Update

[pozorvlak]

I got the job application in, finally: here's the revised (or rather, totally re-written) research proposal, and here's the summary for laymen. You will notice the point where I thought "Speculative? Ha! I'll show you speculative!" I'd really appreciate feedback, especially on the one-page summary: the two or three formulae in there should be

Comments

Pantos

[johnckirk]

My only criticism (and I know this is something I go on about a lot) is that some of the USLEs need to learn to project their voicesI went off to an SF convention a while back, and the guy who played Sinclair in "Babylon 5" did one session. I was impressed by how he started: there was a bit of fiddling around with a microphone, then he just put it aside, saying "I don't need this, I am theatre trained!" And he did do a great job of projecting his voice

Re: Pantos

[pozorvlak]

Well, the Glasgow panto had an actual man playing the principal boy - and worse, an actual woman playing the dame! I was shocked, shocked I tell you.

Re: Pantos

[countess_rezia]

To be fair, Alice is the principal girl in Dick Whittington, so it is still a main part. That she's been cast as Alice rather than Dick is probably more to do with her singing range (ie higher) than anything else.

Not that I endorse casting "celebrities" in pantomimes to sell them though.

Re: Pantos

[johnckirk]

Ah, fair enough; it's been a long time since I saw "Dick Whittington", so I'd forgotten about that character. As I recall, Dick and his cat were the two main roles (i.e. both played by humans) - is that still the case?

As for the celebrity aspect, my experience is a bit skewed here because that was always the case when I went to pantos as a kid; I remember that Christopher Biggins would go dashing through the seats (in character) but stop to sign autographs on the way. I was quite surprised when my old flatmate told me that most pantos don't do that.

[michiexile]

Ey, coooool. I -really- gotta sit down and read Eugenias paper at some point. That sounds like real fun.

I wonder whether there's a paper waiting to be written that picks up the Haskellite monad transformers and ... I dunno ... simplifies it using the Yang-Baxter viewpoint. It seems like it should be doable.

It also seems like if we could do this properly, introducing all the necessary changes into Haskell' or something, monad transforming should be possible to do a lot better, easier and more obvious than it is done now.

[pozorvlak]

I suspect there is something to be written along those lines: if not a paper, then at least a wiki page or something. The literature on distributive laws isn't all that easy to dig up, and I kinda suspect that monad transformers were developed ad-hoc without reference to the existing theory. It certainly seems very confusing at the moment.

Research

[johnckirk]

In the layman's version, you said "Two elements of a set are either equal or not: there is no middle ground." Are you talking about two elements of the same set, or from two different sets? My set theory is a bit rusty, but I thought that you couldn't have duplicate values in the same set. As for different sets, I'd say the "middle ground" is when they're strongly typed, e.g. you can't really say that "fred = 3" or "fred != 3". This isn't really a correction as such, more of a request for clarification (since you obviously know far more about this subject than I do).

As for the main paper, I got a bit lost when you started talking about monoids in the first paragraph, so I didn't read through the rest (sorry).

Re: Research

[pozorvlak]

D'oh, thanks. OK, what I meant was "Let x and y be elements of some set X. Either x = y or x != y: there is no third option. In other words, the labels x and y can refer to the same element, or to different elements. Whereas if x and y are (names for) objects in the same category, we have more options: they can refer to the same object, they can refer to objects which are isomorphic but distinct, or they can refer to non-isomorphic objects (every object is isomorphic to itself).

In some sense, when you're dealing with objects of a category, all you really care about is whether things are isomorphic: equality is asking too much, and irrelevant anyway.

[ext_44906]

Gimme a ping next time you're passing through Sheffield; it would be good to meet up. Perhaps not at Christmas at one of your pervy pantos though. ;)