So, NPR decided to do a story on CS. I am going to write CS here for my research field. The first word is compressed. The second is sensing. I just broke them up because of the target audience for my blog doesn't really include my fellow researchers googling the term. (By the way, if you google "Fettercairn 1824" this blog is on page 7. I run analytics that tell me how people get to the site which made me try that search. Bruichladdich has also brought someone here already.)
Anyway, here's a 5 minute segment from All Things Considered that is about CS. It might help explain what it is that I am doing.
Showing posts with label Maths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maths. Show all posts
Saturday, 29 May 2010
Sunday, 11 April 2010
A-bel is better than No-bel!
On March 31, I got up early, walked in a snowstorm to Bubaccar’s flat and waited outside. Together we road a bus to Heriot-Watt University. It was funny to hear the University of Edinburgh students describe the remoteness of Harriot Watt, a university of seven thousand students on the edge of Edinburgh. I invited them to Grinnell. Anyway, Bubaccar is a Ph.D. student and helped organize the Edinburgh Student Chapter of SIAM (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics). He then also helped organize a one day conference. They had two wonderful keynote speakers. One is so good at math, he was knighted. Sir David Wallace is the director of the Newton Institute at Cambridge. The Institute serves as a host for six-month themed research programs and amazing results have been formulated and announced there. For example, when Wiles announce his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, it was at the Newton Institute. Sir David said "...after three days of lectures, he looked at the board and said, 'I think I'll stop there.' There was a second of silence and then an explosion of applause!"
Later that day, I went to a talk by Jean-Pierre Serre, a very famous number theorist. He was introduced by Sir Michael Atiyah. Obviously, Sir Michael is also so good at math that he was knighted. In fact, very recently his knighthood was promoted. However, the impressive part of this duo is that they are two of the three people who have won both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize. These two prizes are considered roughly equivalent to the Nobel Prize for which mathematics is not a prize category. The Fields Medal is for amazing singular accomplishments (a la the Nobel) but pays very little. The Abel prize is also awarded by the King of Norway and pays roughly $900,000 (a la the Nobel). So, winning both of these awards is just plain amazing. To be in the room two of the three who have done this, that was a rare thing and very cool.
A comment about Europe and science: in Europe, science is appreciated in a different manner than in the USA. Strangely, with all of our innovation, we seem to think of science as “hard” or “nerdy” rather than challenging and beautiful. Should it be so shocking that the average American student isn’t exceptionally proficient in the sciences? Which model do you think promotes a career in science better: the Presidential Medal of Science or Knighthood? Seriously, most of you just thought, “We have a Presidential Medal of Science?” But Sir David and Sir Michael are often invited to State affairs because of the status in society which was given to them because of their contributions to science. We can’t fix science education in the USA with a cool prize, but we could certainly make strides toward promoting science in a more positive, inviting fashion.
PS: I have only five more years of eligibility for a Fields Medal. I really think I could have won it this year if I hadn’t spent so much time writing this blog and doing push-ups.
PSS: Today’s title must be attributed to my Ph.D. advisor, Guido Weiss who is a master of awful jokes. He busted this awful joke out when introducing Sir Michael at a public lecture in St. Louis a few years ago.
Later that day, I went to a talk by Jean-Pierre Serre, a very famous number theorist. He was introduced by Sir Michael Atiyah. Obviously, Sir Michael is also so good at math that he was knighted. In fact, very recently his knighthood was promoted. However, the impressive part of this duo is that they are two of the three people who have won both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize. These two prizes are considered roughly equivalent to the Nobel Prize for which mathematics is not a prize category. The Fields Medal is for amazing singular accomplishments (a la the Nobel) but pays very little. The Abel prize is also awarded by the King of Norway and pays roughly $900,000 (a la the Nobel). So, winning both of these awards is just plain amazing. To be in the room two of the three who have done this, that was a rare thing and very cool.
