As I have discussed in this forum before, sometimes on my weekends I get together with other similarly-minded people to play the "Battlestar Galactica" board game (which is really fun). I'm sure several of you have wondered, "what is it like?" Let me break it down for you. During a typical session, this is what we do:

1) Put on our wizard hats. Although there are no wizards in the future, this makes us more comfortable and more stylish.
2) Roll to see who goes first. Because we are mostly mathematicians, we each roll a die 1000 times and average the result -- this seems 'more fair' and reduces the effect of random chance.
3) After all that die rolling, it is three hours later and it is time to go home. The most vocal and assertive of us declares victory and the rest of us congratulate him/her.
4) We take off our wizard hats.
5) Someone suggests, "hey, one more game?"
6) Return to step 1.

Sometimes we 'house rule' some parts of the game. What you must understand is that I would never play a game on my weekend with people who don't respect the rules and the spirit of the game. To be clear: I don't have a problem with 'house rules' if we all agree on them beforehand, and if those 'house rules' serve to improve the game and are well-thought out -- but I can't tolerate people just doing whatever, willy-nilly, and messing up the whole point of the game. For example: would it be fun to play a game of Monopoly if, at any time, you were allowed to take out a loan from the bank at any time which you could pay back without any interest at any later point? Answer: NO, because monopoly is A DUMB GAME. Wait, I think I got my point mixed up.

Sometimes we order pizza; sometimes, to simulate the shrinking food reserves and plummeting morale among the fleet, we spend the entire day fasting, then we play in a dank, dimly-lit basement with erratically dripping water in the background eating only raw tofu.

Last night we went to dinner with another couple; the host at the restaurant we ended up at was one of my current students. That was awkward. It was more awkward when, as he was seating us, all I could think of to say was, "So, did you finish your homework?" My dining companions suggested later that perhaps that was a bit overly confrontational, but at the time it felt like a perfectly legitimate conversational gambit. He comped us chips and guacamole, though, and he had finished his homework, so in my opinion, everyone won that night.

So my dad quit his job recently, and in his 'closing remarks' email to his team at work he cited a story from the Odyssey that I hadn't heard before: over the course of his journey home, Odysseus incurs the wrath of Poseidon, and the gods decree that to appease the god of the seas, Odysseus must go ashore with an oar over his shoulder and walk inland. Only until at last he reaches a people who don't recognize an oar, nor know what the sea is, can he cease his wandering; at which point he must build a shrine to Poseidon, and thus earn forgiveness. In his email, my father likened himself to Odysseus -- that he has begun wandering and he looks forward to receiving a sign that it's time to stop.

From this we can conclude two things: greek mythology is pretty awesome, and so is my dad.

I have to dial back everyone's expectations a little, re: my last post. The significant thing was that we're talking about these things now, a little more seriously than in the past -- but there are no definite plans, no agreements, no contracts or expectations. Just more conversation.

We went to an open house yesterday, just to see. It was a condo a block away from our current apartment, so it was easy to just stroll over, no-stress, and check out the scene. It was fun until the moment of shame where we disclosed to the realtor that pretty much we couldn't afford anything anywhere in the city. I was pretty depressed for the next forty-five minutes but that wore away.

We CAN afford houses in Milwaukee. So there's that.

It is possible that we could afford something here if we had more money. Obviously that is tautologically true, but what I mean by that is, in fact we do have a way to get more money (I'm not sure how much more, but 'more') that doesn't involve getting a new super-high-paying job or winning the lottery. Unfortunately, it involves the largess of Lucinda's grandmother, and she won't offer any financial support until we get married. (Up until recently, she did offer emotional support in the form of bridge games, but apparently she has begun threatening to withhold bridge until we enter a state of holy matrimony.) So there's that too. Semi-serious discussion of brief, cheap Vegas weddings has occurred.

Lucinda and I have also begun preliminary negotiations into reproducing and/or passing on genetic material. So far I think we've reached a tacit understanding that at some point in the indefinite future we are interested in popping out a kid or two.

