I spent much of the past two days dealing with Fortran 77 programs. I would say that I've spent the past two days swearing at the Fortran compiler, but the truth is that I'm much too mild-mannered to swear at such a commonplace nuisance. I satisfy myself by muttering I hate Fortran 77 from time to time, and by taking frequent breaks for tea.

Much of what I do on a day-to-day basis involves combining subprograms written in Fortran, C, C++, and Matlab into a single program that will solve problems that interest me -- and that may solve problems that interest other people, too. Not all of these subprograms were designed to work nicely together, and so it isn't always trivial to write the interface code that glues the program together. I typically receive a few e-mails each week asking how to use C and Fortran together, usually from people who want to use CLAPACK 3.0, a library which I built in my first years at Berkeley by translating the LAPACK library. This week, I've answered an unusual number of requests for technical help, not all of them related to CLAPACK. Between answering those requests and extending the finite element program FEAP to solve a problem in my own research, I've been dealing more than normal with some obscure, arcane, and frustrating details of various computer systems.

Some days, I think the work of building interfaces between different programs is like bringing together two or three unfriendly and remarkably stupid parties in a negotiation. In this analogy, I suppose I would be the skilled negotiator. But when I visualize a skilled negotiator in my mind, I see a middle-aged gentleman with a fringe of grey hair and a solemn and dignified demeanor. I lack grey hair, and am far too familiar with the workings of my own mind to call myself solemn and dignified, no matter what the rest of the world may see. Perhaps a better analogy would be this: I am like a monkey with a staple gun, a clever creature of questionable sanity who delights in firmly attaching together articles which are not usually joined. Likening myself to a monkey may be no more realistic than likening myself to a diplomat, but the notion of stapling a sock to the ear of a gargoyle on the roof is more amuses me more than the notion of concluding a treaty.

I think most people are likely to flee a monkey with a staple gun rather than to thank him. But almost everyone who has asked me a question this week has said Thank you after I've answered. I appreciate the thanks. Thanks keep me answering questions -- thanks and bananas. Of course, I'm aware that I can't record e-mails of thanks or acknowledgements in papers and theses on my CV. Still, I'm pleased to here that I've helped.

As I write, I'm listening to an Internet radio station. The station plays electronic music, and the altered sound of the bass drums in the song that is playing reminds me of a rhythmically talented bullfrog. Croak! Thump! Croak! Thump! It tickles my fancy to hear these things, even if it might annoy me in other circumstances. My taste in music, like my taste in food, is catholic. What a wonderful thing it is to be able to listen to classical music, news programming from NPR, jazz, or techno just by turning a dial! At the same time, I'm glad that the radio and the computer both have convenient off switches. I like to write in my blog and to surf the web, but I also like to write with a pencil and read a book.

I think it is time to turn off the computer. A book, a glass of water, and a warm bed all beckon.

Today was a day of tea.

After this week's social dancing class, Winnie and I went to San Francisco for high tea. We had one pot of tea flavored with black currants and one of a blend of black teas. There were also finger foods to savor between sips.

In the evening, I went to dinner with friends at La Mediterranee, a local Mediterranean restaurant. The wait was longer than we expected, but the food came quickly after we were seated. It all tasted good to me. We ate cake at home. Two friends brought tea with them. My friends have excellent taste.

It was a full day, and I'm omitting details. In the brief quiet moments, I did a little work, listened to the radio some, and read more from Simple and Direct by Jacques Barzun. And now I will read a little more and go to sleep.

And tomorrow I'll start with a cup of tea.

I was sitting in a chair in the Barnes and Noble Cafe this evening, reading a book and nibbling on a cookie, when I was distracted by a comment from the people chatting at a nearby table. You actually remember CS 61A [Berkeley's introductory CS course]? one exclaimed. Yeah, said the other, but all that stuff you learn is useless. When I started this job, I was looking at code with some other programmers, and I said something looked like it was O(n³). They laughed at me, and I said to forget it.

The conversation at the next table turned to the topic of night life in various Bay Area communities, and I stopped listening. I finished my dessert, closed my book, and left the store. But as I went to buy milk and then to walk home, I continued to think about the exchange I had overheard.

How quickly I never use it becomes It is useless! A college acquiantance of mine -- a business major with a concentration in information systems -- once told me that computer science education was worse than useless, because computer science students learned irrelevant crap. Business majors who had introductory programming coursework, he argued, are in a far better position: they know all the programming anyone really needs, and they have business savvy as well. I've heard others say similar things, though less bluntly. Oddly, I know few who say the same of mathematics. Of course, I know many people who have an unwarranted high opinion of their own computer expertise, but most of those people find mathematics frightening -- at best . Perhaps they would prefer not to mention math at all, for fear that an integral might smite them from the sky, hurled like lightning by a vengeful god with a short temper and a part-time job teaching freshman calculus.

My college acquiantance's attitude annoyed me, but I shrugged it off easily. I was more disturbed by the statement I overheard tonight. It is one thing to hear a businessman say that an understanding of electrical current is useless; it is quite another to hear the same from an electrician who supposedly learned his trade in school and who helps design the wiring for new office buildings. The businessman may be blindly, willfully, and woefully ignorant, but he is probably less dangerous in his ignorance than the electrician.

Perhaps I'll regret that metaphor by the morning. Or perhaps I'll have forgotten it.

Every night since Wednesday, including tonight, I've thought I'll take a break this evening and spend a little time reading before I sleep. But I haven't quite managed it yet. It was a productive week, but a busy one.

Tomorrow, I intend to spend a little time reading before I sleep.

Am I incorrigible, encouragable, or simply uncorrugated?

I finished Master and Commander (Patrick O'Brian) and Angels and Demons (Dan Brown) this weekend and last night. I enjoyed the former a good deal more. I didn't understand most of the nautical terms -- this despite the fact that many pages are spent in explanations of those exact same terms to the ship's doctor.

I re-discovered today that I cannot maintain adequate attention through 3.5 hours of lecture without some break. Today was the first meeting of an interesting, if hastily-organized, course on numerical optimization. Alas, it came on the heels of an hour and a half of fluid mechanics. The first lecture of the optimization course could be entitled a two hour review of elementary analysis: in which we briefly review definitions related to topology, sequences, continuity, and compactness, focusing predominantly on the real line. At least, it could be so entitled if the title conventions of former centuries remained in vogue. Fortunately, times change, and so the first lecture would more likely be entitled lecture 1. Regardless of the title -- and of the familiarity of the material -- I could feel my eyes crossing by six.

I think I will stick to fluid mechanics and the matrix computations seminar for this semester's formal offerings.

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime and honey

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day. Sadly, it seems overshadowed by football at the moment.

For my part, I think prognosticating rodents are far cooler than half-time commercials.

It's a beautiful day. We opened the windows to the apartment earlier, and I can hear the sounds of the wind rustling the branches outside. I plan to go walking with Winnie in about an hour when she arrives in El Cerrito. For the moment, though, I need to stay near the phone -- so it seems like a good time to catch up on some writing.

I already spent some time outside today. My bike is in working order again at last, and I took a ride around the block to try it out. Traffic aside, it was grand to be out riding again. Before the bike ride, I walked to the post office to drop of some mail, and from there to Barnes and Noble for a morning cup of coffee and some browsing. I deliberately left my glasses at home, a tactic which I find usually keeps me from becoming so engrossed in browsing as I otherwise might. Glasses or not, though, I was distracted today. I have two new books in my collection: The Pig Who Sang to the Moon by Jeffrey Masson, and The Value of Science, a collection of three books by the famous French mathematician Henri Poincaré.

Sadly, Poincaré is not as well-known outside mathematics as he deserves to be. He was a giant in mathematics, a physicist of no mean skill, and an author of several popular science articles for the general public. The article cited above (from an excellent site on the history of mathematics) ends with the following quote from Poincaré's funeral, which I think is quite well-put:

[M Poincaré was] a mathematician, geometer, philosopher, and man of letters, who was a kind of poet of the infinite, a kind of bard of science.

We need more such figures today (and not just in Georgia).

My proudest accomplishment of the week is, alas, probably an insignificant one. On Thursday night, I finished writing (rewriting, actually) a small program to print mathematical documents typeset by Kahan for an Epson FX80 printer using a custom font. My program generates Postscript code, which I then usually feed through ps2pdf to obtain a PDF document. Unlike previous versions, this code correctly handles all of the documents which I've received from Kahan over the past couple years, including switching back and forth between fonts. And if the code ever does encounter a special character that I forgot about, it will fail gracefully -- an error message describing the unknown character will be sent to the console, and a placeholder will go into the document.

It may not be the most marvelous thing I've ever done, but it was a lot of fun to write.