A comment about Europe and science: in Europe, science is appreciated in a different manner than in the USA. Strangely, with all of our innovation, we seem to think of science as “hard” or “nerdy” rather than challenging and beautiful. Should it be so shocking that the average American student isn’t exceptionally proficient in the sciences? Which model do you think promotes a career in science better: the Presidential Medal of Science or Knighthood? Seriously, most of you just thought, “We have a Presidential Medal of Science?” But Sir David and Sir Michael are often invited to State affairs because of the status in society which was given to them because of their contributions to science. We can’t fix science education in the USA with a cool prize, but we could certainly make strides toward promoting science in a more positive, inviting fashion.
PS: I have only five more years of eligibility for a Fields Medal. I really think I could have won it this year if I hadn’t spent so much time writing this blog and doing push-ups.
PSS: Today’s title must be attributed to my Ph.D. advisor, Guido Weiss who is a master of awful jokes. He busted this awful joke out when introducing Sir Michael at a public lecture in St. Louis a few years ago.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Blogging is hard.
I guess blogging isn't hard if you are doing anything interesting. I'm doing things that I find interesting, but I can imagine they won't make for good blogging material. I am working a whole heck of a lot, which might just be a reflection of inefficiency. I'm learning this new programming language for GPUs which is based on C. Problem is, I didn't know C either. But I am now making reasonable headway. My goal is that I will have a program which performs Iterated Hard Threshholding on the GPU by the end of the week.
The Heatherlea has had some turnover. Rad, the polish guy, and Elodie, the french girl, have both moved out. Cat, an Australian girl, and Essam, an Egyptian - UK resident, moved in back in February. Essam was on faculty at a University in Glasgow and then moved to the University of Edinburgh in the business school. His family is in Glasgow. He commuted for three years and then decided he wasn't going home during the week. Afterall, he has to cross the entire country to go from Glasgow to Edinburgh. If you live in a major US city, it probably takes you longer to get to work than it would take to drive from Glasgow to Edinburgh. The train is 105 minutes. Cat is a young lady who just doesn't really want life to start yet so she's globetrotting. I would guess her life is similar to the life of our blog follower Elpeebee after his triumphant days at Emory.
Very recently (last two weeks?) a Japanese girl moved in, and I think her name is Chica. Her boyfriend is around often. Two nights this week, I made myself some dinner and ate it in the kitchen while they chatted each other up. It is the most amazing conversation: Chica speaks Japanese while Boyfriend speaks English. If they really want to make fun of each other (or maybe me) then they use the other person's language. At one point, Chica asked Boyfriend to get something and was trying to explain where it was. He was aimlessly shuffling around the kitchen. It was very bizarre to witness because I know where things are in the kitchen, but I had no clue if he was getting closer. I finally snapped, asked what he was looking for, and directed him to it. It was clearly not that he didn't understand Chica, I think Chica was saying something like, "No over there."
Anyway, I asked them about this and they both said that they understood the other language perfectly, but when they speak it they slow down their conversation. I can't imagine my brain working that well. Later I find out that Boyfriend has done this his entire life as his parents only speak Icelandic to him and he only replies in English. What a weird set of languages to know: English, Icelandic, and Japanese.
On that note, I am working diligently on my bilingual quest as I now understand both English (US) and English (UK), although I usually only speak English (US). {If you don't think these are different languages, look at the language options on your Facebook page.}
The Heatherlea has had some turnover. Rad, the polish guy, and Elodie, the french girl, have both moved out. Cat, an Australian girl, and Essam, an Egyptian - UK resident, moved in back in February. Essam was on faculty at a University in Glasgow and then moved to the University of Edinburgh in the business school. His family is in Glasgow. He commuted for three years and then decided he wasn't going home during the week. Afterall, he has to cross the entire country to go from Glasgow to Edinburgh. If you live in a major US city, it probably takes you longer to get to work than it would take to drive from Glasgow to Edinburgh. The train is 105 minutes. Cat is a young lady who just doesn't really want life to start yet so she's globetrotting. I would guess her life is similar to the life of our blog follower Elpeebee after his triumphant days at Emory.
