Just a couple of updates on stuff from my last entry. My paper is done, and it will likely be submitted to a journal this week! I’m very excited.

About the textbook problems: after I complained to the publisher (the email was positively scathing), our rep fixed everything to our (the textbook manager’s and mine) satisfaction. I have the new edition in the bookstore, and they took back the old ones at their expense, and all within 3 business days of my complaint. I’m upset about the price increase, but that happens with new editions all the time. Overall, I am very happy with the way the situation was handled. No hard feelings.

I got my motorcycle back with the new exhaust pipes on it. The pipes were from an ‘82 Yamaha Virago 920, and I have an ‘81 Yamaha Virago 750, but folks on online forums said that exhaust systems from those early year Viragos are interchangable, so I took a chance, and it paid off. They fit just fine, and it sounds great. Not too quiet, not too loud. And I picked up a windshield they couldn’t get rid of for less than half the price, and it looks great! The only problem now is I need new saddlebags, since the current ones now hit the stock pipes (which are higher than the aftermarket ones I took off). That, and I need to fix a pesky turn signal, but hopefully that’s just replacing a bracket; a quick fix. That should be done soon, but the saddlebags will have to wait … I’ve put enough money into this bike this year!

Check out Questionable Content, one of my favorite webcomics. It’s about a bunch of 20somethings centered around a coffee shop. I’m currently wearing this t-shirt. There are others here. Good geeky stuff.

In the meantime, I’m doing math a lot these days. The REU inspired me to get this paper that I’ve been procrasti- … er, working on, out. And for a week and a half now I’ve been incredibly productive! Talk about taking the bull by the horns and running with your nose to the wheel! It’s been great, and it looks like I’m going to meet my self-imposed deadline of getting this paper presentable, at least to a couple of colleagues to look over, and without qualifiers like, “Ignore the formatting errors in chapter three,” or, “I know the proof in the Hermitian case needs work.” This is going to be a no-qualifiers, one edit away from submission to a journal, state of done-ness.

This makes me very happy. It almost makes me not mind so much that my motorcycle’s been in the shop for a week and a half. I think I’ll call them. They said a part was on order last week, and that it’d take several days to get, so it’s not totally unexpected that it has taken this long, but I’m getting antsy.

What else is going on? Jenny’s tummy is unhappy, so neither of us got much sleep last night. My poor sweetie. She’s been doing lots of riding on her bike, though. Good for her! She’s taking it slow, practicing on the college campus after hours and on local residential roads. She’s concentrating on having excellent control, and building experience, and therefore confidence, little by little. We can’t wait til we can ride together, each on our own bike!

One and a half weeks until classes start. There was a recent issue with one of my textbooks. One company bought the textbook I was using from another company and raised the price by over 60% from the last edition. Then they had the nerve to ship us hardcover copies of the old edition, and were charging the inflated price! I sent one of the nastiest emails I’ve every sent, and it looks like it’s being taken care of at no cost to us. We’re getting the new editions, and my textbook manager won’t have to have our bookstore pay to send the old copies back. If it all works out, I’ll have no ill feelings about the publisher. I may not use this book again at this price (it’s a bit late to change at this point), but we’ll have to see.

Now I’m off to a clicker demo. “Clickers” are used for ConcepTests, classroom voting and such, and the college is evaluating several systems from various vendors. I use them regularly. I don’t recall if I’ve posted any entries about them. There’s lots of info online if you want to google “clickers,” or “conceptests.” Ta-ta!

This summer of 2008, I took part in an REU, Research Experience for Undergraduates.  It’s the acronym that has stuck for a summer program where talented undergraduates work with a Mathematics professor on a research problem.  The Potsdam/Clarkson REU has been running for about 11 years now. This is my first time doing it. The professors here who are involved with it find it a good way to stay active in research in a school with such a high teaching load. (The current 24 credit per year teaching load is being reduced to 21 credits per year, with plans to further reduce it to 18. But recent changes in the state government make me wary of being too optimistic.)

I was very apprehensive going into this. Actually, I was downright nervous. Finding a tractable research problem for myself is enough of a challenge, but finding one appropriate for someone with an undergraduate background, where they could learn enough of the area to understand and make progress on the problem, seemed an incredibly daunting task. Nevertheless, people do it. There are REU programs all over the country, so surely it can be done.

I prepared for this in a few different ways. I talked with professors in the department who have done it in the past. We talked about selecting a problem, getting the students up to speed, managing the group dynamics, etc. Also, I attended an excellent workshop at the spring 2008 meeting of the MAA Seaway Section by Francis Su of Harvey Mudd college. He has been doing research with undergrads for years, and he really broke it down and made seem manageable.

My biggest obstacle seemed to be how to get the students up to speed and actually working on the problem quickly. Do it too quickly and they won’t have a good sense of the context or a deep enough understanding of the problem. This could lead to initial attempts that are overly naive, or a lack of motivation. Do it too gradually, and too much of the eight weeks is taken up by learning background before they even start the problem. This could lead to a drain on the initial excitement and enthusiasm of starting the REU, enthusiasm that should be harnessed, not squandered. After all, research is hard. There will be frustration enough.

