After 20 years continuous work at the University of Auckland, I am moving with my family to Amherst, Massachusetts, USA (as described here). I will be in the Department of Math & Stat, and also Adjunct in Computer Science. Giving up a tenured position for a limited term visiting one with no guarantee of anything beyond that may be considered foolhardy by many. Moving a family to the USA from our highly locally optimized life in Auckland, especially in the era of Trump, is also challenging. COVID-19 has made job hunting harder. So I am highly incentivized to work hard and make contacts. Wish me luck!
Tag Archives: personal
A rant about Lufthansa
Apologies, a rant is required. I just swore at someone on the phone, which is quite a rare occurrence. Read on to see why, if you dare.
Lufthansa is by far the worst airline I have ever had the misfortune to deal with (I haven’t flown on anything really unsafe, of course, but have flown in Iran on a Tupolev). Not only is their in-flight service embarrassingly behind my usual carriers such as Emirates, Singapore, Air New Zealand, their customer service is a joke. My wife has flown them twice in the last year.
Example 1: The first time she bought an in-class upgrade in order to make a further upgrade using Mileage Plus miles. Then was told that the upgrade was not possible. Nor was a refund and in-class downgrade. She flew in the same seat as before, and after 10 months they have offered to refund 20% of the cost, but still haven’t done it more than 3 weeks after asking for bank details. Each time I enquired it took weeks or months to get an email reply.
Example 2: She was denied boarding for LAX-Munich on a trip from Auckland to Europe (because of a newly enforced rule on passport validity that was not picked up at Auckland), and the other 5 legs of the trip were then cancelled. She had to buy a 1-way ticket home. Note that because my wife never made it to her invited conference talk, she doesn’t want to ask the organizers for any money, and they probably think she is being refunded by the airline. The original was bought through Expedia. After hours talking to Expedia we have been told that Lufthansa will within a few days let us know how much they will refund, and then it will take 10 weeks for a refund. I asked Expedia to transfer me to Lufthansa in order to discuss the extra costs incurred that were not on the ticket. The LH staff member told me this number is not for customers, only travel agents. She refused to give me any contact numbers other than the general US 1-800 number. Not wanting to start all over again and failing to convince her with reasoned argument I yelled and hung up.
I don’t want to make too many jokes about Germans, but there is some really stereotypical behaviour going on here. Is customer service, or basic human flexibility, such as difficult concept to grasp?
I strongly urge anyone reading this to avoid Lufthansa if possible. Other tips – never buy your own ticket if it is supposed to be reimbursed by others, get them to buy it directly; make sure your passport has 3 months validity past the end of your stay in Schengen area. And maybe consider cancellation insurance!
Renee Wilson RIP
My mother died 2016-02-02 after a fairly short battle with cancer. Although aged nearly 82 she was very energetic and this was a big shock to all who knew her. It is a strange feeling when someone you thought would be around forever leaves so early. I have a memorial website to which anyone reading this who knew her should ask me for the link.
Being orphaned in middle age is much better than earlier, but still tough to handle.
A vain attempt to recapture lost youth
At short notice I decided to enter the 2015 NZ Rapid Chess Championship, lured by the location and presence of foreign grandmasters. My first competitive games for over 27 years were a very mixed bag, as might be expected. I had problems playing at that speed (approximately 30 minutes per game per player). I ran out of energy on the second day, and the last game was one of the worst I have ever played. But there were enough positives to allow me not to rule out a repeat. It was strange to be playing sub-teenagers and realizing that I look really, really, old to them.
Results can be found here.
Some of my encounters with Iranian culture
On 30 November I gave a short presentation at an event called “I for Iran – a celebration of Iranian culture”. I was asked to discuss my encounters with Iranian culture as an outsider. Here are the speech notes and the accompanying slides.
For those wanting to learn Farsi online, I suggest easypersian.com as a good place to start.
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.
RIP Paul Callaghan
Dead of cancer at 64. I never met Paul Callaghan, New Zealand’s greatest public intellectual and by all accounts a thoroughly good human being. His vision for this country struck a chord with me. A basic obituary is in the NZ Herald. Let’s hope that his work is not wasted. Productivity growth through better use of the mathematical and physical sciences is what we need.
Prometheus
I don’t claim to resemble him in every way, but his unfortunate fate came to mind in the last few months as I suffered from recurrent corneal erosion. A short description: imagine that intermittently 10-20% of the skin of your leg is torn off, and grows back within a few days. Now imagine that instead of the leg, it is in fact your cornea, it only happens at night, and it is your own eyelid that is sticking to the cornea and tearing off the top layer. This is certainly the most annoying, painful and debilitating condition I have come across that is essentially trivial in that it won’t really cause any permanent damage. Doing anything with the eye for hours or days after an attack is very difficult, and for me going an hour without reading is very unusual, let alone several days.
Apparently there is a good chance of simple treatment succeeding, and more complicated options exist.
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.
My French university experience
As part of an academic couple I have had my share of applying for jobs, but not recently. However this year I applied for a position at a university in Paris. The whole experience was interesting and frustrating. France really seems quite different from anywhere else I have dealt with. I did a lot of background reading and have seen that the current government have tried to shake up the university system substantially – it is underfunded, poorly adapted to student needs and overly rigid, perhaps exacerbated by the existence of the grandes ecoles. On the positive side, French research is still very good in many areas.
Academics at French universities are civil servants with many things about the job completely prescribed. For example, the number of hours of teaching, the salary and the application procedure. The last was unusual – fill in an online form, but also send 3 copies of the application by snail mail; send a CV but no letters of recommendation or even names of referees. Included in this is the requirement that the PhD degree certificate be translated – I did this myself and took to the head of the French department here, who said “Oh, I thought you had French” and proceeded to rewrite for me. My application was rejected because of the failure to meet the 3 snail mail copies requirement – luckily, some apologies and merging of two applications (I had applied for a related job on the advice of my local contact) saved the day. The selection procedure involved a committee of about 16 people, many of whom were researchers at the university concerned but with several other specialists in the research area from other nearby institutions. This was unusual in my experience and seems like a good idea. I was chosen for an interview in Paris, but since no costs for travel are reimbursed (apparently a standard French procedure!) I opted for a “visioconference” which was held at 11pm in Auckland (1pm in Paris). In my 20 minute presentation and interview I managed to speak French well enough to convince them I could handle teaching there, and was ranked first in this “concours”. Another very unusual feature was that the rankings of the candidates were semi-publicly available – surely against privacy laws in many countries. I was asked to accept or reject the offer during a fixed week, several weeks after I had been told that I would be offered it. In all that time, I never managed to find out the exact salary and benefits that would be offered, and was told that it would not be decided exactly until after I had been working there for a while!
In the end personal reasons meant I had to turn down the offer. From the point of view of experiencing Europe and being less isolated in research, not to mention the challenge of teaching in French, I have some feelings of regret. However, I am sure there would have been many negatives. I have gained some good experience for the future.