"Oh the humanity", or what I remember of wine and cheese

Well, first of all, I was reminded last night that I haven't blogged the last Red Room Trivia, so lets just warm my wine-pickled brain up by recalling that to you now. This was the last red-room trivia for the year and it was (and let's be fair to it) completely crap. This is more than mere sour grapes on account of the fact that we didn't win. Anyone failing to notice, by virtue of Rupert's novelty sombrero, that there was to be a theme should probably have cottoned on when they got their answer sheet. This was a photocopy of a hand-scrawled job with "Gringo Trivia" written on the top, two columns and "horizontal" lines about as straight as Molly Meldrum. Rupert, however, feeling that the point had not been sufficiently well made announced that it was to be a Spanish-themed trivia. This was unfortunate for me given that, when it became apparent we had put the wrong nationality for South American Paulo Coelho, the night's theme lent me sufficient confidence to bet Geoff $10 that we could at least be sure that the answer wasn't Brazillian. This was not a wise investment ladies and gentlemen. So not only is this son of a bitch responsible for The Alchemist, he went and lost me $10. Anyways, Two rounds of ten questions became two rounds of 5 instead¹ . So, how do we sum up this, the last Red Room trivia for the year? I'm inclined to paraphrase T.S. Eliot myself: This, my friends, is the way trivia ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. Were the comic book guy from the Simpsons present, we might instead say WORST. TRIVIA. EVER. Perhaps we said it best, though, with our answer to the question "What is the English translation of 'Naranja'?". We wrote the following:

Naranja: "So, this is the way trivia dies. To thunderous applause...."

Which, I feel, also gets across our nerd credentials.

Anyways...... to get back to the original post title. Wine and cheese. Why oh why, dear reader, do we look forward so to this event? A mathematics department wine and cheese night sounds superficially so very civilised. "Sure," we seem to be saying "like many departments we see fit to hold an end-of-semester get-together. However, unlike yours, ours is no mere seedy booze-up. No Sir. We hold a wine and cheese night at which members of an intellectual elite sample fine wine and cheeses whilst discussing sundry philosophical difficulties with the axiom of choice." In fact, it is of course the case that the MSS wine and cheese night differs from your average seedy booze-up only in as much as there's more cheese involved, and in that probability of hearing the phrase "mathematician celebrity head" is significantly higher.

Attendance seemed lower than last semester to me, and we were a little worried that it wasn't going to be a real wine and cheese night anyway on account of how....... hmmm.... a small digression is in order here. So as to avoid naming too many names un-necessarily I'm going to institute a coding system and the lecturer in question here shall be code named "Mrs Robinson". Most of you will know who I'm talking about. Anyways we were a little worried that it wasn't going to be a real wine and cheese night on account of how Mrs Robinson took a while to show up and at first didn't appear to be drinking. Luckily, this state of affairs did not persist. It was, to be certain, something of a shame that "Dustin Hoffman" had at this point left, but before too long Mrs R. was crawling around, throwing a tennis ball at people and throwing water all over Claire - so there was a happy ending on that front at least. I remember the night finishing with a group of us climbing onto the roof of the maths building and, rather predictably I suppose, urinating over the side². I also remember sundry trips into the strange, strange mind of Mary Waterhouse. Apart from that the reader can probably fill in most of the remaining blanks themselves from the last booze-up they attended. I'm just going to go and lie down now......

¹ My cries of "why not one round of ten with two prizes given out Rupert? Can't we end this farce now?" went sadly unheeded.

²you'd be amazed how far you can reach

Who has the right to be glib here - Marty McFly or Emmett Brown?

