math-&-music presentation announcement
at hyperbolic guitars (NCTM; 4/26 in philly).
well here i am. friday night.
you could look it up. i guess
if i *had* a home, this’d be it.
(a more-or-less abandoned math
department, far away from any
place i have the authority to
lay my head down and think things
over. but!… with internet access.)
in the nature of the case, we graders
work while the students… um…
do whatever students do… “party”,
i suppose. so papers picked up on
friday after class have to be collected
by *somebody* (& returned by monday
morning; we’re trying to set a high
standard here after all). fair enough,
too.
it’s not like you don’t have to lie
to do *this* job right; getting us
to say things we don’t actually mean is
pretty precisely what money is *for*.
just this: there’s one *big* lie; the rest
is essentially about matters of taste.
and the “big lie”?
well. of course:
“make it look easy”.
no teacher (of anything) can afford
to be honest about what it’ll cost
to get good. *obviously* any rational
being will run like hell before enduring
anything *like* the tribulations that we
(every expert in any art) went through…
only realizing, much too late, that most
of it was for astonishingly foolish
reasons (“youth is wasted on the young”).
worth it, worth it, worth it.
& a long bus ride home.
(“worth it, worth it, worth it”: ramble of 8/09.)
i’m grading for four classes.
so i’ll be processing a couple hundred
homework collections weekly. they’ve
started coming in and i’ve turned around
two sets and have done most of a third.
and it’s not so bad. grading has always
seemed like the worst part of the job…
but not having to deal with students
in person certainly has its upside.
story at OSU.
his lecture notes in abstract algebra are exemplary
(as i know from my grading gig in galois theory
last quarter). congratulations, ron!
charles (six-winged-seraph) wells
is back at the “discourse” stuff. yay!
abuse of notation & mathematical usage.
i was griping earlier today
(in another blog) about a long-ago password SNAFU.
within less than an hour of posting: another.
and right here at work. i was able to log in
to this *math department* box… but can’t get
into the *university level* system (where stuff
like syllabi and grades are found and posted).
i’d been recently made to choose a new
(and messy) password, so first
i tried resetting that… and succeeded. the system
recognized me enough to ask me the three “mother’s
maiden name” style questions allowing this…
but then when i tried to get to the sites
where *actual work* can be done i learned,
to my chagrin, that *that* part of the system
couldn’t recognize my username at all.
well, i’m barely an employee. indeed i didn’t
have any duties assigned me until two days into
the quarter. so i figured maybe this had something
to do with it. too soon to tell, really: it took
about 15 minutes on the phone to discover that
(1) the guy at the help desk couldn’t help me &
(2) others are reporting similar issues.
i’m lucky to’ve gotten the e-mail assigning my
new grading duties at all… g-mail was working
this week evidently but my official campus e-ddress
was, emphatically, *not*. &… like i was saying
in my earlier post… we only get the web at “home”
(really my girlfriend’s house) by the on-and-off
grace of the vastly-indifferent cable company.
so it’s a problem.
pumped with fear and trembling through several layers
of incomprehensible digital superstructure:
my latest linear algebra exam at “google docs”.
three solutions (## 12, 13, & 14) for the latest
math 549 homework. sorry it’s late.
my sidebars appear at the bottom of the page
under the posts. i’ve seen this before and been
able to tweak the code until it looked right.
to me. how it looked to other people?
none of my business evidently. anyhow,
after laying off for a long time and
flirting with coming back, a sign that
this *isn’t* (at *all*) how i want to
spend my time. it sure was fun when it
was easy.
my latest… i thought i was quarterly
when i issued it but maybe i’m semi-annual…
looks like this.
1876
2345
in the upper left are the “covers”:
these become the front and back
of the zine in folded form.
i discussed the title a few hours ago
(along with some other stuff).
suffice it to say here that our
subject is self-dual spaces.
*under* the title (in folded form;
above it here) are two
representations of the *simplest*
example: duality in P^2(F_2).
the space P^2(F_2) is itself
displayed (without a duality)
on p.5 (the lower right of the
photo) in the usual “triangle” way.
the colors are used to show
how these two objects…
*and* a certain subobject
of the space on pp. 7 & 8
(the 21-point P^2(F_4))…
can be considered “the same”.
the lower left (pp. 2 & 3)
are the desargues configuration.
i’ve discussed it recently
(here, for example)
and’m starting to hurry.
finally then (for now),
the cube-and-cross sections
bits are much the most vivid
visual motivator i’ve found
for the concept of “projectivity”.
the colors are surprisingly
helpful here. i’ll try to convince
you later. company coming. bye.
Owen “Vlorbik” Thomas
Open A Vein (homepage)
Math 151 posts
e-mail: vlorbik@gmail.comW'press login.
More mathy stuff by me:
Lectures Without Words (drawings mostly)
Vlorbik On Math Ed ('07—'09)
Community College Calculus (S '09)
Math 148: Precalculus (W '09)
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