Humour in the Darkest Hours

So today I gave my last lecture to the first year scientists/engineers. At the start, as is customary, I handed out questionnaires. As a student I was always really mean on these, but -- thank god -- they were quite kind to me. I've been smiling all afternoon because they were really nice, though how much of this is due to my relative youth -- I could be half the age of most of the lecturers -- isn't clear.

Anyhow, my favouritest one was this (they've been told I'm a Dr, which is premature):

What did you like about the course?
Dr Hepworth who managed to provide humour in the darkest hours.

Whether that makes me more of a clown than a nice guy isn't clear, but there you go. I liked it.

The iPod Zepto; I should be working.

I know I should really be working, but this article on the iPod Zepto was really funny.

I feel like I've almost finished my paper now. Some kind people have agreed to glance over it for me; so far the only error is a split infinitive! Watch this space for news of its final emergence.

Reading Aloud

In How to Write Mathematics the author advocated reading your work aloud to see how it sounds. This morning I gave this my best shot on the penultimate draft of my Teaching Philosophy. (These statements are a requirement of all US universities, and are one of nature's most profound sources of bullshit, codspeak, and piffletalk. I hope mine isn't that bad.)

So anyway, there I was nervously sipping tea and declaring my teaching competence and abilities to the wallpaper. It wasn't as "revelatory" as I had been lead to believe, but it certainly did help: there were three or four points where I just had to stop because it sounded so limp. Hopefully it's a little sparkier now.

Last night I refused to do any work, and at glacial speed read my way through a sizeable chunk of On Beauty, the new novel by Zadie Smith. I really like it so far. One of my favourite features of it is that there are many references to current events (well, mostly the war and Bush) and, more importantly, to popular culture and celebrities. So at one point a character in the distance is talking to `a famous black newscaster', and elsewhere someone on the television asks a contestant `how much of a reserve do you want to put on that?' I actually laughed out loud.

Snow!

Like Dave said on his blog, today in Edinburgh we are beset by mingy snow! Despite the dullness of the photo (am going to get a digital camera sometime soon so that I don't have to use my phone), the snow was rather lush and fluttery. Now it's all slush and mess.

Had my penultimate lecture today. I also had thanksgiving dinner leftovers at a friend's for lunch, so now I'm familiar with proper cranberry sauce and sweet potato mash and green bean casserole. It was a fine thing.

Now I have to do more writing. God this is dull. Sorry!

The calm before the storm ...

Well, the calm before the School of Mathematics Cheese and Wine Party. Funded by the staff (myself included, natch) for the benefit of the postgraduates and fourth year undergraduates, it sounds like a bloodbath in the making. The sole aim of everyone I've spoken to is to get violently plastered. I'm above that, of course. (In honesty, so shattered that a whiff of anything strong will probably knock me flat.)

So there's a faint buzz around the place, fuelled by the arrival of new updated photographs on the staff/students noticeboard. (Excellent for pointing out the people you hate, basically.) This means that even though the even doesn't start until 7:30 I'm doomed to not get anything useful done before then. Ach well. Resting is good.

"I'm living in my office," or, "I'm incapable of writing mathematics!" or, "Ach ach ach ach!"

So those rumour-mongering mathematical astronomers have been spreading dirty lies about me. For the single barely-significant reason that I've been wearing the same shirt (but not the same undershirt or anything else, thank you) since tuesday, they're convinced that I've been living in my office.

Well, I have not been living in my office, but it certainly does feel like it. Why? Because I've been working quite a lot -- for example right now; check out the time! -- preparing various things, and in particular trying to write a paper and doing that computation I mentioned. Why why? Because I want to make competent applications for jobs quite soon, and all this should help my chances a bit.

Anyhow, not only does it feel like I've been living in my office, but for the same reason -- lack of time, leading to lack of fresh ironing -- I've been wearing the same shirt for ever and now look like I've been living in my office. Apparently I don't yet smell like I've been living here, but it surely is a matter of time.

So that's it. Busy. Ugly rumours. (I think the astronomers can technically be labelled a `gang'. I expect that they have matching tattoos and a pact (sealed, by starlight, in blood and spit, naturally) of mutual protection and ginger-mockery. They even have a weekly meeting called `astro-tea'. I bet that's a lie. `Astro-tea' must be a substance, not an event! They just sit there getting pie-eyed on star-candy pretending to have a team-building social!)

PS Dave: I'm currently listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. They're Canadian, you know!

Drowning in a sea of red ink!

Today, right now, I'm correcting the first draft of my paper. After the mammoth typing session on monday I didn't look at it again until thursday, and was immediately depressed by how awful the opening sections are. Ach!

My spare half hours since then have been spent going through it with red ink, gutting and rewriting entire paragraphs and generally making satisfying improvements. Now all I have to do is type the corrections. At great length. On friday evening. Ach ach!

In fact, this week has depressed me. I don't know where it's gone. Things (including yesterday's already-sour mood) haven't been improved by a colleague repeatedly informing me of deadlines half an hour before they expire. I do know where some of this week went: down the drain in the form of a calculation I'm nowhere-near capable of making yet, but which I still spent a day and a half attempting. Ach ach ach!.

