Michi’s blog

In a recent column at The Chronicle of Higher Education, the columnist writes

I’m a latecomer to it, in part because I have a very hit-or-miss interest in new technologies. (I still don’t own a cell phone, for example, though I check my e-mail 4,000 times a day.)

Now. There are 24 hours in a day. 1 440 minutes. 86 400 seconds. Thus, checking e-mail 4 000 times in a day would require you to check your inbox every 21.6 seconds. Day and night.

Either the author is innumerate or hyperactive.

Due to a spectacular spam storm incited by akismet.com being unreachable from the webserver, I have decided to globally shut off commenting for the time being.

This should be a temporary state, and I hope that the akismet issue solves itself soon.

Today, I told my two bright students about abstract and geometric simplicial complexes, about the boundary map and the chain complex over a ring R associated with a simplicial complex Δ, and assigned them reading out of Hatcher’s Algebraic Topology.

The next couple of weeks will be spent doing homology of simplicial complexes, singular homology, equivalence of the two, neat things you can do with them; and then we’ll start moving towards a Borsuk-Ulam-y topological combinatorics direction.

I might end up pulling combinatorics papers from my old “gang” in Stockholm on graph complexes, and graph property complexes, and poke around those with them.

I tried out an idea from Khymos recently when inviting a bunch of friends over for a party. We took six slices, about 1100g, of beef entrecôte and rubbed them all over with vodka (in order to minimize the risk of getting for instance botulism growth in the heating process). These were then put in an ordinary plastic bag and into a 60 degree (+- ~7 degrees – I monitored it reasonably closely, but couldn’t keep it within a few degrees of 60) water bath.

Alas, once I started the water bath, I forgot about the camera I had to document the whole process with, so I probably should repeat it with more photos sometime later on.