Right. So. I was watching Back to the Future III recently. Now, call me petty, and what with the plethora of other time-travel paradoxes just kind of overlooked in said movie you'd be justified in so doing - but I have a quibble Mr Zemeckis!! On two separate occasions Marty is jibed glibly with not thinking 4th dimensionally by the Doc - on the first he's afraid of smacking into a wall that didn't exist at the point in time where he's going, and the second time of running off of a bridge not yet constructed when travelling 100 years into the future. Now, as with most people, my tendency was, once again, to sit back and laugh smugly at the hapless Mr McFly and think to myself "ah, Marty.... what a dufus". But is this really fair ladies and gentlemen? If I were to say to you "This delorean is a time machine - it will take you back in time only when you get to 88 miles per hour". Supposing you then travel back two months. Is there not a case to be made that if you arrive at the same point in space, but at a different time you'll end up in the vacuum of space? Is it not at least a little surprising that the delorean seamlessly ends up on the future (completed) version of the bridge at which it reaches 88 mph in 1885? Hmm? I think Marty raises a reasonable concern. Pointless post over and out.

Gaussian Eliminators\{Dave} play trivia again. Did we win? Read to find out. Or alternately you could just scan the bolded text. Your call, buddy.

I should probably open this with a few brief notes. Firstly, that there have been two trivias since my last post. Some of you, such individuals being distinguishable from the general populace by virtue of being BASTARDS, know about the first such trivia but chose not to attend. I'm not bitter or anything, but be warned that my friends in the Russian mafia may have misconstrued certain .......remarks......... I made in the heat of the moment and may remove your spleen. I have it on good authority¹, however, that you can live without one - so hey, what's a spleen between friends? Feel free to come next week, assuming you're over the surgery by then. I didn't blog monday's trivia as seems to have become customary for these things as I have had various other things on my mind in the interem - one of which being that I have now aquired a proper maths-type job (this is to say a job attained because of, rather than in spite of a first class honours in mathematics - yay me). Also, my potential supervisor for next year looks an awful lot like John Bunnett. As the reader can imagine, this has caused me some angst.

A few things of note in Monday's trivia that I will mention are as follows. Martin may remember a "nerd-off" we had about who'd kick the other's arse in a Tolkein round². Well, apparently the question "to which mountain were Frodo and Sam taking the one ring"? was, based on wrong answers, the hardest question in round three. Talk about dufuses. We kind of missed having anyone who knew or cared anything about sport questions, though, giving the answer 10³⁸⁶:1 in disgust when asked for the results to some sporting match no-one could be expected to care about. Oh, actually, this question's kind of interesting: What was strange/special/of note about the Australian national cricket team that toured England in 1868? We wrote "they were all English". This was wrong, but the correct answer is along these lines. As a test to see whether or not anyone actually pores over the mindless trash I spit out into the great void of the WWW, I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Now, on to last night's trivia at the Red Room. We felt, in many ways, short-changed last night. For one thing, recent recruit Tim defected to some random team we'll just refer to as the Judas Turn-coats. For another, Rupert, declared that there'd only be three rounds this week. Helping us swallow these bitter pills, however, were the following two happenstances: 1. Chris turned out to be marking Tim's Phys2100 assignment at the time - so Tim, if you're out there buddy, imagine I'm talking like a crusty English gangster from Snatch when I say: "It's a shame what can happen to a Phys2100 assignment when the marker isn't too careful, my son". Oh, and 2. As it happened, we were ahead at the end of round three anyways, so We won, bitches!!!!! It must have been pretty close, though, because there were two teams 1/2 a point ahead of us and one team 1 point ahead of us just prior to this round - and we scored a perfect 10 when two other teams tied for 9. Anyways, we don't have to pay for beer next week either.

Possibly the reason for Rupert's cutting trivia short was because he knew there would be a mock-wedding between a representative of King's college and a woman's college a comin' to the read room. This mock-wedding differed from a real one in as much as A) it wasn't legally binding, B) there was even more alcohol involved, and C) it was basically a frat party. Someone had gone to the trouble of making matching tight-fitting white shirts for, I guess the bridesmaids (of which there were, oh I don't know, 100) on which they were writing such witty aphorisms as Tits out for the drought³, Huck me Fard and I am a cum hungry slut. We joked as to what we, being witty maths-nerds, would have written on said shirts instead. Geoff's response involved the petersen graph. Mine involved the pigeon-hole principle. Man, we're funny. Anyways, notable questions and suchlike........

