Sweat Stain Report

Last night I didn't feel like going down to the storage area to fetch the borax and oxy-spray, so I soaked all the items with sweat stains in diluted vinegar. While sorting the laundry, I sprayed some items with oxy-spray, and put borax paste on others. Those treatments had 1.5 - 2 hours to "work"... but they didn't. (At least, not completely. I still have yellow stains.) *sigh* Items with just vinegar didn't work either.

I've brought the oxy-spray and borax upstairs, so next weekend there'll be another experiment.

(Perhaps I should just dye those items yellow? *grump*.)

WTF?!?

Who on earth searched for me using my real name and "hot babe knit"?!? (And is he single and cute?)

PS: This was on my Academia.edu page, not this blog.

*finally*

I *finally* placed my order for my new laptop tonight! (I've only been planning this since last fall, with the intention to order around Christmas time...)

Now to twiddle my fingers until the sweet little thing arrives. :)

(Back to reviewing papers... *sigh*)

Sleep

Finished marking at 7, was in bed at 7:30, and got to sleep until 11... when it was time to get up for my afternoon job. I've decided not to go to the art club tonight. Not sure if I'll veg when I get home, or attempt to wash some of the dishes that piled up during the final marking scramble. About the only thing I can have for dinner that doesn't require dishes to be washed is frozen pizza... but the weather (and thus apartment) is hot enough that I'm not sure I want to turn the oven on. I'll see what I feel like tonight.

Well, time to sign up for paper reviewing... one job done, the next just begun. *sigh*

Bingo!

IMG_1761.JPG

Success! Found it! I finally got a lucky break with my google-fu. :) (It was searching for "Wedgewood blue" that finally gave me the break.)

The glasses are made by the Jeannette Glass Company. The green glass pattern is "Hellenic Green" (or possibly "Grecian Hellenic Green"), and the blue pattern is... dang, my google-fu has run out for tonight. (The Hellenic pattern is suspiciously similar to a Wedgewood pattern... I wonder if it was "inspired by", or if they were in collaboration?)

Another useful keyword: Jasperware.

To do: find out the name of the blue pattern (I found a listing on Etsy given Jeannette as the company, but without a pattern name), and a date for both. The date appears to be 1950s, but I'd like a better source.

Awesome!

Thanks to teaching this summer, I'm now on the *cool* book mailing list... I just received The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 0: "Introduction to Combinatorial Algorithms and Boolean Functions" by Donald Knuth (who happens to be my great-grandadvisor). This is much better than fifteen books on how to program in Java. :) (Not that there's anything wrong with learning to program in Java, it's just that I already know how, and there are *so* many of them! I don't need them cluttering up my bookshelf.)

Found on Flickr

Crochet experiments

Oooo! Neat!

This reminds me of a term project from back in 1999. I wrote a program that drew sea shells using some sort of formula that I forget the name of now... hmmm... googling... hey, neat! The main paper I based my project on is available online. (Frenet frames... that's what they were called.)

Is Wool Self-Combustible?

Penny had trouble mailing yarn again. In my quest to get to the bottom of this issue, I've submitted the question to Quirks and Quarks:

A friend of mine continually has problems mailing packages that contain wool. She is told by the postal worker that it's listed in the book of dangerous goods as being highly flammable. Recently I was listening to the Car Talk podcast, and Ray was reading from Philip McCutcheon's book "Tall Ships":

"Spaced along the upper deck were the cargo hatches with their heavy covers of reinforced hardwood planks, well chocked in and secured with three separate layers of tarpaulin, held down with ropes and more chocks to withstand the pounding of heavy seas. Below the hatches lay the reason for the ship's presence on the sea, her cargo, to be held inviolate against nature and disaster, against fire that could come from a self-combustible cargo like wool, or a cargo that could swell when it met water, such as rice."

Why is wool considered highly flammable or self-combustible, especially when wet? I have not heard of sheep in Britain (where it certainly rains) self combusting in the fields. As a knitter, I have never had my wool yarn self combust, even while washing it. In fact, one test to see if a particular yarn is wool or not is to see if it self-extinguishes after being held to a flame.

Is wool dangerously flammable or self-combustible?

Thank you.

(No, Car Talk hasn't answered me yet.)

Do I or don't I?

