Monday, December 18, 2006

[Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity] Comment: "India 6 - A plumbing breakthrough"

New comment on your post #435 "India 6 - A plumbing breakthrough"
Author : grb (IP: 24.148.36.73 , 24-148-36-73.nwb-bsr1.chi-nwb.il.cable.rcn.com)
Comment:
HAHA! that is about the funniest thing I have read in a long time!

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Saturday, December 9, 2006

[Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity] Comment: "India 6 - A plumbing breakthrough"

New comment on your post #435 "India 6 - A plumbing breakthrough"
Author : deepu (IP: 203.200.95.130 , delhi-203.200.95-130.static.vsnl.net.in)
Comment:
say u r so impecunious to pay for a better place in India...

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Friday, December 8, 2006

[Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity] Comment: "India 6 - A plumbing breakthrough"

New comment on your post #435 "India 6 - A plumbing breakthrough"
Author : Sariel Har-Peled (IP: 202.141.70.18 , 202.141.70.18)
Comment:
Thank you for your kind comment. I am completely grateful for it.

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Comment on India 6 - A plumbing breakthrough by dvs

u seem to be an outspoken, ungrateful asshole

URL: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/blog/index.php/archives/2006/11/21/india-6-a-plumbing-breakthrough/#comment-18018

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

[Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity] Comment: "India 4 - Glory made"

New comment on your post #432 "India 4 - Glory made"
Author : Rafi (IP: 89.1.250.113 , 89.1.250.113.dynamic.barak-online.net)
Comment:
Regardless of the quality of math education in the US and bananananana, about which you may be right, I never saw the point of teaching kids long division or other elaborate computational procedures (and I recently read an interesting article of a non-mathematician programmer who realized how math could be very useful, gives tips on how to learn it and claims that most of what they teach in school is useless. He gave long division as an example. I agree).

Long division doesn't help anyone do anything. They once taught kids how to approximate logarithms with logarithm tables. I'm sure you're not used to that, and there's no reason you should be, even though they might still teach it in some places where they teach long division. All these useless procedures are also responsible for making people think math is just about numbers and algebra, when in fact the merit in a mathematician who knows how to compute cubic roots quickly without a calculator is null.

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Wednesday, November 8, 2006

[Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity] Comment: "Elections!"

New comment on your post #431 "Elections!"
Author : Sariel Har-Peled (IP: 202.141.69.75 , 202.141.69.75)
Comment:
While I agree that "an n-bit vector" sounds better, I think I have to vote D in this case. The letter n just sounds like an atomic sylabble and not as "en". I vote D, but the R camp might disagree...

Overall, it seems like the R camp won in a landslide. Go R go.

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Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Comment on The holy land by Sariel Har-Peled

Thank you. Therre are new pictures online now. For example, [here][1] are pictures from Yum Kipor. Did not have time to add comments/select best pictures, etc…

[1]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/pictures/travel/06/10/02/all/

URL: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/blog/index.php/archives/2006/10/03/the-holy-land/#comment-13200

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Comment on A teaser by D. Eppstein

Isn't it as simple as: look at the bounding box; some simplex within the box is full, so V = Omega(volume), but each line in the direction of the box's longest dimension has at most one maximal point.

URL: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/blog/index.php/archives/2006/09/23/a-teaser/#comment-12493

Saturday, September 2, 2006

You know it is festival time in Arhus when…

1. [A big kitsch advertisement announce it from afar][1]
2. There are big tents throughout town.
3. The city is decorated with [underwear][2].
(The main theme of the festival this year seems to be women (see [here][3]), but maybe Womania in Danish means women underwear, who knows.)

4. [A line of women waiting to enter a department store][4] - only women are allowed in (well, they have to buy new clothing, now that the decrations are complete).
5. [These huge unsafe gas cylinders][5] are in fact completely safe beer kegs.
6. [Royal yacht is in town][6].

In my next blog entry: "Is it just disgusting, or is it beer?"

[1]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/pictures/x/travel/06/08/31/all/1082h.html

[2]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/pictures/x/travel/06/08/31/all/1084h.html

[3]: http://www.aarhusfestuge.dk/aarhusfestuge/festuge2006.nsf

[4]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/pictures/x/travel/06/08/31/all/1093h.html

[5]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/pictures/x/travel/06/08/31/all/1096h.html

[6]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/pictures/x/travel/06/08/31/all/1147h.html

URL: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/blog/index.php/archives/2006/09/02/you-know-it-is-festival-time-in-arhus-when/

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Handling rejection

Here is the ultimate rejection letter (this is old and you might have seen it before - I reject your complaints on the topic). Every once in awhile I fell like sending it to a PC that rejects one of my magnum [opera][1]…

_
Dear Admissions Committee:

Having reviewed the many rejection letters I have received in the last few weeks, it is with great regret that I must inform you I am unable to accept your rejection at this time.