Notable correct answers:

1. What movie, in 1985, represented Madonna's screen debut? I gained us a point here, but lost the respect of the table.
2. What is a Haboob? O.K. so, a clue is that this was in the Weather and Climate round in which we scored a perfect 10. We originally thought the point was down to Rupert's thinking the answer "a boob only 1/3 as funny as a hahahaboob" as funny as only we could have, assisted as we were by a largish amount of beer. Actually, it was down to the fact that I scribbled a footnote saying "or maybe a/an X" - where X is the correct answer - proving once again that teams who don't have the word "Gaussian" in their team name suck balls.

Notable incorrect answers

1. What city held the world cup in 1986 after being devastated by an earth-quake?
2. What musician's birth-name was 'Decland McManus'?
3. Who sang the 1980 hit 'I am a woman in love'? and for bonus marks, perhaps you could compile a brief list of who the fuck cares, anyway.

¹An episode of Doc Martin. It was a good episode, though, so I think we're in the clear.

²The answer to that question was "me", incidentally. I'm not proud.

³While we commended the young lady's commitment to help out in this national emergency, we were divided as to whether or not this represented an effective response.

I'm βringing Sεxy βack

Sam introduces himself on his blog as "Sexy Mathematician Sam". Sadly, however, if we exclude the laudable Hot Mathematician website and, of course, Sam's questionable characterisation of himself - it would appear that the web is not altogether kind to us when it comes to appreciating the raw, unbridled sexual power of the mathematics community¹.

It is time to redress this imbalance. I propose, dear reader², that we hereby compile a list of candidates in a quest to uncover the the sexiest mathematician of all time a-la Dave's classic and terribly popular 'what's your favourite cardinal?' poll³. You can nominate yourself if you like, and yes, Martin, you can nominate Victor.

I wish to propose the following two candidates.

Geralomo Cardano , of Cardano's Method fame - a method which has the dual distinctions of 1 Victor Scharashkin's actually expecting us to remember the fucking thing on a 4th year Galois theory exam⁴ and 2 not really being Cardano's anyway. Apart from his dashing good looks, debonair smile and raw animal magnetism he has the following to commend him as a hard-drinking, hard-living, devil-may-care hornbag:

1. After wheedling the general solution to the cubic from his friend with the promise not to tell anyone else, he promptly published it.
2. He was a professional gambler who published posthumously a book on, amongst other things, effective cheating methods.
3. He was convivted of Heresy, with his own son contributing to the prosecution.
4. Having predicted astrologically the date of his own death, he killed himself on said day.

If I had my druthers (I'm bringing back the word "druthers" too, incidentally) the young and hip would be wearing the visage of Cardano, not Che Guevara proudly on their chest^5.
Kurt Gödel , the man himself. And when I say "the man", I mean this in the sense of "who's the man?" Kurt's the man. As I go through the following I challenge you, ladies, to tell me you wouldn't hit that.

1. He looked like a relative of Count Dracula.
2. He married a night-club dancer. Up high, Kurt.
3. He proved results which ran counter to, not only the entire generation of which he was a part, but pretty much everyone who went before him.
4. Not only did he proved the mutual exclusiveness of the completeness and consistency of formal arithmetic on upwards - he did so by inserting into formal arithmetic an analogue of the statement "this statement is unprovable" - leading one to the inescapable conclusion that people were uncomfortable about his work not due to point 3., but because no-body likes a smart-arse.
5. When being naturalised as a U.S. citizen he lectured the judge on the U.S. constitution and explained to him a loop-hole he'd found while Albert Einstein sat in the background saying "It's allright,........he's with me".
6. He was completely, irretrievably insane - dying of starvation presumably because he thought that ghosts lived in his fridge.
7. Whenever asked the question "What are you rebelling against?", he'd always answer with an Arnold-Schwarzenegger like voice "Vat Haf You Got".