If I had any doubts that the spring semester is well and truly underway, they would be quashed after a glance at the seminar schedule this week. The matrix computations seminar began this Thursday with a special seminar -- Gene Golub spoke about the solution of real positive nonsymmetric linear systems -- and there was a guest from Japan who spoke on Friday about some of the work done at Chuo University on combining measured data with finite element models in order to more accurately predict microsystem behavior. I attended both those meetings, but I missed both the presentation by MEMSCAP representatives (MEMSCAP runs several standard MEMS fabrication processes) and the presentations for Sensor Nets Day. The seminar calendar is full of other presentations, too -- they might be less relevant to me, but some sound interesting nonetheless.

One of those interesting presentations is coming soon, but remains to be scheduled. My fluids professor is hosting a visitor this semester who is, among other things, an expert in creeping flows and lubrication theory. We've been talking for the last two weeks about creeping flows. Creeping flows are flows in which viscous effects dominate inertial effects. Think about trying to move a marble through cold honey, by way of example -- unless the marble is fired into the honey at high speeds or something similarly implausible, you can neglect the inertial forces (the ma term in F = ma). Since inertial forces scale with volume, it's usually possible to neglect inertia when dealing with very small objects like single-celled animals or microsystems. Since I spend a lot of time thinking about micron-scale machines, creeping flows are particularly interesting to me. Lubrication theory deals with creeping flows in narrowly confined channels -- like the layer of air between a transparency and a projector, the layer of air that supports an air hockey puck, or even a layer of drying paint. A lot of the flows in MEMS involve creeping flows in a thin film of fluid, so lubrication theory is pretty relevant to me, too. So I'm looking forward to this presentation, even though I don't know when it is.

Of course, the fact that it is relevant to my research is an excuse, if a true excuse. The real reason that I'm going is because I think the topic is intrinsically interesting, and because it sounds as though the presenter is one of the grand old statesmen of fluid mechanics -- and such gentlemen often have an entertaining presentation style.

Of course, going to lectures costs time and attention. After the presentation on Friday by our guest from Japan, I and some of my colleagues presented on MEMS simulation, design, measurement, and model verification in which we've been involved. I'd heard most of the presentations before, but felt obliged to stay for the sake of politeness. Polite or not, though, my concentration was spent halfway through the second mini-presentation. I'd have probably felt miserable and started pining for a coffee break if I hadn't had my pencil and pad with me. As it is, I doodled my way through some calculations which I think may prove useful. I need to sanity-check them tonight or tomorrow in order to be sure.

I added command line history and a proper X11 refresh loop to FEAP this morning. It took perhaps an hour of reading last, another half hour this morning, and an hour of coding, testing, and debugging. That was about as I estimated -- which is surprising, as I'm not very good at such estimates. The rest of the day was not as productive. I seem to be prey to a dark and distracted mood, and did a lot of wandering in circles.

I enjoyed the social dance class yesterday. After dancing, we read, and then ate Indian food. It was all quite good.

I took a walk this afternoon. I'm out of English Breakfast tea, and planned to get some more from Peet's Coffee and Tea on Solano Avenue. It takes me just under half an hour to walk there from my home in El Cerrito at my normal clip. I'm not sure whether it took more or less time today, as I was trying to walk and read at the same time. Eventually, I gave up on that idea as too hazardous; there are just too many dog leashes stretched across the walkway (not to mention too many cars in crosswalks, or parking meters and lamp posts along the sidewalk).

I had a bite to eat and read for a while at the Cactus Taqueria near the top of Solano, then turned around and walked home. I didn't stop at Peet's. I took a different route home than the one I usually follow, and my wanderings took me through the center of Kensington, past the old mission-style chapel. The view from there is beautiful, even on a cloudy day like today. The sky was slate grey with clouds, but I could still see the Bay, the bridges, and Albany Hill.

After I returned home, it occurred to me that if I'd planned to pick up cheese as well as tea, I could have been part of a Wallace and Gromit episode. All I'd need would be a dog. Okay, I'd need some improbable tools and perhaps a herd of sheep, too, but it's the thought that counts. And the tea and cheese counts, too.

I shared a dinner of chili and rice with Patxi and Esther this evening. Esther made cornbread. She replaced the usual vegetable oil with olive oil -- necessity being the mother of invention -- and the result was quite tasty. We also had grated cheese laced with jalapenos for the top. It was delicious. As I was preparing the rice, Esther commented -- not for the first time -- how odd it was that Patxi and I prepare rice in a pot. It seems that many of my friends who eat a lot of rice use a rice cooker, and are a little bemused that we would prepare decent rice without such a gadget. In fact, Patxi and I do have a rice cooker, but it invariably burns the rice, and so we rarely use it.

Otherwise, today was a lazy sort of day. I thought I might do some work, but I was distracted and instead spent the time reading about cascading style sheets and about various GUI toolkits. I also spent some time reading various articles about intellectual property. There was a NY Times Magazine article on current battles over copyright, and I'd recently filled out a member opinion poll for the US ACM policy arm regarding legal protections for data collections. And it all set me to thinking.

The ACM poll results, last I looked, were very telling. About 80 percent of the respondents strongly agreed, and another 10 percent agreed with the ACM's position that current legal protections are adequate. But software developers have depressingly little clout when it comes to the actions of Congress and business. The SCO law suits seem to me more about businesses hiring lawyers to march to war than about any real point of technical merit. Diebold would be in far better shape if only they listened to their programmers before releasing their voting machines. Large companies can afford to engage in patent warfare, and they do so -- but the programmers I know agree almost uniformly that software patents as posed now are just foolish. And so it goes.

The current environment in the US with regards to copyrights and with respect to cryptographic export restrictions means that some software projects are migrating abroad -- and no longer accept input from American programmers. Those who warn of cyber terrorists urge industry and academia to address problems with the current computer security infrastructure, but judgements based on laws like the DMCA discourage researchers from pursuing those same problems. Similarly, various agencies seem to feel it's important to ensure the existence of another generation of researchers competent to analyze physical threats, whether they be biological, nuclear, or whatever; but at the same time, foreign graduate students who come even close to those areas face intimidation and woe, and domestic students... well, it seems that more domestic students want to go into business than into science or engineering.

After all, business is where the money is.

Happy Year of the Monkey! Gung Hay Fat Choy!

I wrote today.

I've been thinking recently about mathematical writing. It's a tricky business. Ideally, mathematical writing should simultaneously be concise, precise, elegant, lucid, and correct. Each goal is difficult in its own right. Further, there is tension in these goals; sometimes it is easier to be lucid by writing (at least initially) an imprecise or slightly incorrect statement which conveys the idea of a proof, then filling in corrections later. The conventions used by most authors are a compromise. It is hard to write proofs which are precise and correct without sounding stilted, because ordinary speech patterns are often too vague. There is a reason why we write let k be an integer instead of k is an integer; the former sentence defines the type of k, while the latter sentence observes a fact which might be a consequence of something else (e.g. Let k = m + n where m and n are integers. Then k is an integer).

There are other conventions, too, which students of mathematics absorb over time. The phrase for suppose not usually starts a proof by contradiction; the phrase without loss of generality means that the proof treats a special case to which all other cases can be reduced trivially. Even the vague-sounding phrase almost everywhere has a precise meaning: a statement holds a.e. (almost everywhere) if it is true except on a set of zero measure.

I recently read a draft of a paper which severely abused the conventions of mathematical style. It was not a mathematical paper, and I think the author only adopted the style because he thought it sounded impressive. I read the paper slowly, marking as I went, and when I finished I walked to the bathroom and washed my hands and face with hot water until I felt better. I was in the bathroom for several minutes.

My favorite mathematical authors usually write two or three descriptions of their ideas. First, they describe the idea at a high level, often in intuitive language: this quantity describes how close a matrix is to being singular; this theorem describes why we cannot comb a sphere covered with hair without creating a part somewhere. Then there may be a special illustrative case, something to show the idea without the baggage of technical details -- though the technical details may be mentioned so that the reader is alerted to their existence. Finally, there is a theorem and a proof, which should ideally be written using a concise and suggestive notation. If done well, the reader is left pondering the ideas presented, and does not have to battle constant confusion because the author has decided to make n approach zero as an integer epsilon goes to infinity.

I cope gracefully enough with authors who present their intuition clumsily. Similarly, I'm entirely sympathetic to authors who occasionally resort to awkward devices or notation in their proofs. But those who write a vague and imprecise proof sketch and claim they are done irritate me immensely, as do those who write enormous quantities of unmotivated (and often irrelevant) algebra without even attempting to help the reader develop a mental road map first.

Concise, precise, elegant, lucid, and correct -- that's my ideal. I read few papers, mathematical or otherwise, that do well in all categories. I'm still critical of my own ability to be simultaneously concise and lucid, but I leave room for self-forgiveness. And I make progress, however slowly.

If only I could apply the same criteria to political speeches!

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime

Oh. All I needed to get my code to link under Solaris was to use the -mimpure-text option. Obvious, yes?

I don't really hate computers. And I don't hate Fortran 77, either, my frequent complaints notwithstanding. But that sort of linking problem sometimes makes me drift from a Muppet personality of Gonzo (generally friendly, if a bit confusing) to something more like Miss Piggy (Hi-ya!).

