apprentice, week 4

oi... both teams declared losers and sent to the boardroom? that's new... then again, i've not been as impressed with this season's teams.... (there are good individuals, but as teams, neither is my favorite)...

i was so sure bren was out when they decided to do his commercial... maybe for a college joke project, but for a real life commercial for deutsch? come on, you can't shoot a semi-porn commercial for dove body wash... ridiculous... at least they worked together even if it was a bad idea... and to bren's credit, he still stepped up to the plate with good people management, etc. during the task, even after his bad idea...

kristen was so pompous even after she was fired... part of being truly spectacular is being able to take criticism, and not just defend that you're always right all the time. i'm kinda glad she screwed up... if she had gone with john's idea more like it was intended, then they would have maybe had a chance... for bren's sake, i'm kinda glad she screwed herself over with the job she did... maybe he screwed up with an idea, but i think he's a stronger contender than kristen was anyhow (and not just b/c he's from memphis :-P)

anyhow, yeah, the most disappointing episode of ALL THREE seasons... i don't watch to see them bicker and fight, i watch to see them problem solve and then see who's a good debater after all is said and done with the task... there was no brilliance in this episode, though... there were two extremely poorly done commercials, and one really self-inflated person who couldn't listen in the boardroom, along with 5 people who had some merit to stay. i just hope next week is better.

in other news, today was another long day... not bad, just long. yesterday was long, and homework took longer than planned last night, so i was dragging from the moment i woke up... i happened to be looking back across the last page of notes mid-class this morning just trying to take in what was going on when the prof randomly called on me, and i answered wrong twice before i got it... oi... and it wasn't a hard question, i was just really out of it.

the dimacs reu project advisors had a meeting while i was in class to go through our sorted and rated applications and rank their favorite candidates for their projects... now to resolve any conflicts (of the "two or three mentors really want the same student" variety), and see if the students accept, before round two commences... fun, right? i'll be less involved in this phase, but informed, partly just because i have classes on mondays and fridays more than other days, so i'm not around immediately to help... it's nice to have the reading lots and lots of letters part done though :-P

had a really good meeting with my advisor today... vince, an older grad student, who's really brilliant at the stuff i'm just starting to learn about and work on, joined us and explained how some computer packages that he's written work, so that i can start to use them on my own... after vince left, zeilberger and i were talking about stuff i can be reading to learn more about the data i'm generating and studying... there's a book i've been eyeing on amazon for a bit... the combinatorics of permutations, that zeilberger recommended i read some of... when we discovered it's new new to be in the math department library yet (it came out july 2004), zeilberger decided to buy it for me on his "buying academic books with math department money account)... that's an $80+ book i've been wanting, and my advisor bought it for me :-) yay. :-)

otherwise, i'm just tired, and going to sleep soon... i made a point of not working on math tonight because i'm just plain exhausted... TONS to get done this weekend, but tomorrow will be decent... after plenty of sleep ;-), there's just one class, and then pizza seminar between me and the weekend... sikimeti's doing the seminar tomorrow and starting out talking about plato's correspondence of the elements to the platonic solids (which i've referenced at least once or twice on here, albeit months ago, because it's a random idea but kinda fun to think about)... here's siki's abstract, plenty of people are excited about it:

" Plato, back in 350 BC, knew a fair bit about regular polyhedra. He knew that there were only so many, and that made them special. What he didn't know, he made up. And so it was that he "discovered" a mysterious bijection with the Fundamental Elements of the Universe: tetrahedron = fire, icosahedron = water, octahedron = air, and dodecahedron = whatever was in the stars/heavens.
The McKay Correspondence is another mysterious bijection, only marginally less aesthetic than Plato's.
In the classification of finite subgroups of SU(2), the following types pop up: cyclic (order n), binary dihedral (order 4n), binary tetrahedral, binary octahedral and binary icosahedral.
In the classification of simple Lie Algebras, graphs called Dynkin diagrams pop up: types A_n, D_n, E_6, E_7 and E_8.
And yes, you guessed it: there's a bijection between the two."

yeah, it'll be a good afternoon...

and, after that, eric and i have tickets to see carmen at the local theater tomorrow night... it'll be good.

but first.... before any of that... SLEEP TIME!

night y'all