Way Ahead of My Time

I hear people talking about just wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt all the time and not properly getting dressed to go out, and I'm like: I have already been doing this for decades.

I was way ahead of my time.

The Karate Club Will Long Live in Network-Science Infamy

Especially with the new Karate Club lore that has made it into the 2nd edition of Mark Newman's textbook.

(However, Mark misspelled "awesome" as "dubious", for some reason.)

Snarky Karate Club lore (t-shirt + ZKCC) has made the 2nd edition of Mark Newman's textbook on networks (the closest thing we have to a standard introductory text).

Should I be happier about having papers & research cited in the 2nd edition, or about the t-shirt being cited? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/yCjq4MCzer

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) August 27, 2018

P.S. You can see the history of the ZKCC at this website and buy ZKC memorabilia at The Power Law Shop.

"Pessimism: It's Probably Not That Great"

Someone here in the airport is wearing a t-shirt with a logo and associated slogan: "Pessimism: It's probably not that great".

I approve!

It's Going to Game 7!

With Chicago's victory today, tomorrow is going to be Game 7 of the World Series between the Cubs and Indians, two teams who have not won in a very long time. One game to rule them all. Very exciting!

(And Bill Murray's "I Ain't Afraid of No Goat" t-shirt is fantastic!)

The Buffalo Beholders and Other Fantasy Football Teams

Here are some very cool fantasy football t-shirts that 'put the fantasy back in fantasy football'. I especially like the Buffalo Beholders, and some of the other ones are also really cool.

(Tip of the cap to Greg Stolerman.)

Tending Towards Infinity

At the conference I am attending, I just saw a t-shirt with the text "Old mathematicians don't die, they just tend to infinity." I approve!

Well, the grammar could be better --- there should be a semicolon instead of a comma --- but I still love the shirt.

Eye Orientation of Ghosts in Pac-Man Games

Another of those things that perhaps says a lot about me: I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt with the ghost Shadow/Blinky from the Pac-Man series. And besides thinking that the shirt is awesome, do you know what else I noticed? That the ghost's eyes were oriented in the way that allows you to go through it without dying (which, by the way, is a skill ones needs to get really good at these games).

One of these years, I hope that I will get to the kill screen in Ms. Pac-Man...

Dragon*Con: Day 2

Yesterday really wiped me out, so I decided to be lower-key today.

I again got tons of cool pictures, which I will post once I get back to North Carolina. I made sure to eat breakfast (unusual for me) because I was too tired to have dinner last night, and that definitely helped. I then split time between the art exhibit and some of the 30-minute mini-concerts---where I could sit down, listen to some cool music, and take pictures. I bought a t-shirt in the art gallery from the artist who I believe is responsible for 'Houses and Humans'. (For that matter, I recognized a couple of artists from signatures amidst pictures on covers of D & D novels and also pictures in D & D game products.) The picture shows a dragon on top of a crushed house, roasting a chicken and sipping some tea. How very English! I want to buy a picture to hang on my wall in my flat, and the problems is that there are so many cool things that I don't know what one or two things to get. And there's part of the art gallery at which I haven't even looked yet! I'll do that tomorrow. (I also want to head back to the dealers and exhibiters halls, but that might not happen until Monday.)

Then I had lunch with a friend (who came down for 2 days of Dragon*Con) [+ his wife] who was a fellow math postdoc at Georgia Tech but with whom I also overlapped a year at Caltech. After that, I wandered a bit and decided to get in line early for the Firefly panel with 4 alums of the show. (I have a nice picture of the panelists---did I ever mention that I like my camera's zoom feature?) I figured that I could get good pictures of passersby while waiting in line, so I occupied my time that way. The line ended up being outside much of the time, but thankfully the breeze was nice, I never ran out of photo ops, and only one person who walked by told us that it was not too late to turn away from evil. The panel itself was meh, though it had a couple of shining moments and the stars certainly have an excellent rapport with each other. After the panel, I played in a 3.5-ish D & D game (it was heavily modified, including the magic system---but for 4 hour sessions at cons, this helps quite a bit) based loosely on a part of the first book in the Death Gate Cycle. It's too bad we were in the Air realm; the first book was painful to read, but it was necessary because it set up all of the other stuff. In truth, though, very few aspects of that world were overly relevant to the game. The event was team run by 3 DMs, and a huge group was split into 3 groups of 9-10 people each, and each group was assigned a different mission---so in essence three different games were going on simultaneously (though if one group wreaked havoc, others could use it to their advantage). This is way too many people per DM, in my opinion, and our group included 2 small children who were often bored/distracted and went on side quests. (And in one case, needed in game to be prevented from destroying any chance of success in the mission---a little bit of magic from my character did the trick and resulted in profuse thanks from every adult at the table, especially the boy's mother.) It was a bit of a challenging real-life scenario in which to game, and the huge amount of background noise in the room didn't help, but we made it through and most people seemed to have fun, so things worked out well in the end. (I was often very frustrated, but I strongly suspect that the 9 people around the table and horrible background noise were much larger factors than the children occasionally needing to be reigned in.)

