Even though I knew what was going to happen, I think I enjoyed it even more this time around. There are great passages on nearly every page, but I think my favorite is this one:

“Where are my friends?” she repeated icily.

“Oh, how should I know? We were only told to feed you up and send you into the woods. No one tells us anything unless it’s ‘Mix up Life-in-a-Flask for me, Citrinitas!’ ‘Bake me a Cake of Youth, Trinny!’ ‘Grade these papers!’ ‘Watch that beaker!’ ‘A monograph on the nature of goblins’ riddles, Ci-ci!’ I swear to you, I am finished with postdoctoral work!”

Academia, it appears, is much the same in Fairyland as it is in the human world…

Downside: I have to reset them all by hand twice a year. Upside: they don’t break every time some idiot in Congress decides to change the DST rules.

Overall I’d say it’s a win.

“Well, honey,” her mother explained, “there are two types of doctors: medical doctors and smart doctors. Your father is a smart doctor.”

This is going to take a little getting used to…

I’m looking forward to the next meeting in 2 weeks! Next time we’ll be reading “Fuzzy Sets”, Lotfi A. Zadeh’s seminal 1965 paper on the mathematics of fuzzy set theory.

FA Cup - Suarez wins Cup tie for Liverpool with handballed goal

Liverpool won the game 2-1, so I thought that the word “tie” must have been a typo. But when I checked another story to find out more about Suarez’s handball, I saw this caption underneath a photo:

No chance: Alan Marriott is helpless to prevent Suarez netting the Reds’ second of the tie

Clearly, then, the Brits are using the word “tie” to mean “match”. But why? True, they use “draw” to refer to a match that ends with both teams having the same score, while Americans use “tie”. But they commonly talk about “tied scores” during games, so it’s not like the word has a completely different meaning on our side of the pond. What’s going on?

I checked a few dictionaries but none of them had that usage in their definitions of “tie”. I decided to check the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I’m able to access via Drexel’s library. The OED, of course, had the answer.

But to understand the answer, we first need to understand how the FA Cup works. In most single-elimination tournaments Americans are familiar with, such as Wimbledon and March Madness, every participant is seeded and each match is laid out in a tree. When two participants meet in a match, the winner moves on and the loser is eliminated. Draws are impossible; there is always some sort of mechanism in place to break ties.

The FA Cup, however, doesn’t work like that. First, there is no tournament tree. The pairings for each round are chosen at random, along with which team will play at home. Second, if a game ends in a draw, they don’t try to settle the match with extra time or a penalty kick shootout until they get to the semifinal and final rounds. Instead, the two teams play each other again, this time at the home field of the team which was the visitor in the first leg.

The OED says that this rematch used to be called a “cup-tie”. For example, in 1895 the Daily News reported, “The Wednesday men are noted cup-tie fighters.” (The “Wednesday men” refers to Sheffield Wednesday, a very famous and old English soccer club that won the FA Cup in 1896.) By 1905 this had begun to be shortened to simply “tie”:

Probably the Cup-‘tie’ has been evolved from the phrase ‘shooting off’ or ‘playing off a tie’ after two competitors have ‘tied’. The match between those who stand on a level gradually gets regarded as itself the ‘tie’.

As we’ve seen from the Liverpool headlines, these days “tie” is used to refer to the first leg FA Cup matches as well.

Interestingly, when “cup-tied” is used as an adjective, it means something completely different. It’s used to describe a player who’s ineligible to play in cup-ties for his current team because he’s already played in cup matches for another team earlier in the competition. Some examples: “Wakeling, being cup-tied after playing for Corinthian-Casuals, will be missed in midfield, and Richards will probably replace him” and “Jimmy Greenhoff, Manchester United’s £120,000 buy from Stoke City, is cup-tied and will not be eligible to play against Everton.”

Corinthian-Casuals, with their chocolate and pink uniforms, are my new favorite English soccer team.

Well, I wasn’t about to ignore the challenge. I called over to one of the grad students in the lab. “Hey Eric,” I asked, “vi or emacs?” (Emacs, of course, is the One True Editor.)

“Emacs!” he replied immediately.

Damn.

“Java or C++?” asked Eric.

“C++, of course!” I replied. Again we were in agreement. It was time to break out the heavy artillery.

“Perl or python?” I asked. Surely this would start a holy war. Nobody in academia likes Perl.

“Well,” said Eric, “to tell you the truth, I haven’t used either language very much.”

“Huh. OK, how about Apple or Microsoft?”

I should point out that my lab is a Windows shop. Each of us has an enormous, maxxed-out Windows box that we use to analyze stem cell videos. Eric’s the biggest Windows fan in our group, and installed Windows 8 when it was still in beta. Meanwhile I used Macs all through grad school, and I still keep my MacBook on the corner of my desk to use for email and iTunes.

“Linux!” replied Eric, surprising the hell out of me.

“I like Linux too,” I said. “But what if you had to choose between Windows or OS X?”

“Windows.”

“But OS X is Unix!”

