Offer

In our house at university we do our food shopping by online delivery, which I hate hate hate but unfortunately have very little choice about. As with food prices in the stores, the whole website has gone absolutely crazy of late with products going massively up or down in price, products changing, and cheaper alternatives no longer being available via the website (, which only adds insult to the injury of not being able to get to a store in person).

However when putting on today’s order, I came across the following ‘offer’, which I thought I would share with you: (click for a less eyesight-damaging version)

Proof, if it were needed, that the world has actually gone completely and utterly mad.

My Favourite Poem

Us Two by A.A. Milne

Wherever I am, there’s always Pooh,
There’s always Pooh and Me.
Whatever I do, he wants to do,
“Where are you going today?” says Pooh:
“Well, that’s very odd ‘cos I was too.
Let’s go together,” says Pooh, says he.
“Let’s go together,” says Pooh.

“What’s twice eleven?” I said to Pooh,
(“Twice what?” said Pooh to Me.)
“I think it ought to be twenty-two.”
“Just what I think myself,” said Pooh.
“It wasn’t an easy sum to do,
But that’s what it is,” said Pooh, said he.
“That’s what it is,” said Pooh.

“Let’s look for dragons,” I said to Pooh.
“Yes, let’s,” said Pooh to Me.
We crossed the river and found a few -
“Yes, those are dragons all right,” said Pooh.
“As soon as I saw their beaks I knew.
That’s what they are,” said Pooh, said he.
“That’s what they are,” said Pooh.

“Let’s frighten the dragons,” I said to Pooh.
“That’s right,” said Pooh to Me.
“I’m not afraid,” I said to Pooh,
And I held his paw and I shouted, “Shoo!
Silly old dragons!” – and off they flew.
“I wasn’t afraid,” said Pooh, said he,
“I’m never afraid with you.”

So wherever I am, there’s always Pooh,
There’s always Pooh and Me.
“What would I do?” I said to Pooh,
“If it wasn’t for you,” and Pooh said: “True,
It isn’t much fun for One, but Two
Can stick together,” says Pooh, says he.
“That’s how it is,” says Pooh.

Evolute

Maths is a beautiful subject.

I was attempting earlier to persuade Maple to plot the evolute of an ellipse (with a = 9 and b = 6, for those who care. I could have put in a couple of extra lines of code and written it for arbitrary a and b, but to be quite honest I couldn’t be bothered). For an ellipse like this:

xxxxx, it’s meant to look vaguely like a diamond-shaped hyperbola. Instead I got this:

xxxxx, which is clearly complete rubbish but rather pretty nonetheless if you excuse the poor graphics quality of this particular example.

As a related aside, I was giving up in the library for the day and copying the code via Microsoft Word into an email so that I can play with it here at home. Word thought about the text for a long while before solemnly declaring that it was Spanish (International).

It’s been that sort of a day.

Health and Safety

In the last week or so I have spent a not inconsiderable amount of time and money on my back, and as a result I am now the proud owner of the following stunning pieces of equipment:

The wireless keyboard and mouse are to enable me to raise my laptop screen to a better height while still allowing me to type and what have you. They didn’t have to be wireless, I’ll be honest, but it does mean one less USB lead to get in the way, and I did the silly thing of reading around too carefully and then falling in love with an out-of-budget-but-oh-so-shiny product. Contrary to my usual judgement in these matters, I went ahead and bought it anyway.

And here we have, ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, the upshot of Lucy vs The-Health-and-Safety-Rules-of-the-Maths-Dept. It is horrendously ugly. One of my housemates remarked that it looked as though I had stolen a car seat (before adding “You’re not Scouse… but you are a Brummie.”). People give me odd looks on the Science Site as it’s not exactly discreet to carry about – although nothing new there, I guess. Yay for spotty rucksacks! – and my own initial assessment was that it looked closer to a piece of prosthetic equipment than anything I’d really rather have in my bedroom. But it is wonderfully comfortable, especially on the chair in the photo, and it makes all but the very worst lecture theatres bearable for the amount of time. Which is something!

Analysis

The trouble with being trained to think analytically is that you can’t turn it off. You analyse the world around you. You analyse your friends. You analyse yourself, and then because of the nature of self-analysis, you start to analyse your own analysis.

And slowly, slowly you drive yourself mad.

Gender Relations

There are twenty people in my Galois Theory lectures at the minute*, four of whom (including myself) are female.

That isn’t too bad as gender ratios go. Slightly unbalanced even for the Maths Department, but I’ve experienced much worse elsewhere. I don’t dislike having male company – if anything I find guys easier to interact with than other girls, at least in the short term – and let’s be honest, it doesn’t matter hugely one way or another. But there was still that moment, just before the start of the first lecture and before the other three girls walked in when I suddenly became conscious of being the odd one out.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Guys and girls may have physical and neurological differences. Guys and girls may have different social and cultural expectations placed upon them. The lecturing staff may be 90% male, stereotypes may be bandied about in jest, and the girls’ Chemistry Department toilets may be absolutely disgusting but that’s no hindrance, essentially, to being a girl learning Maths. In the eyes of officialdom, I am a student defined by a nine digit number alone, and in the eyes of everything that feminists have rightly stood for and fought for, that is how it should be – I would resent being picked out for being female on that basis alone.

And yet, I find that when the only girl in a group of guys, my subconscious instinct is to assert my femininity. Brush my hair, wear skirts and make-up, become generally ’softer’ in my attitude. I’m sure that a psychologist would have a field day analysing the associated sexual instincts, need for a USP, the degree of consciousness of such behaviour, and on ad infinitum… but as a self-declared assertive woman (who still agrees with Jenny here**), I just find the whole thing pretty damn scary. Is it just me?

x

*Tiny group! Not, though, as tiny as the group for ‘Approximation Theory and ODEs’ who allegedly have fifteen, indecisive ‘tourists’ inclusive. Given that that particular module description effectively read, “Numerical Analysis! Only more, and harder!”, I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised.