I think it's time for lunch. Maybe I'll play the Swedish Chef for a few minutes.

First day of classes for Spring 2004! The first fluid mechanics lecture is this afternoon; the starting topic for the course seems to be flow at very low Reynolds numbers. Fun stuff.

I bought a bookshelf and an under-bed plastic storage unit at Target on Saturday. I carried it home, assembled it, put books on it, and suddenly found that I could see the spines on most of my books! But there was still some double-stacking, and if I put one more book on my desk I would probably reach critical mass and the whole pile would self-destruct. So after we returned from a dance lesson at Stanford, I asked Winnie if she would drive me to Target for a second set of shelves. She was willing, and getting the shelves home proved much easier with a car. So on Sunday night, I assembled another set of shelves, reshelved the forty books on my desk (I counted) and shelved the remaining double-stacked books. I filled up two of the three shelves in the unit, so I have some room for expansion.

Whee! Books! I found a few that I thought I'd lost or loaned away. Hello, Mythical Man Month! Fancy meeting you here.

Yes, I talk to my books. No, they don't talk back.

I spent the morning of MLK day reading prognostications about a digital Pearl Harbor, stupid patent tricks, and a college kid named Mike Rowe who set up a site called MikeRoweSoft -- and was sued by Microsoft for it. I came away growling. Computer security experts whose sole qualifications are in management of a security-related company, or in dire prognostications, can do an awful lot to improperly alarm a credulous public. Is computer security important? Yes. Do these authors form plausible scenarios, or write about countermeasures that make sense? Well, some of them are probably the same people who think it's vitally important that public restrooms in the BART train stations be unavailable in order to thwart terrorists (who presumably will be so distracted by full bladders that they'll become confused and head home).

I spent the afternoon and evening becoming equally irritated by linker errors on Solaris. I fixed my interface so it should now actually be portable. But I don't think the thirty pages of linker warnings have anything to do with my code being correct or not; I think they have something to do with the linker receiving the wrong options. I could be wrong, though. The error messages are singularly unhelpful, and the code takes long enough to compile that trial-and-error is trying as it is error-prone.

Monday -- now technically tomorrow in Pacific Standard Time -- is Martin Luther King day. It's a big deal in Berkeley, even more so than Indigenous People's Day (known as Columbus Day in the rest of the country). It was a big deal when I lived in Maryland, too. Enough of that attitude has transferred that I still take a few minutes every MLK day to listen to the radio when the I have a dream speech plays.

I've thought a lot recently about another dream: men on Mars. Books on Mars are a sci-fi staple, probably because Mars is the only planet in the neighborhood we could plausibly survive on. I've read many books from the Mars sub-genre. I've read Heinlein's Red Planet and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and various others, good and bad. I think the dream of Mars is exciting; and for a nation where ever-fewer students want to study engineering and the sciences, I think that excitement is important.

I also think that an unnerving fraction of the unmanned missions sent to Mars have failed. The current Mars rover is inspiring, and that robot is almost certainly a more appropriate choice than a human at this point. I remember watching the Challenger go up -- and blow up -- in elementary school. I remember how NASA had to struggle to leave the shadow of Challenger, and I wondered if I would watch history repeated with the Columbia. To more than one generation, astronauts are heroes, and the death of such heroes is hard to take. I wonder if we will rush to send the first men to Mars, only to find men lost, hopes dashed, and NASA irreparably damaged.

Mars is a noble goal, and I'm impressed by it. I'm less impressed that the first steps involve taking away funding from other productive projects -- like the Hubble -- and promising insufficient additional funds. If the project is to be undertaken, future administrations will face hard fiscal questions. Of course, those fiscal problems may be minor compared to other future fiscal difficulties resulting from Bush administration policies. I was disturbed to hear Paul O'Neill's quote of Cheney: Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. Carpe diem! I do not think we have the funds to commit to a manned Mars project done right; and a manned Mars project done wrong will reduce funds and prestige available for other space-based science. I also agree with critics who point out that we have some serious messes on our own planet and in our own country that should take precedence over putting men on Mars. I also expect that Bush's move is inspired less by a grand vision of men in space than by a grand vision of Bush in office for another term.

But for all that, I still would like to see men on Mars while I live.

My mixed feelings about Mars mirror a lot of my mixed feelings about politics recently. Should the United States have reacted to September 11 with an examination of it's own security? Of course -- that was an inevitable part of the reaction. Does that mean that we should suspend civil liberties for the prisoners of Guantanomo Bay, or that some bureaucrat should decide that BART train restrooms must be closed until further notice for your security and the security of others. No! Is Afghanistan better off under a regime less repressive than the Taliban, and are Iraq and the rest of the world better off without Saddam Hussein in a position of power? I think so. Did we do well to anger our allies, not only acting unilaterally, but in the process declaring them irrelevant if not outright reviling them? No! Freedom fries indeed. Are we now doing the right thing in trying to help Iraq? Well, perhaps we have some of the details wrong, but I think we're obligated to give what help we can. Does the proclamation that countries who were not militarily involved in Iraq shall not bid on reconstruction projects make the US sound like we have any motivation higher than commerce? Not really, though I believe that we do. Should we explore new technologies for energy production, and study the failures of the current distribution system in the hopes that it can be improved? Yes. Does that mean conservation is irrelevant because profligate energy expenditure is the American way, and the American way of life is a blessed one? Hardly.

I dream of a world where people are morally outraged by sloth and profligacy, and not by the fact that not everyone in the world is Christian. I want to see more people excited by the opportunity to build and explore, to be scientists and engineers, and fewer people who are excited by the profitability of law suits. I dream of ideas shared, not locked up in a safe and guarded by ill-considered patents. And I dream of men on Mars in my lifetime.

I also dream of warm socks, breakdancing koala bears, and writing equations with a weird stick of chalk that keeps changing colors. I suppose the dreams that come from REM sleep have as much place in life as the dreams that come from inspired sentiment. And right now, I think I ought to check in on those koalas.

The thing that has always disturbed me about O_DIRECT is that the whole interface is just stupid, and was probably designed by a deranged monkey on some serious mind-controlling substances.
-- Linus

I spent Wednesday of this week writing documentation for my Matlab-FEAP interface and pondering my software toolkit. The documentation is generated automatically in part; there is a script to build the table of contents, another script to generate the list of function references from my Matlab comments, and yet another script that generates all the graphics. The scripts are a few lines each, written in AWK and Matlab and shell.

When programming, I write a few these little scripts each day. They do things like produce header files for me, or rewrite function calls to change the order of arguments, or change a naming convention I've decided I don't like. Most of them fit on 5-10 lines, usually in AWK. Perhaps I should learn to be more comfortable with Perl, but it is hard to beat AWK for clean one-liners. I write Matlab scripts, AWK scripts, and shell scripts, as well as Makefiles and the odd macro in M4 or the C preprocessor. All this, of course, is in addition to the code I write in compiled languages: predominantly C, C++, and Fortran.

I've thought a lot recently about my choices of languages and tools. My Linux environment is very programmer friendly. That's one of the reasons I switched to Linux -- eight years ago, now. With Linux, I had access to free compilers, build tools, version control systems, and so forth, in a flexible environment very similar to the one we used for coursework. And the situation has improved a lot since then. The Fedora installation has caused me no troubles, and I've had the opportunity to trade time spent mucking with details I don't care about -- such as the syntax of yet another configuration file in the /etc subdirectory -- with tasks that I care about and enjoy.

Still, there is a long way to go. I still spend too much time trying to build numerical software, often in the face of utter frustration. The make tool, which is the de facto standard of software building today, was invented early in the life cycle of UNIX. Autoconf, a powerful and cryptic tool for configuration detection and setup, is written in M4, a preprocessor which first saw use as a preprocessor for Fortran. Every compiler takes different flags, or has different quirks in library support, and every tool is documented in a different format: TeX or troff or HTML or DocBook, or any or all of the above. Building software under Windows is sometimes like starting from scratch; while Windows supports a make program of its own, Windows make is a somewhat different beast from its UNIX sibling. I have powerful debugging tools like Valgrind under Linux -- but they don't work when I need to develop Matlab extensions, or when I need to debug my code under Windows. And, with a timing that seems to depend on the phase of the moon and the alignment of the planets, sometimes everything breaks. Would-be authors of portable code are reduced to the lowest common denominator they can bear -- and sometimes that denominator is technology from the 1970s with a thick layer of GUI painted in peeling layers on top.

All this has motivated my continued use and exploration of scripting languages. I use Matlab for much of my day-to-day numerical work; as a language, it leaves some things to be desired, but it is adequate for many applications -- and it's hard to beat when it comes to numerical linear algebra. I use Lua to script SUGAR, the MEMS simulator I work on. Lua is fast and small, but it is also very flexible, and I've spent a lot of time gloating over things I can do with it. Recently, I've increasingly been looking at Python, which is increasingly popular among scientists at the labs (who use it for steering their codes), system administrators, and web developers. It has a simple high-level syntax, it's compiled, and it has a big library. If I want to run my codes remotely and interact with them via a web interface, it will be a lot easier for me to write the interface in Python with compiled hooks into code that I provide as a dynamically loaded library.

