Here are a couple of youtube clips that might help clear up the difference.

This one is about Australia:

And this one shows pretty much the worst thing that any New Zealand wildlife is likely to do to you:

(The first was featured on Pharyngula, not sure any more where I turned up the second one.)

There’s a smart initiative here, issuing stickers for on your mailbox that say “No unaddressed advertising, no house-to-house newsletters” (or no to one but yes to the other). They’re nationwide and highly recognisable, with a big “NEE/NEE” or “NEE/JA”. They might even keep some of the junk away, who knows?

Today’s post contained a flyer from GroenLinks, a political party whose name translates literally as “GreenLeft”. The flyer informs us that because of our NEE/NEE sign, they did not leave a house-to-house newsletter in our mailbox. It also tells us where we can go for more information about the party.

Funnily enough, the flyer doesn’t mention the fact that despite our NEE/NEE sign they did leave unaddressed advertising in our mailbox. But perhaps they realised that we could figure that out without their help.

He handed in a homework containing the immortal line “Je bent een aap, dat je dat weet” (“Just so you know, you’re a monkey”) instead of one of the answers.¹ He went on to accuse me of not being able to produce my own answers, which (after some puzzling) I decided probably meant that he found the exercise too hard.

It took me almost a week to work up a response. First I had to cool down; then I had to find out the official policy (I’m only a teaching assistant, am I allowed to kick students out of my classroom for rudeness?); then I hoped to talk to the guy at the lesson but he didn’t show up. At that point I decided this was probably a flamboyant way of announcing his decision to quit the class.² Finally I sent a rather acerbic mail pointing out that insulting the person who grades your work probably isn’t the smartest policy if you care about passing, and asking him if he indeed was quitting the course.³ I didn’t expect an answer.

But I got one: “I’m afraid it was a terrible mistake,” and “Rest assured it will not happen again.” The poor sod had sent me a file intended for one of his fellow students (for “reference” purposes, of course…).

The moral? For my students, I’d suggest: don’t send your work around “for reference purposes” (boring, I know). For the rest of the world… When someone calls you a monkey, don’t assume they mean it? The one I’m taking away from this is, always count your monkeys before you hit “Send”.

Notes:

1. Olga suggested that he was simply confused about my species, and that I could help him out by trimming my beard more often. Supporting evidence being that at the Babylon Circus gig I danced “like a monkey” (O. Grigoriadou, p.c.). Against this hypothesis two observations: (1) it fails to explain the comment about finding my own answers, see below, and (2) the homework was delivered before the gig in question. As far as I can recall I have never danced in the classroom, like a monkey or otherwise.
2. In the meantime there were other irritations to deal with: half the class didn’t read the instructions for the homework (“work in pairs”) and there were several folk to hassle about copying.
3. For the record, I also announced the policy that work containing insults would get no grade.

1. Make sure you spell the name of the Rector Magnificus correctly, where it appears prominently on your title page (part of the boilerplate that “So-and-so has been awarded the degree of doctor…”). They’re picky about this: it’s not enough to have all the right letters in there, they have to be in the right order too. Yes, that includes initials.
2. If you plan to defy Rule 1, at least remember to send a copy of your title page, signed by the dean of the faculty, to the office of the pedel.¹ The reason for this requirement is so that someone from the dean’s office can politely point out that you’ve misspelled the name of the Rector Magnificus.
3. If you plan to defy Rule 2, well, you can’t. But what you can do is go ahead and print your dissertation before you’ve had the title page signed by the dean and sent to the pedel. It’s against the rules and I don’t advise it, but all the available evidence shows that this is, in fact, possible.

In other news, my plans for the weekend involve 200 books, a stack of little pieces of paper reading “Prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom”, and a pot of glue. And significant quantities of embarassment.

Notes:

1. In English I believe it’s “beadle”, but that still doesn’t tell me much.

Μια κοπέλα με ρώτησε κάτι που δεν κατάλαβα. Είπα, “Δεν είμαι Έλληνας.” Είπε αυτή, “Δεν είσαι Έλληνας και παίζεις μπαγλαμά;” Εγώ: “Δεν είναι μπαγλαμάς! Τζουράς είναι!” Είπε “Συγνώμη”… και έφυγε.

That is: A girl asked me something which I didn’t understand. I said, “I’m not Greek.” She said, “You’re not Greek and you play baglamas?” Me: “It’s not a bagmalas! It’s a tzouras!” She said “Sorry”… and left.

It’s a conversation, of a sort, right?

[Any correct spelling in the Greek portion of this post was made possible by the kind intervention of Olga.]

Bo, Jack, and the Professor (either Calculus or Branestawm, I forget which one we gave allergies) are characters from examples in a joint paper I wrote with Michael Franke. I used similar examples in my dissertation but changed the names.

And what’s the point of the exercise? Well, perhaps this pdf will make it clearer. It’s a draft of the front cover of my diss. (Text is slightly different, and the colour-scheme is just one of several options I’ve tried; some others are blue and black on white (the first one I posted here), white and medium gray on medium blue, and white and blue on gray.)

In Lovecraft’s cycle of horror sonnets, Fungi from Yuggoth, …

And then his fans wonder why nobody takes them seriously…

1. Choose a nice complicated mystery novel you haven’t read before. One where you’ll have to keep track of lots and lots of clues and remember who knows what when and so on.
2. Buy it as an audio book, with chapters as separate tracks.
3. Shuffle.

(B.S. Johnson wrote a book designed to be read this way, The Unfortunates. It was published with the chapters separately bound, in a box.)

Today the internal post brought me the last two homeworks from an Axiomatic Set Theory course I completed in 2004.

(Ah, nostalgia. “The idea for this construction is due to Alex Ma. The messy details and confused notation are entirely my own.”)

For the continual sipping of this pitiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpiece-point without a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel’d as Envy, or an old meager Hag over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiff but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears: They pretend ’twill keep them Waking, but we find by scurvy Experience, they sleep quietly enough after it.