My brother-in-law is a sculptor

Yup, that's right. My sister's husband is an artist, and now he has made lots of pieces of stone sculpture in preparation for the largest sculpting show in the world. It's pretty neat, what he's made. If you like sculpture -- or music, or short stories, because he creates those, too, visit his Web site, which is his name, Jeff Wiens. And then you can buy his pieces of sculpture. They're nice. As you can see.

IE is not a friend of this blog.

About 60% of the browser share for people who visit my web pages -- I have one site meter for all my pages together -- is Internet Explorer. That's good, because it reflects far more people (40%) using Mozilla Firefox and Safari than the proportion in the general population. The problem is that 60% of people still use IE, and some of those people are people who read this blog relatively frequently, and if you use IE, you can't see the sidebar on the left. In fact, if you use IE, you might not even know that I have a sidebar. Try it -- scroll down to the very end of the page. Then you'll see it. And I cannot figure out how to modify the template to make the sidebar wide enough to contain the text I have in it in IE. Here is the relevant bit of code:

div#mainClm{float:right;width:73%;padding:0px 7% 0px 3%;border-left:solid 1px #000000;}
div#sideBar{margin:0px 0px 0px 1em;padding:0px;text-align:left;}

Changing the 73% changes the position of the width divider in Mozilla, but changing it does not change it in IE. What shall I do? I am not sure. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. One is to say to heck with anyone who uses IE; they're collecting enough spyware that soon their computer will not allow them to access my happy little blog anyway. But I'm not ready to give up just yet. So I'm open to suggestions.

Niece and Nephews

The cute little ones are my niece and nephew. You knew the cute ones were the ones related to me, didn't you? And soon I'll have another niece!

In the meantime, here's my other little nephew this summer visiting Deer Isle. Emily says I get the Cutest Nephew award. I say I wish I had been there.

Carlee's coming

on Tuesday night! And pending approval from my advisor -- from whom I got permission for this two months ago -- I might get to go!

MathFest 2005

Next week, most of SMALL will be traveling to Albuquerque for the MathFest. The Geometry Group is speaking in a special invited session with the four of us and three former Geometry Group members all speaking. You can see our special page that the MAA has for us here. Unfortunately it only lists the four of us; I don't know why. Yay for one-sentence abstracts.

1:40 pm
"Single Bubbles in Gauss Space"
Michelle Lee, Williams College
Abstract: In Euclidean space, the least-perimeter way to enclose a given area is a round, spherical bubble. In Gauss space, the answer is different.

2:00 pm
"Curvature in the Gauss Plane and Minimizing Curves"
Diana Davis, Williams College
Abstract: We consider constant-curvature curves in the Euclidean plane with Gaussian density.

2:20 pm
"Double Bubbles in Gauss Space and Spheres"
Regina Visocchi, Michigan State University and Williams College
Abstract: We seek the perimeter-minimizing double bubble in Gauss space and spheres.

2:40 pm
"The Hutchings Function and Gauss Space"
Elizabeth Adams, Williams College
Abstract: We will discuss the crucial inequality behind the double bubble theorem in Gauss space: the so-called Hutchings function, whose positivity guarantees that the minimizer is a Standard Y.

So if you happen to be in Albuquerque...

Birthday #20

Today is my birthday. Professor Morgan took these pictures when there was a surprise cake after colloquium. My parents sent money and asked him to buy a cake, so he had Michelle (pictured with the cake) and Regina buy it since they are responsible for refreshments after colloquium. Earlier I had received flowers from them during our group meeting. So yes, now I am 20, and that is that. And this is the first time I have had Blogger host my pictures, and the formatting is a little strange.

Stupid math

Professor Morgan forwarded us the following e-mail forwarded from Professor Johnson:

This is from NewScientist, July 9, 2005:

FORBES Magazine ... article stating that 1 in 8 pounds sterling spent in British shops goes to the supermarket chain Tesco. Then, presumably out of concern for readers not familiar with the value of the UK pound, it helpfully informs us that this is equivalent to 1.89 in every 15.15 US dollars or 1.43 in every 11.48 euros.

If you think about it, you will realize how ludicrous it was to convert that in the first place.

Peaches

The dining hall has the most amazing peaches now. They started serving them a few days ago and they were hard, so I took one then and now it's ripe, and they have kept putting them out and now they're all ripe, and they are delicious -- juicy, succulent, tasty.

