Boring me
Not too much going on lately. Anupam, Hubert, and I found another construction for slack spanners that's even better than our previous one, which is really cool. It's basically optimal, but the construction is so simple that It's not clear there's enough there for a SODA paper, much less a STOC paper (which is the next paper deadline). There's still a lot of stuff to think about, though -- if we can come up with a gracefully degrading spanner then that will give us an average distortion argument, which would almost definitely be enough for SODA. Gracefully degrading is hard, though. We're trying various techniques, the most promising of which seems to be based on "measured descent", an embedding method that I'm trying to read up on now because Anupam and Hubert were flying past my comprehension on Thursday. The basic idea seems to be a local decomposition that depends on the growth rate -- we actually did at least part of this in the seminar that danpeng and I took with Sanjeev senior year, but I didn't really understand the growth rate stuff then so I'm trying to understand it now. It's very interesting.
In more fun news, I've been slightly more social lately. Last weekend the GSA had a bowling tournament/happy hour down in Oakland, which was a lot of fun. I didn't bowl, but I hung out with Dan, John, Jason, marymcglo, Serge, etc. Afterwards some of us went back to Serge's and hung out, which is always fun. He has a great house, and always hosts cool parties. Then on Friday we had a TG, the first of the semester. It was sponsored by the Robotics first years, who told us they would do the setup and they just needed DEC/5 to do the beer. Well, we assumed that meant that they needed us to buy and serve the beer, but they would set it up themselves, while they thought that we would set up. I had volunteered to help serve (along with John, and helped out by William), so I went down at 4:45 and found that the beer hadn't been set up. We ran around for 15 or 20 minutes and got things set up just in time, and then served at an incredible pace -- far faster than any of other TG's that I've served at. It was a lot of fun, and I got to see some old professors getting drunk off of two or three beers :-). I also had time to hang out with John, which was fun since I never see him anymore since we don't take the same classes and his office isn't in Doherty. And next weekend there's a GSA ski trip on saturday that at least Sue Ann is definitely going on, and possibly Crazy Mike as well (I'm trying to convince him). On Sunday there's obviously the Super Bowl, which will be insane here in Pittsburgh. I've been watching the playoffs over at a friend of Jason's with a bunch of CALD people, and I'll either do that again or go over to Serge's if he has a party. Good stuff.
Oh, and today is Princeton's first and only home meet (in fencing, of course), against Vassar and Sacred Heart. Go Tigers! Hopefully it will be a good warmup for the Ivy season. I've been fencing pretty well lately -- I actually haven't lost a bout yet this semester. I think that I'm going to try to make it out to some smaller USFA events this year in the Pittsburgh area, maybe try to earn my D back. We'll see.
In more fun news, I've been slightly more social lately. Last weekend the GSA had a bowling tournament/happy hour down in Oakland, which was a lot of fun. I didn't bowl, but I hung out with Dan, John, Jason, marymcglo, Serge, etc. Afterwards some of us went back to Serge's and hung out, which is always fun. He has a great house, and always hosts cool parties. Then on Friday we had a TG, the first of the semester. It was sponsored by the Robotics first years, who told us they would do the setup and they just needed DEC/5 to do the beer. Well, we assumed that meant that they needed us to buy and serve the beer, but they would set it up themselves, while they thought that we would set up. I had volunteered to help serve (along with John, and helped out by William), so I went down at 4:45 and found that the beer hadn't been set up. We ran around for 15 or 20 minutes and got things set up just in time, and then served at an incredible pace -- far faster than any of other TG's that I've served at. It was a lot of fun, and I got to see some old professors getting drunk off of two or three beers :-). I also had time to hang out with John, which was fun since I never see him anymore since we don't take the same classes and his office isn't in Doherty. And next weekend there's a GSA ski trip on saturday that at least Sue Ann is definitely going on, and possibly Crazy Mike as well (I'm trying to convince him). On Sunday there's obviously the Super Bowl, which will be insane here in Pittsburgh. I've been watching the playoffs over at a friend of Jason's with a bunch of CALD people, and I'll either do that again or go over to Serge's if he has a party. Good stuff.
Oh, and today is Princeton's first and only home meet (in fencing, of course), against Vassar and Sacred Heart. Go Tigers! Hopefully it will be a good warmup for the Ivy season. I've been fencing pretty well lately -- I actually haven't lost a bout yet this semester. I think that I'm going to try to make it out to some smaller USFA events this year in the Pittsburgh area, maybe try to earn my D back. We'll see.