schneefink

Related to yesterday's post, apparently Dr. Kiesenhofer is currently trending on reddit in r/interestingasfuck. Little Brother is a mathematician, so DD wanted his opinion on the mentioned non-linear partial differential equations (LB has strong opinions on math, e.g. that counting is not math), leading to the following text exchange.

Me quoting DD: Is it the good math or the bad math? Where is it on math scale 1-10?
When asked to clarify: How does he feel about it? Is it in his top 5? If it were a person, would he be interested in dating it, or would he prefer other math instead?
LB: It would not be a person, but rather a family of people, I think. Most of which I'd only know via a quick glance at their public facebook profile.
There are some of them that seem a bit weird (those that have strange obsessions with existence proofs of weirder and weirder equations), but there are those who do stuff I don't understand but sounds vaguely datable.
DD: That is beautiful and exactly what I wanted to hear. Very informative.

I then explained to LB that the interest came from the topic trending on reddit.
LB: ...what.
LB: Oh, cycling.
LB: Gimme a moment to see what she's doing
LB: Sample taken: 3 abstracts. Seems perfectly datable to me.
LB: There's geometry and funny groups, which is enough to make me happy.

So that was a great start of the day xD

*collapses in an exhausted heap*

The last four days I participated in a scavenger hunt. It was organized by students from the Technical University. In teams of eight people (at most) we had to look for 202 items, some of which were a live coachmen with goulash, a 1,5 meter hobbyhorse made from paper maché, a raw whole chicken egg in an undamaged bottle with a bottleneck of no more than two centimetres (nobody got that one), an Eiffel tower made out of specific fruits, a Julian Assange action figure, all team members with French nails and ball clothes, pedobear, lots of stuff from companies that no longer exist, and more items that were ridiculously difficult to get, many of which I can't translate properly or that wouldn't make sense without context. Oh, and there were also "find that person" games in Vienna. Time was important. My legs are sore.

Most of the team didn't know each other in advance, so we met an hour earlier in a nearby café. We exchanged anecdotes - meaning that I kept pestering those who'd participated before how they'd acquired the things on the old lists - and then our team leader opened his bag and pulled out a Star Trek phaser. "Just in case," he said. Okay, I said to myself, obviously he's more of a nerd than I'd thought.

Item 173 on the list: a LARP weapon. Whooo-hoo! So he knew what he was doing after all. ;-)

We had a lot of fun, but it was exhausting. We, or at least I, overdid it on the first days and didn't have any energy left today, but everyone implicitly agreed to stop being overly ambitious and in the end it was fine. 16th out of 28, not bad. And the first few teams had approximately 170 of 200 items; they must be crazy.

Sadly, we forgot to take many photographs. Maybe next year.


Tomorrow is "open motion" at debate club. This means that the motion will be vague (eg. "TH totally would", which became the orgy debate at the last party), but the first speaker has more liberties: he can specify time, location, and universe. So for example tomorrow we could have a debate "This house, as the Galactic Senate, would dissolve the Jedi Order" or "THW dissolve Slytherin" or "TH, as the orcs in LotR after Sauron's defeat, would demand asylum in Gondor" or things like that. (Suggestions welcome ^^)

This promises to be so much fun! I hope I get to debate.


More randomness: LB is reading Dresden Files now. xD I am, apparently, reading Homestuck. I don't know how that happened. My genficathon fic is coming along slowly (had to take a break because of the scavenger hunt), but I'm still hoping to get it done in time.