War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Work is Play

Three days into my new job, I feel as if I’m procrastinating from schoolwork. This feeling, fortunately, is not due to procrastination from work. Instead, it’s somewhat of a nostalgic feeling brought on by the type of work that I am doing.

Every dedicated university student knows of the black hole, the oasis, the addiction that is addictinggames.com. Many spend countless hours working on their paper by playing Kitty Cannon and the like. Being a more mathematically enlightened student, I knew that I had found the ultimate procrastination tool when I found Planerity. The game goes something like this :

Start off with a mess of circles (called vertices) and lines (called edges), as depicted below.

This example is already a few moves into the game. To play, move the vertices (the circles, remember? c’mon, I just mentioned that!) until none of the edges (lines) cross, forming a planar graph of N vertices and M edges where N and M depend on the difficulty level. A finished product can be observed below :

My current job at work is like this game, except that I work with a circuit board, using components and traces instead of vertices and edges, and I am allowed a number of line crossings as I have two layers to work with. What fun! (And you thought the connect the dots from grade one had no practical applications!)

An occasion to celebrate

The red mule turned 1400.0 today. I was there to celebrate with it (fortunately… another worker, A., almost had the pleasure when he went to move red mule so that green mule could get by). Admittedly, it wasn’t a huge party, but the red mule didn’t really want a big birthday anyways.

I tend to notice nice round numbers like that. Today I spent some time thinking about numbers. Important points of my pondering were :

• I don’t like odd numbers as much as even numbers, in general. Especially at work. Unless they’re divisible by 5, in which case they’ll barely tolerable.
• Prime numbers, while enjoying a place of prestige (even though, yes, all but one are odd) have no place at a tree nursery.
• Just touched briefly on a few of the many relationships between numbers and music. For instance, the eight note system ends up giving you a great example of modular arithmetic. Also, anything in which the terms “third”, “circle of fifths”, and “time beats given in fractions that used to drive me crazy until somebody finally managed to make me understand the differences between them and that no you can’t just play different timed pieces the same way” have a place of importance clearly has an appreciation for numbers.

As a disclaimer, I don’t think about numbers everyday. So I’m only partly crazy.

Everyone wants a piece of me

Being tall, I’ve received my fair share of related jokes and comments. One of the more interesting suggestions, likely made by social aggitators who demand equality in all things, is the suggestion that I receive surgury to remove several inches from my legs which can then be grafted into the aggitator’s legs in order to equalize height. As attractive as this offer may sound to those who don’t like being tall, I have up to this point graciously declined all such offers.

But today, I’ve found someone who wants another part of me. I was at work at a prestigious tree farm, where my task of the hour was to move a large number of potted trees from one location to another. Potted trees may occaisionally look like this :

They didn’t look like these this time, since I was moving Larix laricina, not a random assortment of deciduous trees. At any rate, the foreman (here named ‘S.’) commented on the amount of walking I was doing. In response, I half-jokingly gestured at my stomach and said, “S., I’ve got ten extra pounds I need to burn off here. Walking is good for me!” The middlesized, skinny S. looked at me and said, “Why you burn them all?? Give them to me!”

So there you have it. Someone does want your fat. But instead you choose to either burn it or to hoard it closely. How very selfish.

Europe – Part 1 : The airplane and London

I thought about making this series 3 part and calling this post Europe – Part 1 : The fellowship of the tourist camera, but just like Robert Jordan I can’t limit myself to a paltry 3 part series. Besides, I generally forget to take pictures by the 3rd day of travelling anyways…

The story began when I arrived well in time for my flight at Toronto Airport on a Monday evening. After flying (no pun intended) through the check-in and security stations, I discovered that I had the honor of waiting two hours for my flight. Such are the miracles of our modern transport system. Fortunately, I had company to help pass the time.

The flight itself was not without pain. The space allotted for the average sized Canadian seems to decrease everytime I fly; I remain thankful for aisle seats. Nonetheless, after an otherwise uneventful flight the plane landed on the first try in London. Asserting my identity as an EU citizen for the first time, I found customs to be painless. Within minutes I had collected my luggage and set out to de-confuse myself on the issue of transportation to my hostel.