And that's the state of the union, 2010.

Today my colleagues have engaged in an ongoing online discussion about electronic dictionaries in the classroom. Many of our students are international students who have trouble with story problems -- no matter how generic, no matter how non-American-specific we try to write them, we always have a few students who don't understand this or that or the other thing. And with the state of modern electronics being the way it is -- one tiny device may or may not be a cell phone or a graphing calculator or a camera or a mere electronic dictionary -- we have begun banning all electronic devices of any kind during exams. I'm OK with this; some of my fellows are not.

But one of us just wrote: "I wonder what it will be like in fifteen years when people will have internet connections built into their glasses or contact lenses?"

Yeah... that's going to be a problem. My personal philosophy is to avoid calculator use in the classroom whenever possible, but this kind of technology is going to make that so impractical, so unenforceable, as to be useless. The future is going to be a strange and terrible place.

Books I saw people reading on the bus today in America's Most Literate City:

* Dreams Of My Father
* What is the What
* The Amber Spyglass
* Tuesdays With Morrie (this had a USED sticker on it, suggesting that a fellow faculty member had perhaps assigned this as reading; I pity the benighted students in that class!)

Longtime readers may recall that previously on this blog I discussed a visit to a 'bikini barista.'

For the record -- it was NOTHING like this. (Extremely not safe for work. Mom, do not follow this link.)

Things I am getting worse at as I get older: thinking, hearing, speaking, moving.

Today while grocery shopping I wore a Santa hat. This delighted a ten-year-old girl, but led to awkwardness in the parking lot when a sketchy character made straight for me with the 'can you spare some change for the bus' routine. It definitely felt... inappropriate for me to turn her down, but that's what I did.

(For the record, I have in the past and probably will in the future give money to beggars and down-and-out types, but never to people who 'need change for the bus' because in my experience that is 100% always a lie.)

Today I learned that Livejournal is not always the best medium for leaving notes to oneself that others are not supposed to read. Oops. One would think that this would be obvious, BUT. Alas.

Today, as part of the same lesson, I also learned that I am very easily embarrassed by completely innocent and harmless blunders. Things which, if other people did and if I even noticed, I would write off as meaningless and silly and self-evidently unworthy of obsessing over; yet if I do them I swirl into a vortex of shame. Even things that any rational person should feel a little chagrin over, if it strikes a chord with some deep inner insecurity it can become magnified into something irrational -- I end up traversing the same circle of acute embarrassment over and over until some biochemical miracle occurs and I break out of the loop.

Although I have many great memories and dear experiences, the ones that are clearest in my recollection and which carry the sharpest emotional weight are the ones in which I make some sort of mistake -- some major, some minor, some the definition of trivial, some innocent and some malicious -- and sometimes I find myself reliving those events like some sort of small-scale shame-oriented post-traumatic stress disorder. The really weird thing is that it's not like EVERY mistake I've ever made has an impact like this -- some really awful, bone-headed errors I've made, I've blithely forgiven myself with little effort. And the ones that still haunt me don't seem to have anything in common. And I'm definitely not going to think any more about them right now, thank you very much!

Also, why is egg nog so good?

So I think I got into the 'Christmas Spirit', about 2 minutes into tonight's episode of 30 Rock. Bring on the holiday music and the gift-giving!

We have been watching a great deal of The West Wing over here lately (they show it twice a day on Bravo). What a gloriously flawed show. I can't think of any other tv show, or film for that matter, that managed to be both incredibly great and sometimes horribly grating at the same time. It's schmaltzy and inspiring all at once. The dialogue is generally superb, except when someone is Making A Point; the characters are all incredibly plugged-in to arcane subdomains of trivial knowledge, except when the plot requires them to be completely ignorant of something extremely basic; strong, empowered female characters hold positions of authority (and are not just secretaries), but are frequently put into humiliating positions by their well-meaning but immature male coworkers, often involving their wardrobe or their underwear. So it's a mixed bag. It reminds me of reading David Foster Wallace -- he is a great writer but half the time you're thinking, "what a jerk."

