Men's Urinals and Antiferromagnetic Equilibria

In the men's room, there is an understanding: you space as far apart from each other as possible at urinals. Not doing so, or when some gaps must be filled, leads to frustration --- not just in real life but also in the sense of spin models from statistical physics.

The stable equilibrium in this case is most definitely the antiferromagnetic one.

(Also, you are not supposed to talk. Ever.)

Update: Aaron Clauset reminds me of the related discussion and mathematical formulation in xkcd.

Sketchy Futon

Fun Fact: The Stanford psychology department has a very sketchy futon in front of its ground-floor bathrooms.

I assume that it gets used for 'experiments'.

"There's Room?"

Smiling sheepishly and asking "There's room?" is totally not the right thing to do when you open the bathroom door and I scowl at you from inside.

Thankfully, I was only washing my hands at that point.

(This made me think of a certain Caltech dinner announcement by Steve Van Hooser, though thankfully the present situation involved much less trauma.)

On the bright side, the place where I was (my local ice cream place) played the original version of "Instanbul (Not Constantinople)" earlier, and that made me very happy. I need to go buy the original version if I can find that on iTunes. I've made a note to myself to go and do it.

Well I just started the trip off right...

I really needed to use the bathroom and searched all around both my floor and the bottom floor of the building in which my room (a dorm room) is located and tried to find a single bathroom without success. This building is a maze, though I did manage to find a key to indicate what rooms corresponded to bathrooms. Unfortunately, all of them were unlabeled and there didn't seem to be any rooms at all in the physical locations that were supposed to correspond to bathrooms. I did find a couple of random things, but none of them were the bathroom I was seeking.

As it turns out, I missed the bathroom that was located in my room. (The entryway to the room covers it when one opens the door.) Oops.

I can tell already that I'm going to be extremely helpful for the mathematical modeling problems this week---especially when it comes to finding efficient (or, day I say, optimal) solutions.

Once again I have proven that I am a theorist...