Pappus' plane

I was standing at the whiteboard waiting for the clock to tick over to 8am when one of the students asked a question. "Hey," she said, "is it true that you're really really good at Minesweeper?"

"How on Earth do you know that?"

It turns out that she knows a chemistry student who knows me.

So those keen students who had arrived before 8 learned a bit about competitive Minesweeper.

Today I sat and stared at C++. Thanks to many hours of this I am now sure that soon I will be calculating my spatially averaged correlators.

Every now and then I read the guestbook that is a hive of all things Minesweeper. It seems that someone's found a better way to quantify the "hardness" of a board. The old technique relied on the assumption that we can estimate this useful value by only looking at the left-clicks needed. It's certain that this method won't work always.

Alas, it seems to me that all it is is fudging. Though it be a step towards a better number, I don't think that we have really neared such an ideal metric.

This will be another short post, because I want to learn some fundamental quantum mechanics before discussing at length Prof Tony Leggett's talk to the physics department on Friday. Leggett won the 2003 Nobel Prize for physics, and most of his talk was accessible, but I don't see the need for a "many worlds" or extreme statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics if superpositions of macroscopically distinct states are observed.

And I got a 16 on intermediate on Saturday, my second fastest ever int time.

What is the Muscat Hall of Fame and how did I get on it?

Big Jo Angel has played his last first class match for WA. He took 485 first-class wickets, 419 in Sheffield Shield/Pura Cup cricket (the only bowler other than Clarrie Grimmett to better 400) and in recent years, wore a similar number of metres' worth of bandages and strapping to keep his legs from falling to pieces.

Happily, his last match at the WACA was a win for the Western Warriors, with Angel taking five wickets for the match.

Not so happily, it was WA's first outright win of the season.

If you open an MSN chat window with someone, then have someone else invite you into a group chat with that person, and then have that someone disappear offline, you end up with two chat windows to the same person. MSN keeps track of which window you type to. Unfortunately, it doesn't save the ex-group chat to its history, so I lost what would have looked like a long and odd monologue yesterday.

The conformal field theory report is coming along. All that remains is playing with the Kac determinant, labelling some formulas and maybe going through some quantum field theory to derive a G⁽²⁾ function somewhere.

And I got a 19 in intermediate today, my first sub-20 since October 2002.