Very recently (last two weeks?) a Japanese girl moved in, and I think her name is Chica. Her boyfriend is around often. Two nights this week, I made myself some dinner and ate it in the kitchen while they chatted each other up. It is the most amazing conversation: Chica speaks Japanese while Boyfriend speaks English. If they really want to make fun of each other (or maybe me) then they use the other person's language. At one point, Chica asked Boyfriend to get something and was trying to explain where it was. He was aimlessly shuffling around the kitchen. It was very bizarre to witness because I know where things are in the kitchen, but I had no clue if he was getting closer. I finally snapped, asked what he was looking for, and directed him to it. It was clearly not that he didn't understand Chica, I think Chica was saying something like, "No over there."
Anyway, I asked them about this and they both said that they understood the other language perfectly, but when they speak it they slow down their conversation. I can't imagine my brain working that well. Later I find out that Boyfriend has done this his entire life as his parents only speak Icelandic to him and he only replies in English. What a weird set of languages to know: English, Icelandic, and Japanese.
On that note, I am working diligently on my bilingual quest as I now understand both English (US) and English (UK), although I usually only speak English (US). {If you don't think these are different languages, look at the language options on your Facebook page.}
Thursday, 18 March 2010
48 Billion Calculations Per Second
Now we know how blogs die ... I hope someone comes back and reads this. Blogs die when they get dormant and people stop checking on them. I had a bad run there. The fact is I was traveling for most of the three weeks. Now, I'm settled back down in Edinburgh. Last night I didn't drink any whisky, but I did have a McEwans70, a Spanish red, and a red from South Africa. I went to a dinner with the optimization group: smoked salmon, rump steak, panacotta! Very lovely. I was reminded why my wife loves Europe. The food is very good, but most importantly, they think of fries (chips, pommes frites) as classy enough to serve with steak.
I am involved in an adventure where I am trying to write source code for doing large scale calculations on the graphics card in your computer. This is taking a wacky amount of time as only a programmer should be attempting such a ridiculous undertaking. I am very far from a programmer/developer, but I am having a lot of fun. Today, I got someone else's program and my laptop was doing calculations at 48 giga-flops (floating point operations per second). That was for geeks. If it meant nothing to you, let me describe it a different way. My laptop computer was doing
48,000,000,000
single precision calculations per second.
Your computer has a graphics card, technically a graphical processing unit (GPU), which does lots of calculations to display your graphics. It does them very fast and many of them at the same time. Now all a GPU can do is simple calculations. A central processing unit (CPU), your computer's brain that you might call "the processor", can do much more complicated things. But, hey, if you want to multiply and add about 80 trillion numbers, you should do that on a GPU!
If you can watch HD on your computer, the graphics card is pretty good. My laptop has a pretty nice GPU, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M. It has 48 cores on it. So, when I send calculations over to the GPU, it is like using 48 CPUs simultaneously. That's in my laptop. We are trying to get all of our code ready for the arrival of a new machine in late April. It will have multiple, very accurate GPUs designed precisely for this purpose and should perform at roughly 2 TERA FLOPS. That means this computer, which will be a desktop, not a supercomputer, will do
2,000,000,000,000
double precision operations per second. It will cost roughly $10,000. In contrast, the fastest supercomputer in the world today, with 224,162 CPUs and located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, which presumably cost significantly more, can do only 1000 times as many calculations per second.
(Single precision versus double precision is about accuracy and I list it only for those who care. A single precision number is accurate up to 8 decimal places and a double precision number is accurate up to 16 decimal places. So one double precision calculation is 100,000,000 times as accurate as one single-precision calculation.)
Update: I'm at 615 pushups. (A very small number for this post.)
