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.

I spend much of my time doing calculations that are not too taxing on a modern computer. I set them up, start them, and work on something else for anywhere from a few seconds to half an hour, then come back to look at the answers. At least, that's what usually happens. Some days I mis-estimate what is small, and halfway through the calculation my machine comes to a grinding halt as my tiny computation eats all the available memory.

Today seems to be one of those days.

The word thou is archaic now, but before it fell out of use, thou was the second person singular form and you was the second person plural. The lapse of this usage that made you bear the weight of both the singular and the plural has lead to the introduction of the plural forms y'all and youse in some American regional dialects. The use of the older thou form persists in popular culture through older works of English literature, including the plays of Shakespeare and the King James translation of the Bible. Unfortunately, the thou form may appear in literature classwork, but it does not typically appear in grammar class. Consequently, some people think thou is simple a more formal way of saying you, and abuse the poor pronoun ferociously. Pronoun abuse is a peeve of mine; but since I lack the resources to run a pronoun abuse hotline, I'll settle for writing lists like this one.

How to use thou

• Use thou for singular and you for plural. It is not correct to thunder from the pulpit Thou art sinners! unless perhaps you're addressing someone with multiple personality disorder -- and in that case, don't you think you're being a bit hard on the poor fellow? It would be grammatically correct to say You are sinners -- except thee, though the I will leave the truthfulness of the statement to the religious authorities.
• Conjugate! You would wince (or perhaps thou wouldst wince) if you heard someone say we am going now; the phrase thou are going now is just as wrong. It should be we are going now and thou art going now. In general, verbs that go with thou end with an st, though there are irregular verbs that don't fit (like art). Thou dost, thou makest, thou thinkest, thou hast.
• Be consistent! Unless you need to do so for some specific reason, don't switch between the verb forms in mid-sentence That means that if you start with thou, you should use thy and thine for possessives. If you're unsure how to use thou correctly, why not use the modern forms?
• Do not mistake thou for a particularly impressive or authoritative form of the modern you. It has a specific meaning; that meaning should be respected. If you're unsure of the grammar of the old form and still want to give your prayers and hymns a sense of religious grandeur, use capitalization. And if Terry Pratchett's personification of Death can speak in capitals all the time, surely you can manage it for a single word on occassion.

Rain is falling and playing percussion on the roof. I'm glad to be indoors, pondering cosmic questions like What are tomatillos related to, and how did anyone think to make salsa from them? I often wonder about the origins of various foods and drinks. Who would think to make drinks from rotted potatoes or fermented mare's milk? I've been told olives are almost inedibly bitter in their natural state (and some friends would claim they remain inedible even after processing). Who first thought to pickle them in brine? The oxalic acid in rhubarb leaves is toxic, though not nearly so much so as the neurotoxin in blowfish; how did we end up eating these things? Even my cup of tea -- flavored with osymanthus flowers today -- is a bit of a mystery. According to one tradition, tea was discovered when a few leaves blew into a Chinese emperor's kettle, but that story is likely apocryphal.

I finished my corn chips and salsa with lunch. That salsa is wonderful stuff. My friends all found it too salty -- but I've always had a weakness for salty foods, to the point that my flatmate once suggested we install a salt lick. With the chips and salsa gone, my cupboard looks startlingly bear. I have the ingredients for sour cabbage for dinner, with some bread and cheese on the side, but then I will need to visit the grocery store.

I briefly visited campus today, before the rain started, and checked out a book on the physics of musical instruments. I also photocopied an article on the effects of air loading and acoustic radiation loss on the sounds of kettledrums. To all appearances, the books in that library are organized by Library of Congress codes, but the journals are organized alphabetically. I could be mistaken; whether I was mistaken or not, though, I certainly was bewildered. By the time I wandered out of the physics library with my prizes in hand, it seemed like high time to have a cup of coffee and a snack.

The Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus is in the basement of Moffitt Library, which is next door to the Doe Library Building where the physics library is housed. I often enjoy something there when I'm visiting the libraries. Despite the spring break holiday, the cafe was open and busy today. I found a table where I could skim my article, but spent less time reading than I spent listening to the group at the next table, who seemed to be discussing the results of some experimental data on groundwater contamination. While their discussion was spirited and sounded fascinating, it was also distracting, and so I finished my coffee, got on my bike, and headed home.

The rain started when I was only a few blocks from home.

Yesterday, Winnie and I went to Stanford, where made a lunch of garlic bread, cheese, and oranges; played frisbee barefoot in in the grass for a while; and met one of Winnie's college friends and his girlfriend. They were visiting from the East Coast. The four of us went into the city, walked along the Golden Gate Bridge, rediscovered the joys of driving in San Francisco, and ate at a nice Italian place. Then I came home and slept.

Today, we took the BART to Berkeley station and walked back home. We stopped at Black Oak Books along the way, and browsed through the used cookbooks. I have not done that in quite a while. It was a beautifully sunny day, though the breeze carried a chill with it that told of the end of our midsummer-in-March weather. I made us a cross-cultural dinner: French onion soup followed by Chinese stir fry over rice, with strawberry ice cream for dessert. We shared our meal with Patxi, Esther, and Mike. Then we watched Muppets from Space -- which I found hilarious -- and then it was late, and Winnie headed home.

Wednesday, I will be back to work. Until then, though, I'll enjoy the chance to read and play and do non-academic things.

I have been happily busy. My talk last Saturday went well; my hike this Saturday was fun; and in between there were some fun things and some not-so-fun things and a lot of general doings.

I continue to work my way through a volume of short stories by Dorothy Sayers. A friend loaned me three sci-fi books by Michael Flynn, which look interesting. I have the new SIAM Review, which I've perused in part, and a copy of Alistaire Cooke's Memories of the Great and the Good. It had been on my wish list for a while, and I finally decided to buy it -- not long before the last of his Letters from America. I will miss his voice on the radio.

I now own Horn and Johnson'sTopics in Matrix Analysis, which I've missed ever since my former office mate graduated and returned the copy our advisor had loaned to her. Barenblatt's book on similarities and intermediate asymptotics should arive soon. I'm still making my way through Fowler's book on code refactoring and through Rob Phillip's excellent Crystals, Defects, and Microstructures. I have a bounty of light reading and of technical reading, both.

At the end of the meeting last Saturday, there was an interesting round-table discussion about education in computational science and engineering. The immediate question was from numerical computation experts at the national lab who asked How can we ensure there continue to be people with the right background available to hire? The ensuing discussion was wide-ranging and heated, and covered everything from how high school might be better organized to the effect of the job market to the structure of undergrad curricula in engineering, computer science, mathematics, and the physical sciences. I listened to the argument, and I agreed with many points made -- and I pondered my own thoughts quietly.

The word amateur now has a negative connotation -- an amateur is a bungler, or at least someone who lacks the skill to be a professional. Yet that is not the original meaning of the word. From the Latin, an amateur is a lover -- one who pursues a skill for the sheer joy of it. I would like to see more students become professional scientists and engineers of various stripes, but I really want more amateurs: people who build their own physical models to better understand every-day phenomena, for example. I also think we need more amateur historians and poets, philosophers and writers, engineers and naturalists. The world is a marvelous place, and we should take time to marvel and question and explore for ourselves.

Mark Zimmermann discovered my pages, first Sandy Mack's sermons and then this blog. He seems a kindred spirit, with wide-ranging interests much like mine. In an e-mail, he reminded me of the question about whether you can hear the shape of a drum -- given a membrane, how much can you tell about the geometry by learning the frequencies of the modes of vibration. Quite a bit, as it turns out. Jim mentioned the same body of literature when I first mentioned drums to him. It's not quite the same problem that I'm helping Cynthia simulate -- but it's an interesting problem nonetheless.