I think I can handle watching the first two seasons -- then I think 9/11 and Mary-Louise Parker kill the show.

So there's a bookcase in a hallway at work where people dump books they don't want anymore, for other people to claim for their own nefarious purposes. One day I was able to pick up a tall, heavy stack of statistics textbooks. That was a good day. Today has it beat, because I found a book so dramatic, so momentous, so mind-blowingly awesome, that it deserves its own paragraph:

The Rumsfeld Way.

Published in 2002, it's a leadership/management treatise mixed with a biography of the most persnickety secretary of defense our country has ever known (or at least, that I have ever known), written by a man who could be no more objective and dispassionate about his subject as he could about his own child. Every page drips with poorly-masked adoration. (A quote from a page chosen at random: "Through forty years of service in both the public and private sectors, Rumsfeld has stuck his neck out many times -- although never without carefully calculating his odds ahead of time. And if making progress equates to making enemies along the way, then so be it.") Every chapter concludes with paragraphs summarizing the Rumsfeld managing style, formatted as close to a bullet-point list as you can come without actually including bullets. The whole book drips with a delicious blend of business-speak, neoconservatism, personality-cult, and Bush administration gossip -- so many things I hate about my society, condensed into 242 pages of relatively large-print adulation!

Surprisingly, no enterprising mathematician has yet bought the domain name www.doesitconverge.com. Someone should get on this; calculus students all around the world would find it a very useful resource.

(Actually it would've made a great, 'fun' website six years ago when 'Am I Hot Or Not' was popular. People log on and vote on whether a sequence or series or integral converges or not. Mmm, good times.)

Butter was on a super-mega sale today; we bought 8 pounds for 12 dollars. That's the best deal I've ever seen on butter. We probably should've bought more.

So I have to call your attention to MATH For Liberal Arts, the first math textbook inspired by the look and feel of an IKEA catalog (or Glamour magazine, I can't decide which). The publisher sent my officemate a free preview copy earlier this week, and every day since then I have been taking it down from the shelf and leafing through it, and every time I do this I end up making the distinctive sighs of intense disgust and disbelief.

The trend in textbooks in our modern era is towards glitz and flash and color, in accordance with the current Modern Students' Attention Span is Briefer Than Planck Time theory, and this book is the logical next step. I am not kidding about the word MATH being in all caps. That is for real. Just like the IKEA catalog. I am not kidding about it being like a fashion magazine either -- it is softcover and about as thick as Cosmo, the pages inside are glossy and every page has several busy color illustrations, and sometimes information is presented in columns EXACTLY like advertisements. On my most recent examination I actually caught myself flipping through looking for Who Wore It Better? (or maybe it should have been Who Factored It Better, I don't know.). I made a joke about trying to find some sort of personality quiz, and then I realized that I was holding a MATH TEXTBOOK and it should be full of quizzes -- but the crazy thing about this book is that there are actually NO PROBLEMS OR QUIZZES. The book comes packaged with codes to access online homework and quizzes, but none are provided on paper. (This is actually a fairly clever attempt to shut down resale, I think -- as the front cover warns, the online resources are available only with purchase of a new book.)

I think this book is a terrible textbook, would be nearly useless as a resource, and would be insulting to students forced to purchase it (do liberal arts majors enjoy being condescended to? I assume not) -- but I could be wrong. MATH. It could be our future.

It's tough to do your laundry when you're dog tired; it's tougher when part of the stuff to be washed are your bedsheets and pillowcases, so you have to put the sheets on and make the bed before you can collapse into slumber, presumably with the basket still brimming with unfolded laundry and unmatched socks.

So I really want to get inside the head of people who don't want the 9/11 plotters to be tried in civilian court instead of some military tribunal. Because I honestly don't understand what the argument is. And the New York state governor has stated he doesn't want them tried in his state; and apparently over a third of Americans don't even want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried in the United States; and it just does not make sense to me to treat these guys as anything more than the worst of the worst of regular criminals who are entitled to a trial as specified in the founding document of this free nation.