**This is NOT intended to be a strict continuation of the same discussion. If you want to argue about that one again, then do so on Jenny’s post, please – I’m sure she won’t mind!

Semantics

In a bid to choose my six modules properly, I am currently attending the lectures for eight. Complete and utter indecisiveness, yes, but the main problem is a complete lack of information about what each course actually involves. It’s very difficult to read up on Maths until you have at least a baseline of starting knowledge, by which time you’re generally committed to whatever you’ve gotten yourself into, provoking an infuriating Catch 22 situation (with the questionable benefit of a genuine lack of summer work).

Anyway, I have just discovered what an ‘elliptic function’ is. It’s a doubly periodic, meromorphic function. Glad that one’s been cleared up…

Priorities

I’ve spent the last few days on things that are important to me.

Friends and housemates are important to me. Good food is important to me. Attending Quaker Meeting is important to me. Being helpful to people (if only through sitting on a Fresher’s Fayre stall for a couple of hours or pointing lost people in the direction of lecture theatres) is important to me. My degree is important to me. My back is important to me. Trying to moderate my stress levels is important to me. Keeping in touch with my family is important to me.

Getting drunk in crowds is not important to me so I have avoided that. And what I love about being a big scared scary third year is having the freedom and confidence to dictate that without feeling guilty.

Getting ill is not important to me. That one’s only sort of working *coughs*

Study Habits

I have a confession to make, Flix. I actually, erm, quite like my lecture timetable this year.

I have twelve hours of contact time. Yes, twelve!* Plus schools placement, admittedly, as after a lot of changing my mind I have finally decided to take the Maths Teaching module, but I really think I can cope with that. The exact nature of the twelve hours has yet to be determined as I still haven’t finally settled on a sixth module, but what I do have looks pretty cushy. No more than four hours in any one day. A maximum of two 9ams and at least one 10am (my preferred starting time). Nothing at 1:15pm, which means that I’ll never again have to balance lunch and folders on a lecture desk while attempting to write at the same time. Nothing finishing after 4:15pm. Wednesdays off. I call it well-earned compensation!

At the same time, though, I will have to learn how to self-study, which is something I’ve never really had to do on quite this scale before. Having less contact hours does mean less support, something that I am all too aware of having taken a Music module in first year. That had one hour’s lecture a week, and no indication of what was expected for the two coursework submissions that together accounted for 100% of the assessment marks. As it turns out, I was OK – I guessed correctly at what was wanted and you only have to pass the first year on 40% anyway – but I was shocked at quite how much they were expected to do off their own backs, and indeed my Musician housemate craves contact hours, feedback, structure – anything. It’s going to take a lot of self-discipline and motivation to work anything like you have to on an Arts degree.

But I am hopeful. A better lecture distribution means that for the first time in my degree I will actually have coherent blocks of time in which to get my head down and very few ’stupid hours’ wasted in Chem’ Café. A lack of tutorials or problem classes is a less scary prospect when I consider just how many of last year’s were a complete waste of time, and I’m not afraid of looking stupid and proactively asking for help from lecturers. The increased flexibility and choice as to when I work will hopefully free up more time for socialising and leave me less physically drained, and I will be able to focus on exactly what parts of the course I need to.

Bright and early, starting 9am tomorrow. I’m optimistic, and somehow inexplicably really looking forward to it :-)

x

*Next year I’ll have eight. That really is disappearing into infinitesimally small figures.

Communication

How well do you communicate?

I’ve been considering this quite a bit in the past couple of weeks or so. I’ve never been a great verbal communicator. I’m better in slightly more formal contexts or when talking to people older than myself, but put me in a stressful social situation and I have a tendency to lose my grasp on the English language altogether, flailing around for words and meaning, desperately hoping that somebody will bail me out before I make too much of an idiot of myself. Phone calls can be similarly awkward, although it does depend who I’m talking to. I know this, it’s the way it is, I can deal with it. I’m a mathematician and therefore entitled to suck at words (- and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it!)

When it comes to body language, however, I’ve always thought of myself as someone who wore their heart on their sleeve – even if I’m not saying something, I’ve always been pretty sure that people can tell what’s going on, simply because I’m just not that good at acting otherwise. And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned of late it’s that this clearly isn’t the case.

The realisation started to come a few weeks into first term last autumn when one of my housemates asked me to make a ’status board’ for my door because when I came in and went up to my room, just to dump my bag or whatever, they simply couldn’t gauge my mood. My body language was clearly not sufficient to distinguish between ‘thinking hard about something problematic’ and ‘tired but contented’. ‘I’m in a foul mood’ would have been marginally easier, I’d imagine, but perhaps not as clear as I thought since I found that stating the fact calmly but explicitly got the message across much faster (and with better results all round). It’s not even to do with the length of time that I have known people – a close, long-standing home friend recently told me that she can only tell when I’m annoyed because she knows what’s likely to annoy me. Even my family have varying degrees of reaction time (- it’s my Dad, I think, who tunes in the fastest, probably because we’re quite similar).

Maybe this apparent lack of open communication would explain my interesting time with relationships over the years. What’s chicken and what’s egg?

I think it’s probably in writing that I consistently succeed best when it comes to communicating. Edited, thought-out, structured writing. Is that a true representation of the thought process that goes on behind the letter or the email or the blog? The irony is that no-one can do the controlled experiment and ever be able to tell!

It’s frustrating. It really is.