I want to spend time on the problems I want to spend time on. I don't want to spend (much) time writing hash tables in C, fighting with broken build systems, or figuring out how to port my code to platforms that don't obey a relevant standard. I don't want to type ten lines of code to beat a behaviour out of Java that I could get out of ten characters of LISP. I don't want to reinvent wheels. I don't want to spend more time than I must in debugging. I do want to spend time thinking about software design and algorithmic strategies, and about how to efficiently pose and solve computationally difficult scientific and engineering problems. I'm not alone in feeling this way.

The state of the art advances, and I get to work every day with some truly amazing hardware and software systems. And at the same time, we've got a long way to go.

I had a marvelous lunch discussion last week this time last week. It took a variety of twists and turns, from tales of lunches in France and travels in China to stories of the history and structure of Oxford University. As we walked back to Soda Hall from the food court where we'd eaten, the topic turned to Byzantine history. As we wrapped up the conversation in the office, Beresford Parlett commented that history seems a great deal more relevant and interesting as you get older. I raised an eyebrow at that; I enjoy reading history, though my chronological memory is too poor for me to ever be more than an amateur. Christof saw my raised eyebrow, laughed, and said Don't worry, we'll count you as old already. Parlett chuckled and mentioned that a friend once gave him a clipping of a New Yorker cartoon, in which a woman is patting her husband on the shoulder and saying to friends: Well, we were all young once -- except for Beresford.

I thought about that as I took BART home yesterday after eating dinner with Winnie and reading from Cooke's America. It was George Santayana who said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it -- and it is telling that I know so many people who remember that phrase (if not who said it), but remember little of their history studies. Somehow my middle and high school teachers often lost the story of history. I like Cooke's history for the same reasons I liked Barzun's Dawn to Decadence: they are works to be savored, full of opinions, perspectives, and stories written in language that is at once elegant and clear. I enjoy historical stories, fiction and nonfiction alike, and find recently I've spent ever-larger fractions of my free reading time relishing tales of Byzantium and Persia, feudal Japan and Communist China, Egypt and Axum, the character of Emperor Justinian and of Thomas Jefferson.

There can be a chauvinism of youth against history -- with such a brave new world before us, why learn about the old one? Quizzes that involve the number of casualties at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire hardly help the situation. My high school European history teacher had the right idea: he told history as a story, in his droll style, with characters and plots. I did less well on the European history exam than I later did on the American history exam; but I enjoyed the European history class more, and I have retained more of it to the present day.

But since the Romans had no computers and the Greeks no matrix algebra, perhaps I should save my historical musings for a later hour.

• Currently drinking: Black coffee

The Year of the Monkey is approaching, and I have been celebrating by playing the code monkey. I don't think we saw any other code monkeys at the zoo yesterday, unless they were wandering around with small children outside the fences. Perhaps they were hiding behind the endangered wheelbarrows.

I automated the setup of the tunnel I use to access library resources from off campus. I reorganized the sources for my interface between Matlab and FEAP, and finished adding the new functionality I needed to extract the appropriate matrices during thermoelastic simulations. In the process, I found and diagnosed a bug in FEAP in the nonsymmetric mass matrix formation. This evening, I spent some time trying (eventually successfully) to figure out a bug in the memory manager code that I wrote for FEAP.

I also paid bills, talked to Winnie, and visited with a friend from the geotech department. And I missed most of the news, but I did listen with interest to a segment on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, a panel discussion on the role of Sandra Day O'Connor in the court. I have heard one of the panelists, a law professor at Berkeley, in several other discussions. I think I have yet to agree with any of the positions he has taken.

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lemon

I finished installing. I proofread a manuscript sent by a colleague. I added some new functionality to the interface that I maintain between Matlab and FEAP (a Finite Element Analysis Program). And I was hit over the head with a vorpal cudgel of silliness, which kept me working until past my bed time.

I just finished transitioning to Fedora Core 1. I was using RedHat 7.3 until yesterday. I took the opportunity to clean up my drive, too -- I backed up critical files to CD and did a clean install rather than an upgrade.

I take such joy in these little things.

A panda walks into a bar, orders and eats a sandwich, fires a gun into the air, and then walks out. On his way out, he tosses a poorly punctuated wildlife guide to the bemused bartender. The bartender turns to the entry for panda, and reads Panda: Native of China, this creature eats, shoots and leaves.

I was reminded of this joke while reading an article in the NY Times yesterday on a surprising best-seller on punctuation (entitled Eats, Shoots and Leaves). I only realized later that the joke is not only an attack on poor punctuation -- it's an ad homonym attack as well.

I'm listening to All Things Considered on National Public Radio. When I'm around to listen to it, the evening NPR programs are always a high point in my day. At the moment, the major theme in the news seems to be Mars. This morning I heard Kim Stanley Robinson talking about the landing on Mars (he's impressed; his son is not). And this evening, I've heard about the surroundings of the Spirit lander, a plain of small rocks with a nearby depression dubbed Sleepy Hollow. The excitement doesn't end in America, either; as one of the NASA team wisecracked of a European team, Remember how we were jumping up and down, and hugging and crying? It was the same thing, only in German.

Of course, I listen to other stations, too. I found an electronic music program on Saturday night that I hadn't discovered before. And someone in the middle of the dial was playing the Broadway song that goes da da da da in America! -- where da da da da is replaced by words of some sort. I like listening to the BBC, and online stations from Canada and Europe, too. So I decided to get a portable radio -- with shortwave reception as well as FM and AM. It should arrive some time in the next few days; it was on sale from Amazon.

I spent the day listening to the radio and being productive at home. My e-mail inbox is now back to about 30 messages, where there were around 200 before. I've set up an ssh proxy tunnel to my office machine so that I can use the electronic library resources without actually being on campus. I spent time writing, too, but was severely hampered by the fact that I apparently cannot differentiate on a week when there will be a full moon.

Okay. Maybe I just couldn't differentiate today.

I'm actually able to tell when the new moon is because I finally bought calendar's this weekend. They were half price. A calendar of baby animals has been replaced by a calendar of Irish landscapes. I bought a pocket calendar, too; with luck this one will last longer than the one that I got at the beginning of last year. That calendar lasted about a week before it disappeared.

I'm sipping hot water with lime, which goes well with the chill in the air. We've had a few clear, breezy days, and I appreciate the break from the winter rains -- but even if it has been dry, it hasn't been warm. The days are still short, too, so I'm unlikely to forget that it's still winter. But I have my hot mug, and that's all I need right now.

I think I'll go back to work as soon as I'm finished sipping and writing, but perhaps I'll just work for a few hours and then spend some time fiddling with my computer. It has been a while since I upgraded the software on my system, and my temptation to do so is only tempered by the recollection of how much of a time sink upgrades can be. Perhaps I'll spend the time playing with Python, instead. I haven't exactly made a New Year's Resolution to learn a new language, but I've meant to add Python to my toolkit for a while, and now seems like a good time. Or I could try to build nicer configuration scripts for LAPACK and FEAP, if only for my own use.

Or I could continue to work on things that I'm supposed to be working on, I suppose.

Perhaps I'd be better off taking a shorter break and doing something completely unrelated to computing. I have history to read: I'm in the middle of Alistair Cooke's America, and I have The Histories of Herodotus and O'Brian's historical fiction piece Master and Commander in queue.

For the moment, though, I think I will fix myself something to eat, and -- as I've just finished my water and lime -- perhaps I'll have a cup of tea, too.

Neither holy, nor Roman, nor empire.

Dad is back in the hospital for a day or two. Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve both -- it's like some unfortunate sort of double-header. My fingers are crossed. My legs are crossed, too, but that's just because of the way my legs are stretched out.

I worry, but can do little.

• Currently drinking: Hot apple tea with lemon

Hmm.

It's wet, wet, wet outside. I like the sound of rain on the roof and wind on the windows, but I'm glad that I'm in here and not out there. I suppose this means that the area waterfalls will be particularly impressive for the next few weeks.

Today, though, seems to be a good day for quiet activities. Indoors activities. Work activities, perhaps.

• Currently drinking: Black coffee

This poem hangs on the refrigerator at my family home. It seems a good New Year's thought.

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see in the final analysis. it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

-- Mother Theresa.