Hostels can be interesting places. My room looked like this (mess provided by yours truly) :

The view outside of my room was one of stimulating diversity :

In addition, the toilet stalls at the hostel were rather interesting… ever had to pull your legs up so that the door could close? It’s not my fault, I swear!
At about 1 pm, after an hour nap (only having gotton about an hour and a half of sleep on the plane), I set off to walk around London. I found myself in the vincinity of London’s parks fairly quickly, and decided to walk to Buckingham Palace,

Westminster,

and within sight of Benny.

It should be noted that I did attend an evensong service at Westminster. The service was amazing, with a really good choir. The occassion was only slightly marred by those that had less of an interest in the service and more of an interest in seeing the inside of Westminster for free. The latter incentive was only a minor part of my motivation, naturally.

After having explored London for about seven hours with little food or sleep, I headed back to the hostel, stopping for food on the way. Up early the next morning, I took the train back to Gatwick to catch a plane. (Tune in next time… )

A Job Well Done

Where ever you work, it is always important to have a sense of how your work is progressing. There are many ways to do this, from meetings with supervisors, key deadlines, etc. All the same, having a visual cue can be extremely valuable for showing how far you’ve gotten, boosting morale and spurring future efforts.

Take, for example, coffee cups. How better to measure your workplaces’ coffee drinking progress than collecting the used cups and constructing architecturally significant works of art with them :

[ "Cups". SAS,IN,MW, 2006, Cardboard and plastic. 56 cm x 68 cm x 68 cm]
One esteemed art critic in the CS lab commented that this masterpiece “… contains a true expression of the humen dillema …” and that “Its use of both symmetrical and asymmetrical elements … shows the order and chaos of our shared experience.”

Another critic wrote this short critique :

The masterwork, “Cups”, from the CS lab, defines the drama of the workplace in a humanistic context of real data. It speaks to the soul of the burdened worker – torn between the realities of drug abuse and the chaotic yet symphonic manifestation of essence. The medium is a striking appeal to the senses, bringing to play elements of satire in conjunction with corporate highlightig. No topic is to deep for the work, it is a commentary on life, both as we know it and as we will find it. In short, it forms a refreshing and sophisticated dialog with the viewer both entertaining and inspiring.

The artwork will be on display until Sept. 2, 2006.

Abraham

My father has seen Abraham today. Ask a Dutch person, they’ll tell you what that means.

Ok, ok, I’ll give you a hint:
John 8:57 “You are not yet fifty years old,” the Jews said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!”

Research

It seems to me that everything is more exciting in the movies. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of research / academics. Dramas such as Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, and the like show us the world of geniuses that make academics look like alot of fun. However, there’s a lot more work involved than there appears initially.

See, if you work in construction, you can see the house being built, you’ve got the plan, the roadmap to where you need to be, a timetable to ensure you are on schedule, and established industry practices / codes to ensure quality. In research you can spend a year just to discover that your fabulous idea doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t work.

In addition, there may be a great deal of grunt work involved. I can only sympathize with those poor grad students who are working in the field, carefully measuring the same thing every day in order to get enough data to be able to say something. Or in my case, taking pictures. You’ve never really known a hallway untill you’ve crawled along it 6 times, in one foot increments, to get a buch of ones and zeros that look like this :

I think I’ve gotten to understand the hallway’s frustrations a little better… all those students walking on it, leaving dirty scuff marks all over. If it wasn’t for its weekly cleaning, the hallway would have gone postal by now.

The Pineries

So this past weekend I reached another milestone in our current solar-based year system. In addition to this event, it was also the youth group camping weekend for my church, which was held once again at Pinery Provincial Park. On Saturday various people came up to celebrate with me, and we ensured that Redeemer was not under-represented at the beach :

This worked out well, since while sitting at tables by the park store we were approached by a couple with a few young children and asked if we went to Redeemer. Upon hearing the affirmative, it was revealed that alumni of ‘94 do occasionally frequent the Pineries. Good times.