I ran another resonator simulation this week, and also another drum-head simulation. Both simulations were intended as much to test some new machinery as anything else. That's good, since I'm suspicious of the results of at least one of those simulations -- but for reasons that have nothing to do with the machinery I wanted to test. I also went to the floating point committee meeting this Thursday, and was party to a four-hour discussion on extended semantics for NaN (Not-A-Number). I was grateful when the meeting ended and I was able to meet with Winnie and play Frisbee for a while. I also helped my neighbor with a calculation involving molecule alignment, finished a fluid mechanics homework problem, and learned a little more about thermal effects at grain boundaries in polycrystalline silicon. It was a busy week.

It was also another beautifully sunny week, and a week of good food. Last Saturday there was a banquet dinner after the meeting, and I got to take home some leftovers. I had duck for a few days. When Winnie visited on Sunday, we got a loaf of olive bread, tangelos, and a delicious brownie. I was so impressed that I walked back to Andronicos on Monday to buy some bread and cheese, more tangelos, and a gallon of milk. On Thursday evening, I went with Winnie to the store, and we bought grapes and cheese and a baguette; and yesterday, I went to Trader Joe's and got some sesame thins, corn chips and tomatilla salsa, tangerines, and grapefruit Italian soda.

You might have the impression from these grocery lists that I subsist mostly on bread, cheese, and citrus fruit. It is not so -- I eat salad regularly, too, not to mention sour cabbage, noodles, rice, and beans. On the other hand, I do dearly love good bread, cheese, and fruit, and I've been eating a lot of all three lately.

And this week is Berkeley's spring break. I look forward to enjoying a couple days off, and also to finishing a little of my work backlog.

The weather this week has been balmy. It has reached 80 in many places, and it is supposed to remain this warm through Saturday. I have enjoyed the heat during my bike rides and walks, but I'm not looking forward to sitting in class today. On Tuesday, the heat was stifling in the classroom where my fluids course meets. I expect it will be the same today.

Patxi told me last night that he and Esther are planning to move. They've found a place they really like, which may open in the next few months. I'm not sure how the timing will work; our lease doesn't run out until June, I think, and none of us are in a tremendous rush. I understand why they want to move: our two-bedroom apartment, though spacious for two, is not so spacious for three; and I think Esther will be more comfortable sharing housing with her boyfriend than with her boyfriend and his quirky flatmate. Still, this is drattedly inconvenient. I'd hoped not to move again until after graduation.

• Currently drinking: Black currant tea

I'm making a movie of the (simulated) oscillation of a coupled micro-resonator system. It's not quite Oscar material, but I'm very pleased with myself.

I should see if I can get Peter Jackson to direct the sequel, Lord of the Shear Rings.

I stuck my head through Mike and Tracy's door this evening to show off my new hat, and this conversation ensued:

D: Did you know the Siberian crane dabs a collar of mud around its neck as part of its courtship ritual?
T: (laughing) I'm trying to decide which is funnier, the crane or the hat.
D: Looks like you're leaning toward the hat.
M: What I want to know is, where did you find out about the crane?
D: I just finished a book on cranes by Peter Matthiesen. I gather from your expression that you find the hat amusing, too? I got it to keep the sun off my neck.
M: Well... you look a little like a hybrid between a geeky computer scientist and someone who should be named Billy Bob.

The Prairie Home Companion radio show this week was a repeat from earlier in the year. It was done in Nashville, Tennessee, and includes a skit of concert musicians being taught to guffaw, wear coveralls, and keep chickens handy in order to make the Grand Old Opree more authentic. I suppressed the urge to slap my knees and say hee hee hee! and Mike's comment -- but just barely.

• Currently drinking: Red tea with rasberry

I've written little lately, in part because I've been busy, and in part because I've spent my leisure time enjoying the sun. But I'm working on a lot of interesting things, and I feel inspired to share.

1. Computer animators and game developers use physics-based simulations to create some incredibly convincing effects. Sometimes they resort to models that are fast and look reasonable, but are physically unrealistic; but as computers get faster, they can get more of the physics right and still run fast enough to remain on schedule.