Over to you.......

¹Clio Cresswell doesn't, doesn't count.

²And I probably really do mean "reader" - singular, here.

³I still go with aleph₁ . There's something I can relate to in the least cardinal in a state of identity crisis.
⁴Bastard!!!!!
⁵ Having bought said shirt at some trendy expensive boutique and failed to appreciate the irony

Whatever Happened to MC Pooh?

Find here a truly awe-inspiring collection of album covers ben assures me are real.

Man sentenced in 'pride' killing of ostrich

See here. I don't know which is greater - my dissapointment that this was (apparently) not a bizarre case of an islamic honour killing which would imply some pretty wierd shit going down with two men and an ostrich - or my joy that the Ostrich's name was "Gaylord".

Either way, you really have to feel sorry for the ostrich. Seven months seems kind of light to me. People who would do something like this over such a petty matter should probably be where other people aren't for a very long time.


Veni Vino Vici

That's right people, we came, we drank, we conquered¹. The relevant Gaussian Eliminators \ {Dave} statistics now stand as follows:

Trivia nights entered: 2
Trivia nights won in a spectacular display of PWNAGE: 2

Turnout was at possibly the highest it's been all year (I think about 11). We were joined early on by some random Law student who, we subsequently discovered, was only there in an attempt to steal our mojo (bitch!!). Later arrivals included a biology student and friend who awarded Sam with a high-five for being a Jew² - something he assures us happens all the time.

There were many heroes in our team last night. All were impressed and, yes, just that little bit scared by Claire's encyclopedic knowledge of Winnie the Poo, for instance. But for my money, the nights' paragon of awesome was - much as it pains me to say this - Nick. We were awarded a total of 2 unjustified points this evening - a 1/2 mark for answering "Soul-brother Rupert" to a question about some soul singer shot at the age of 33 (the correct answer being "Sam Cook") - another 1/2 for stating that the name of the strip-club from the movie Striptease was "Scores, New York" (thanks Chris). The remaining point we owe to Nick. The question asked for the title of the song to which David Brent from The Office, danced in a well-known scene. We didn't know the answer but pledged that, if awarded the point, Nick would re-create the scene for the viewing ...... pleasure(?)...... of the Red Room. Let's just say that we got that point, baby. And Nick, if you're out there, there ain't no-body except Harry Kinsman himself would have been able to out-impersonate you at a sad middle-aged middle-management exec dancing appallingly to Disco Inferno. You go, girl.

We scored 28 over-all (including a perfect ten the tie break being one by us when Nick out-skulled two competitors proving that those years spent in College weren't a complete waste of time). Next closest team: 25. I kind of wish it was at least 26, though, given the above.

(Other) Notable Correct Answers:

1. What fruit goes by the latin name Ribus-Nigum? Thankyou, Ribena, the correct answer was, indeed, blackcurrant.
2. On What River was Babylon on? Tigris, no Euphrates, no Tigris, no,........ Euphrates!!!!
3. What City means, in Arabic, "Sanctuary"? Mecca, no Medina, no Mecca, no ......... Mecca!!!!!!
4. What was the name of the Wood in which Winnie the Pooh lived? See previous comments about Claire. Not only did she know the wood's name - she knew the entire back-story of the naming process.

Notable Incorrect Ones:

1. What is Limnophobia a fear of? Surprisingly, the answer is not a fear of the island of Limnos. And, incidentally, in the cold light of sobriety I now think that the island I was thinking of was "Lemnos", anyway.
2. What is the collective noun for a group of wood-peckers? Hint: it isn't a "Peck"
3. What band, when asked to mime on Top of the Pops in 1977 performed with their guitar strings removed in protest? We answered the Sex Pistols. Again in the cold light of sobriety, it occurs to me that while we were right on the money in thinking that this would be something the Sex Pistols would do - what the cock would they be doing on Top of the Pops?
4. What part of the Sphinx is, according to some emininent engineer whose name escapes me, likely to fall of by the year X - X being a number not much greater than 2007? The correct answer is not "The Beard". The correct answer is, in fact, the head. The entire goat-blighting head, no less.
   