Even if we accept as fact that 9/11 was the single most heinous atrocity ever committed on American soil (a statement which is in my mind arguable) we have principles and rules we should follow if we intend to live up to the hopes of our forefathers: principles which if they are worth upholding are worth upholding even in the most egregious cases. Even if we think they will somehow transmit coded messages to their confederates.

Are we worried that they will testify to being tortured repeatedly by the federal government? Because that cat is already out of the bag. Maybe someone somewhere is afraid that having that testimony entered legally into a court record will lead to criminal prosecution -- I don't care about that and neither should anyone else. As has been argued repeatedly elsewhere, the proper way to deal with federally sanctioned torture is to prosecute and then, assuming a guilty verdict, the President can step in and issue pardons if appropriate. Rule of law preserved; loose ends tied up; everybody 'wins'.

Are we concerned that somehow civil trials will damage the delicate psyches of Americans who will be forced to live through the trauma all over again? "Oh, sorry, we're not going to try to prosecute the people we think killed your father because it will hurt you too much"? I can't think of a much better way to encourage further terrorism in our country than letting on that IT ACTUALLY HURT US TERRIBLY FOR ALMOST TEN YEARS.

If we are nervous that the 'risks', whatever they might be, are so grave that we must suspend all civil liberties, then we should just kill them. I mean, seriously, right? We have presumably gotten all the information from them we can; it is probably cheaper then keeping them prisoner forever; it would make lots of Americans pleased (ugh); everybody 'wins' again!

Or are we afraid that they might actually be acquitted? Because it seems to me that there are only two ways they could be acquitted: 1) they didn't do it, or 2) we screwed up legally while holding them for trial and so as a legal matter somehow much or all of the evidence acquired against them is admissible. Either way, that's our legal system, that's how the cookie crumbles, and if our mistakes have made our enemies un-punishable then that is the price we pay for being the good guys.

As part of the publicity blitz for their remake of 1960's cult tv show The Prisoner, AMC has made the original show available On Demand. Over the course of the last few weeks, Lucinda and I have been watching some of these. I saw nearly all of them before (some several times) as a child; she had sometimes in college been in the same room when one was being shown but had never paid attention.

Her final summing-up, before even viewing the mega-trippy final episode: "This sure was made in the 60's".

On my part I was surprised to discover how painfully bad some of the episodes were. I know it's sort of the point of the series, but how many episodes can you really have about mind-control drugs before it starts to feel like you've run out of ideas? (answer: at most 2) And I understand the desire to be vaguely allegorical about things, but can't you at least try to have the plot make some sort of superficial, logical sense? (I'm not even thinking of the last episode here, which I enjoy as being completely surreal -- it's other episodes that don't commit to it, and live in this wretched half-existence between the real and the unreal.) And that episode that's set mostly in the American Old West, featuring English countryside and Tudor-ish architecture, and which bludgeons us with its poor acting and portentous symbolism? I want those 50 minutes of my life back, please.

But it was still fun to watch. The main draw is Patrick McGoohan, who runs funny and fights funnier -- sometimes his acting choices are very odd but he is always intense, like Daniel Day-Lewis. So I enjoyed watching the show mainly for him. Also in the last few episodes they apparently gave the composer of the incidental music carte blanche to do whatever -- in "The Girl Who Was Death" a new theme starts in the background nearly every minute, and each new melody is aggressively non-background. Lucinda actually found the episode nearly unwatchable because the music was so oppressive (and the instrumentation so piercing), but I actually really liked it for being full of ideas and surprisingly catchy. All the music used for those episodes was, I presume, composed by Ron Grainer, whom I'm sure everyone knows better as the writer of the Doctor Who theme.

I will attempt to watch the remake but my expectations are very low. My sense is that they stripped from the original many things that were bad but also nearly everything that was good, and also of course they cast Jim Caveziel, who is no Patrick McGoohan, that's for sure.