When I got back Saturday night, I discovered that after several months of waiting, I finally received my birthday present from Chris. Eric had visited Chris over the holidays, and had brought the gift back here, finally giving it to Nath a week or so ago.

It was totally worth the wait: an autographed copy of Everybody vs. Bob the Angry Flower. Chris, you are my hero. The book has a collection of BtAF comics, and includes bonus features such as a brief essay about the limits of relativistic physics (no, I'm not kidding). Best of all, the physics essay is illustrated with cute little cartoon diagrams. If only Serway could have had this much personality.

I'm not sure exactly what I like about BtAF. I really enjoy the randomness. And the giant killer robots. Yeah, robots. And the fact that Bob is a hard ass when it comes to correct punctuation. Also, the strip reminds me of Intelligent Humor, one of my favourite comics from undergrad days. To sum up, Bob is the funniest flower since the snickering daisies from the NFB film "The Apprentice". Yeah, I know that means almost nothing.

After three days in eastern Canada and a week visiting friends and family, I'm back at my undisclosed location in the pacific northwest. I will reveal no additional information about my whereabouts, except to say that US vice president Dick Cheney is not here.

Ten days. I'm pretty sure this is the longest I've ever been away. I'd like to say that it's the longest vacation I've ever had, except that it's a bit of a stretch to call a three-day job interview a vacation. On the other hand, only one of the three days was at all stressful, so perhaps this trip does qualify after all.

There's plenty of stuff to write about, but I don't simply want to accumulate it all into one monster post. Instead, I'll leave the different bits of news for individual posts, to be written when inspiration strikes. If my muse is feeling cooperative over the next few days, we might hope for a brief flood of entries to compensate for the long drought.

It's a bit early in the morning to attempt anything overly coherent. Suffice it to say that I'm leaving in about an hour for the airport, to begin a trip to eastern Canada for my first job interview. Hopefully, I'll get lots of sleep on the plane, and be rested up for a killer presentation tomorrow (Thursday). When the interview's done, I can look forward to a week in Montreal and Ottawa with family and friends. I may not get a chance to keep thingo current during the trip, but hopefully I'll be able to provide some interesting updates once I'm around again.

On Sunday, we went to see a local performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, put on by the Professional Actors Training Program, the drama department's graduate acting program. I was particularly interested in seeing this production because my TA from the acting course I took (whose middle name, I have come to learn, really is "Seven") was playing the role of Jack.

The performance was... fine. The sets were quite extravagant, as were the costumes. The lighting was right on. The ushers were highly capable. But as much as I hate to say it, the acting really wasn't all that great. Mr. Seven did a pretty good job, I suppose. There was a bit of weirdness where they played the easy camraderie between Jack and Algernon to the point of latent homosexuality; I fully expected them to run off with each other instead of Gwendolyn and Cecily:

Jack:		Algernon! At last!
Algernon:		Jack! My own! [They embrace passionately.]

Now maybe it's the mists of memory and the many intervening years, but I feel like we did a much better job with this play back when I was in high school, with me as Algernon, Mike as Jack, and Carolyn as Lady Bracknell. I think most people remember Carolyn in particular as making the part her own, and playing the Lady subtly yet brutally. The actor who played her on Sunday wore the role like an ill-fitting hat, not really internalizing the fundamental biliousness of the character. Perhaps our early, shared acting success should be seen as forshadowing what was to come, for after all these years the three of us perform regularly on stage: Carolyn as a musician, Mike as an actor, and of course me in front of a classroom.

According to the NIH, passing gas 14 to 23 times a day is normal.

But... it isn't even 10:00AM! I guess I can take the rest of the day off.

Yesterday, Nath pointed out that the archive links in the sidebar on the left only showed the last ten months; there was no direct way to click through to earlier times. Now that thingo is more than ten months old, this became a problem.

So there's now a more... link below the links to recent months. Click on that to get a complete archive of thingo since its inception in the ancient, misty past of December, 2000.

This will be my geekiest thingo entry ever.

The Clay Mathematics Institute has a collection of seven one million dollar prizes they're offering as bounties for the solutions to famous unsolved problems in mathematics. Each problem has a page describing it, including essays and streaming video lectures by scholars working in the area. The lecture about the Riemann Hypothesis ends with a simple, elegant observation: perhaps the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function are the eigenvalues of some infinite-dimensional linear operator. Find the operator, and the structure of the zeta function becomes transparent.

Now as far as I know, there isn't any particular reason why this observation should be true. But what's cool is that it has an undeniable feeling of rightness that you don't always get in mathematics. Mathematicians have struggled with the seemingly arbitrary arrangements of the zeroes; but these sorts of strange values come up all the time in eigenanalysis. This is the explanation that you would want to be true.

Of course, I completely lack the training to understand how this might work. The courses I took about eigenanalysis were so abstract that I never figured out why eigenvalues were remotely interesting or useful, and I prompty forgot the theory when the courses were done. I guess I'll have to leave the Riemann Hypothesis to the better equipped, and stick with the relatively straightforward Poincaré Conjecture.