Highlights of this week

On Wednesday night, I ran into the grad student teaching History of Mathematics.

grad student: How did you find Descartes?
me: Descartes? ... Oh, is that what our reading for tomorrow is about?

Friday morning, I was interviewing for Microsoft.

me: "I run Linux on a Mac."
[few seconds later]
me (in my head): *oops*

Tuesday morning convocation

Me: (decides to take picture of Professor Loepp explaining NSF fellowships) *points camera*

Professor Loepp: Alan's taking a picture of the presentation. Alan do you want me to take a picture of you and the presentation?

Me: Actually, I can do it myself! *takes picture*

Dining Services doesn't understand logic

"if you are assigned a lunch shift on Friday, you will be provided with lunch, but you will not be provided with breakfast or dinner." (source)

(I have many other complaints about dining services as well.)

Google CodeJam

5am in the morning! Just in time for Google CodeJam Round 1C!

Update (7:30am): round just ended, made it to the next round!

Mathematicians at the Beethoven concert

Tonight, I ran into Professor Stein at the Beethoven concert, and he introduced me to Professor Shimura!

While jogging at 7am, I saw Professor Gunning in front of his house getting the newspaper!

Smashing two planes together?

Minh-Tam and I were just discussing algebraic topology, and now we're wondering the following: what do you get when you smash two planes together?

(By that, I mean $\mathbb{R}^2 \wedge \mathbb{R}^2$, where $\wedge$ denotes the smash product.)

Stay tuned! (I will figure out the answer.)