“Do you think we could do what we do here on Apple machines?”

“No,” I admitted. “But we probably could on Linux.”

“Linux doesn’t have a driver for the 3D card I’m using.”

“Oh, good point. Guess we’re stuck with Windows then.”

And thus we agreed to agree. This business of starting holy wars is harder than I thought. I’ll have to step up my game next time.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not allowed to touch the beer.”

“Huh,” I replied, not entirely shocked by this. Purchasing alcohol in Pennsylvania presents some unique challenges. “OK, then could you at least leave some space in one of the bags, and then I’ll put the beer into the bag myself?”

“Umm…”

“OK, forget I even asked.”

I have a very interesting AI project that I have been ask to seek out very special people on and I think you may just be that. If you would like a chance to talk about this life changing, history making career opportunity and see if maybe you would be interested then please let me know, and we can talk further. Trust me you won’t be disappointed.

Somehow I get the feeling this “opportunity” involves selling herbal viagra for her clients in Nigeria.

The only catch was that I had to remember to reorder a new pass each month by 5 PM on the 4th Monday of the month. After missing a few deadlines during my first year, I decided I needed to setup an automatic reminder system. It worked really well and I never again forgot to place my order. I never got around to turning it off and, today being the 4th Monday of August, I just got my reminder:

Date: 27 Aug 2012 12:00:01 -0000
From: "order_trailpass.pl" <waltman@mawode.com>
To: Walt Mankowski <waltman@mawode.com>
Subject: Order new trailpass
   
Today is the last day to order your October Trailpass.  The
deadline is 5 PM!

Hugs,
order_trailpass.pl

Before I disable it, I thought I’d share how it works.

The tricky part is setting up the cron job. Cron lets you run a job on a specific day of the month. It also lets you run a job on a specific day of the week. It does not, however, let you combine them. Here’s what you have to do instead:

0 8 22-28 * *   if [ `date +\%a` = Mon ]; then /home/waltman/bin/order_trailpass.pl; fi

That tells cron to run the job at 8 AM on any day that could possibly be the 4th Monday of the month, namely the 22nd through the 28th. If that day turns out to actually be a Monday, then it goes and runs my reminder script. Otherwise it does nothing.

I was worried that I might miss a single reminder. For example, I might be off at a conference in a different time zone and be asleep when I got the reminder. So I set it up to bug me every 4 hours all day long:

# run at midnight then every 4 hours on the 4th Monday of the month
0 0-23/4 22-28 * *   if [ `date +\%a` = Mon ]; then /home/waltman/bin/order_trailpass.pl; fi

The order_trailpass.pl script is pretty straightforward:

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#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
    localtime(time);

my @month = qw(
    January February March
    April May June
    July August September
    October November December
);

my $next_month = $month[($mon + 2) % 12];

open QMAIL, "|/var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject"
    or die "Can't fork for qmail: $!\n";

print QMAIL <<"EOF";
From: order_trailpass.pl <waltman\@mawode.com>
To: Walt Mankowski <waltman>
Subject: Order new trailpass

Today is the last day to order your $next_month Trailpass.  The
deadline is 5 PM!

Hugs,
order_trailpass.pl

EOF

close QMAIL
    or die "sendmail didn't close nicely";

The only really tricky part is that you have to order the passes a month ahead of time. In other words, if I were to place an order today, I’d be ordering an October pass. But because the script for the October pass runs in August, I needed to add 2 to the current month. That’s what the math on line 14 does. I put that in so that if I knew I was going to be traveling that month, I could save a little money and buy weekly passes instead. The % 12 makes sure it wraps around from December to January correctly.

Oh, and obviously this script assumes you’ve got qmail installed. If you don’t, well, there are dozens of ways to send email from Perl. For something as simple as this — a plain text email and local deliver — chances are they’ll all work fine. But if I were writing this today, I would consider using rjbs’s excellent Email::Sender::Simple module.

My friend Mike runs the Atlantic City Perl Mongers. I’d been meaning to go to a meeting for a while, but it’s a long drive and it never worked out. Last night I finally had some free time and so I decided to take a little road trip and go.

AC.pm meetings are held at Linode, whose headquarters are in a small office building in Galloway Township near the Atlantic City Airport. I checked Google Maps, and the directions seemed straightforward enough:

1. Cross a bridge from Philadelphia to New Jersey.
2. Take the Atlantic City Expressway to the Garden State Parkway,
3. Take the Parkway north a few miles to Route 561.
4. Turn right on 561, and the office was a mile or two down the road.

The only thing that seemed a bit unusual was that the exit for 561 was on the left, but I’ve got a good sense of direction and I was confident I could figure it out.

I hit a lot of traffic getting through Philadelphia at rush hour, but eventually it cleared and it was smooth sailing down the AC Expressway. I took the exit to go northbound on the Parkway and started looking for a sign for Route 561. Instead, all I saw was a sign for a rest area. I passed that, and immediately started swearing.

You can see what happened on the map below. I was on the yellow road heading north, and the rest stop, the Atlantic City Service Area, is the set of rectangles just to the left of it.