I decided on the essentials they needed to have, and to avoid too much of me lecturing, I assigned them mini-presentations in the first week. We met for the first time on Monday, and at the end of the afternoon session, I gave each student (there were 3) the equivalent of a short chapter to read, learn, and present a 10 minute talk to the other 2 students and me. It was not a formal presentation, they would not be judged on their speaking style or anything, and if they got stuck we would help them through it. It was understood that this was new material to them and they weren’t yet expected to speak as an expert, but they should attempt to do as thorough a job as they could in the time given. This was assigned at the end of our first day, Monday, and they were to present on Wednesday morning. I would be available for questions before the presentations if they wanted or needed it.

I thought the talks went very well. No one ran screaming, and they all took their assignment seriously. So I followed it up with a more in-depth talk, about 30 minutes long, to be delivered on Friday morning. They were doing pretty well by this time, so I assigned topics that, if they understood them, would enable them to understand the main question our research was to be centered on. It worked! The talks went well; they knew from the friendly atmosphere I took the effort to create for the first talk that this wasn’t something they would be judged harshly on, and they seemed much less stressed. They did a nice job, and in the afternoon session of the first Friday, we were able to state the problem in an appropriate amount of detail. I was so happy to be able to get to that point before the first week ended.

A large part of this was due to my having high expectations of them, and communicating those expectations. Also, the talks early on got them involved in learning the background more than if they were just listening to me and reading books and papers. (All these happened too, and were essential.) I think those early talks gave them a sense of teaching each other, collaborating with each other. Whatever it was, I rested much easier after that first week was over.

The rest of it was very good. They made good progress, they got stuck, they got unstuck, they went down dead ends, … in short, they got a good idea of what math research is like. They were also successful in making conjectures, proving some of them, giving a great presentation to the other groups in the REU, and writing a nice paper about it. At this point I suspect the paper is at least worthy of being published in an undergraduate journal, perhaps more. I’ll be reading it next week with fresh eyes after having put it down for a week. One of the students is giving a talk about our results at a national conference in a session on student research this week.

I am incredibly proud of and impressed by these guys. They did a fantastic job, they worked hard and long, they were tenacious and creative, and they produced a nice paper at the end. I’m also very happy with myself that I was able to provide an environment that let them achieve what they did. What a great feeling! This is one of my most fulfilling professional moments ever. I hear that not every experience doing research with undergrads is this fulfilling, but I’m so looking forward to doing it again!

Woo-hoo!

If you want Star Trek movies on DVD, but just never got around to getting them, then the DVD box set, Star Trek - The Motion Pictures (Special Edition) is for you. Actually, it’s for me. But maybe it’s for you, too.

Unlike some box sets in the past, every one of the ten movies in this set is the 2-disc special edition. And the first movie is the Director’s Cut which is, from what I understand, a significant improvement that makes the movie at least watchable if not great. And it’s less than $70!

This is a great time to pick up movies like this, because Blu-Ray is coming, and regular old DVDs won’t be made in the near future. (Less than 5 years, I’d guess.) And since Blu-Ray players also play DVDs, you won’t be stuck when buying DVDs on the cheap, unlike the folks who bought cheap cassettes in the late eighties, or cheap VHS tapes in the late nineties. The new machines will still play these babies.

So scarf ‘em up! And keep your eyes out for other great DVD collections at low prices in the next year or two.

It’s been long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time!

I used to be into video games hardcore. I was into them at the very beginning. The pizzeria by us had a space invaders machine that was replaced by Pac-man when it first came out, and later, the better Ms. Pacman. My friends had Atari and Colecovision, and I had Intellivision. Before that, we had pong. I also had the Gameboy’s handheld ancestors Merlin and Microvision. My friends and I would play Yar’s Revenge for hours until my hands hurt so much from the sucky controllers that I had to ride my bike home one-handed. And we loved it. I was there when it started. For a fantastic rant about what life was like back in 1987, listen to Ernest Cline’s “When I Was A Kid,” on http://www.ernestcline.com/spokenword/

When I got a part-time job and a computer in high school, I played video games less and less. I did NOT bring them to college, not because of any intelligent choice on my part, but because computer games were getting better and better and I was playing those instead. Finding out about girls probably played a role in decreasing the video game time, too.

Anyway, I found out about the next great video games to come out, the Nintendo with Super Mario Brothers. Some cousins had it. I didn’t get it, or any of its successors. It didn’t even have a joystick, for crying out loud. It was fun I guess, but I was into other things. Since then, nothing has really grabbed me. Especially since the domination of the so-called first-person shooter games that Doom started. No thanks. My favorite games were Adventure, Utopia, Tetris, Ms. Pac-man, and the like. Puzzle games, not as much the kick the other guy’s ass games. Competition was fine, but the FPS games never grabbed me. I probably would have gotten into Starcraft, but for some reason I didn’t.

Sure, the newer systems had some other games, too. The Playstation 2 had graphics better than we could have dreamed about in the 1980s, but a minority of the games were interesting to me. And they were damn expensive. Probably just as expensive as video games of old when allowing for inflation, but still.