¹To the reader now inclined to point out that the actual translation of the post title from the latin is more like "I came, wine, I conquered" - you are cordially invited to go and fuck yourself.

²Yay team Zion!!!!

A Brief Message For Geoff

COCK

An elaborate form of petty theft

People who know me know that I have various modest goals in life. I'd like to be the first person to circum-navigate the moon on a pogo stick. I'd like to beat Gary Kasparov at a game of Battleship.¹ I'd like to actually finish reading Don Quixote. I'd like to organise for Kevin Andrews to be made a contestant on the next episode of Survivor: Africa and, further down the line, I'd like to take that stab at world domination - preferrably in a manner involving an elaborate extortion scheme and a death-ray in space. These are all long-term goals, but in the mean-time I think it'd be cool to be able to steal people's wallets by hypnotism. This last goal, apparently, is eminently achieveable. All manner of further hijinks can be found by typing in "Derren Brown" to Youtube. Apparently he has a show on UK tv.

¹ I don't know if anyone got this reference to a scene from Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey parodying a scene from The Seventh Seal, but I totally dug it.

The Australian is Jerking my Chain, Here.......

Alright. So, if you go to The Australian blogs page today you'll find the words Biased? Don't take our word for it next to a picture of Janet Albrechtsen. What is The Australian trying to do to me here? Again, this one is just the title of her latest blog. Way to dash a guy's hopes, Oz.

In other news, Kevin Andrews has left us all asking the question "Is this an attempt at Tampa mark 2, or is Kevin Andrews really that big of a dufus?" I'm inclined to go with "dufus", myself whatever the answer to the first half of that question is. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure he hopes this will help in the upcoming election, he just seems to have forgotten that it's middle-easteners on boats that scare the living shit out of Australians. Note to Kevin: If you're going to bad-mouth an entire ethnic group for shits and giggles, in this day and age, it's just not a good look if they're all black. People would have been totally cool with it if you'd decided to pick on Lebanese people or something.

In other other news, my dreams of constructing, from scratch, my ideal woman a-la cheesy 80s science fiction flick Wierd Science just got one step closer to reality. Yay for me.

Oh, and also, I've gone and deleted this site from my list of links on the blog-roll. Technically, there's a day left of voting but I think the writing is on the wall. Unfortunately, I didn't include another option "I have no opinion either way, but don't feel that Fitz should get his hand off it either" - so for now, at least, the hand stays on.

Looks like I got out just in time......

Alright, so I know we all appreciated that extra point on the "20-sided die" question at trivia on wednesday. And while I, at least, probably wouldn't have got that question right but for having a misspent childhood involving pretending to be a dwarf with a silly germanic name on weekends, whose interests included mead, his +3 axe of awesomeness and picking up bearded dwarf chicks on his sweet, sweet, chariot......... I have only just now come to realise that this victory in trivia could have come at a terrible price.

I guess it's just lucky that no witches coven came for me.

Gaussian Eliminators \ {Dave} undefeated.

O.K. So the following report is appearing to you, the reader before you see
the comments that appeared before the report. It's all very Star Wars episode
IV. So let's just pretend that report and comments make sense together and leave
it at that, shall we?

Hello. So this is me, Fitz, filling in for Dave as the official trivia correspondant answering to the need of you Joe Public, the little people, to have constant up-to-date information as to the trials and tribulations of a (sometimes) small and (sometimes) dedicated team of University of Queensland maths-department affiliates who see fit to play an awful lot of trivia. Well last night the team was neither small nor dedicated. We weren't even calling ourselves the Gaussian Eliminators exactly - but we won, god damn it, we won.