View Larger Map

The Atlantic City Service Area is the craziest highway rest stop I’ve ever seen. That’s because, in addition to the typical gas station and fast food restaurants, it also has a secret exit from the Parkway! You can see it if you pull the map down. Better yet, click on the link to view a larger map to see the full extent of the craziness. Not only was there no sign for 561 on the Parkway itself in either direction, there’s not even a sign inside the rest stop. All you see as a driver is a short access road heading away from the rest area with a traffic light at the end. That light is clearly visible from the Parkway, but you can’t see it until you’ve already gone past the exit.

To make things even more fun, the Atlantic City Service Area is at mile marker 41.4. The next exit heading north on the Parkway isn’t until mile 50. That means if you miss this completely hidden exit, you’ve got to drive over 17 miles (27.5 km) to loop back around and hit it from the southbound lanes.

I finally made it to Linode and had a great time at the meeting. It was fun meeting some of the other Linode employees and getting a tour of their office. Of course this exit is well-known to all of them, and missing it is a rite of passage to anyone visiting their office for the first time from outside the area. One poor guy said he was late for his interview because of it. Mike tells me there are plans to rebuild the Route 561 interchange, such as it is, so this little piece of Weird New Jersey might not be around for too much longer.

Customer: I’d like a double espresso with hot water.

Barista: You mean an Americano?

Customer: Umm, yeah.

There are lots of other great sessions on the schedule all day long, and it’s not too late to register. There are still some slots left and it’s free to attend.

Please be upstanding for the national anthem of the United Arab Emirates.

This was followed by:

Please remain upstanding for the national anthem of Great Britain.

This sounds bizarre to my ears. Here in the US we only ever use the word “upstanding” to mean “deserving respect”, as in “an upstanding member of the community.” However, friends in the UK assure me that this is normal usage on their side of the pond.

Who knew the Olympics could be so educational?

I made two PDFs. One is the version I submitted to the library. This is in the traditional, anachronistic thesis style, where the text is double-spaced and formatted to be printed on one side of each sheet of paper. The other PDF is formatted more like a normal book, with single-spacing and different formatting for left and right pages. They both have exactly the same content; the only difference is the parameters I passed to our LaTeX style sheet.

Enjoy!

I think the reason they limit it to two days or one trial is that after the second day, you realize that even though they tell you to be there by 8:30, you don’t really need to be there until 9. They took attendance at 9 to make sure nobody decided to play hooky, and then we sat around until around 11 before I got selected for another juror panel.

This time I had a much lower number, 26. Unlike Monday, when the judge had each potential juror come up and discuss her or her issues in private with the attorneys, this time the judge did most of the voir dire by having people say their issues out loud. The 4th of July holiday was the following week, and nearly half the panel had vacation plans. I, however, did not, since I’d decided to hold off on any vacation plans until after I was done with jury duty. By the time we broke for lunch I was sure I was going to end up on the jury.

Before we left, the judge said that he was going to talk to the attorneys over lunch to see if they could speed up the jury selection process. When I got back from lunch this was apparently still going on. The doors to the courtroom were closed, and all the jurors were waiting out in the hallway.

About 20 minutes later the doors opened and a number of people left the courtroom and walked past us to go to the elevators. Shortly afterwards we were told we could enter the courtroom. We sat there for about 45 minutes, and finally the judge entered. He apologized for making us sit around so long, but he had good news: the defendant had accepted a plea deal. It turned out they’d been in negotiations for months, and he could have gotten a much better deal if he’d accepted the original offer. As it is, he’s facing up to 54 months in prison. When the judge sent us back to the jury room, I hadn’t seen so many happy people since the Phillies won the World Series back in 2008.

By the time we got back, it was already late in the day, and within a short time we were excused for the day. Since I didn’t get picked for a trial, my federal jury duty was over. When I got home, I found a report on the case online.

The following day I was supposed to report to Media for Delaware County jury duty. But when I called them up, I learned that they didn’t need any jurors that day, so I was excused. My perfect record of never serving on a jury remains intact!

It’s 2 days or 1 trial, and clearly I’m going to have to step up my game tomorrow. But even if the feds don’t want me, that’s not the end for me. On Wednesday I get to report to Media for Delaware County jury duty! (If I do end up on a jury in federal court, I can get a postponement for Delaware County.)

Since they had to shut off the water to my bathroom to stop the flooding, I decided to spend the night at a hotel in Center City.

Sigh.

And speaking of my defense, it’s scheduled for Tuesday, June 5. I’ll be spending the weekend working on my slides. Wish me luck!

Just about everything is there, but there are still a few small parts that need some work. I’ll be continuing to edit it for about another week and a half or so. I might post some updates from time to time, but the URL will stay the same. (It’s also not in the final format my committee gets, but it’s easier to read this way than when it’s double-spaced.) I’ll post the final version of the document after my defense and take down the draft.

Of course, if you spot any typos or have any comments or questions, please let me know.