I am involved in an adventure where I am trying to write source code for doing large scale calculations on the graphics card in your computer. This is taking a wacky amount of time as only a programmer should be attempting such a ridiculous undertaking. I am very far from a programmer/developer, but I am having a lot of fun. Today, I got someone else's program and my laptop was doing calculations at 48 giga-flops (floating point operations per second). That was for geeks. If it meant nothing to you, let me describe it a different way. My laptop computer was doing
48,000,000,000
single precision calculations per second.
Your computer has a graphics card, technically a graphical processing unit (GPU), which does lots of calculations to display your graphics. It does them very fast and many of them at the same time. Now all a GPU can do is simple calculations. A central processing unit (CPU), your computer's brain that you might call "the processor", can do much more complicated things. But, hey, if you want to multiply and add about 80 trillion numbers, you should do that on a GPU!
If you can watch HD on your computer, the graphics card is pretty good. My laptop has a pretty nice GPU, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M. It has 48 cores on it. So, when I send calculations over to the GPU, it is like using 48 CPUs simultaneously. That's in my laptop. We are trying to get all of our code ready for the arrival of a new machine in late April. It will have multiple, very accurate GPUs designed precisely for this purpose and should perform at roughly 2 TERA FLOPS. That means this computer, which will be a desktop, not a supercomputer, will do
2,000,000,000,000
double precision operations per second. It will cost roughly $10,000. In contrast, the fastest supercomputer in the world today, with 224,162 CPUs and located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, which presumably cost significantly more, can do only 1000 times as many calculations per second.
(Single precision versus double precision is about accuracy and I list it only for those who care. A single precision number is accurate up to 8 decimal places and a double precision number is accurate up to 16 decimal places. So one double precision calculation is 100,000,000 times as accurate as one single-precision calculation.)
Update: I'm at 615 pushups. (A very small number for this post.)
Monday, 22 February 2010
Crossing the Street
I had a long weekend working on a paper that I submitted today. It's just a conference proceeding paper which for a mathematician means a paper that isn't all that amazing. Mine is cute; it says something interesting, but it isn't very sophisticated. In fact, there aren't really any new ideas in the paper, just a means for interpreting some work and stating what the latest conditions say.
Anyway, in the UK people are very organized. At a bus stop, the "queue up." Seriously, they're not just all standing around at the bus stop even if it is just two people; they stand in a line. (So, no wonder they need to have so many different kinds of whisky, they can't even relax while waiting for a bus.)
One serious positive of all this organization is the way cross walks work, at least in Edinburgh. Traffic light goes green and the cars go with the standard rotation. But then, when it is safe to cross, no cars are moving in any direction. This means you can diagonally cross the street. Ahhhhhhhh! Every single time I am crossing a street diagonally on a green crossing sign I think, "Why do I have to be on a small island with people driving on the wrong side of the street to get to cross diagonally."
Anyway, in the UK people are very organized. At a bus stop, the "queue up." Seriously, they're not just all standing around at the bus stop even if it is just two people; they stand in a line. (So, no wonder they need to have so many different kinds of whisky, they can't even relax while waiting for a bus.)
One serious positive of all this organization is the way cross walks work, at least in Edinburgh. Traffic light goes green and the cars go with the standard rotation. But then, when it is safe to cross, no cars are moving in any direction. This means you can diagonally cross the street. Ahhhhhhhh! Every single time I am crossing a street diagonally on a green crossing sign I think, "Why do I have to be on a small island with people driving on the wrong side of the street to get to cross diagonally."
Monday, 15 February 2010
Swiss Wrap-up
The meeting ended, with yet another lovely three course meal served with a desire to be perfect. I had mentioned that Switzerland was expensive, and a colleague replied, “Switzerland is expensive, but you always get the service you’re paying for.” The best way to visit Switzerland, it turns out, is when the EU is paying for your lodging and meals, and the National Science Foundation your airfare.
The weather was not ideal for amazing Alpine views, but it was easy to get the point. Below are a few photos.
After three hours on a train, two flights with a lay-over, and a taxi, I made it home on Friday night. The meeting was very interesting and I began a collaboration with two electrical engineers. Hopefully we can get something out of the project we started during the meeting.