   That's great for graphics, but what about for sound? Several professors and students at Berkeley are working on creating sounds on a computer by simulating the real physics of objects bounding off each other, or by simulating what happens when a musical instrument is played. Cynthia, a graduate student researcher in the department, has been working on simulating drums for computer sound generation. I've been helping her build some of her finite element models, which so far include only the vibration of the drumhead, but will soon include the interactions between the drum skin, the drum body, and the air inside and outside the drum. I hope to use this for the term project for my fluids class -- it's an interesting computation, it helps someone else out, and I might be second author on some related publication.

2. When you hit a drum, the sound dies away after a brief period. Why? Some of the sound energy is absorbed by the walls of the drum; some radiates out into the room, where it is absorbed by the ceiling tiles, the carpet, or the household pets; and a very little bit turns into heat energy in the air itself.

   Now, what if your drum was a bit of silicon, a small fraction of a hair's width in size, and it vibrated at around the same frequency as the carrier signal for your cell phone -- 2.4 billion times every second. The vibrations of this drum, too, will eventually die away, but the energy will be dissipated in different ways from a bongo drum. Some of the energy will escape through mechanical connections to a larger chip of silicon, to bounce around and eventually be absorbed, perhaps into the glue used to hold the chip to its packaging. And some of the energy will turn into heat inside the material itself.

   Find a rubber thick band, like the type used to hold stalks of celery together in the grocery store. Stretch it quickly between your fingers, and hold the stretched band to your lips. Can you feel a slight change in the temperature? What about when you let the rubber band relax? Rubber is a remarkable material, but in other materials, too, fast stretching and compression can cause changes in temperature, and vice versa. When an elastic material is stretched, if the stretching isn't uniform then the change in temperature will also not be uniform. Heat will flow from the warm spots to the cool spots, and in the process, some of the energy that was put into the material by stretching will be dissipated away, so that it can no longer be used to do further mechanical work. This thermoelastic damping is negligible for your bongo drum, but not for micrometer-size MEMS resonators.

   Together with researchers in the radio-frequency microsystems (RF MEMS) group and colleagues in computational mechanics, I'm involved in trying to figure out how these high-frequency resonators vibrate, and the ways in which those vibrations die out. In particular, right now I'm involved in looking at a test problem -- in a vibrating beam, how much energy is lost due to thermoelastic damping? We also hope to look soon at how much energy radiates away through the anchors by which the beam is connected to the rest of the chip.

3. Suppose you drop fine grains of sand into the water, and watch them drift downward toward the bottom. If you drop ten grains of sand together, will they fall at the same rate at which a single grain of sand would fall alone? No! Water has some viscosity, and so each of the ten grains of sand pulls its neighbors with it as it falls. Consequently, the ten grains fall faster together than they would alone -- a fact which will doubtless be astonishing to anyone with more experience in committee work than in physics. The last fluids homework involved a calculation of the descent of such a collection of slowly-falling particles.

4. If you slowly turn off a running faucet, the smoothly flowing stream will turn into a sequence of individual droplets before it finally halts completely. If you sufficiently push hard on the end of a column, eventually it will buckle to one side or the other. These are both bifurcation behaviors: sudden, qualitative changes which occur in many systems when some parameter (like the flow rate or the load in the previous two examples) exceeds some critical threshold.

   Finding the values at which such bifurcations occur is not always an easy task. There is some general-purpose software available for numerical bifurcation analysis, but many of the best software packages only work well for small problems. If the size of the problem is too large, these software packages run too slowly to be very useful. In order to extend the software that works so well for small problems to be useful for bigger problems, we use a projection method, in which we're able to examine a carefully constructed sub-problem which tells us all we need to know about the bigger problem. I have been collaborating with Mark, a math professor in Alabama, on an algorithm called continuation of invatiant subspaces, which should let us intelligently choose the sub-problems we need in order to find bifurcations both accurately and quickly.

5. I maintain a large linear algebra package called CLAPACK, which is a C translation of the venerable LAPACK library, a huge collection of Fortran 77 routines for solving a variety of problems in numerical linear algebra. It's a popular package, and I usually receive at least two or three requests each week from people who are having difficulty using the routines, or who don't understand which routines they need to solve their problems. For example, I recently had several exchanges with a gentleman who is studying the cable equation, which models neuron activity. He wanted to use LAPACK routines as part of his differential equation solver, but had trouble preparing his input in a way that made LAPACK happy. I was able to help him, and he sent an e-mail thanking me for clearing away one of the final impediments in his thesis research. I filed his thank you note where I can retrieve it easily; I like to have such notes available to comfort me when I'm forced to deal with inquiries written in broken English by those who have no grasp of what they're doing or why they're doing, but seem utterly convinced that the fault lies in some bug in LAPACK.

