Giant beer pong

The ingenious engineering students organized a fun, interactive "prank" accessible to every student at the college and harmless, while also being college-themed and lightly edgy. I admire the design, style, and execution of this idea.

Beer pong, but: giant. Sober. With enormous slingshots firing volleyballs into red-cup-clothed garbage cans!

It turned out to require a lot of knowledge about current wind conditions. Many trials were necessary to figure out a good angle and distance to get an even reasonable-looking parabola towards the targets.

In conclusion, this was an Extremely College "prank", more like an interactive performance art piece or, frankly, a game. No binge drinking required, all daylight-hours wholesome fun. Adorable. Students here are fantastic.


This post's theme word is endogenous (adj), "originating from within." I admire and am impressed by students' endogenous creativity and ability to execute ideas.

If you could give Turing machines one bonus feature, what would it be?

I like to give students the opportunity to be creative. Partially this is because I am noble and committed to good pedagogy practices and all that; partly it is for my own amusement. (Students had to create Twitter bots for my amusement, too --- you can see them here, Twitter login required.)

If you could give Turing machines one bonus feature, what would it be?

Some people were practical:

• I would add a more streamlined ability to count.
• Ctrl-F find value
• Writing proofs for me.
• remember marked spot (instead of needing to mark)
• Its head can go to any position on the tape instantly without having to step through the middle steps.
• to be able to jump to a location in the tape not right next to where the head is

Others were silly:

• snack dispenser
• a cool spoiler (illustration below)

• funny hats (illustration below)

• dance a jig

Some were infeasible:

• Always halt for every problem. [editor's note: provably impossible, you impertinent youth!]

And some were downright haunting:

• Express feelings. It would be nice to know how TM feels when in runs forever. Would it be sad? happy? bored? [editor's note: how would the TM know it is running forever? it could just be churning and doing real computation...]
• consciousness

By far the one that struck the deepest chord and has followed me, hounding me into my dreams, was: "teeth." Yikes.

This post's theme word is stenophagous (adj), "feeding on a limited variety of food." The zookeeper found the dietary needs of TMs a challenge; they were among the most stenophagous charges at the mathematical-hypothetical petting zoo.

Don Giovanni

Opera Philadelphia's production of Don Giovanni offers a very minimal staging and scenery; the stage is draped, from the high ceiling to just above head height, with shimmering golden curtains. Between the curtains and the floor, a bevvy of upright pianos ring the stage. Throughout the production, these pianos were wheeled across the stage and served as scenery, as prop storage, as trees in the garden, as indoor furniture, as walls, and as miscellaneous stationary objects to swoon against.

The performance was lovely and the music was as melodic, and crunchy, and satisfying as Mozart always is. But the plot was inescapably gross, as it centers on a serial sex offender who won't take "no" for an answer and whose every action is manipulative and dismissive of other people. It's hard to see the plot in any other light, and even the mild opera-style staging of the scenes made my skin crawl, as Don Giovanni continually pressed against women and called to them from across the stage and in every way maneuvered the people around him to match his will.

(I recently sat in on some interesting lectures re: Don Giovanni, so I recognize that even at the time it was composed, part of the point of the plot was how noblemen could manipulate people of lesser status in this way. Thanks, Prof. Blasina, for letting me crash your class!)

... and so it was satisfying enough, I suppose, that in the final scene, Don Giovanni is literally dragged to hell, though my reasons for wishing him ill may have differed from original audience's reasons. But overall I'm surprised that this opera continues to be the most-performed opera in the world; perhaps momentum will take it awhile to lose that status? In any case, I've seen it several times now and don't feel any desire to ever see it again.


This post's theme word is nuncupate (v tr), "to solemnly pronounce," or "to declare a will orally." She resolved and nuncupated, and only listened to the audio for evermore.

What is the title of your autobiography?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the name of your autobiography?

I've edited to remove students' names; this means some titles are fully expurgated, since a lot of people were not satisfied with a byline and needed to include their name in the title of their own autobiography:

• [name]'s shared thoughts
• My autobiography
• [name]? More like [pun on name]
• [joke about first name]
• [joke about last name and studiousness]
• [pun about name]
• [joke about name's pronunciation]
• [name]'s book

Only one person self-aggrandized with "A Great American Novel"; many people went the other direction:

• Why am I like this
• I wrote some words here
• That Berpy Specy Person
• I smell
• a guy does stuff and has fun (maybe)

Some people only loosely followed the prompt, and their replies mostly reflected what they were thinking about during this lecture on Turing machines and finite automata:

• Am I a finite automaton? Why I'm so forgetful??
• I should NEVER have taken 5 classes in one semester
• TM: Nobody wants ALL The Details

Several students's titles followed a theme:

• How to sleep + eat a ton
• How to sleep more + eat a sh*t ton
• How I sleepwalked through life
• Life Goal: sleep like a kindergarten kid

The cutest one by far was today's winner: Existential Mathematician: Always Looking for "y". (To see previous students' replies to this question, go here.)

This post's theme word is lection (n), "a version of a text in a particular copy or edition; a selection read in a religious service (aka a pericope)." The second printing lection of my autobiography contained a number of typos; the publisher would like to apologize for the particularly egregious typos on the cover, including the author's name.

