Pappus' plane

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.

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.