Some highlights of the break:

• Books:
  1. Exile's Honor and Exile's Valor by Mercedes Lackey -- I enjoyed these more than I thought I would. It has been a while since I've read anything by Mercedes Lackey; perhaps I read too many of them in too short a time before. They do tend to be predictable, but I enjoy the writing style well enough, and the main character of these books (Alberich) is one of my favorites.
  2. Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold -- I enjoyed the book, as I've enjoyed most of Bujold's books, but it was not my favorite. The writing was fine, but the perspective seemed bleak and grim with little breaks of humor. I much prefer the Vorkosigan books, in which I think she takes herself a little less seriously.
  3. The Elder Gods by David and Leigh Eddings -- I was really disappointed by this book. In most of the Eddings books I've read, I've enjoyed at least one of the plot, the writing style, or the character development. But this book seemed flat.
  4. Service of the Sword by various authors -- This is an anthology of stories in David Weber's science fiction universe. Some of the stories were pretty good, some less good. But overall I enjoyed it.
  5. The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun -- Excellent, even if some of the essays tend toward polemic. Barzun writes briskly, and is quite clear about stating and arguing his position. I enjoy the writing even -- or perhaps particularly -- when I disagree.
  6. Caress of Twilight by Laurell K. Hamilton -- Fun. Read quick.
  7. The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond -- ESR is one of the characters of the UNIX community. Sometimes I agree with his points, sometimes not -- but they're worth reading. The book has a lot of little useful nuggets, some of historical interest, others of interest from the difference in perspective. But it read quickly, and when I finished I'd added a few books and papers to my to-read list. That's always welcome, even if my to-read list is always too long.
• Food:
  1. Fruit cake -- I've never figured out what people have against fruitcake. I really like the stuff.
  2. Cookies -- Cookies of all sorts are good. So I ate cookies of all sorts.
  3. Mandalay Cafe -- This is the first time I've eaten Burmese food. I liked it.
  4. Ham-bean-potato soup -- This is just green beans and potatoes cooked with ham and some water. With a loaf of homemade bread, it's hard to beat.
  5. Bread -- It's all good stuff: plain bread, bread with dates, bread with raisins.
  6. Veggies -- I rarely get radishes for myself. But I love them, and think I finished most of that part of the vegetable platter when it was out. I ate a lot of the little plum tomatoes, too.
  7. Popcorn -- I've never met anybody besides my immediate family who makes popcorn with brewer's yeast. Or rather, I don't know that I've met anybody out of my family who does; it's possible that I just don't know, as I usually don't ask people about their popcorn-eating habits. But it's good. I used to not particularly care for the flavor, but apparently my tastes have changed over the years.
• XEmacs amusements
  1. M-x tetris
  2. M-x snake
  3. M-x sokoban
  4. M-x hanoi
  5. M-x all-hail-xemacs
  6. M-x spook
• The cats:

  'Twas two nights before Christmas,
  And all through the house,
  The cats batted string toys,
  But never a mouse.

  1. Jasmine and Thyme -- The two black kittens were new arrivals since the first time I was home. They weren't going to curl up in my lap to be petted, but they were happy to play with a bit of string, even if I was at the other end. They were also fascinated by things moving on a CRT, whether it be a television screen or a monitor. I know Thyme has a few white hairs at her neck, but that didn't help me much when I tried to distinguish them. I still couldn't really tell them apart by the time I left.
  2. Pounce -- She was still happy to play the last time I was home. This time, she was less interested (though she did pounce on my foot under a blanket a few times). Mostly, she seemed happy to observe what was going on.
  3. Misty -- The old grey cat is just what he used to be. He still pounces on a bit of string -- more sparingly, but more effectively, than the kittens. And he was happy to hop into my lap and rest or be petted for a time.
• Things to drink
  1. Hot water with lime juice
  2. Hot cider with lemon juice
  3. Ginger beer (not an alcoholic beverage, despite the name)
  4. Holiday tea blend (black tea with fruit bits)
  5. Russian caravan tea

This about hits the mark.

The trip back to California was long and crowded, but otherwise mercifully uneventful. I took a window seat in the back, and spent most of the eight hours on the plane sleeping, reading, or staring out the window. I finished reading The Culture We Deserve by Barzun and The Art of UNIX Programming by Raymond. Both were interesting books. As far as the view from the window goes -- there were a lot of clouds. For parts of the flight, the clouds came in neatly painted stripe; for other parts, the clouds looked like a snowy landscape, with snowbanks and crevasses. Near Oakland, the clouds were irregular, and often sat close to the ground. I was briefly reminded of superficial fascia, the connective tissue that ties together muscle to skin -- but only briefly. After a moment's thought, I decided that the resemblance wasn't that strong, and that I'd worry if I ever saw muscle that shade of green.

After I returned home yesterday, I went grocery shopping, surfed the web briefly, ate something, and went to bed. I'm not sure what it is about air travel that I find so tiring, but there is something there. I slept until late this morning, too. I spent some time reading, and then spent a while walking around outside. I felt restless after sitting all day yesterday. I thought about going to campus to retrieve some papers that I want to reference, but I didn't.

According to the news, there will be 200000 revelers at the official New Year's Eve celebration at the Embarcadero in San Francisco. I'm immensely glad not to be there, particularly since the weather predicts rain, occasionally heavy. I'll be next door with a small group of neighbors and friends instead. The path from here to there is entirely covered.

When I was young, Dad built beds for my brother and I. I grew up dealing with essentially one major piece of furniture in my room: the bed, desk, and dressers are all of a piece, with the bed perched atop the dressers and over the desk. The ensemble is a sturdy monument to my Dad's engineering skills and his love of power tools.

When I was small, my brothers and I used to pretend the bed was a ship -- whether a sea ship or a space ship depended on our mood -- manned by our favorite stuffed animals. I dubbed the game Frog and Other Animals, modestly putting my favorite stuffed animal (a threadbare frog which I creatively named Frog) in a position of prominence over the equally creatively named Bear-Bear and Whale. I doubt Dad intended it this way, but the structure of the bed lent itself perfectly to our play; under the desk was the engineering deck, the middle deck was the bridge, and the top of the bed was the watch deck -- I think. We had a grand time passing orders, information, and Lego constructions of questionable purpose between the decks.

Over the years that I grew into that bed, I refined my technique for entering and exiting it. To get into bed, I would put one foot on my desk, swing my body down and my left leg up, and roll into place. I exited by a similar procedure. By high school, I frequently bypassed the desk when entering or exiting; I jumped instead. I might have tried further variations on the theme, but I was somewhat restricted by the fan and light fixture that jutted perilously close to the edge of the bed. If I jumped into the fan, I figured I risked possible decapitation and almost certain embarrassment, neither of which sounded particularly appealing. I bumped my head against the fan at times despite my cautions, but managed to avoid the more drastic of my theorized fates.

I remember waking up on weekend and summer mornings and spending a lazy time draped over the guard rail on the bed, staring out the window at the play of light and dark in the leaves of the trees. I'd engage in similar contemplation in the winter months, particularly when it snowed, but in such times I usually didn't leave a leg dangling over the edge as I was wont to do in other, warmer seasons. I kept my feet together, tucked under the warmth of my old yellow quilt. It may have been warmer around my perch near the ceiling than it was near the floor, but it was cold enough that I practiced caution.

I've been using the desk, but I'm not sleeping in my old bunk bed this winter. Mom has turned the top into storage space and a staging area for various cloth-based projects. I've slept instead on a more ordinary box spring placed where I used to keep the gooseneck rocker. It suits me well enough. Sometimes I sit on the new bed and look at the old bed and think its time may be past. It should be packed away, or passed on to some other child who will treasure it as much as I did; a simple desk would take up less of the room, in perception and in fact.

But tonight, I'm feeling nostalgic, and I'm glad the old bed is still there.

We picked Dad up from the hospital on Christmas morning, and Rick returned in the early afternoon. So all five of us were home for Christmas. Dad will be wearing a cast on his hand for a while, but the doctor said he thought it looked good at Dad's appointment on Friday morning. He'll have to return Monday for another checkup, but it seems likely that his hand will heal to full function again in the next several weeks.

I spent the past few days visiting. On Friday, the whole family visited Rick and Sarah's new house. They've done a lot of work on it, and while the basement still needs some attention, it's a very pleasant place. Mom and I took a tour of the neighborhood as well. And we all had lunch together at the Mandalay Cafe in College Park. That was a fine meal; it sounds like it's a favorite of Rick and Sarah and Scott.

On Saturday, I went to visit college friends. We exchanged news, and I heard about houses and kids and career plans and such. We all gathered at Will and Liz's home in Towson, and while I made it there without incident, I got lost on the way back. I wandered into some fairly run-down neighborhoods of Baltimore along North Avenue before I found a road I recognized and made my way back. The detour only added about half an hour to the trip, though, so I can't complain too much.

Today, my aunts and uncles came to visit, and we all had lunch and then chatted and ate cookies and sipped coffee. My relatives are fun. They're sharp, pragmatic, silly folk, and I miss visits with them when I'm in Caifornia. In the evening it was just Dad and Mom and I, and we sat and talked for a while more before we dispersed to our solo evening activities.

