Tag Archives: fun

Amherst

I have spent the last 3 months living in Amherst, Massachusetts, close to the university campus. Life in a small college town (and this certainly qualifies, having one university and an elite liberal arts college in town, with several other colleges close by) has a rhythm determined by the academic year. Today is the first snowstorm, and we shall see early tomorrow whether the campus is closed. It marks the end of a long autumn full of pumpkins, apple cider, Halloween, Thanksgiving and all the other traditions of this part of New England.

UMass has been voted Best Campus Food in the country by Princeton Review for the last four years, there is abundant music on campus, and life is pretty good here it seems. Of course the weather is not great in summer or winter and it is too far from a swimmable beach for my liking, but nowhere is perfect.

Apparently 40% of residents have a university degree. Conversations on the sideline at soccer matches seem to revolve around quite different ideas from those in Auckland! In the small street we are living in can be found the sister of Harley Flanders and the great-grandson of G.W. Snedecor. Again very different from our milieu in Auckland.

It has been a tiring but very rewarding visit overall and I hope to return soon.

Vienna

I spent almost 2 weeks in Vienna, Austria in November, visiting the Schroedinger Institute. The work environment was excellent (maybe the blackboards on the toilet walls were overkill) and the city is really impressive – no wonder it ranks so highly in the standard international quality of life surveys. In addition to the ease of getting around by foot, tram or U-bahn, and the high quality music (I went to 3 operas, a highlight being a 3 euro Stehplatz L’Elisir d’Amore experience at the Staatsoper), both of which I expected, the well priced and varied restaurants and cafes, and the cosmopolitan feeling were a nice surprise and different from what I remember from 25 years ago. I highly recommend a visit to Vienna!

Otello

I saw a concert version of this tonight with Simon O’Neill in the title role. While the plot is quite weird and distasteful in places, the orchestra and singing were excellent. I saw Simon O’Neill in 1997 (I think) in a small role in the play Master Class in Auckland. He has certainly gone up in the world!

Los Angeles

Today marks the end of an expensive and rewarding 5-week visit to Los Angeles. Most of it was vacation. We experienced some excellent museums (Petersen Automotive, Getty Center, La Brea Tar Pits) and the Santa Monica caught up with some old friends and colleagues, and spent a lot of time with many relatives. As expected, there was a lot of driving and eating, and not a lot of exercise. Weather was excellent, around 16-20C most days and with a lot of sunshine, and smog much less than I had expected. In the end we forwent the delights of the big theme parks, couldn’t stomach the crowds around the Chinese Theatre, and missed out on being part of the audience for a TV show recording.

I did manage to do a small amount of professional work: a talk at UCLA (in Igor Pak’s Combinatorics seminar, my first ever visit to the campus – it looks like a wonderful place, and I ran into Terry Tao in the line for lunch!) and my first ever discussant appearance, at a very interesting political science workshop in Laguna Beach organized by Bernie Grofman. Overall this has been the longest break from work I can remember, and it’s time to start serious research and teaching for 2016.

Coincidences

Although we know that the probability of an unspecified “unexpected” event is rather high, given how many possible events can occur, it is still interesting to note them. There is probably an evolutionary reason why probability is so unintuitive to us. Perhaps being curious about coincidences had substantial survival value in the past.

Here are two that have occurred to me recently.

1) Just over a week ago I wandered into the Mechanics Institute Chess Club (apparently the oldest in the US) in downtown San Francisco.There were just a few players sitting around casually on a Sunday afternoon, with no events scheduled. Then in walked someone I haven’t had any contact with for 25 years, whom I knew from playing against in the schools tournaments in Christchurch and at the Canterbury Chess Club, who later became NZ champion. Now that is a coincidence – he works for Google in Sydney and was in SF for a conference. Neither of us has played competitively for many times longer than our competitive chess career lasted. Playing a few games with the newfangled clock (3 minutes per player, plus 2 second increment per move) was a fun way to spend an hour.

2) This is close enough to true, and doesn’t change the essential mathematics. I know someone who has been married twice, each time to someone with the same birthday. How likely is that? This is different from the famous “birthday problem”. Suppose that everything is uniformly randomly chosen, and I have $latex k$ acquaintances who are in a position to marry and whom I know well enough that I would hear about such a coincidence. Let $latex n$ be the number of days in a year. The probability that one of these acquaintances fails to have such a coincidence is $latex 1-1/n$, so the probability that some succeeds is $latex 1 – (1-1/n)^k$. Let $latex c$ be a number between $latex 0$ and $latex 1$ that represents our threshold for incredulity – if an event has probability less than $latex c$, I will be surprised to see it, and otherwise not. Thus we should be surprised if $latex (1-1/n)^k > 1-c$. Reasonable values for $latex n,k,c$ are $latex 365, 100, 0.01$, but since $latex (364/365)^{100} = 0.76$, we should not be surprised. Analytically, the inequality $latex (1-1/n)^k > 1 – c$ can be approximately solved via making the approximation $latex (1-1/n)^k = exp(k log(1-1/n) approx exp(-k/n) approx 1 – k/n$. Thus I expect to need $latex k < cn$ in order to be surprised: the number of acquaintances should scale linearly with $latex n$, which clearly doesn’t have to measure days. So if I only care about which month the person is born in, I will never be surprised, but if I care about the hour and have fewer than about 80 acquaintances, very likely I will be surprised. The original case of a day shows that if I have more than 4 acquaintances, I should not be surprised.