Then, about a year ago, the Wii came out, and as soon as I saw commercials for it, something inside me said, “Video games are fun again.”

I might actually get one.

This past weekend Jenny & I played Rock Band on a friend’s Xbox. Fantastic! We just loved it. So fun. This is a video game? It’s about time. It’s about time video games were fun again.

I read the reviews for Rock Band for the Wii. Apparently it doesn’t have all the features of Rock Band on the other game systems. For one thing, you cannot download songs online. You can only purchase bundles on CDs. Not cool. That’s a huge part of the draw for us is that we can get songs that WE want to play.

I hear that Rock Band 2 is coming out in time for Christmas, and so is a competitor, Guitar Hero: World Tour. To be honest, even though Rockband is the first one I played and I love it, GHWT for the Wii looks like it is going to have the full functionality of the other systems. And the drum set looks better, too. I know that the designers of Rockband are the same folks who developed Guitar Hero in the first place, years ago, but to me it really all depends on how good the Wii version is. I want to be able to play the songs that I want to play. That’s really what it comes down to. That, and I want to have fun with friends. Right now, it looks like GHWT will do that for the Wii, the current Rockband won’t, though Rockband 2 might. So for now, it’s a wait and see.

Besides, I don’t even have a Wii yet.

It’s about the size of a ST:TNG comm badge, and it’s in the same position on my left chest. I can scarcely believe I’m such a geek!

It was done my Don Morley at In The Skin Tattoos in Ogdensburg, NY, about a 45 minute drive from us. Don was great. He was friendly and accommodating. And he’s good at what he does. In the rear of his shop, out of view of the front counter, are over a dozen trophies he earned over the past 10 or so years.

Jenny went first, and then me. It only took less than an hour each; they aren’t very big, after all. Of course it hurt, but after the endorphins kicked in about five minutes after he started, it wasn’t so bad.

Not much else to say. I’m positively giddy! How am I supposed to work today?

Ok, how many people do you know who are trekkies?

No, I mean REAL trekkies. Real science-fiction convention attending, episode memorizing, trekkies. Folks with more than just a casual appreciation for the series. Borderline fanatics, you might say.

I suspect I may be among that group.

I have a Star Trek tattoo. How freaky is that?

I watched Star Trek on Saturday afternoons on channel 11 with my Dad in the late seventies when the original series was on reruns. Of course I loved Mr. Spock. I was the logical, math, computer nerd in middle and high schools. I went to a technical college, and when Star Trek: The Next Generation started, my friends and I were glued to the TV set. We had Star Trek parties in the dorm. The first two seasons sucked, but we still watched them, because it was Star Trek. It didn’t start strong, but it had the lineage. And, by some miracle, Paramount didn’t sabotage the series in the third series like it did the original, and the third series was the best yet. They actually started writing continuing storylines and fleshing out and evolving characters. They created Worf’s Klingon heritage and the associated socio-political drama. Wesley stopped being quite so damn annoying. And Picard built up some muscle and got some of the babes instead of Riker. And there were four more awesome seasons after that, including the Borg. And three more whole series. And movies.

Anyway, the point is, I’ve been a trekkie for a long time. I don’t have a star trek uniform. I haven’t gone to a Star Trek convention. I don’t even have any cast member’s autograph.

But I think I’ve finally “joined the club.” I have a Star Trek tattoo.

Here’s the thing. Jenny, my partner/wife, first got hooked on Star Trek: Voyager, the fourth series. [EDIT: Jenny originally got into Next Gen, and followed Voyager from the beginning.] She was way into it. I didn’t like it so much. After all, the first season or two sucked. Oh, wait, but then it got good. She showed me that, and we bonded over Trek. (Among other things.) Add to it all that we have been trying to find a joint tattoo design for years. We tried infinity rings, pi symbols, celtic knotwork … and it just didn’t click. Finally, we came together on Star Trek.

Jenny saw two Star Trek tattoos online. Well, more than just two, but two of them had the insignia on the upper left chest, just where it is on the uniform. One from the original series, and one from one of the later series. Almost a year later, we decided that we would get our matching tattoos, and they would be … wait for it …

Star Trek comm badges!

I got a modified Next Gen comm badge, and J got a modified Voyager comm badge. We’re hoping they can still talk to each other. 24th century comm badges would be advanced enough to have backwards compatibility, wouldn’t they?

I’ll post pics later.

I’m so giddy! (And in a little bit of pain. Tattoos still hurt a bit.)

The semester is over, and a nice big deep breath is called for.  I have just a couple of things to wrap up this week, and then I clean up my office, resume writing my paper, and preparing for the summer REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates).  Today is spent cleaning house and doing a project or two that have been sitting too long.

Wow, that was brief.  Not much else to say, though.  I’ll write more about the REU later.

I finally re-ripped all my music onto iTunes. Woo!

This Friday, 5-9-08, Legendary Magpie Mead will be pouring a free tasting at
The Heights Chateau
123 Atlantic Avenue
From 5-8 pm