Incredibly retroblogging

An honest assessment indicates that I mostly want this blog as a post-dated account of things I once did, some time ago. Want up-to-date Lila information? want breaking Lila news? want to know where Lila is, what she's doing, and what she's thinking?

... well, you won't find it here.

On the other hand, you will find all that information, edited and curated as usual, for past iterations of Lila. In particular, starting with the "Repatriation Phase 1", you can now find the following new old posts:

The tiniest steamroller
Purple tree
Sky in mirrored skyscrapers
Ithaca is gorgeous
Bring Up the Bodies
License to Quill

Just so you know, my sycophantic readers, my curious future students, and my intermittently-checking-in relatives, I have made a resolution in 2019 to blog more consistently. And I've beeminded it, so if I fall off from my goal, the sharp sting of a penalty will (maybe) prompt me to post more frequently. I've successfully managed my akrasia on several other topics using beeminder. Here's to 2019, and the 11/12ths of it that remain!


This post's theme word is nuncupate (v tr), "to solemnly pronounce," or "to declare a will orally." Long-time readers considered Lila's nuncupation as tenuous and tongue-in-cheek, which it probably was.

In which "snake" is not a valid proof technique

Non-proof techniques that students tried today in lab, hesitantly, knowing that I wouldn't buy it:

• proof by picture
• proof by snake
• proof by interpretive dance

This post's theme word is satisfice (v intr), "to satisfy the minimum requirements in a given situation." Your snake is very clever, but it does not satisfice in this class.

Mathematical property of friendship

As part of my lecture, I ask interactive live-polling multiple choice questions. Today, one of those questions was:

Let S be the set of Swarthmore students. Consider the binary relation "is a friend of" defined over S x S. This relation is symmetric.
(a) true
(b) false

The point of this question was twofold: first, I wanted to confirm that everyone was on board with the notation, vocabulary, and definitions involved in reading the question. Second, I wanted everyone to laugh --- the joke is that either answer can be correct, depending on your attitude about friendship. (The class was pretty evenly split across (a) and (b), with one outlier protest vote for (d).)

Imagine my complete and sheer delight when one student's defense of answer (a) was "This is a Quaker school, so we are all friends."

HAH

It is utterly, totally perfect as a response: it confirms that the student understood the concepts AND that they got the joke AND that they joked right back, indicating they're comfortable with the classroom environment already, in week 1.

Dear student: you made my day, 'twas a stellar reply, thank you very much for your in-classroom participation today.


This post's theme word is breviloquence (n), "speak briefly and concisely." English humor favors breviloquence.

What is the silliest nickname you've ever had?

I take attendance by having the students answer a sign-in question.

What is the silliest nickname you've ever had?

Because answers to this question are fairly identifying, I'll just highlight some non-name-based nicknames that stood out for their silliness and their non-identifying-ness:

• couscous
• Baracuda
• sea cow
• Anpanman
• extra toppings

This post's theme word is endogenous (adj), "originating from within." There is no such thing as an endogenous nickname.

The Favorite

The Favorite is a movie that tells the (fictionalized, edited) story of a snippet of the life of Queen Anne (of England) and two ladies who are vying for her attention and the political and social power it confers. This move was advertised at me with what was surely targeted ads online... and they were right, it's in my wheelhouse: a British Period Piece Featuring a Strong Female Lead.

And which of these tremendous actors is the "lead"? The plot allows all three of them space and time onscreen to develop an inner world, and they have the breadth of real people. No one is single-minded, no one is consistent, no one's inner monologue is transparently interpretable by the audience. I really enjoyed that the audience was left space to feel sympathetic, or outraged, or critical, of the characters at different moments. I did not emerge from the movie with a clear hero in mind, or a clear villain, or even a clear moral. There was no overarching lesson, as far as I could tell.

This movie passed the Bechdel test in a ferocious way. Most scenes featured only women, talking about whatever topics they want. Occasionally men were allowed to be furniture, or backdrops; when men were permitted lines in scenes, they discussed women. The single two-man scene consisted of them desperately discussing how to change their behavior to get women to notice them. It was fascinating to watch this happen, so naturally, and to notice when I noticed that men were being so sidelined.

The Favorite featured what I am sure will be my favorite sex scene of 2019. Possibly of the decade. (I am confident I can say this because popular culture's take on sex scenes is so skewed. I don't want to spoil this one for you, but it really stands out as unusual and memorable.)

We left the theater and immediately read the Wikipedia articles for Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill. Then I requested Churchill's book --- an after-the-queen's-death smear job, reportedly --- on interlibrary loan (full text here with OCR errors, scan of the physical book here).

In summary: of course I recommend this movie. I left it and assigned myself reading homework! Some days I truly am living my best life.


This post's theme word is desacralize (v tr), "to deprive of hallowed status." A falling-out between friends can result in desacralization and loss of peerage, if the friends are royal.

Boston Molasses Disaster

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Boston Molasses Disaster, wherein a giant tank of molasses burst and caused immense destruction.

Fluid mechanics are fascinating. Here's a quick video with some light information about viscosity and the disaster:

This post's theme word is cunctative (adj), "delaying; slow." While the initial pressure drove a powerful and quick-moving wave, viscosity made the residue a cunctative challenge for rescuers.