Dr. Seuss's hundredth anniversary was this week.

Big Q, little q, what begins with q?
The quick queen of Quincy, and her quacking quackaroo!

I remember, even after so many years. Of course, I don't remember the rhymes for any of the other letters. I was particularly attached to the letter Q, though. I still look fondly on it, even though now when I see the letter in isolation it immediately conjures thoughts of system energy or quality of resonance.

When I woke this morning, I had the theme song to Monsterpiece Theater stuck in my head. This spoof from Sesame Street of Masterpiece Theatre was hosted by Alistair Cookie (the Cookie Monster dressed in a bathrobe), and always began with a shot of the cookie monster chewing meditatively on a pipe, listening to the alphabet being sung to a sort of chamber music tune. Ah, Mr. Henson! I come from a generation whose culture is part Sesame Street and part The Simpsons -- both shows which allude to an amazing number of other bits of cultural trivia, so that they can act almost like a filter for the world. I've heard of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses; if I had to make glasses out of Sesame Street and The Simpsons, what color would they be?

Winnie asked me today why the Cookie Monster is blue. I had no immediate answer, but later I decided that it must be because of his diet. If the Cookie Monster ate more vegetables, perhaps he would be green. After all, pink flamingos are pigmented because of their diet. Why not blue Muppets?

Last night, I received around forty copies of an e-mail virus message. The mail told me that my computer was infected by a virus, and that I should execute the attachment in order to remove the infection. However clever the author might have been, his grammar was abominable:

Hello user of Berkeley.edu e-mail server,

Your e-mail account will be disabled because of improper using in next
three days, if you are still wishing to use it, please, resign your
account information.

Pay attention on attached file.

In order to read the attach you have to use the following password: 07407.

The Management,
The Berkeley.edu team

When I received the first such message, I was entertained. By the time I moved that message to the trash, there were four more in my inbox. That's when I wrote a filter so that I wouldn't have to think about it any further.

Yesterday was sunny and mild, and the weather is supposed to remain sunny for the rest of the week. I've started to bike to campus again. Though the weather provided no excuses, few voters cast ballots yesterday -- the registered voter turnout was around 43%. The low voter turnout didn't keep our governor from praising the electorate for passing his budget measures, saying Don't you love to see the people flexing their political muscles? The people of California are the greatest power lifters in the world. A commentator on one of the morning radio programs commented that Bush plans to stump in California soon, and that he hopes to ride on Schwarzenegger's popularity. That seems backward to me: Schwarzenegger has succeeded as a populist, not a partisan. His strength is in the combined support he has received from Republicans and Democrats. One of the callers on this morning's Forum program called Schwarzenegger a Democrat in Republican clothing; certainly his social views are more liberal than the views of many Republicans. In contrast, I doubt Bush's social conservatism and fiscal laxity will play well with California's electorate.

Were I Bush, I might stump in California despite misgivings about the state's politics, if only to enjoy the weather. Perhaps he'll spend some time campaigning by Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco? What a circus that would be! I can imagine Schwarzenegger posing beside the man who pretends to be a steam-powered robot (complete with silver body paint and hoses which must have been cannibalized from at least three vacuum cleaners). I cannot imagine Bush doing the same.