There are many wonderful things about being an academic, in particular a mathematician. One example is a meeting in Switzerland. But each night at dinner, I was reminded of my absolute favorite part of being active in mathematics research. The first night, my dinner table was occupied by an Italian, two Iranians, an Israeli, and me, an American. Think about the power of science in that context. Of the 19 people at this meeting, the participants claimed nationalities from Belgium, France, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Serbia, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States. Now that’s a dinner party.
Now it's picture time. When I got on the slopes, I realized I had forgotten my camera, so there are no skiing pictures. (Actually, I think I was still subcontiously contemplating never telling anyone I went skiing with inspiration taken from the pacifist Swiss.)
First, this is the hotel.
My room came with turn down service. They even came in once it was dark to turn on a light for you. (The first day I was confused; I was certain I had turned the lights off.)
This was the view from my room the first day. It snowed and was cloudy the whole time.
The second day, you could see a bit more into the valley.
I tried to capture the mountains across the way, but the camera couldn't really distinguish the mountains from the clouds. This is a doctored version of the photo so you can see the mountains.
Here are some other pictures from off my balcony. I love the houses.
In Austria and Switzerland, they love wood. They never paint it. If it is made of wood, it looks like wood. And they don't go through a big hassle of making it all smooth. The wood looks like wood. Here are some examples:
My room
The meeting room
The restaraunt (I apparently did not take a picture of the very intricate woodworking above the tables we sat at each night.)
the bar
Oh yeah, and look back at the picture of the hotel.
Finally, I snapped this photo on the train down the mountain. I post it here because of the cool effect. If you look carefully in the "sky" you can see me taking the photo. What you can't make out, is I'm sitting with an Iranian, or that strangely, the woman across the aisle is holding a fish bowl, whispering to the fish for the entire hour.
The weather was not ideal for amazing Alpine views, but it was easy to get the point. Below are a few photos.
After three hours on a train, two flights with a lay-over, and a taxi, I made it home on Friday night. The meeting was very interesting and I began a collaboration with two electrical engineers. Hopefully we can get something out of the project we started during the meeting.
There are many wonderful things about being an academic, in particular a mathematician. One example is a meeting in Switzerland. But each night at dinner, I was reminded of my absolute favorite part of being active in mathematics research. The first night, my dinner table was occupied by an Italian, two Iranians, an Israeli, and me, an American. Think about the power of science in that context. Of the 19 people at this meeting, the participants claimed nationalities from Belgium, France, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Serbia, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States. Now that’s a dinner party.
Now it's picture time. When I got on the slopes, I realized I had forgotten my camera, so there are no skiing pictures. (Actually, I think I was still subcontiously contemplating never telling anyone I went skiing with inspiration taken from the pacifist Swiss.)
First, this is the hotel.
My room came with turn down service. They even came in once it was dark to turn on a light for you. (The first day I was confused; I was certain I had turned the lights off.)
This was the view from my room the first day. It snowed and was cloudy the whole time.
The second day, you could see a bit more into the valley.
I tried to capture the mountains across the way, but the camera couldn't really distinguish the mountains from the clouds. This is a doctored version of the photo so you can see the mountains.
Here are some other pictures from off my balcony. I love the houses.
In Austria and Switzerland, they love wood. They never paint it. If it is made of wood, it looks like wood. And they don't go through a big hassle of making it all smooth. The wood looks like wood. Here are some examples:
My room
The meeting room
The restaraunt (I apparently did not take a picture of the very intricate woodworking above the tables we sat at each night.)
the bar
Oh yeah, and look back at the picture of the hotel.
Finally, I snapped this photo on the train down the mountain. I post it here because of the cool effect. If you look carefully in the "sky" you can see me taking the photo. What you can't make out, is I'm sitting with an Iranian, or that strangely, the woman across the aisle is holding a fish bowl, whispering to the fish for the entire hour.
