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Reports
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Someone posted a spoiler to some anime series.
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Someone posted an equation whose graph is a swastika.
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Someone is cheating. I am sure of it, but I don’t have any proof.
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Someone said something off-topic several years ago.
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Someone is annoying, and I don’t want to ignore him.
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Knitting Update
So, I finally finished the freeform scarf where I was making the pattern up as I went along, based on a sketch that I had made.
It did not turn out as I had planned, but it exists. Probably if I had thought more about what I was going to do and made swatches and actually written a pattern, it would have gone better. But I am not good at planning ahead for this sort of thing, so I would just pick some yarn and start knitting.
I’ve made rule that I can’t buy any new yarn until I use most of the yarn that I already own (or I can’t figure out what to make out of the remaining yarn). Next project is going to be a striped poncho. Striped because I don’t have enough of any one type of yarn to make anything of note. Poncho because I do not have the patience to figure out how to make something that fits out of a zillion different types of yarn.
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Consolidated Updates
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I felt like nobody wanted to hear about the crazy updates with specialty pharmacies and FedEx. Delivery exceptions, phone tag, the run-around with the dose delivered by FedEx on behalf of McKesson. (And by “the run-around,” I mean “I had to drive to the FedEx center in the barrio during a specific 30-minute window during rush hour.”) The dose delivered to CVS sat around, ice packs melting, for almost eight hours because no one at CVS checked-in the specialty medications that were delivered that day.
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Despite the fact that this medication does not work particularly well (there are no measurable, quantitative improvements; I just have a vague sense that headaches don’t get quite so bad and that they improve just a little bit faster), I decided to give it another shot (ha! ha! ha!), and I injected myself with a second dose on Thursday.
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Almost entirely done with future prediction and writing up what was tried and which code does what.
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Next up: making lots of little widgets for a dashboard!
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Hiring update: Still looking for a Cat Herder. I am still debating whether or not to bring one of my actual cats to work on the days that we are interviewing for the Cat Herder position. I suppose the first step would be bringing the extra litter box in to the office.
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Hiring update 2: I’m developing a partial ordering of how well the applicants, as a whole, for our various open positions follow the directions in the job ad. Potential Cat Herders and Software Developers do better than expected at following the directions. Potential teachers do worse than expected. Let your friends know: If they want to teach for us, if they follow the directions in the job ad, they will already be in the top 10% of our applicant pool. (The directions are not particularly tricky.)
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Hiring update 3: A new person started on Friday! On Thursday we learned that the new person uses they/them pronouns. We are all trying very hard to use they/them pronouns when referring to our new colleague, but we don’t always remember. Both during the interview and during the process of preparing for this person to join the team, most of us were unaware that they used they/them pronouns, so we had been talking about them using a set of common third person singular pronouns.
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Pronoun aside: You mostly use pronouns when you are talking about someone and not when you are talking to that person. So when we make mistakes, our new colleague isn’t there to notice. But everyone else can judge.
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Pronoun aside 2: Wouldn’t it be easier if English were more like Mandarin or Turkish and personal pronouns were not declined for gender? In English, personal pronouns are the only words that are declined for gender. People stopped complaining about singular “you” and the loss of the T-V distinction. We could probably tolerate a further collapse of English pronouns.
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Referring to people aside: I’m going to admit that I don’t understand anything at all about why some people care which pronouns are used to refer to them. And because I am from the 1990s (Intellectually, I mean; I’m originally from the 1970s, but I attended a liberal arts college in the 1990s.), I was raised to believe that gender is a social construct and a purely performative aspect of our heteronormative culture. But I have a lot of friends who use names that do not exactly match what is on their birth certificates, so to me it is equivalently polite to refer to all people however they ask to be referred to.
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Names aside: Not too long ago I realized that I have two legal names (one on my birth certificate and a different one on the social security card that was issued when I was an infant). At some point I should do something about that beacuse people are way less tolerant these days about names not matching exactly. My passport has my birth-certificate-name, and my drivers license has my social-security-card name. So no matter which name is on something, I have a legit-seeming ID to match it. Which is why I’m not particularly motivated to change it. (Neither of my parents have middle names, so they didn’t really understand how middle names work, which is what led us to this situation.)
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Hiring update 4: Another new person starts tomorrow! His first name is the same as that of the new person who started in July. His last name is the same as the first name of the CEO. This means that email autofill is going to lead to potentially awkward situations. Colleagues, if you are reading this blog post, you may want to set up distinct email aliases for these people!
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Recently from the bug reports: “Is the answer supposed to be 2, because when I type it in, it does not work.”
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You have no idea how much yarn I brought with me to knitting group this morning.
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Tales from the BugMaster
You know that image that goes around the internet where there’s a picture of a triangle, and one of the sides is labeled x, and the problem asks, “Find x,” and someone has drawn an arrow to the x and written “Here it is”?
Well, I see things like that sometimes.
I have trimmed out the student’s pleas for more points.
Based on the problem ID number, I have a decent hunch of who wrote this problem (I left the team writing problems for this project when the ID numbers were in the 26000s.). Likely I will edit the problem to include the words “the value of.” Such is the world of mathematics. Some students will read the problems incredibly literally. Other students have such a freeform view of notation that they are upset when the parser doesn’t recognize the submission of “10 squirt” or “10 sort” (postfix function notation, lack of parentheses, a heavy dose of autocorrect) as \(\sqrt{10}\).