Dear reader, it hasn't all been doom and gloom! Sparkling, gemlike highlights have included two genuinely interesting topology seminars (really), the gift of a lovely (and now necessary) hat, and the alpha highlight: Disco and Neyir's gala screening last night of Canadian Bacon and Stewie's Big Adventure.

That's right. The Urminskies have a projector. It turns their living room wall into a cinema. It dominates. The films were extraordinary, and all the more so since the first was written and directed back in the day by Michael Moore. Plus it was about Canada. Well, attacking Canada. Plus plus, it contained the ageless line "in a decent, godfearing country I'd be allowed to beat you both to death!".

Paper!

Hoo! One day, a late night, lots of fruit and tea, and that's the first draft cranked out. (Well, there was a week of general preparing for it in my spare time, but there you go.) That's sixteen pages of TeX, people. And now my eyes hurt! (Though Optrex helped.)

The plan now? Well, tomorrow I won't have anything to do with it, for reasons of health. (I intend to read `How To Write Mathematics' by Krantz first. Not that I haven't written plenty of mathematics before, but I've never been in a research-paper headspace before.) I'm going to draft research statements instead. That'll be hilarious. Oh, and there's a lecture to give as well. Ah, fun!

Paper paper paper

This week I'm going to write a paper based on one of the chapters of my thesis. I've got it almost entirely planned and only need to type it all up. Which might take a while. So here's the thing: how can I type for hours on end without going mad? I'm going to buy an enormous thing of eye drops, for starters. Any other recommendations?

PS Guess which TV personality screen burn writer Charlie Brooker referred to as "like an ageing Thundercat"?

Sigur Ros

Last night I went to a Sigur Ros concert at the Corn Exchange. If you don't know about them, Sigur Ros are an Icelandic band who make long songs that tend to sound like a cross between whalesong and The Lord of the Rings. They're possibly the most affected band on the planet (the singer uses a made-up language; they played the first and last songs behind a gauzey curtain that they projected lots of stuff onto; their last album but one was called () and none of the songs had names), but the music's just so great that you can forgive them.

And it was really good. Mostly it was stuff from the recent record, but they also played three songs from an oldie that sounded better than ever, and they closed with the last track from () which is utterly colossal (you can get it from the page linked above: it's subtitled `the pop song' DO IT).

An honourable mention has to go to the support act, Amina. When they came onstage I was sceptical: four ladies in floaty knitwear looking like they were just SR's string section with a silly name. And the first few things they played got a mixed reception. But then it got much much better, with the silliest instruments known to mankind (well, to be precise, they played a saw, `ring for service' bells that produced different notes, and a phalanx of different wine glasses). I bought their EP from the stall at the back before I left and am looking forward to putting it on.

Screen Burn

This is the second post in my proposed series wherein I will berate you with information about things I like. You will then like them, and the world will become better.

Today's thing I like is Screen Burn. This is Charlie Brooker's weekly TV column from the Guardian. The great thing is that rather than reviewing the most worthy or interesting of the week's viewing, Brooker usually picks something awful and moans about it (and modern life in general) in ways that are often very, very funny.

For example, in a review of this year's Big Brother, he described Eugene as a "human pylon" and Saskia as a "burly, wrathful harridan with a face that could advertise war".

Screen Burn is so funny that I actually went as far as buying the book. That's right, they took 4 years' worth of columns and stuck them in a paperback. Doesn't deserve to work! Works! Here's a section where he's moaning about a Pop Idol-style reality TV programme called Making the Band from 2001:

The remaining `performers' are a bunch of hissing styrofoam meerkats desperately clawing over each other, craning their necks to suckle from the withered tit of fame; whining, mewling, preening, bitching -- they couldn't be more dislikeable if they strode around in Nazi regalia firing nailguns at ponies.

It made me laugh very hard. Even the index of the book is hilarious:

Oliver, Jamie: plugs Sainsbury's, 84, 168; turns air blue, 199-200; likened to Roy Hattersley, 285; is not a timelord, 307; can just about fuck off, 343.

Post-Lecture!

So my first lecture came and went. My little plan to give them short breaks with the odd puzzle worked a bit. The course design makes it really hard to do anything short of just listing formulas and things; I avoided this in the first half (which took quite some planning) but in the second half it dragged, I got a bit bored, and I could feel the same coming from the students. Never mind: there's always next time.

Today, recovering after a postgrad party. Beware Poles with vodka!

Lectures!

Tomorrow I will give my first lecture. It's going to be about vectors. There will be me, in front of a room full of something like 300 sceptical youngsters. Will I survive? I hope so. The main problem is that I have 8 lectures' worth of stuff to get through in 7 lectures. That's like an extra 5 or 10 minutes worth of stuff to cram in every time. I've prepared my notes now, but it looks like there's going to be way too much to cover. Eek.

McSweeney's!

I think I'll start off my regular blogging by berating you with things I like. The first of these is McSweeney's. This is a quarterly magazine (a book really) full of short stories and things. It's edited by Dave Eggars, who wrote A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius and the mighty Short Short Stories out of the Guardian (it's now one of those cheap little penguin books -- buy it now). It's dead good, but what's better is the McSweeney's website, where they post a very short and often funny story every day. Here are some of my favourites. Please visit them!

Klingon Fairy Tales

Things Koala Bears Would Say

Bawdy Best Man Speeches (the last one is best.)

The Short Essay That Conquered The Planet