After receiving multiple birthday wishes from people on facebook, I reflect now on what it is to be 30. I responded to one birthday email that I would celebrate my 1/3 life crisis by getting a tattoo, here is what I will get:
(I will actually use the LaTex font because I am such a nerd).
Last week I was stuck in traffic for half an hour because someone wrecked on Lakeshore. It took me (and I estimated 400,000 other people) half an hour to go 3 miles (instead of the normal 3 minutes). During this half hour I found myself angrily wishing that the person who crashed had never existed. I then tried to do some math to justify this feeling along the lines of - If
(people whose time was wasted)*(hours wasted) > (life expectancy of time waster in hours)
then it would have been better for the world if they hadn't existed. Of course this argument ignores what the people one each side do with their time if it is not "being wasted". Is this a psychotic chain of reasoning? b says yes.
I got my first real response to a job posting today. Instantly after applying for a job in Physical Oceanography I received a notice that the position had been filled. I went to the web to see if I had missed the application date (I don't believe so) and noticed that the solicitation (which was online this morning) was taken down as a result of my email. I call shennanigans. When I visited NU this fall (an engineering department) they said that other fields are not nearly as well organized as math and who you know matters much more. I suspect this job was awarded before the application deadline. Is this unethical?
I taught Chebyshev polynomials today, which we refer to as T_n(x) for Tchebycheff, the French transliteration. It would be cool if we used instead Ч_n(x) for his actual name Чебышёв.
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