I've done less fiction reading this week than I thought I might. I spent a lot of time visiting, and playing with the cats, and eating. I spent some time helping chop, saw, and stack wood for the stove. I spent time admiring the woods, and time listening to music, and time playing Tetris (M-x tetris under XEmacs) while thinking about nothing in particular. I saw Return of the King. I extensively edited a technical report that I'm working on, though I've only finished revising a bit under half of it. The total length is about 45 pages right now. And I've read a substantial chunk of Eric Raymond's Art of Unix Programming, which is a far more entertaining work than one might think from the title.

Time flies. I have only one more full day at home; I return to Caifornia on Tuesday. I'll miss leaving the woods when I go. I always do. But it feels like time to return, since right now I'm starting miss my daily work routine.

While diagnosing a problem with the tractor early this afternoon, Dad broke a high-pressure hydraulic line. The stream of fluid cut his right hand, and some of it got into his finger. Scott took him to the emergency room, and early in the evening he went to Union Memorial in Baltimore to see a hand surgeon. They'll probably have done the surgery by now -- they were going to cut the had open to irrigate it, in order to clean out as much of the fluid as possible. He's there overnight, but should be back tomorrow.

Otherwise, it was a quiet Christmas Eve. Rick and Sarah visited, and Scott came back from waiting at the hospital around 9:30. We ate well, and the cats were funny. I enjoyed listening to the rain in the morning, and spent some more time editing my paper in the afternoon, and in the evening I visited with Rick and Sarah, played Tiddlywinks, and nibbled on various food items.

Rick and Sarah took off a little while ago, and Mom and Scott retired to their beds. I think I may retire to my bed soon, too.

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lemon

Programmer job reductions worry me.

I planned to come home and do some reading, writing, and arithmetic (or at least algebra) along with visiting friends. I've done more reading than I have writing or arithmetic, but I did finish a sanity check calculation last night that has been on my plate for a while. And maybe I'll do some more this evening.

I'm home. Big flakes of snow are falling, though they don't seem to be sticking right now. The cats are hilarious, particularly the two little ones. They're still a little afraid of me, I think. And I've been reading and sleeping a great deal for the past couple days. I think I was more tired than I'd realized. That always seems to happen at the end of the year, almost independent of how much or how little I've been doing.

And I can't get PPP to work under Linux. I tried for several hours last night, and again for several hours today. After fixing the initial problem with the kernel module for the driver for my WinModem (which I'd apparently hosed since the last time I was home, doubtless in an attempt to do something else that required a kernel patch), I've been stymied. The PPP daemon connects, negotiates an IP address, fetches the DNS information -- and fails to transmit any IP level packets.

How annoying. It all worked the last time I was home.

On the other hand, I can watch the snow from my window and listen to it on the roof. I have something to read, and the cats are fun. And I'm trying hard not to set to howling, about the computer or about anything else.

I'm listening to classical music on the radio. It's a familiar tune, one by Bach, but one I can't name. There are a lot of tunes I can't name.

I remember in a conversation with Kahan once, he commented that he thought about mathematical concepts not verbally, but as ghosts and images. I know a number of people -- myself included -- who as often think nonverbally as verbally. Verbal patterns are great for working through details and for communicating ideas. But mathematical inspiration is, for me, a nonverbal process. The problem with nonverbal thought processes, though, is that they are often difficult to translate accurately into speech. The same difficulty holds for feelings, which is perhaps the reason why the phrase words cannot describe is a cliche -- because so often words can't accurately describe a feeling.

There are so many simple things that I enjoy: walking, reading, cooking, eating, thinking, learning, or just sitting alone. I enjoy cleaning and organizing. I enjoy bullshitting with friends. I enjoy feeling like I'm helping make the world a little better. I enjoy coding, and solving problems, physical or mathematical. I enjoy playing with words and ideas. I enjoy my research. I enjoy a lot of simple things. But I have a hard time saying why I enjoy these things, exactly. Why do I find some things so engrossing? Why do I sometimes feel so strongly the need to retreat and be alone? What is so comforting to me in a warm cup of tea? I cannot say clearly, and am frustrated when I try. Perhaps that's part of the beauty of time alone: the freedom to think in a manner as verbally fanciful or as completely nonverbal as I wish, without concern for whether anyone else understands or cares.

I've had occasion to think deeply of late on what I enjoy and what I want out of life. Right now, I want to finish my degree and move psat graduate school. Life as a graduate student at Berkeley has been rewarding, and I don't regret it in the least. And I'm getting very ready to be quits with it -- not with research but with the Berkeley graduate student status. So is that the reason I seem to have such a strong affinity toward work of late? Why not take it easy and go one step at a time? I have my own answers to those questions, but the answers seem weak when translated to speech. Is that because the answers themselves are weak? I think not.

I spent a lot of the day feeling pretty miserable. Work didn't help in this case; bullshitting with friends for a little while and then spending time alone listening to music did help. Actually, bullshitting with friends who talked about three-dimensional visualization of molecules and who asked me about quaternions really broke through the cycle of gnawing self-doubt; sitting quietly and listening to music just brought me the rest of the way back to good cheer.

I leave for home on Monday, and I'm looking forward to the time off. I look forward to seeing family and old friends, and I look forward to some time late at night when the cats are playing and everyone else is asleep, and I'm alone with my thoughts. Historically, this has also been a very productive time of year; perhaps it will be a productive time this year as well. I will probably take a break from writing in this blog until the new year -- if I feel the urge to write, it will probably go into papers or into e-mail. And so, gentle readers, though there may be few of you, and fewer still who I will not see on my trip home: best wishes to you as the winter starts and the year ends. It is a hard season, even festooned as it is with holidays. Be well.

Good night, moon.

The right thing is such a nebulous phrase sometimes. Body shakes, stomach aches. It's probably best to sleep.

Two of the three problems on my fluids final are done. The remaining one looks trivial, but in the interest of not making foolish errors, I will put off finishing it until morning. For similar reasons, I think I will put off reading about micromechanics of damping, thermoelasticity, structured matrix computations, location of codimension 2 bifurcations, or any other of the technical things that I could be working on.

Instead, I'll write about shaving.

I learned during my first year of college that I don't look particularly good with a beard. It grew unevenly, and was laced with more silver than I cared to see. My friends seemed to agree with my assessment; when I eventually shaved it off, one friend told me that I'd started to look too much like some stereotype of a crazed mathematician. I took it as a compliment, much the same way I try to take my neighbor's exclamation that I look like the original Unabomber sketch when the hood of my sweatshirt is raised. But at the same time, I shaved the beard, and I have not let it return since.

I continue to wear the hood of my shirt, at least when I think nobody is around. It keeps my ears warm.

At any rate, some time in the middle of my college years, after the unfortunate experience with the beard, my electric razor ceased to hold a charge. And so I started to shave with an ordinary safety razor, and discovered that I got a much cleaner shave. I found the experience of shaving with an ordinary razor enchanting for about a week. After that, enchantment faded to a more prosaic sort of enjoyment. I enjoy shaving in the same way I enjoy showering, washing my hands, or brushing my teeth. It's a pleasant ritual that yields concrete results.

At the same time I enjoy shaving, there are a few things about the process that really irk me. The main source of irritation is a simple matter of geometry: no matter how I stretch my jaw, my chin remains pointed, and the corners of my jaw remain sharp corners. Consequently, I'm usually unable to shave my chin and the corners of my jaw quite so clean as I might wish. On the other hand, I tend to scratch itches on the back of my hand with the scruff at my chin, so perhaps there is a silver lining. In fact, there is certainly a silver lining -- and it's a good deal harder to shave than the part that is brown.

Pointy facial features aside, shaving is simple and the effects are immediate. Alas, the same can rarely be said of programming computers or proving theorems. Perhaps I would feel differently were I a barber.

There's a thought to sleep on.

My PDE final is done. The apartment is clean, my laundry is done, and I have food for the next few days. I have new (nonleaking) shoes, and hair that no longer curls into my ears. I spent time with Winnie, and I spent a little time just staring into space. I read Michael Crichton's Timeline, which I don't recommend, though it was fine for a couple hours entertainment. I slept well, and I ate well, and I finished the work I absolutely needed to finish, plus a little. I didn't finish all that I wanted to finish this weekend, but perhaps that's simply a sign that I need to strive for more realistic expectations.

The fluids final is assigned tomorrow at 9:00, and is due 48 hours later. I hope it only takes a few hours, as I would very much like to have an extra day for writing. I've made good progress on a number of fronts over the past few weeks, but I have not written as much as I intended.

I look forward to going to the family home to visit. I only have another week before I take off.

Evans made what I think is one of the most amusing remarks of the semester in class today.

This technique [deriving an inequality by contradiction rather than calculus] is sort of like the One Ring. On the one hand, it has great power, and when you use it you get all sorts of magical results. On the other hand, it makes you evil. I'm neutral -- this is a really slick proof, but if you do the calculation directly, as your Puritan work ethic tells you to do, you get a little more information. Any questions, either about the proof or the Ring?

• Currently drinking: Mint tea, I think -- the label was lost.

