Tales from the ArXiv: Motto: "Somebody has to Study this Shit!"

Motto: Somebody has to study this shit!

And I mean this literally: the title of the paper is "An Agent-Based Model for Bovine Viral Diarrhea".

Update: Normally, I hate it when papers are full of bullshit. However, I may need to make an exception in this case.

I have stuff

I have stuff now. It's in my apartment, and it's very heavy. (Some of it will need to go to my office to take its proper place there.) Major props go out to several members of Oxford's complex systems group, who helped me move it up to my flat. Then we all went to a pub.

Now that my stuff is here, I can finally renew my efforts to pass the 5th dungeon in Zelda: Twilight Princess. (Yes, I actually made it as far as the 5th dungeon.) Of course, I'm going to check and make sure my stuff can handle appropriate voltages first and I don't particularly feel like unpacking things today. (I will probably unpack my desk chair just because it's much more comfortable than the best chair I have here.)

Moving my stuff to make room for somebody else's shit

The movers are currently at my apartment. I am moving my stuff to make room for somebody else's shit.

The next stop after the apartment will be my office. Then I'll take a bath and maybe get some work done (or maybe I'll just watch the Dodgers game, though I suspect we'll be between games when the movers finish).

Adventures in Moving Insurance

I just spent an hour and a half futile hours trying to fill out several pages of insurance forms pertaining to my upcoming move to Oxford.

As stated explicitly in the insurance forms, spontaneous combustion is not covered by this insurance. It was listed among several things known collectively as "inherent vices", which means "the inherent nature of the goods to become easily destroyed". (What they're really getting at here is death by natural causes --- such as battery decay in old iPods, rust, and so on --- as opposed to their breaking something, but I find their phrasing to be pretty curious, and I find the explicit statement about spontaneous combustion to be particularly odd.) My goods must repent their sins! Now, damnit! No more spontaneous combustion! I won't stand for it!

Another weird thing is that cordless phones are apparently considered restricted/prohibited goods in the UK. I'm going to have to ask (Mike)^2 about that one. I was hoping to continue using one, because I really like those. Maybe they can only be in certain frequency ranges?

Anyway, I want to insure my stuff by filling out this shit. (OK, that joke didn't work, but there really has to be a way to properly allude to George Carlin's "A Place for my Stuff" with this shit.) I filled this out to the best of my ability (which isn't actually saying much), but when it asks for the quantity of various shit, my case of OCD is no even close to extreme enough to count my books one by one. That's just way too much of a pain in the ass. (I basically did separate estimates for textbooks and other books.) Moreover, prices for a lot of this stuff is different in the UK, and I am not going to spend tons of hours investigating the precise differences. Doing my best to approximate things makes the most sense to me.

The customs part of the form wants you to write down everything bought in the 6 months prior to the move. For me, this would include a bunch of books, and I can't even nail down the precise number of them I'm taking with me that I've purchased in this time frame.

Well, I'll fax this to the people at the UK insurance company and we'll see if I need to be more specific about anything.