The SIAM conference on Parallel Processing took place in San Francisco last week, at the Hyatt near Fisherman's Wharf. I did not go to most of the conference, but I did attend part of a workshop on Combinatorics in Scientific Computing on Friday and Saturday. I left early on Saturday to return to Berkeley in order to hear a panel session that was part of the CS division 30th anniversary celebration. Between the sunny days, the interesting conversations I had with people at the workshop, and some of the work I've done in the past week or so, I feel a renewed enthusiasm for my research -- which is welcome, since I felt uninspired for most of the latter half of February. I spent some time on Monday working on adding support for anisotropic effeects to the thermoelastic element model from last semester. I look forward with unholy delight to adding other physical effects to this element, so that we can add an avalanche of appropriate adjectives beyond anisotropic. Actually, the next effect will probably be Akhieser damping. Huzzah for alliteration! I've also helped analyze and draw pretty pictures of vibrating drumheads; computed frequencies and node points for the third harmonic of a shear-ring resonator; read about thermal effects at grain boundaries in polycrystalline materials; drawn three-dimensional pictures of a building brace structure; and worked out a fluids homework problem involving sedimenting particles. I get to turn interesting physics into interesting mathematics, and solve the resulting problems with interesting computational methods. Huzzah!

• Currently drinking: Lemon-spice black tea

It's time for a mid-day tea break. Today I'm having black tea flavored with black currants.

I looked outside this morning and thought My umbrella will never survive this. But I needed to go to campus. So I changed into shorts and a t-shirt, put on a pair of sandals, and ran to Long's Drugs in the El Cerrito Plaza. Carlson Ave was flooded, and the water was knee-deep in places along the route I took. By the time I reached the store, I was drenched and dirty, as though I'd been swimming in mud water. I picked up a rain coat from the rack, walked to the register, and pulled my wallet out of the plastic bag in my pocket. The cashier looked at the rain coat and then at me. I smiled at her politely, and she started to laugh. I think I made her day -- she was still laughing when I left the store.

The rain was lighter when I walked in to campus for my meeting, and now there is no rain at all. I'm sure it will start again soon enough; I'm just thankful that I had the chance to walk in the sun for a few minutes.

I spent part of yesterday handling routine paperwork that accumulated over the past two or three weeks. Part of my task was sorting through commercial mail: discarding the dross that I kept only because I'd not looked at it, retaining the book catalogs and newsletters which I'd like to read, paying the bills, and sometimes puzzling over what to do with the odd bits left over. One such odd bit is a DVD that I received from Genetic Programming, Inc. which contains a FREE 4-hour DVD inside! along with an advertisement for a book (Genetic Programming IV: Routine Human-Competitive Machine Intelligence). The packaging looks so like one of the gaudy AOL CD's that I quickly tossed it toward the discard pile with my left hand, only to catch it with my right before it landed among the car insurance ads. After a moment's thought, I put it in the pile of things that I may look at soon or may discard next time.

I know several ways I could reasonably appear on a mailing list of people interested in books on evolutionary computation. As I thought about mailing lists, I turned up the radio, just in time to hear an interview segment from Weekend Edition about the new essay section on the SAT. The interviewee recently wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled Would Shakespeare get into Swarthmore? After analyzing essays by Shakespeare, Hemingway, Orwell, and the Unabomber -- only the Unabomber's essay would have scored well in the new exam -- the author of the article observed that the SAT is a perfect predictor of who will get into top rate colleges, and of very little else. And I thought, I wonder whether many marketers buy mailing lists from the Educational Testing Service?

Later yesterday, I read about a study of server break-ins. The company who ran the study looked at some thousands of break-ins, not including those due to Windows worms and viruses, and counted how many of the compromised systems ran one operating system or the other. Many of the compromised systems ran Linux, and relatively few ran Mac OS X; therefore, concluded the company, Linux must be insecure while Macs are secure, with Windows somewhere between. This conclusion seems eminently logical, as much as if the company surveyors walked into a local high-end jewelry establishment, counted heads, and decided that the most Americans make salaries of at least $100K and will marry within the year.

I spent much of the remainder of yesterday afternoon reading about the migrations of cranes and about fluid mechanics. I also took an hour to walk to Barnes and Noble, browse, buy a toffee bar, and return home. Such little things make pleasant days.