Every time I eat a peach, or even think about a peach, I think of the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I didn't really understand it when I read it at first, but then Anne explained that eating a peach is a very sensual experience, and that he is worried that now that he is old he can't do sensual things anymore. And I get it now. And so when I eat peaches, I think of T.S. Eliot and Anne Stephens.

Quotations

Orthodox is like the lim sup. Reform is the lim inf.

You have to choose between the love of your life and the laundry of your life.

"My Summer of Love"

Yesterday we were walking along Spring Street and we noticed that a new film, "My Summer of Love," was playing at Images. The movie didn't have a poster, but just a poster made out of construction paper with the title and some quotations about it. It sounded all right, so we got tickets and went to see it.

In retrospect, I am not sure if perhaps the lack of a poster was calculated -- the film certainly has a poster, as it has an official website and it won best film of the year in England. You see, this is a story about lesbian love, and maybe if people knew that, they wouldn't go see the film. We didn't know, and we went. (Although we might have gone anyway. We are very accepting people over here in Williamstown, and I like good stories in any case.)

The film was quite disappointing. From the beginning, there were three important stories in the film, and I was not sure how they were all going to come together at the end. They were:

1. The two girls love each other.
2. One of the girls' brother is a born-again Christian.
3. The other girl is mourning her sister who died of anorexia.

So, what was the connection? They were all false. The sister turned out to be still alive and wasn't even anorexic; the brother eventually told the people at the revival meeting at his house to get out because they were frauds; and worst of all, the lying girl wasn't actually in love, and was only interested in some summer fun.

It's like what Mr. Delaney told us in English, that the worst way to end a story is to say, "and then I woke up." You lead the reader along as though the things you are writing about matter, and then at the end you take all the meaning away.

The only thing that saved the movie a little bit was the action of the jilted girl: she held the other girl underwater until I was sure that she had drowned, then let her go at the last second and calmly walked away as the other girl sputtered and gasped. But this is an evil ending, all of it, to an otherwise nice story.

Optical illusion

Since this is a JPEG, I am pretty sure that it's not actually moving. Is it? But it sure looks like it is, so I think this is a good one.

Bobcat screaming

On Saturday at about 10 pm we heard this screaming outside, an odd rhythmic screaming that sounded like a young boy, strangely not panicked or painful but that continued for several mintues. We called Security and went outside to see what was going on, but we couldn't find anything. Security sent two officers who shone their searchlights at the edge of the woods but didn't find anything. An hour or so later, the police came by and asked some questions, took a name for a witness, but didn't find anything and left.

On Wednesday night I had just finished watching Silence of the Lambs, so I was a little on edge already, and as I lay down to go to sleep, I heard this shrieking -- the same rhythmic screaming, but anguished this time. So I ran and woke up Brian, because he had gone out and investigated the screaming with me the last time, and I called Security to tell them we were hearing it again.

This time they only sent one guy, and dispached him about 10 minutes after I had called, so the screaming had stopped by the time he got there. But he felt really bad that it had been so delayed, so he looked really thoroughly in the area we said the sound was coming from, shining his flashlight into the woods.

And he found two yellow eyes shining out of the woods. It was a bobcat, about 50 feet from the edge of the dorm. Cool. We have a bobcat. He said the screaming was probably coming either from the bobcat or from whatever it was killing. And he invited us to come out and look at it, which I did not think was probably the safest thing to do, thinking of things like Where the Red Fern Grows, but I did, and I saw the yellow eyes.

And that was that, except that it really did sound like a human, so maybe it was, and the fact that we have a bobcat living 50 feet from the dorm is just a coincidence.

Wedding

For the first time, a friend of mine is getting married. Yay, Jocelyn! Actually, she's only engaged, and she won't be getting married for over a year, and she's older than me anyway. But that's pretty neat.

So, let's all hope her fiancé stays safe when he goes to Iraq for six months between now and the wedding.

New things on the block

The year before I was born, my parents built a cabin in Deer Isle, and installed a shower so that they didn't have to use a bag of rain-heated water hanging from a tree.

When I was eight, we got a telephone so that we didn't have to call Grandma from the only public phone on the island, a pay phone at the gas station.

When I was twelve, we got a "flusher," which replaced the composting toilet that didn't compost, and the outhouse that we used in the interim, though that is still there.

Now I'm 19 and we got a washer and dryer. Something new on the block.