"Our somolitude must not be quenched." and other loose ends
Saturday and Sunday I did some studying, but mostly I ate and drank outside, surrounded by greenery, and looked at Bristol flatshare ads. Saturday I met up with friends from Toronto here for the first stage of their honeymoon and with my brother, and we ate food under a tree and chatted. A magician came along and asked if he could show us some tricks. My brother is a fan of prestidigitation, so he said yes.

At first I was not so sure this was a good idea, but the Spanish magician was a mensch, not at all smarmy, and skilled. He did coin and card tricks; I never actually saw the coins in the wrong hand, though sometimes I knew what he must be doing. He did this very cool "bullettime" trick. First he split the deck at angles and had it in 5 segments while he "froze time" and rotated it around as though a camera was panning Matrix-style. Then he had me pick out a card, the 5 of diamonds, found it again, and had me put it face down on top of my left hand, with my right hand on top of it. The 6 of hearts went face down on my right hand, after we saw it. Then he froze time for 5 seconds, "like in the Matrix", he said, and when flipped over the top card was now the 5 of diamonds and when I flipped over the card on my left hand it was the 6 of hearts.

Later Jason and I mused that he must have multiple copies of the cards, since we saw the 6 of hearts after the first card was between my hands. Though I'm wondering now if I was really the one who flipped over the cards. Maybe that's when the switch happened.

That musing was done on the Victoria line out to Grash's Saturday evening for a barbecue. Grash is an excellent cook, and I have told her she must come visit me in Bristol. I haven't told her I want her to make me food when she does but she can read it here, mwa ha ha. Saturday there was excellent dilly potato salad and homemade ginger beer, and Pimms, and Eton mess and much entertaining conversation, some of it about papers and academic pursuits. One of Grash's housemates' friends asked if anyone had ever made up a word in a paper. No one had, other than him. It was actually in a letter he wrote to The Sun and they never published the letter. Isn't somolitude a nice not-a-word? In context, it meant something like unity.

I wouldn't mind if it meant something like synchronicity or serendipity, though, since I don't want that quenched either. This evening I went to the OR Society's 2004 Blackett Memorial lecture. John O'Reilly of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council not only had interesting things to say about research in this country, some of which related to the stuff I'll be doing in Bristol, but he also provided a few nice quotes about bottom-up planning and the perils of responsiveness/incrementalism for one of the topics I'm writing on in Wednesday's exam.

I like serendipity a lot, even though I think it's just selective perception at work.* I chatted over sherry with someone from Nottingham who worked in the lab I'll be working in and who told me where to live in Bristol. He said I'm going to get fat because the cafeteria is very good. My plan is to avoid that by buying a bike. And dancing a lot.

I'm all about the making of plans tonight. Here's the proof in instant messenger form:
Me: I am sleepy.
Me: How does this sound as a plan to you:
Me: 1. I retune my outlines for my three essays for Wednesday.
Me: 2. I put away all my clothes.
Me: 3. I read some more stuff to fill in the holes in the essays.
Me: 4. Sleep.
Kevin: That is a fucking excellent plan.
Kevin: That's like the Monroe Doctrine of The Next Couple Of Hours

And now for implementation. I am walking softly and carrying a big stick. (My top three memories from IB History: The Monroe Doctrine, the gruesome details of the deaths of the Romanovs, and how cold the lake was when I was playing the part of an unfortunate and dead gangster for our video about Prohibition and the Great Depression. I wasn't convincing enough on the first take of being sent to swim with the fishes, so had to be dumped in the water a second time.)


*I asked John if it was Bayesian, since he just finished that exam.
John: well, you're doing the updating
John: new information changes your degree of belief about the state of some event or condition
John: but i don't think that serendipitous events are Bayesian by their nature
John: serendipity is some other statistical phenomenon
John: the happy coincidence of a large number of unlikely and unconnected events

- posted by Christina @ 8:31 pm