Back in the Old World

I arrived in Oxford today, and I'm really tired. I actually made it just in time for a brief SCR meeting. (Q: "How long have you been back?" A: "About 2 minutes.") It was held in the same room where I can get espresso, which definitely encouraged my attendance.

I had a shitload of snail mail waiting for me (a relatively light load at my apartment, but a ton at my office --- still no reimbursement from Charter, however), and about 50 or so e-mails had accrued in the roughly 24 hours since I had last checked. I went through a bunch of the snail mail, though there are a couple of things (principally ones related to e-mails I received while I was out of town) about which I need to ask people. A couple of the e-mails are also going to require some work on my part once I talk to the relevant people. I also need to do some marking (though that stuff is not yet on my desk) and some lecture organization, though that will need to wait until a meeting that is happening on Tuesday. I also should finish unpacking the boxes in my office, and I think I'll get through a bit of that tomorrow. However, I think I'll also have time to come close to finishing draft 3 of my grant proposal and I think I'll go to the local indie theatre and watch the Bob Dylan biopic. (By the way, I watched Tootsie on the airplane. I had heard good things about it for years, so I'm glad I finally had a chance to watch it. The film had some excellent performances---including one by Bill Murray, who displayed many of his now-famous mannerisms.)

Among the snail mail I got were the statistics (plus comments) from my student evaluations from my perturbation methods course last term. Thankfully, the students were very pleased with how I did (the evaluations were actually through the roof in the positive direction, so let's hope I can continue that). The only really big complaint was my messy handwriting, which has been a constant struggle with my teaching. I think my next lecture is in a room with a whiteboard rather than a chalkboard, and that will help things a bit. I'll try to remember to write bigger, however. Some students thought the course was too hard, but not as many as I was expecting. A few students asked for more examples, though given the limited time and all the stuff we have to cover, that may be hard to accommodate even though in principle I highly agree with the request. People should be cautious about encouraging things like my sense of humor in class, because that's the type of fuzzy-headed liberal thinking that leads to my playing "Tarzan Boy" over and over again. :) (On that note, I will be able to borrow season 3 of Angel from a local very soon and once he gets the rest of Buffy on DVD---he has some of it on video tape---I'll be able to continue with season 6 of that as well. Or I'll buy some of it, especially if I can find it at a reasonable price.)

I also listed reasonably closely to Travis's new mix CD today. It seems solid in general, and there are a couple of songs that sound really good. At the moment, I can't figure out what I did with the 2006 mix CD (the one at the end of the year, not the one that went with Coachella). I might need this one sent to me again, but we'll see if I faked myself out by putting it in a strange spot.

I have a couple more things to mention from the Joint Math Meetings. My student Alex, who attended the conference, e-mailed me to let me know that she did very well on her talk (I had to leave before then to catch my train) and that she got good feedback in terms of both ideas and opportunities. That is always excellent news! Alex also mentioned that my name was called in the Exhbitors Hall, which means I won something. That was news to me, so it also means that I wasn't there to claim it. I admittedly filled in a number of these things---more than usual, I think---so we'll see if this was one of the raffles where they'll send it to me later or if I got disqualified from not being there. The most interesting thing being given away (as far as I was able to figure out) was an iPhone.

One of the unfortunate things about this conference was that I was so busy that there were several people I know who I barely had time to say 'hi' to (or was so intent on going wherever it is that I was going) that I didn't even get to do that. Basically, enough things were going on that the social part of the conference had to be curtailed a bit. This is rather unfortunate, as that is one of the reasons I usually enjoy this conference. I did get a chance to have lunch with science writer Barry Cipra (who I know from numerous previous conferences) on Wednesday, but I had to miss the undergrad student poster session (which is usually one of the conference highlights for me) and a talk on mathematics in the social sciences to attend the entirety of the marathon nonlinear waves session on Tuesday. (I also couldn't see Terry Tao's talk on stability of solitons in the nonlinear Schrodinget equation, which occurred not only during the session but also during my talk. Because of the asinine scheduling, we lost half our audience for the 1 hour that that talk was going on.)

After the nonlinear waves session ended, the session organizer (a collaborator of mine) hosted a party at his place. He's from Mexico, so the party had traditional Mexican food that kicked my ass. (Well, I was able to handle the tortilla chips, the sparkling apple cider, and the desserts.) It turns out that there was a snake at the party: My collaborator has a pet boa constrictor at home---he also has pet black widows in his office, but I managed not to notice them at all when I was there for a while on Saturday---that was living up to its name on Tuesday because it constricted people. A couple people asked it for it to be put around their necks for pictures---I'll try to look for one at some point, so that I can post it---and then very sharply asked for it to be extracted from their necks. This snake is not as large as it would be if in the wild, so it was maybe 5-6 feet long instead of several times that length (in which case it would also have a larger cross-sectional width). Although the party was very fun, it conflicted directly with the Project NExT reception, which is another of my favorite Joint Math Meetings events that I had to miss this year. Why do the two best parties have to be at the same time? That's so frustrating. Some of the people I didn't get a chance to talk to are people I know from Project NExT, so as a result I missed out on a whole group of my peeps almost entirely this time around. All of us were very busy doing our own things this time, and in my case it seemed rather extreme this year.

I think that's it for the Joint Math Meetings blogging for this year. I'll add more if I think of it. Now I'll try to finish off my end-of-year reviews in the next few days, and then I can do things like review Rock Band and list a few songs to which I'd like to jam. (Pump it up!)