This year, after applying to a great many colleges and universities, I received an especially fine crop of rejection letters. Unfortunately, the number of rejections that I can accept is limited.

Each of my rejections was reviewed carefully and on an individual basis. Many factors were taken into account - the size of the institution, student-faculty ratio, location, reputation, costs and social atmosphere.

I am certain that most colleges I applied to are more than qualified to reject me. I am also sure that some mistakes were made in turning away some of these rejections. I can only hope they were few in number.

I am aware of the keen disappointment my decison may bring. Throughout my deliberations, I have kept in mind the time and effort it may have taken for you to reach your decision to reject me.

Keep in mind that at times it was necessary for me to reject even those letters of rejection that would normally have met my traditionally high standards.

I appreciate your having enough interest in me to reject my application. Let me take the opportunity to wish you well in what I am sure will be a successful academic year.

SEE YOU IN THE FALL!

Sincerely,
Paul Devlin
Applicant at Large
_

From [here][2].

[1]: http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_1861635272/opus.html

[2]: http://www.collegiatechoice.com/myaccept.htm

URL: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/blog/index.php/archives/2006/07/27/handling-rejection/

Thursday, May 25, 2006

[Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity] Comment: "Discrete integration?"

New comment on your post #376 "Discrete integration?"
Author : (IP: 24.176.200.3 , 24-176-200-3.dhcp.malb.ca.charter.com)
Comment:
Something is weird.

I keep typing an inequality. But perhaps I just mean a (1+- epsilon) approximation to K.

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Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Comment on A simple proof? by Sariel Har-Peled

I fixed the link problem. It seems to be some problem with wordpress. A hack of apache avoids this…

URL: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/blog/index.php/archives/2006/04/10/a-simple-proof/#comment-1002

Monday, March 27, 2006

[Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity] Comment: "What I did in my spring vacation"

New comment on your post #358 "What I did in my spring vacation"
Author : Maverick (IP: 128.2.220.215 , ZIMBS4.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU)
Comment:
is this the big flat? where are the corns? :P

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Friday, February 3, 2006

[Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity] Comment: "Miscellaneous - In Hyndrabad "

New comment on your post #314 "Miscellaneous - In Hyndrabad "
Author : adobe acrobat (IP: 200.121.71.53 , client-200.121.71.53.speedy.net.pe)
Comment:
Love your blog!! though I sometimes disagree with you, you really are intelligent. Always good to read you.

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Wednesday, February 1, 2006

[Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity] Comment: "The Future"

New comment on your post #341 "The Future"
Author : Lily A (IP: 63.195.115.156 , adsl-63-195-115-156.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net)
Comment:
Oh, man... Twenty years have passed, amd still you are quoting this dude. When are you coming to tell Daria about your plans to first take Manhattan?

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Monday, January 23, 2006

Lowly paper

While [some][1] despicable [people][2] [are][3] [having][4] [fun][5], drinking [soft drinks][6] and having [business meetings][7] in warm Miami, I am condemned to continue toiling without hope of redemption.

Now that I am done with the whining, I can point out that I had put on my webpage this [lowly paper][8]. I started using the **picins** package, which allows one to put pictures embedded inside the text and allows the text to wrap around the figures. This is really nice, because now one can put in small figures close the relevant point, without them taking huge space. You can [see the paper][9] for an example.

Which brings us to the fact that a new version of [Ipe][10] (using QT 4) was recently released, and it works very nicely. Especially because you can tell it automatically to save both pdf/eps versions (which is nice if you use latex/pdflatex simultaneously). Sadly, the Debian version is outdated so if you use Debian you might to compile it yourself. Ipe works very nicely if you need [animation][11] in your presentation ([here][12] is more info). If you want to see talk slides using beamer and Ipe figures, see [here][13] ([source][14]). And here is a [Ipe][15] figure that uses several views for animation in the above presentation.

[1]: http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/

[2]: http://geomblog.blogspot.com/

[3]: http://11011110.livejournal.com/

[4]: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/kechen/www/

[5]: http://ragde.cs.uiuc.edu/~sadri/

[6]: http://www.siam.org/meetings/da06/

[7]: http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2006/01/the_2nd_annual_.html

[8]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/papers/05/lrank/

[9]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/papers/05/lrank/lrank.pdf

[10]: http://ipe.compgeom.org/

[11]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/blog/index.php/archives/2005/05/03/ipe-beamer/

[12]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/blog/index.php/archives/2005/03/23/the-wonderful-world-of-ipe/

[13]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/papers/04/lipschitz/lips_slides.pdf

[14]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/papers/04/lipschitz/lip_slides_06_07_05_valis.zip

[15]: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/misc/blog/06/01/23/htree.pdf

URL: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/blog/index.php/archives/2006/01/23/lowly-paper/