apprentice, etc.

networth, dudes, what happened? john was one of my favorites.... until this episode... he was always so levelheaded and up til this week i don't remember anything from him but hard work and treating everyone with respect... he definitely fell down on both counts this time, although mostly the latter. you don't have to like someone to pull your weight and temporarily follow their orders...... audrey was one of my favorites until this episode too. although she fought for her chance to be project manager and she works hard, she was too hands off about it throughout, and to her own detriment since now she's gone.

kendra continues to impress me... magna was pretty below the radar this episode, but kendra's idea is what seemed to pay off most of all for them... i don't see her bickering, just working and helping pull things off well, whether they're assigned to her or not.

anyhow, good episode, next week looks fun too.

in other news, dinner with the speaker after experimental math seminar was quality. the speaker talked about some continued fractions results relating to catalan type problems, ordered trees, and pattern avoidance... since pattern avoidance is exactly what dr. z. has me working on right now, the last bit of the talk especially was right up my alley.

anyhow, dinner was the speaker, another professor from the speaker's home university, a rutgers prof i'd never met before, dr. z., drew (a postdoc who works with dr.z. a lot), mohammud (one of dr. z.'s students working on a totally different problem than me), and vince (the student whose work i'm learning all about), and me. it was good for me in that dr. z. bragged on what i'd been working on a bit (so i felt affirmed that he really is pleased with my progress... he's 99% of the time appearing so happy that i can't really read degrees of happiness out of him yet :-P)... i sat next to vince and across the table from mohammud, so i talked a bit with both of them... mohammud's talked to me regularly before, but when vince and i were the first two to arrive to the restaurant, and we chatted for 5-10 minutes before the rest came, i think that was probably a good thing... just in that we've now interacted for more than 3 minutes outside of class :-P zeilberger brought me and stuff i'm doing up from time to time throughout the conversation... so for a little the whole table was discussing my upcoming spring break road trip to SC even :-P... zeilberger also commented that he thinks i should attend the 4th annual permutation conference in sweden next spring (the 3rd annual one is next week in florida, dr. z. is the invited keynote speaker, vince is giving or associated with at least 2 of the other talks)... you wouldn't think math is a very exotic discipline being all paper, pencil, chalkboard, and computer, but, you'd be surprised how many places there are that people go for conferences. math people really are, at least the top notch ones, pretty well travelled. and even the ones not at top ranked universities are at least locally well travelled. yay academia :-P

anyhow math-socially it was a good afternoon for me :-P

now, i'm pondering crashing early... it's been a long week and i'm fighting getting sick, so sleep could be a very very good thing.

later dudes :-P