After inital suggestions that we name ourselves The Gaussian Eliminated Dave, we instead adopted the far less nasty, far more nerdy title you see above you. So why was this team so successful? Some said it was because we culled the Dave Barry dead weight (the author would, of course, like to acknowledge that this comment is grossly unfair - partly because Dave did, of course, tend to answer a lot of questions, but mostly because he'll be reading this post. Incidentally, if anyone knows how to insert footnotes on a blog post, I'd appreciate your letting me know. In the meantime, if the reader could imagine that the text within these brackets is in the more aesthetically appealing form of a footnote, the author would appreciate it. Thank you.). Some said it was down to our two new recruits. Some said it was because Nick saw fit to drag his arse from the minor human catastrophe that is the current state of his honours thesis and join our team. Well, actually, Nick said this at any rate, and we're all sure he had a point. Mostly, though, I'd like to put it down to our answering more questions correctly than any other team. Our final score was 32 1/2. Our nearest competitor scored 30. That's right team 30 points, if that is your real name: you were PWNED.

Our notable incorrect answers were as follows (correct answers to which, if not given here for comedic effect, can be found in subsequent commentry if anyone actually cares):

1. What country's first government was headed by Henry Sewell in 1856? We put "South Africa". We was dufuses.
2. What does W.A.P. stand for in the context of mobile phones? This one is notable, since we managed to get it wrong at the last Staff Club trivia also. We got a 1/2 mark, though.
3. What percentage of the population of the Northern Territory identifies itself as indigenous? O.K. so Rupert gave everyone the clue that it was somewhere between 10% and 40%. We answered, incorrectly, 35%. This was notable because we should have listened to Geoff when he said that Rupert, bless his simple soul, would have selected those bounds such that the correct answer was precisely half way between them. He was right. The answer Rupert wanted was 25%. So, again, we was dufuses.
4. Who was the first female director to gross 100 million at the box office? Now, this one shat me right off, because I was pretty damn sure (and wrote as much) that the correct answer was whoever the fuck directed the movie Big. This was right. Since I couldn't give this woman's name, we instead opted for the only female director we could think of: Sophia Coppola.
5. What element comes last alphabetically? We wrote Zircon. This word has the benefit of requiring to be listed after Zinc in any dictionary in which the two words are listed. It does not, however, have the benefit of actually being an element. Zirconium was the answer Rupert was after. We got half a mark, which put us at 9 1/2 in a maths and physical sciences round when two other teams got 10. These kind of shennanigans make it very difficult to justify our team name.

Notable correct answers:

1. From which city did the worlds longest car race begin in some year I can't remember? Stevo got the correct answer to this question. The Rally was called "Peking to Paris", from which an astute reader can infer the correct answer. Maybe getting this right only seems impressive to me, though, since I know almost nothing about sport.
2. Who discovered Kangaroo Island? We got 1 1/2 points on this one for writing that the answer we thought he wanted was Matthew Flinders, but the answer we were nonetheless giving was "The aborigines". Readers take note: Rupert may not be giving out any more half marks for funny answers but you can still use the powerful weapon of guilt to get him to hand them over.
3. How many faces does an icosahedron have? Notable because, in the maths and physical sciences round, I got this one right not because of any special knowledge of Platonic solids derived from years of formal mathematics training - but because I knew that the 20-sided die you use in Dungeons and Dragons was called an icosahedron.

You don't know, man, you weren't there

As we all know, there are absolutely no comparisons which can be made between the Iraq war and the Vietnam War. In other news, Iran can in no way be compared to Laos.

This is good news, yes?

Democracy in Action

It has been pointed out by one Dave Barry that I have listed this site on my list of sites better than this site. I had expected people to spot this earlier but, hey, it turns out no-one ever actually reads the lists of links on people's blogs. There is a gold star making it's way to Dave even as we speak. This is a lie. Say rather that there will be if Dave will be so kind as to email me his current mailing address in France.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I am leaving it open to you, my loyal readers (all, what, five or six of you..) to decide on this weighty issue.

I was going to add another option "I feel that each viewing of a web-site constitutes a new web-site (you can't cross the same river twice, after all) and that each new viewing is better than the last - so yes", but someone went and voted so I can't change it now.