I did a few things today, but perhaps the most satisfying was the reorganization of my collection of papers. When I found that I could no longer put my hands on the paper I wanted, but had three copies of a paper I no longer cared about, it seemed time to do something. It's now possible to tell at a glance roughly the topics I work on: eigenvalue computations; computational mechanics and finite element simulations; modeling MEMS at a variety of levels of abstraction; and floating point arithmetic. There are folders for other topics, too, but those are mostly thin folders each containing a few papers related to a side project or a secondary line of inquiry.

One of the papers I uncovered during my sifting was a short piece entitled Research as a Life Style, written for the Retrospective section of Applied Mechanics Review (Aug 97). The author is the eminent fluid dynamicist George Batchelor; it was a name I recognized when I happened across the article about a year ago while looking for something else, and it is a name I know even better now that I've spent a semester using Batchelor's fluid dynamics text. It's an entertaining article and a pleasant counterpoint to some of the essays by Barzun which I've read recently.

A few sentences particularly plucked my interest:

• On the central role of research in a life, sometimes at the expense of other activities:

  Any assessment of the nature of scientific enquiry as a human activity must recognize that research is more than an occupation or a career. One becomes hooked on research, which can be, an usually is, a demanding and compelling search for knowledge which dominates your life.

  I do not know how to reconcile these two aspects of the life of research, firstly, the pure bliss accompanying a bright idea or clarification that comes as a consequence of a long period of concentration, and secondly, the guild accompanying demands made on family and friends and the loss in personal relationships. Perhaps the best a scientist can hope for is a compromise rather than a reconciliation.

• On how collaborations begin:

  ... since I knew him [Alan Townsend] to be a first-rate physicist and an electronics wizard I suggested that he too should work on turbulence under G.I. Taylor and that we should collaborate. He said he would be glad to do so, although he wanted first to ask two questions: one was What is turbulence? nand the other was Who is GI Taylor? My answers were evidently satisfactory, for the outcome for both of us was a marvelous decade of turbulence research which began in 1945.

• On my new favorite coffee table design:

  The Department at which I work at Cambridge encourages this informal communication by providing coffee tables with laminated tops on which people may draw or write, and I believe this simple device has endeared the Department to several generations of young scholars.

• On scientific writing:

  Reading a paper is a voluntary and demanding task, and a reader needs to be enticed and helped and stimulated by the author. Contrary to popular opinion, the words in a theoretical paper need to be understood no less than the equations for the effective communication of science.

  If the present poor average standard of composition in scientific papers is to be raised, and if the preparation of a paper is to be turned into a minor art form, as is desirable in view of its dominant role in scientific communications, we shall need to proclaim openly and often the importance of good writing.

And that, I think, is enough for the day.

• Currently drinking: Chamomile with lemon
• Currently nibbling: Freshly baked cranberry-carrot bread

I just took a break and found more math jokes. There are a lot of them, some of which I'd heard before, some of which I hadn't. Two of them really tickled me:

An engineer thinks that his equations are an approximation to reality.
A physicist thinks reality is an approximation to his equations.
A mathematician doesn't care.

Q: What do you get when you cross the Godfather with an economist?
A: An offer you can't understand.

On Thanksgiving, I took my desk chair next door for my neighbors to use. The plan was that six of the people present would eat in their apartment and four would eat in my apartment, with people shuttling back and forth to get food items. The meal did not go according to plan, of course -- we all ended up eating sitting on the floor in their apartment. It was a comfortably informal arrangement that scarcely detracted from the meal.

I did not think to retrieve the chair until today. When I asked Mike about it, he commented that it was very comfortable, and -- unlike any of the chairs he owned -- didn't bring any pain to his problem hip. So I sold it to him. And now I'm sitting in the remaining chair in my room, a sort of upholstered rolling rocker which used to serve solely as a reading chair and a hanging place for an overshirt or windbreaker. It's a fine, comfortable seat, and it retains my body heat far more effectively than the other chair ever did. That's a distinct advantage in the evening, when the temperature in the apartment sinks to 60 F or so.

This grey rocker has character. I bought it from my former landlady when I moved. I wanted a chair, and she wanted the space. It reminds me in little ways of several chairs in my past. When I lived with my parents, there was an old stuffed rocker in my room where I used to stretch and read for hours on end. The handles were carved in a design I never quite understood, with a little indented circle at the bottom that looked like the eye of some stylized bird or snake. The seat was nearly twice as wide as I was, and so it was easy to spread a blanket over my lap and have space for a cat to curl up beside me. The handles on this grey chair remind me a little of those handles, and the way the chair rocks reminds me a lot of that old chair.

In another way, the chair reminds me a little of Big Red. Big Red was my desk chair (and reading chair) when I was an undergraduate. It was a bit threadbare, but most of the surface was still covered by a maroon cover flecked with a sort of slivery blue. It wasn't pretty, but it was comfortable, and I was attached to it. As a freshman, I carried that chair from the store where I bought it along Route 1 through College Park, across the campus, and up six flights of stairs to my room in the high rise. The trek was perhaps two miles, and I carried the chair on my head for much of that distance. In memory's light, that trek is one of my treasured adventures from college days -- but those days are not so far past that I don't remember getting something of a crick in my neck on the walk home. Regardless of the crick in my neck, I felt some attachment to the chair from the moment I set it down in my room. I think Big Red still sits by the desk in my old room at the family home.

This grey chair previously sat nestled in the nook bounded by one of my bookshelves, the foot of my bed, and my floor lamp. That lamp is another comforting piece of furniture which I purchased inexpensively and carried some miles from the Berkeley Salvation Army store to my home. On the wall between the shelf and the lamp is a world map, tacked up so that the bottom is perhaps four feet from the floor. That nook seems startlingly empty, now. I think I may fill the space with a set of brick-and-board shelves to relieve the overcrowding of my existing book shelves. But that is a task for the new year, after I return from my visit home.

Perhaps by that time I will be able to use the space for some boundary element books borrowed from the Berkeley engineering library. I spent some time this evening searching the catalog for books related to boundary element simulation of elastic wave propogation from structures sitting on an elastic half space. There are a few books that look like they may be very useful -- and most of them are checked out. The fact that those books all have the same due date makes me think that one person has probably checked them out. I have some guesses as to who that person might be, though. Perhaps the easiest way to find the information I need is to e-mail the people who I think might have those books (or might have read them recently) and ask for their help.

Meanwhile, I've more than enough other tasks to occupy my time. Before I call it quits, I think I may spend another half hour revising some text describing posterior error estimates for interpolated invariant subspace bases for twice continuously differentiable parameterized matrix families. Or perhaps I'll just drink a glass of water and sleep a bit early.

The winter rains have finally come to the Bay Area, and they bring to me a sudden desire for new footwear. My sneakers are leakers. In particular, there is a hole at the top of the tip of the toe of my right shoe which seems to turn that shoe into a bucket. There's still a lot of life left in this pair of sneakers, but perhaps it's time to retire them until the rains are past.

I ate well enough on Thursday to be full and happy but not to be overstuffed, and I worked well enough this weekend to be comfortable while still having time to walk and to read a little. And I spent a little time procrastinating, too. It was interesting procrastination, though -- I found out something I didn't know about Marshall McLuhan's book The Medium is The Message.

• Currently drinking: Rasberry Zinger
• Currently reading: The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun

The apartment is clean, and dinner is simmering on the oven. The slowly growing stack of clothes draped over the back of my chair is stowed, as are the stacks of books that were starting to grow by the base of my shelves. I made some good progress this week in my research work; I had interesting conversations with colleagues, some of which may lead to future collaborations; and I have only one homework left for the semester. I have lots of research work that I'd like to do before I leave for Maryland (not to mention two take-home finals to do), but I can worry about that on Friday or Saturday.

Now, though, it's Thanksgiving Eve, which is an approximate Friday. So perhaps I'll curl up with a book and go to bed early.

I saw Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World with Winnie this weekend. We chose that over going to see Matrix Revolutions on the IMAX screen, and I think we chose well. It was a fine movie, and I enjoyed the visit to San Francisco.

I ate a scramble of eggs, peppers, onions, tomato, and sausage for breakfast, as well as a few cinnamon rolls with orange frosting. For dinner, I made a spicy black bean soup with celery, peppers, onions, tomato, and sausage, and topped the meal off with fresh-baked cinnamon-raisin bread. Do I seem to repeat myself? If I've played the same theme twice, though, at least it was a theme worth playing. I enjoyed both meals.

I finished reading Stephenson's Quicksilver. I enjoyed it, but not as much as I enjoyed Cryptonomicon. I'm now reading The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun, which is a pleasantly brisk and direct change of pace. Perhaps I'll stick to essays and short stories until I go home for the holidays.

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lemon

I made cinnamon rolls this evening. Yeast dough with a little sugar, filling of butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, raisins, and honey. Bake 20 minutes at 350.

