward approach), and less satisfactory results in other cases (using slightly different versions of the same formula, I get answers which range from 50 to 50000 -- and I trust none of them). Even when I'm not entirely successful, I find this sort of analysis satisfying; unless there's some analysis to aim a computation, the computer will usually give answers which are at best useless and at worst misleading.

However much I admire Gauss and enjoy analysis, I do need to shave.

I've done a poor job of maintaining this blog lately, and have only done an adequate job of responding to friendly e-mails. I have taken some time from work to do other things, though. I walked home a couple times in the last week. The route I take is about five miles, mostly downhill, and it takes me just over an hour and a quarter to walk it. I usually watch the sunset at the end of the walk; I often smell the scents of evening. One day last week, I stopped at a cafe near campus on my walk home. There were several undergrads there, chatting merrily with each other. One pair was discussing fraternity politics; another was talking about which majors on campus were most difficult (with each party in the conversation convinced that he surely had the most difficult major). They spoke loudly enough that I couldn't easily ignore them, and I mentally rolled my eyes a few times as I listened. Was I ever that young?

Of course I was that young. I still am. But in every young man, an old man bides his time. The converse might be true as well, if those who believe in reincarnation have the right of it.

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime and honey

Alistaire Cooke died yesterday at age 95. I was introduced to Cooke through his Letter to America, the long-running radio series that ended only a couple weeks ago. I enjoyed his radio program, and I have enjoyed his writing. I only hope I survive to such energetic old age.

I spoke at the local matrix computations seminar today. I stayed up too late last night working on the slides, and my presentation was unpolished, but the talk went acceptably well. Whether or not my audience learned anything new from my talk, I learned something truly remarkable from it. In preparing my talk, I tried to describe in pictures why a certain phenomena occurs. When I described the picture during the talk, I realized that I had not carried my idea as far as it would go. After lunch with colleagues, I walked home, thinking as I went. I paused at the French Hotel Cafe and wrote down my idea, then wrote about a different problem for a while. I finished my walk; put my room in order and checked e-mail; had dinner, tea, and an interesting conversation about Hamilton's principle with Dave; talked to Winnie; and then returned to my insight from earlier in the day.

I wrote the programs I needed in about twenty minutes. Neither one was complicated. I tested them on a small problem, and they worked beautifully. They were fast, too, and solved most of my problem in a fraction of the time taken by approaches I'd tried until now. So I gleefully set up a larger problem and set my programs to work -- and the network connection died.

That's okay. The network will come back tomorrow. It was still a good day.