Tomorrow is the Inaugural Meeting for the Research Seminar series in Proteomics and Systems Biology. (Capitalization theirs.) I was going to go, but H isn't going to be in tomorrow except for a brief period. So... do I spend 3 hours on the bus for a talk with the vague title "Proteomics Structural Biology"? It's an excellent chance for me to meet researchers in areas similar to mine at this university... but that three hour bus ride... *sigh*

Miscellany

Ow. I've had a low-grade headache all day. My eyes were a wee bit funky in the morning too. I had a nap this morning... I'm not sure if I would have had one if I were at school, but I'm working from home today. (H is away from the office today.) Coming home yesterday I talked to a friend who was in town, and she also had a headache. The weather was changeable yesterday, so perhaps that's why I had a bad headache. I'm going to give this med a bit more of a trial before writing it off.

(This paragraph contains dissertation gobble-de-gook.) Today I've been thinking about the meaning of the rigidity matrix, and am getting a bit better understanding of it. It's a bizarre thing. I've figured out how translations and rotations look as velocity vectors, and that distance-preserving edge motions can be broken down into a rotation about the center of the edge (or one of the endpoints, it doesn't matter) plus a translation. Non-trivial motions are then simply the ones where two or more edges have motions that can't be broken down to a translation plus a rotation around a common point. I don't think any of this will actually end up in my dissertation, but it's nice having a better understanding. (End of dissertation gobble-de-gook.)

I've also gotten around to answering a few outstanding e-mails. I have more to deal with, though. *blush* I'm bad about e-mails... if I don't answer them immediately, I almost never do. Bad me.

I signed out "The Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning". That sucker is *big*. It's a flippin' textbook! Despite being an academic, I have a deep-seated dislike of reading textbooks. I have read the first chapter of Alden, and it is interesting. I just have to overcome my dislike every time I pick it up. I'd like to take it up to the lake with me, but it's due back the day we're coming back... and I *don't* want a late fee. (I hate library fees with a fiery passion.) I can renew it online as long as there's no requests on it... I'm going to do so before I leave, I'm just not sure when. The longer I wait, the longer I get to keep it for (we only get one online renew before having to take it back in), but the higher the likelihood someone will place a request. Hm. I guess I'll go renew it now, and that way I will definitely get to take it to the lake, and will have two days after I return in order to return the book. But I have a doctor appointment on one of those days, so that would only give me one day to return it, and no leeway if I'm forgetful. I guess I'll wait until tomorrow to renew the book.

Fun With Fun-Tak

Research

I bet you didn't know that Fun-Tak is useful as a research tool.

If I use yarn in my research, can I deduct it from my taxes? (Yesterday D came to my office and said "do you have any string?")

Good Talk

Yay, the talk went well. :) I think I'm figuring out how to present some of the recent stuff that has been stumping me when it comes to presenting it.

Blech.

Ugh. I'm having my pre-talk jitters this morning. :(

Today's Savage Chicken cartoon is oddly appropriate.

Random Shopping Note

I keep thinking I want to buy this sampler roving set (but not at this moment... today because I'm travelling, other times for other reasons), then forgetting who sells it. (Spunky Eclectic.) I know I've bookmarked it (at least once), but my bookmarks are a bit of a mess, so they don't really help either. Especially with so many yarn/fiber bookmarks to search through. So I'm making a note of it here so I don't forget. Of course, I'll probably forget that I've done so, but I'll feel somewhat better about remembering for now. ;) Perhaps I'll remember that I might have done so at one point, and the "shopping" tag will help me find it.

On a totally different note, D, J and I are seemingly making some progress on a question D posed. It doesn't help my dissertation move forward, but it's in a sort of related area, and kind of fun. Perhaps I'll get a paper out of it... papers are always good.

Well, the art gallery is free tonight (technically "pay as you wish", but I keep thinking of it as free), so I think Swatchy and I will go check that out.

Toys!

Toys!

My research may sound boring to you, but did you know I get to play with toys? (Toys that are frequently sold in kid's stores!) I'm not restricted to horizontal surfaces either. ;)

Catching Up

Okay now, where was I? Hmmm... the last photo I blogged appears to be the toque**. I sure have some catching up to do! I'll be doing it over several posts here and at Swatchy's blog. This may take me a while... I'll be posting when I want breaks from work.

