Recently I have taken to previewing my next lecture by making some mysterious statement at the end of class and saying something along the lines of "you'll find out next time". I think of this as just a bit of fun, but I always have one or two students who can't hold their water and follow me down the hall saying things like "I don't understand how that could be". On the one hand, this is exactly what I wanted them to think. On the other hand, I am discouraged when it appears they don't understand that they WILL find out the answer at the beginning of the next lecture.
Silly putty pitch drop status -
I have been trying to recreate Thomas Parnell's pitch drop experiment using silly putty as a conversation piece. So far the time scale of my experiment it too close to that of the original (the drops do not fall in t=O(months) ). So far I have switched funnels three times trying to overcome surface tension at the mouth and reworked the silly putty a couple times trying to avoid non-newtonian and wetting effects. Currently I am trying putting the whole experiment in the sun hoping it will go faster if it is warmer.
My job number -
I have now applied for 43 jobs. A friend who is currently up for tenure at Berkeley told me when he did his tenure track search he applied for 37. I might do 7 more ( I believe that universities have for the most part stopped posting, if more jobs are posted this number may increase). As of this posting, there are 192 tenure track jobs in the US and Canada posted on the AMS search page this year. I wonder what that number has been for the last five years. Is this an average year?
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