Aside: Across all projects, I expect that we are rapidly closing in on having a hundred thousand problems in our collection. (I am excluding the problems that only appear in our books from this count.)
Aside 2: As always, we are hiring. In addition to the usual suspects, yesterday we for-real put up a job whose title is “Cat Herder.” If you know someone who is a generally competent human being with significantly above-average common sense and who wants to live in San Diego and work with a bunch of mathematicians, now would be a great time to get in touch. You can find the job ad on LinkedIn.
Aside 3: While we rarely have actual cats at work, we always have dogs.
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My Enemies at the Specialty Pharmacy
Yesterday I received a series of text messages from the specialty pharmacy. When they orinally set me the medicine, they signed me up for text refills. Your refill is coming tomorrow! Text Y to confirm! You need to be at your house in order to sign for it!
I do not trust the specialty pharmacy at all. Not one little bit. I never received another text assuring me that the medicine is really coming. I never received a tracking number. So I called them this morning at 6am my time (when their offices open). Nope, the medicine was not coming today. But it will come tomorrow! They promise! They claim that they are shipping it to my office, so I don’t need to stay home and wait for it.
The last time I received medicine, I received a text from FedEx with the tracking number. So far, no text from FedEx.
I’ll probably call them tomorrow to see what is up, since they seem to be unable to carry out the basic functions of being a mail-order pharmacy.
When I was getting the run-around for my first dose, I was really annoyed about the whole thing. Medical science had brewed up this magical cure produced by Chinese hamsters, and I wanted in on it! The early studies were very promising. So many people felt so much better! These magical antibodies did something science-y with a recepter that might be the same type of recepter that has something to do with the medicines that make the headaches go away (but that take a while to work and that can only be taken nine days per month).
If this were a drug study rather than the actual drug being on the market, I would be telling everyone who would listen that I suspected that I were part of the placebo part of the study. I had no headaches at all for the first seven days after I gave myself the shot, and I was really excited about that. But then they came back with roughly the same frequency as usual. They seem to be not as bad. They seem to go away on their own without having to take the medicine. But I’m still getting a lot of headaches.
So I have stopped caring quite so much about whether the specialty pharmacy sends me the magical antibodies that I need to stab myself with.
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The Weather and San Diego Real Estate
Everyone complains about the cost of housing in California. It is expensive to live in San Diego. I am consistently amused by groups that try to drum up outrage about something with the warning that it will lower property values. The people who want housing to be cheaper likely outnumber the people who want it to remain expensive. You’re much more likely to drum up opposition to AirBnB by claiming that it makes housing more expensive than by claiming that it makes it cheaper to buy a house. Those partying AirBnB guests bringing down the property values look like they’d be much more fun to have as neighbors than the old lady who is complaining that her house that has probably appreciated by almost a million dollars since she bought it many decades ago is no longer worth as much as she expected.
When I went to UCSD back in the 1990s, my apartment had neither heat nor air conditioning. This didn’t bother me. I had just moved from New Hampshire, so I could deal with the cold. And summers in San Diego (especially in La Jolla) were much kinder than the summers in New Hampshire, which I had also braved without air conditioning. Even on warm summer days I would ride my bike to Pacific Beach and make fun of the people who complained that 83 was “hot.” When I moved back here, I had expected something similar.
Is it still cool in the summer if one lives near the coast? Now I live a little bit further inland, about 3 miles from the bay, and I would be absolutely miserable if my apartment did not have air conditioning. The HVAC system in my apartment dates back to when the building was built in 1986, and it is not efficient. It costs me hundreds of dollars a month in electricity. Fortunately, I have a good job (and a cheap apartment), so I can afford hundreds of dollars a month in electricity. But I wonder how hotter summers will affect people in general.
The rule of thumb had been that if you lived east of the 15, you definitely need air conditioning. And it has always been cheaper to live further east. But as the hotter weather moves west, the cost of utilities goes up closer to the coast. Will people get priced out of the mid-city by utilities and move to East County? At what point will you need air conditioning if you live east of the 805? East of the 5? Anywhere?
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Notes from Jury Duty
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I had jury duty today. I escaped remarkably unscathed!
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According to those in the know, Thursdays are frequently slow at this courthouse, so it’s not surprising that my name never got called ever during the whole day.
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Therefore, I did not need to play up the poorly socialized mathematician angle.
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Very poor OPSEC at jury duty. Not that I am considering doing anything that is illegal or unethical or disruptive. But if someone were considering doing any of those things, it would not be hard. Likely there are cameras and stuff that could be referred to later if someone did something significant enough to be noticed, but some of the subtle ways of undermining the system might not even be noticed.
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New theory about the airport: You need to go through the metal detector to get into the courthouse, and your bag needs to go through the x-ray machine. But the rules at the courthouse are not the same as the ones at the airport; the rules at the courthouse are roughly like going to the airport in 1979. Maybe all the people I see at the airport who are really terrible at the security line go to court a lot and just assume that it works the same way at the airport?
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Insert angry-face emoji: The letter from the jury duty office specifically alerted us to the security screening process. It listed specific items that are verboten. These include knitting needles. Today I saw a woman knitting a sock in the jury lounge. Hashtag security theater.
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