This evening, I solved no partial differential equations. I wrote no code. I baked cinnamon rolls, and drank hot apple juice with lemon, read, and sat quietly doing nothing in particular. I've burned the midnight wattage too many nights this week. Tonight I'm going to sleep early.

I visited Vince's page this evening. There is a new addition to his site: a blog kept by Susie the Guinea Pig. Susie's entries make me wish all over again that I had the ability to digest cellulose.

Vince and Heidi are the only old friends I know still keeping interesting web pages alive. Perhaps this is a sign of my own ignorance, though.

• Currently drinking: Green tea

I think all the following jokes are funny. This is further evidence that I'm probably better suited to computational mathematics than to stand-up comedy.

• The self-help group for compulsive talkers: On and On Anon.
• What looks a lot like a tote bag? An asymptote bag.
• All famous mathematicians are Armenian. Just look at the names: Gaussian, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, ...
• To estimate the time for a task, take your best estimate and double it. Apply recursively.
• I'm totally normal: < totally, David> = 0.
• The calculus of variations is a small part of the beach of changes.
• World ends at 10! More at 11.
• Get thee to a punnery!
• I'd like to fill out an apple-cation to become an orange-anion.
• C is for cookie my browser fetched for me; C is for cookie that's sent by TCP...
• If it ain't broke, you haven't meddled enough.
• Do differentiable manifolds have something to do with integrable exhaust?
• A baby eigensheep is... a lamb, duh. A baby eigencow says mu. And why are all my jokes about wavefunctions met with psis?

The Word.A.Day list to which I'm subscribed has archaic words as this week's theme. The words for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are anon, gainsay, and harken. I think I've used all of those words at some point; I'm sure I've used the gainsay and hark, at least.

I figured out the fluids problem. I made one mistake very early on that led me to rule out solutions of a particular form, and was then immensely frustrated when I found every attack of even modest success seemed to drive me toward solutions of the form I'd ruled out as impossible.

One of my college roommates, Scott, took a course called Thanatos - The Many Meanings of Death. Despite (or perhaps because of) the grim-sounding title, it was one of the most popular seminars offered through the University Honors program at College Park, and it's still offered. After class one day, Scott mentioned a comment the professor made: that the educational system teaches a sort of controlled obsession. I think the comment was more specific -- that technical education teaches controlled obsession -- but it was a passing comment five years ago, and I've forgotten that detail.

I have a stubborn streak in my own nature, and I'm fully capable of pondering a problem during most of my waking hours, and then having dreams about it at night. It can be consuming. I'm trying to understand some aspects of interface waves right now, and I awoke this morning to vague memories of a dream about wave interference patterns on the surface of a sea of fried onions. And while taking a tea break last night, I found myself idly tapping the table and watching the ripples spread across the surface of the tea in the pot -- and thinking whether I could estimate the wave velocity by tapping at the right frequency to set up a constructive interference pattern. I've also spent far too many hours so far this week trying to figure out my fluids homework, and it's likely that will show up in my dreams tonight, too.

Is that stubborn streak taught, or innate? Probably both. Is it constructive? Yes. Is it obsessive, with the unhealthy connotations that word carries? I don't think it is. Call it concentration, or perhaps stubbornness.

Call it time to think for half an hour more.

• Currently drinking: Water

An article in the Sunday NY Times described the world's tiniest guitar, ten microns long, fabricated from silicon. It was an amusing article, generally well done, but at the end there was a reference to Michael Crichton's Prey and the book by Dr. Martin Rees which includes berserk nanorobots among the technological threats to the future of mankind. I was reminded of Dyson's article in the New York Review of Books critiquing such arguments. I was also reminded of another article Times article I'd just read, entitled Does Science Matter? To summarize in an exaggerated way, the point of the article is that a large fraction of the American public is willfully ignorant, frightened, or perhaps just bored of science.

Actually, that's not much of an exaggeration.

Science and technology are not Faust's devil, Pandora's box, or the broomsticks of the sorcerer's apprentice. Those stories are powerful myths, and perhaps useful metaphors. But hyper-intelligent nanorobots seem like a ridiculous sort of bogeyman when you consider not only that they're physically implausible (see Dyson's article), but also how little success we've had in building any sort of machines with even a fraction of the general cognitive ability of a human. For that matter, building a water-carrying robot takes some doing -- much more doing than waving a wand.

I would rather wonder at what we're finding out about the universe and what we're learning to construct, and worry about the wisdom of our politicians. I know some would wonder at the wisdom of our politicians and worry that we're learning too much about the universe, but I find such an attitude perplexing.

Perhaps it's even more perplexing than the calculation I was doing before this procrastination break.

• Currently drinking: Apple cider

And now for something completely different.

The majority of my shirts are plain in cut and single-colored (blue or monochrome, typically). But a substantial minority of my shirts are decorated with some piece of text that shouts to the world, This man is a geek. The collection began with a shirt bought in high school with Maxwell's equations on it. Alas, that has gone from being whole to being holes. But that still leaves me with plenty of other such shirts, accumulated over the years. More than enough, right?

Still. Perhaps I should find a replacement Maxwell's equations shirt.

Saturday was the long-awaited Pumpkin Extravaganza. Well, it was as long-awaited as anything planned about a week in advance can be. I used about 1.75 medium-sized pumpkins for making pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, and toasted pumpkin seeds. There was also fresh apple cider, quiche, bread, pate, a salad with candied walnuts and cranberry goat cheese, and some pork and chicken. There was also a curried cabbage dish and some cupcakes. It was all quite tasty, which is good -- I still have another quarter pumpkin in the refrigerator with which I should do something.

Friday evening, I had dinner with Mike, Tracy, and Anant; most of Saturday was devoted to pumpkin buying, cooking, and eating; and I had lunch with Winnie at Vik's Chaat House today. And then the past few hours were spent coping with the realization that I'd planned to do at least three days worth of work this weekend, and only scheduled Sunday evening in which to really do it. Such is life.

Comments I've received this semester:

• So how does a computer scientist get such an intuition for fluid dynamics?
• So you do numerical linear algebra, right?
• As a mathematician, you probably have a different intuition, but I'm a networking person.
• So you're in mechanical engineering, right?
• So you're an EE, right?
• Well, this makes life easier for the mathematicians, but harder for the engineer -- yes, but you are the engineer in this case.
• So you're a PDE guy?
• I didn't know mathematicians could think such un-lofty thoughts.
• Yes, I dealt with that by joining both departments, but it's a bad idea for junior faculty.
• So when are you graduating? (times umpteen)

Ah, the joys of multidisciplinary research -- it sows such confusion. Lots of people attack the same problem from different backgrounds, and they all get confused about different things.

We just set up the printer to work with the print server built into our wireless router. It was an adventure. It started printing garbage (I may have set the wrong print driver); then the paper jammed; then it refused to respond to any requests at all. Things began to work only after we reset the printer, our router, and our respective print daemons. It will doubtless continue to work, now, until the full moon. Then we'll have to do a little ritual dance around the apartment to appease the Goat in the Machine.

I'm told the Goat in the Machine will be replaced by a more standard Ghost in the Machine in the next firmware release.

I received notice that my Amazon order shipped on Saturday. When I came home this evening, the box was on my desk. This is with the cheap 5-9 day shipping option. Whee!

Giving those new books a home proved trickier than expected. When I tried to put them into on my desk, I knocked over The Pile. The Pile, which grew for at least two months unchecked, contained most of the junk mail, book catalogs, paid bills that I received. It also contained many pages of scribbled intermediate computations, which I may once have found deeply meaningful. The Pile and I form an agreement during the periods when I'm busy: if it doesn't disturb me (e.g. by falling over at the slightest provocation), I won't disturb it (e.g. by discarding most of its contents).

So. The Pile is now again just the pile, an inoffensive stack of blessedly non-urgent business. Once I'd cut The Pile down to size, it made sense to straighten the rest of my room. I can be a packrat, but I'm a tidy packrat, so there was little enough mess outside the confines of my desk. I straightened my covers, put away a nail clipper and a coaster, and scooped some scattered loose pennies into a jar. And then I stowed my books, which was the whole point of the endeavour.

Time flies when I'm procrastinating. But since my room is clean, I have groceries, and my homework sets for the week are finished, I suppose I've no more good excuses.

• Currently drinking: Black tea with unidentifiable spice bits

I made a big dinner this evening: black bean soup with Irish soda bread and with apple-rhubarb-raisin cobbler for dessert. I had a cup of hot apple cider on the side. I filled myself quite comfortably, and shared with Patxi and my neighbors, too. There will still be leftover food for the next couple days, I'm sure.

The weather has turned cool, at least as much as it does in the area. Construction practices in this area place more emphasis on seismic soundness than on insulation, which is as it should be. But as a consequence, the difference between the inside and outside temperature is not so great as I might wish. All of which is a roundabout way of saying My feet are cold.

My feet are cold. But my hands are warm, thanks to the cider, and my ears are warm, thanks to my hood. I find contentment in these little things.