My cold has migrated. I stopped constantly blowing my nose; now I'm just dealing with bouts of rattling coughs. I don't think it's bronchitis yet, and I'm trying to keep it that way. The sun was out today, so the trip to school would probably have been rather pleasant; still, I canceled meetings and worked from home today. I continued to drink enormous quantities of liquids: cold water, hot water with lime juice, mint tea, orange tea, osymanthus-flavored tea, and miso soup.

I did some work, but lacked the concentration to do anything substantial. I had a bad case of clear-ls syndrome, in which I suddenly realize that I've done nothing for five minutes but repeatedly clear the screen and list the contents of the current directory. My fingers know those command so well that they can perform them without any intervention from higher brain functions -- so if I quit thinking, they'll keep typing, just to stave off boredom. Of course, other tasks are nearly as automatic as clearing the screen: finding capitalization errors in a bibliography, for example, as I did yesterday evening. I might even find it easier to do such tasks when my wits are dulled; if I could muster my concentration, I'd probably find it annoying to spend it on such a picayune task.

I typically listen to the radio during the days I work from home, and today was no exception. I was particularly amused by Fresh Air today. The show featured an interview with a White House correspondent for the Washington Post, who spoke about what it is like to deal with the Bush administration; and an interview with the man who helped Bill Clinton make jokes for his speeches. Some of the things said by the correspondent in the first interview made me think about Bush's peculiar brand of cleverness. Garrison Keilor observed that Clinton speaks in complete paragraphs; in contrast, Bush seems to delight in devising malapropisms. But though Bush's unrehearsed public speech may be rough, he delivers prepared comments skillfully enough -- far more so than I would, were I in his shoes -- and I can only guess at what his private speech might be like. In any case, Bush is a successful politician: he has pushed through legislation that he wanted, and still he remains popular.

His geniality and political savvy aside, I dislike the reasons behind Bush's policies, even when I agree with his actions, or at least feel ambivalent toward them. I thought about that today when I listened to news about the report published today by the Union of Concerned Scientists, in which the authors objected to the administration's policy of loading scientific review boards with administration supporters. On one of the radio programs that aired this morning, a panelist said: So what? Scientists disagree; why should we not choose the scientists who agree with our point of view? The panelist's comment reminded me of a point Barzun makes repeatedly in his essays: we apply the label of science to too many subjects in which there is precious little of the scientific method. It should not be an insult to state that a subject is not a science. Indeed, I do not regard most of computer science as a scientific discipline; rather, it is an engineering discipline. But somehow the meaning of the word science has blurred; we can say that someone has a skill down to a science and mean the skill is so practiced it is nearly automatic. Where is the sense of questioning, of hypothesis and experiment, in such a colloquial usage? In what sense does political science employ the scientific method? Scientists disagree, true, and debate over interpretation of the available data is an important part of the process. But scientific review panels should be chosen according to familiarity with the data; if our administration chooses instead based on political or religious position, it risks promoting the likes of Lyshenkoism.

In the evening, the music programming began. For half an hour I listened to a musician trained in the drum styles of the Indian subcontinent; for another half hour, I listened to jazz; and for another half hour, I listened to classical music. I appreciate music without lyrics, or songs in which the lyrics play a secondary role. The tune of Summer time is poetry enough even when unaccompanied by singing.

I've caught cold: my nose drips, my sinuses hurt, and my chest rattles when I inhale. But I have the good taste to drink plenty of hot liquids, the good sense to take a decongestant and a nap, and the good humor to keep grinning.

I read the rest of Simple and Direct yesterday. I enjoy Barzun's writing not solely because he has wit, style, and insight, but also because he states his opinions so forthrightly. I do not always agree with him, but when I disagree, I find myself framing counter-arguments, and not simply shrugging and reading on.

Next on my list is The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes by Peter Matthiesen. I bought it last year, but it disappeared into my cluttered piles, only to emerge after I bought new shelves recently.

We ate dim sum for lunch and a particularly good salad for dinner. We read from Cooke's America, walked in the sun, played frisbee, and practiced salsa. In the morning, I got confused and made a detour of nearly an hour through the BART system; and in the evening, I had to assemble my exit fare from two small tickets and the coins in my change purse. But my BART misadventures proved a minor irritant only.

It was a good day.