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

• Henri Poincare. The Value of Science --

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

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

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

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

• Roger Zelazny. The Great Book of Amber --

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

• William Gibson. Pattern Recognition --

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

• Bill Bryson. A Walk in the Woods --

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime and honey

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

Joy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Currently drinking: Osymanthus black tea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Currently drinking: Black coffee

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

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

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

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime

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

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

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

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

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

Thus, the Grim Beeper.

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

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

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

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

• Currently drinking: Russian caravan blend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Currently drinking: Jasmine downy pearl green tea

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

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

Time to rest now, I think.

• Currently drinking: Water

I think I should read Ulysses at some point.

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

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

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

A week in conversations ...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

• Currently drinking: Spiced black tea

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

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

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

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

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

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