Then I went back home, and here I am.

Quote of the Day: Delayed Edition

While I was in Pasadena during the winter, I witnessed the following quote: "Am I a bad Christian because I like Mason's t-shirt?"

I'll let you figure out which t-shirt it was. (And it's unfair guessing if you happened to be there at the time!)

What happens in the United States stays in the United States

I flew from Heathrow to LA yesterday and had a layover in the Twin Cities. As has become a tradition, I added a bit of a small incident with Customs Security to my resume. (Will somebody explain to me why so many of these people insist of being sarcastic without any provocation?) Part of it is that those people just can't handle the fact that I would choose to have a job somewhere outside of the US. (I am asked how long I've been gone, and I have to then explain that I live in the UK, which always leads to several subsequent questions.) When I say I am a professor, I am always asked what kind. (Note that yesterday I actually tried saying "mathematics professor" for that answer, and there was a brief bit of confusion when the guy didn't notice that I had said mathematics. I thought for a bit that he actually wanted me to say what kind of math I studied. I was like "Do you really want me to describe that?") This guy sarcastically asked "What do you profess?" I told him I was a math professor, though my heart screamed to give any one of a number of sarcastic responses at that point (unlike Roxette, I did not listen to my heart on that particular occasion), I just answered. His response was to ask me what the square root of 237 was, and he seemed a bit perturbed that I then paused to figure it out in my head. How else was I supposed to react? Anyway, he seemed convinced because of that and then let me through. All of this, of course, was after he told me he didn't want me puking on him (the whole motion sickness deal).

I'm on Caltech's campus right now, and I saw someone walk by with a t-shirt that said "Don't be a d^3s/dt^3" (I'm using latex notation here) on the back. (Yes, people at Caltech wear shirts like this! So do I, obviously...) I feel like I should get this, but I'm not. I was thinking of 's' as arclength, but I'm not sure. Does anybody have any ideas here? I must be missing something obvious...

Unintended Memes

Courtesy Kohl Gill, here is a component of a conservative Christian advertising campaign that is apparently about to backfire very badly. I approve!

I love unintentional awesomeness (and "awesomeness").

T-shirt of the day (epic fail)

No really, this is a t-shirt about an epic fail.

The shirt is ok; I'm basically blogging about it because I really like the term 'epic fail'. I've been spreading this term around here, along with other phrases I like such as "tool".

T-shirt of the day

I just received my new J!NX newsletter in which they advertised a new t-shirt that combines two of my obsessions and is so awesome (not to mention "awesome") that I'm simply going to have to buy one: Rock Me, Asmodeus!.

Update:: I guess I'm not going to buy one immediately given that the shipping would cost me more than 50% of the price of the full item. While in the big picture that doesn't matter, it annoys me sufficiently that buying this through J!NX isn't going to happen. I suppose I'll do it when I'm imminently visiting Southern California. Ah well. It's a really nice shirt, though.

Amusing t-shirt

In honor of gnomes being removed from the set of PC classes in 4th edition D & D, J!NX is now selling this amusing t-shirt. The idea is sweet and I was prepared to order one immediately after I saw the blurb in the J!NX e-mail, but unfortunately I don't actually like the graphics that much. I might still get one eventually because the idea is just that cool, but for now I'll wait.

T-shirt of the day

Take a look at this t-shirt, which (in a highly amusing fashion!) makes a nice statement about the fact that mascots like Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians simply have to go.

Maybe if this post is witty enough somebody will finally love me.

As many of you know, lots of e-mails have been flowing lately because of the impending release of my book, Legends of Caltech III: Techer in the Dark. (And I have sent very few "pleasure e-mails" as a result...)

I recently bought an XKCD shirt that says "Maybe if this t-shirt is witty enough somebody will finally love me." (or something very similar... I don't feel like looking it up) I wore that for the first time on Sunday night/Monday. On Tuesday, in an e-mail from one of our contributors, I received the comment, "Once again, thank you for your efforts - you've got my love!" Ironically, the guy who sent that never even saw my t-shirt.

I wore my other new XKCD shirt yesterday. This is the one that claims that I am not antisocial but just shy. Of course, one of my friends decided to make a comment about the shirt and inform me that I can be kind of antisocial. I tend to have very blunt friends, but that's kind of necessary when it comes to people being able to handle my tactlessness. (It's important to be compatible.)