One of my Favorite Oxonian Ironies: 5 Years Ago Today

Oxford is a place of ironies — that's one of its great charms — and one of my favorite ones occurred 5 years ago today.

On that day, an outdoor showing of the movie "Singing in the Rain" was cancelled because of rain. pic.twitter.com/701kNm1Xk4

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) August 10, 2019

Spirograph for MATLAB

Wow. This Spirograph GUI for MATLAB brings back some memories from my childhood. According to the Wikipedia entry, it is still in production. And of course I am sure that you are all shocked --- shocked, I say! --- that I liked drawing with this toy when I was a child.

(Tip of the cap to whoever posts for MATLAB on Facebook.)

"(And Applied)"

More trips down Memory Lane...

I walked by Thurston. At the front of the building, if you look carefully, you can still notice the remnants of the parentheses that someone once snarkily put around "and Applied" in "Theoretical and Applied Mechanics". (Those parentheses were there for at least 2-3 years.) Now, the department no longer even exists.

Also, when I was walking back to campus from Collegetown, without thinking I took my old route that would take me directly back to Rhodes Hall and had to stop myself from walking all the way there.

What Happens in Ithaca Stays in Ithaca

I am back at Cornell for the first time since I left in July 2002 (after graduating with my PhD in May 2002). I will be giving tomorrow's Center for Applied Mathematics (CAM) colloquium. As some of you (many of you?) know, I am an alum of that program.

I am staying in the Statler Hotel on campus (of course). One of the first things that came to mind as I was entering the hotel was a friend of mine who was an undergrad in Cornell's hotel school. I met her in my bowling class my first term at Cornell (she was a frosh), she insisted on becoming my bowling partner for the class, and we became friends. Sadly, we haven't had any contact since 2003, and she has one of those ungoogleable names. This is somebody with whom I would love to get back in touch.

Update: All of a sudden, I am wondering if 'The Elevator Nazi' still works in Rhodes Hall. (Though given how old she was back in the day, I would think that she must be retired by now.)

The Misinformation Effect

Here is a neat blog post, from a blog called You Are Not So Smart, about The Misinformation Effect. Neat stuff!

(Tip of the cap to Rob Neyer.)

Memories

Two of the workers at Peet's Coffee on Lake Avenue in Pasadena remember not only my name but also the drink I like to order. I approve!

I remember their faces (and the faces of at least one other worker, though this one I remember from a previous visit after I moved to Oxford... there are only 2 people who work there now who also worked there before I loved away) but either didn't learn their names or forgot them. I also recognize the faces of several of the regular customers who I have seen at Peet's the last couple of days.

RIP Milton Rowen (age 91)

Dr. Rowen was the principal of Hawthorne School (my elementary school) during my first few years there. (I am listing him only by age because I don't know whether he was born in 1917 or 1918.) The main thing I remember about him is that we were all scared shitless of him because he would come into the cafeteria where we were having lunch, and if he saw something he didn't like he would scream at all of us. I think a couple of times he even screamed right in the face of some young kid. (Unsurprisingly, he had a military background.) He's treated rather kindly in the brief obituary in Beverly Hills Weekly, but for me this was a guy to fear, not to respect. I speak as a tree rather than as a forest, but at the time, I was quite pleased when he stepped down.

A Mathematical Hermit

Here's a brief article from Science News about Alexandre Grothendieck, who celebrated his 80th birthday in self-imposed isolation in the Pyrenees.

A lot of Grothendieck's work was in a subject known as "category theory." As my Cornell abstract algebra professor once said, he wanted us to learn what a category is the same way we learned what an animal was: by seeing examples of them. (A student then immediately asked the professor what a category was, and he went completely berserk. It was awesome.)

10-year anniversary of my (in)famous Black Celebration

As I briefly discussed in this space two years ago today, February 14, 1998 was a special day in my life. It was my favorite episode of the radio show that I broadcast on Lloyd Radio with Lemming.

Given my propensity for enjoying groups like Depeche Mode, mood swings, and an enjoyment of bittersweet songs in general, there would occasionally be special episodes of our radio show (and of the radio show I did by myself the previous year) that I liked to call "All Depressing and Cynical Song Specials". On this day ten years ago, we decided to have the "All Depressing and Cynical Song Special: Valentine's Day Edition" in which we started with a live version of Depeche Mode's "Black Celebration", play depressing and cynical songs about love for about 2.5 hours, and ended with "Blow Your Brains Out" (What is this song actually called? And who sings it? I never remember...).

While we were doing this, there were naturally two recently-hooked-up couple slurping each other right outside where we were broadcasting for the entirety of the show. (It's not clear precisely how much they were aware of what we were doing just a few feet away.) One of the things I distinctly remember is our Resident Associate walking out of her apartment (which was also next to where we were broadcasting) and giving us (or was it just me?) just about the most horrified look I have ever seen in my life. She also seemed to have a sort of helpless feeling because there was simply nothing that she could do about it. It was wonderful.

By the way, there were a couple of other episodes of my radio show that were rather memorable. One of them was when my show was "taken over" by certain people who insisted that I play The Ride until they got showered (people finally had to come over from Ruddock to help with this). Autumn Looijen and I are planning to include a blurb about this incident in Legends IV. (It was punted from Volume III to Volume IV at the last minute.) The other was when I got the folks on the second floor of page to drunkenly sing along with the chorus to Faust and Lewis's "Save the Beer" back when Lloyd Radio was still broadcast from the "Llove Shack" (the bunker that Nestor Ocampo and Walter Brisken built for their Ditch Day stack).