Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Busy days

Yesterday I had an administrative meeting. It started at 9.30 am, paused for 15 minutes for lunch, and at 4pm the rest of it was rescheduled for tomorrow morning. This morning I lectured two hours; I'll spend most of the afternoon doing oral examinations, and I'm giving a talk tomorrow afternoon.

I spent last Saturday socializing with C#1's schoolmates and their parents, and Sunday caring for two more kids than usual while their parents took an afternoon off. They offered to have my kids Monday evening, so that I could have a date night with my husband. When I arrived home Monday in the late afternoon, C#1 had sprained her foot, so my friends took care of C#2 and C#3, while we spent our "date night" queuing at pediatric emergency ward (five days of rest, than good as new).

I definitely need summer vacations, but that has to wait until mid-July.

Friday, May 9, 2008

Plannning research time

I thought I had a great idea, namely to leave my schedule completely free on fridays. For some reasons, fridays there are less students around, so I figured out it would be a great day for getting some research done.
Two fridays in the last four turned out to be vacations/strikes (at school, which means I can't work). Today all seemed fine and promising - and when he woke up, C#3 couldn't walk. Well, he could walk a tiny bit, limping, and crying with pain.
So I called the pediatrician, and he squeezed me in at 9.45am - which means we got in at 10.30, and out at 11. Current diagnosis is arthritis, and I just spent some time looking up several versions of arthritis on wikipedia. None of them looks any good.
C#3 is home now; he feels better after some medication, and nanny is with him. Still, I somehow can't think of research at all. Unless it is on medline, that is.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Movie rerereview

A movie review is what you write after having seen a movie. A movie rerereview is what you write after having read what someone wrote after talking to someone who saw a movie.

I'm talking about Fermat's room, and I am going only to make comments on the (re)review. It's a movie about four mathematicians who get together to solve(?) Goldbach's conjecture. It's apparently an appreciated movie (possibly because the actual purpose of the meeting is to kill them all).

What I found most incredible is "four mathematicians who don't know each other". What? Four number theorists, good enugh that it at all makes sense to assume that they have a chance at Goldbach's conjecture, and they don't know each other?