Suppose everyone in the world is my acquaintance. How precise could we be about the birthday without being surprised? Now $latex k$ is of the order of 5 billion, so with the same value of $latex c$, $latex n$ should be about 500 billion. That means we can slice up a year into milliseconds and such a coincidence event would not be at all strange.

Trip to Iran

I have just returned home after 5 weeks in Iran, mostly for a family vacation. There were many interesting experiences, a lot of them positive. Skiing at about the height of Mt Cook just a few minutes from the city was a lot of fun, as was a bus trip to the ancient city of Kashan, which has had inhabitants nearby for the last 8000 years. Meeting relatives (by marriage) and some old and new friends, buying bread from the neighbourhood bakery, and eating the very high quality and cheap pastries were other highlights.

Of course the political and economic situation is very bad and getting worse. Taxi drivers (of whom we used a very large number – no way was I going to try driving for reasons discussed below, and buses are not that convenient) almost uniformly blamed the government and had no faith in the idea of an Islamic Republic. The rial depreciated sharply against the US dollar and other currencies during our trip. The government appears to be using the strategy of internet “filtering” (censorship) to avoid discussion of anything important, although as usual they were not very competent: the NZ Herald newspaper website was unavailable, although the NY Times was easily accessible. Most internet-savvy people I met were well aware of how to bypass the filters. The drawback is that speeds are reduced to the point where some services don’t really work (I couldn’t see anything on Youtube).

Iran seems to be the opposite of Sweden in the area of design. Doorhandles are loose and when tightened, the locks no longer work. Light switches are routinely dangling from the wall with wiring exposed. Quality control in building seems to be an exception.

Tehran seems to be one big health and safety violation. Some of the highlights I noticed: most taxi drivers have disabled the seatbelts in the back, and seem bemused or offended if this is pointed out (my favourite was the guy who said he would drive carefully and slowly on our trip home, although most of the trip was on the motorway); exposed wiring is visible in many public places; construction workers using welding torches with no eye protection. The most obvious health hazard is the foul stinking air which at this time of year is at its worst.

Many of the health hazards are traffic related (my guess is that the major contribution to the air pollution comes from vehicles, many of which seem to be of low quality and run on low grade fuel). The lane markings are completely ignored, and traffic proceeds (slowly in most places) by a process of everyone trying to claim the right of way and then negotiating silently with the other drivers, who by now are within a few centimetres of the car, approaching at an arbitrary angle. Apparently Iran has 4 times the death rate from traffic accidents that NZ has. We only saw a couple of accidents while there. The low speeds in Tehran must make fatal accidents less common, so I wonder how bad it must be in other places.

This leads to the idea of the rule of law, and the difference between writing laws and enforcing them. Particularly local government rules on footpaths, essentially none of which are wheelchair accessible in the hilly areas because they have steps every few metres (presumably each household deals with its own vehicle crossing and no one checks that they mesh together into a usable path).

It is hard to escape the conclusion that a country with a lot of natural resources, great potential for tourism, a strong and enduring culture with (as yet) strong family units, is being let down by an appallingly bad governance system. I don’t subscribe to the view that just because they have never had a decent government in 2500 years, they can’t have one now, but it does seem that a culture change is needed. Judging from some academic and industry contacts we made, it seems that this change is under way a lot faster than we expected in some sectors, but it seems it will still take considerable time.

The lecturer

This may not be the final form, but I will post it now so as not to forget.

To the tune of “Killing me softly”

I heard he gave a good talk
I heard he had some style
And so I went to see him
To listen for a while

And there he was this (youngish) man
No stranger to my eyes

Numbing my brain with his figures
Straining my eyes with his slides
Driving me crazy with errors
Killing me slowly, with his talk, …

I couldn’t reach the aisle
Surrounded by the crowd
Seemed like he’d brought his paper
And read each word out loud

I prayed that he would finish
But he just kept right on

[chorus]

I tried to get attention
I tried an icy stare
But he just looked right through me
As if I wasn’t there

And he just kept on talking
Barely audibly

[chorus]

Chess and Computers

Garry Kasparov’s book review is a lot more interesting than the book probably is. A lot of really interesting anecdotes from one of the greatest chessplayers ever (perhaps the greatest). I remember following his first match with Karpov via the newspapers while at high school. Now my  local paper doesn’t cover any sort of chess news, and doesn’t even have a recreational column. I must try to do something about that sometime.