**I belive both spellings of toque/tuque are correct, I just waffle between which is *more* correct.

Answering Mea

Mea asked (ever so nicely) what my dissertation is on, and how Toronto is as a city. Frankly, I haven't seen much of Toronto... it's a big place, and I'm mostly meeting with professors. Lettuce Knit, however, is *awesome*! I highly recommend hanging out there on a Wednesday night for their SNB.

My dissertation... um, well, if I use the big words, I'm looking to see if protein allostery can possibly be explained by changes in rigidity using combinatorial methods. Using less scary words, I'm applying a mathematical idea to biology using computer science. Explanations are pretty long... how badly do you want one? ;)

Talk

It was rather unpolished, but it went pretty good. People enjoyed the joke I started with. :)

Prep

My talk is nearly ready... I'll add a bit more in the morning. It's going to be *fun*!!! :))

Bon Voyage

As I head off to Toronto today, nervous about my talk tomorrow that I have yet to prepare, dictionary.com's word of the day is "insuperable: incapable of being passed over, surmounted, or overcome."

I had a bad dream last night. I dreamt that I was still at UNC, and I had a big talk to give on Tuesday to the *entire* department. (It was part of something for which attendance was required, so it really was the entire department.) However, Monday was a holiday, which resulted in me getting my days mixed up. I came in on Tuesday, thinking it was Monday. For some reason I sat in the department meeting room and started playing a computer game. I was really engrossed in the game. It was one of those empire-building type games where you see the entire map, and your guys/armies are little icons on the maps. I was concentrating on one aspect of the game (I can't remember which one), and then noiced that the "health" of my population was dropping alarmingly.

At this point, L, one of the other students in my research group, came in to tell me it was 10 minutes to the meeting. I was so worried about the health of my fake empire that I kept playing the game.

Finally it was time for the meeting, and I remembered I had to give a talk. I needed to get up to my office on the fourth floor (the building seems to have started it's numbering at one instead of zero in my dream), but everyone else was headed in the opposite direction. I struggled against the stream. I think I managed to get what I needed, but I'm not sure.

Then I was going with the stream back to the first (zeroth) floor for the meeting. However, there was construction going on. (Just on the fourth floor.) One of the other differences between dream Sitterson and real Sitterson is that dream sitterson has these big open areas that spanned all floors, and normally there's these glass half-walls that prevent you from falling over the edge. However (do you notice there tends to be lots of "howevers" in dreams), due to the construction, these glass half-walls had been removed. Plus there were additional holes in the floor.

Have I mentioned I'm afraid of heights? I get vertigo and worry I'm going to fall off. I need a good, solid barrier that I can hold onto.

At one point I was navigating this one point where there was only a foot of floor between the open area and a large hole in the floor. This stretch was around four feet long. I got down on my hands and knees. When I was mostly across, I had to wait for the people ahead of me to move. There was a guy beside me. He was a bit ahead where there wasn't a hole any more, but still very close. So close, in fact, that we were touching. (We were all sort of packed in like sardines.) He kept fidgeting, which was pushing me over the edge. I uttered some sort of fear-induced threat that he had better stop. He didn't. In fact, he complained that it was his right to fidget, and continued to do so until I was three-quarters pushed off into the open area. Needless to say I was holding on for dear life and was freaking out. Eventually people starte moving and someone else was able to help me up. I made the rest of the trip away from the unsafe floor on my hands and knees, shaking.

On the second (first) floor, TQ expressed sympathy at what had happened. I replied that it was only getting worse, thinking about the hour-long talk that I still hadn't prepared, and the meeting was starting momentarily. However before I could ask him to remove me from the schedule and tell my advisor, my alarm went off.

I was kind of sweaty when I woke up this morning.

I'm currently in the airport. (This post will be cut and pasted into Blogger when I get an internet connection.) Bording will start soon. My talk is tomorrow, and I'm still brainstorming what to talk about. Whee.

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Later: I'm here and in my room. Slooooooooooow dial-up. (Not sure how to access anything else from here.) I can get better wireless in the building that houses math, but this will do for a quick post. For now I just wanted to say hi before working on my talk. (I was out having lunch and talking with W, my prof-colleague here until now.) Feeling better about what to talk about... preparing the talk shouldn't be a problem. I think I'll have a short nap first... that early morning wake-up is catching up with me.