Pappus' plane

The Ashes are a double-edged sword. On one sharp side of the blade there is the lazy falling asleep while listening to Aggers, Blowers, and CMJ. On the other sharp side of the blade, I will be doing this on Saturday night. This will be OK if I happen to wake up around stumps, as I did this morning. Then I can turn the radio off once the cricket is over. But if I sleep through stumps, then I am likely to wake up on Sunday morning listening to Macca.

It's a terrifying thought.

Remember these? I started reading again when I stopped having a home Internet connection for a while.

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.

I liked this good little story. It took a few pages to get going, but once the old man was fishing I became engrossed. Man plus fish definitely equals book.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.

This was OK. It's one of those things that you admire in that patronising way because it was written in 1931, even though people in those ancient times already had colour photography and knew a bit about quantum mechanics. Quick and easy read, but meh.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez.

I first learned that magical realism was stupid in year 12, when, as the 'world literature' component of English, we read three books by Latin American authors. Like Water for Chocolate was completely ridiculous, involving someone making a patchwork quilt that covered acres, someone crying and it literally becoming a river, and so forth. The House of Spirits was better but it was still stupid to have levitating people, a dead woman with green hair, seances, etc. No-one Writes to the Colonel was by far the best of the three works, and (not coincidentally) contained by far the least magic - only one magical event, according to Wikipedia.

Chris the Blogger, however, was ignorant of the popularity and acclaim of Isabel Allende, and said that I should read a major work by either Rushdie or Márquez before trashing magical realism. So it was that I picked up this book, which (as I recall) also came with a recommendation from dubaiwalla.

Magical realism is still stupid. There are good elements in this book. I quite liked the repetitive nature of the "when facing the firing squad", the well-crafted jumps back and forth in the timeline. Flying carpets, talking to dead people, someone rising up to heaven, prophecies.... All stupid.

Literature had worked its way to its realist pinnacle, and then some South Americans went and spoiled it with magic. That wouldn't be so bad if no-one cared, but far too many people actually like the stuff and hold it up as good literature.

The Life & Times of Michael K, by JM Coetzee. (It's been a long time since I finished this, so these are old memories.) This was more of a struggle than Coetzee's more recent work, and while the story has remained well-imprinted in my brain, I don't look back on many passages and think of them as being enjoyable to read.

Boyhood, by JM Coetzee. This is a series of (semi-?)autobiographical vignettes from when Coetzee was growing up in South Africa. Stories about children are hard to make very good, and it is certainly not up to the quality of Youth. But it was still enjoyable.

It had been a while since I had submitted - almost exactly four months. I figured that the delay in getting the results back to me was longer than it should have been, and yesterday morning I got around to sending an email to the Grad School asking how much longer it would take.

I checked my student email just before 5, and wondered if I actually wanted a reply. I decided that I didn't. But the inbox appeared, and there was an email from the relevant co-ordinator from the School of Maths and Physics, containing the assessors reports. There were a bunch of paragraphs in the body of the email that I didn't read; I just clicked on the attached reports.

The first one started off with a waffly introduction, saying what I had written about. The biggest concern I had was the literature review, which I had written with the goal of doing the least possible amount of work. The introduction and the literature review are adequate. YES! It goes on to say that the thesis is good enough for MPhil, and then lists some corrections to make. One of these will take some non-trivial amount of thought, but happily it concerns one of the few interesting topics covered in the thesis, and it won't be too hard. Another correction will require paying closer attention to a chemical potential that I lazily set to zero at random points, but that shouldn't be hard either. I'll have to learn a derivation that I skipped over; I'll dig up the equations on the weekend, and may end up needing a chat with my supervisor. The rest of the corrections are minor and I should be able to knock them off on Saturday morning.

The second report was brief and said that the thesis is good enough as is.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

That's not a yell of triumph, it's more like those old yells that Stuart MacGill used to give after taking a wicket. It was as though the batsman had consumed his soul and replaced it with nothing but anger and hatred, and a wicket allowed a release of that anger. He could be happy later. And indeed I was happy after I started to reflect on it, a few seconds later.

It turns out that I did care about my thesis.

The team continued to stagger through the university holidays with six people showing up last night.

Round one. The Venus Fly Trap is native to which continent? Which two European countries merged on 3 October 1990? Complete the title of the Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter book: Rich Dad ...? The Monarch is a type of which creature? Which Asian capital city was called Batavia until 1949? We missed the fly trap and a question about beer, giving us 13 points and a share of equal second-last.

Chris the Blogger won the first Oi question.

In the music round we struggled to name families from TV shows, but magictim knew most of the songs with 'Rock' in the title, and the Latino songs were all easy. 13 again.

Round three was unusually easy. What is the name of the gap between two nerves? Which metal turns green after enough exposure to air? The other questions were boring. 15.

Making up for the simple round three was a brutal geography round. In the distant past, we actually won a geography round once. Not last night. Which river passes through (or between?) Broadwater and Surfers Paradise? Cape Horn is a part of which country? Tenterfield is a town in which Australian state? What is the northernmost county in England? What is the capital of New Jersey? Mt Kilimanjaro is in which country? On it went. 8 points, 7 of which were earned. At least we weren't the only ones.

The puzzle page had airline logos. I didn't recognise Aeroflot, but others at the table were sure it was Russian, so we got all the points there.

We got three of the bonuses, scoring 80 overall, 10th out of 19 on a tough night.

I had heard of these parts of Brisbane that got either horrible SBS reception or no SBS reception. This weekend I learned that I was now in one of these parts, both with digital and with analogue^*.

^*The ABC's bad on analogue but excellent on digital; SBS is horrible on analogue and usually non-existent on digital.

Some of you will know that there are really only two sporting events of any importance in the next couple of months. They are

a) the Tour de France, shown on SBS2, and
b) the Ashes, shown on SBS1.

So this is not an ideal time to lose SBS reception. But help is at hand! I have sent off the online form to Foxtel, and so hopefully within a week I'll get all the free-to-air channels coming through cable, as well as a bunch of extra sport channels (and even more channels that I will probably never watch).