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
“Well, I guess we’ll have to meet in Switzerland”
I haven’t posted in a few days, but I should be excused. It has been quite a busy few days. First of all, I worked all day Saturday and Sunday so that we could a different paper back to the editor, this time to SIAM Review. (SIAM is the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.) Most importantly, I had to plan for the Super Bowl, which was on TV here from 11:00pm – 3:30 am. The Grey Horse wouldn’t be open at those hours. More about the Super Bowl in a subsequent post.
Then, on Monday, you see I had to sleep for most of the day after the Super Bowl. When we lived in Germany, the US Army always gave us Super Bowl Monday off. I was pretty sure no one would care (or even notice) if I took most of Super Bowl Monday off. Nonetheless, I was in the office by half noon (12:30) working some more on the SIAM Review article and preparing for a very important meeting this week.
You see, this week I am at a brainstorming meeting. We are meeting to discuss research ideas and directions for analysis dictionary learning. I know nothing about this subject, but was invited along. The hard part is, during the last meeting, when discussing the venue for the next meeting, they were hoping for something more interesting than London. One of the main guys on the grant suggested he host the meeting near Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Someone asked precisely where, and he said a ski lodge. At that point, the head of the grant announced, “Well, I guess we’ll have to meet in Switzerland,” and they settled on the mountain resort town of Villars, Switzerland. If it wasn’t already dark here, I’d take a picture of the view out my window. So, I’m in Switzerland after two planes and two trains and many hours of travel. The venue for this meeting is, well, how should I describe this… ridiculous; it’s Switzerland.
Best part of French speaking areas: saying my own name. Every time I say my name, someone looks at a list, and then looks at me like I am stupid. They ask me again, I say my name “Jeff Blanchard (blan-churd)”, and they look over the list a second time. Now they’re convinced I am not on the list, so I either point to my name or say it the way they read it.
“Oh,” they say, “zshe freigh blaughn –shawd.”
I reply, “Yes, indeed, Jeff Blanchard.”
One time, at a hotel in San Malo, France, this exchange took place. Then, the woman behind the counter laughs a bit, takes out her wallet, shows me an ID card on which her last name was Blanchard. Of course, she pronounced it blaughn shawd. Every morning, she made a big deal announcing my French name the first time I saw her. (That was funny. Here, they seem to just think I am so stupid I don’t know my own name.)
Then, on Monday, you see I had to sleep for most of the day after the Super Bowl. When we lived in Germany, the US Army always gave us Super Bowl Monday off. I was pretty sure no one would care (or even notice) if I took most of Super Bowl Monday off. Nonetheless, I was in the office by half noon (12:30) working some more on the SIAM Review article and preparing for a very important meeting this week.
You see, this week I am at a brainstorming meeting. We are meeting to discuss research ideas and directions for analysis dictionary learning. I know nothing about this subject, but was invited along. The hard part is, during the last meeting, when discussing the venue for the next meeting, they were hoping for something more interesting than London. One of the main guys on the grant suggested he host the meeting near Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Someone asked precisely where, and he said a ski lodge. At that point, the head of the grant announced, “Well, I guess we’ll have to meet in Switzerland,” and they settled on the mountain resort town of Villars, Switzerland. If it wasn’t already dark here, I’d take a picture of the view out my window. So, I’m in Switzerland after two planes and two trains and many hours of travel. The venue for this meeting is, well, how should I describe this… ridiculous; it’s Switzerland.
Best part of French speaking areas: saying my own name. Every time I say my name, someone looks at a list, and then looks at me like I am stupid. They ask me again, I say my name “Jeff Blanchard (blan-churd)”, and they look over the list a second time. Now they’re convinced I am not on the list, so I either point to my name or say it the way they read it.
“Oh,” they say, “zshe freigh blaughn –shawd.”
I reply, “Yes, indeed, Jeff Blanchard.”
One time, at a hotel in San Malo, France, this exchange took place. Then, the woman behind the counter laughs a bit, takes out her wallet, shows me an ID card on which her last name was Blanchard. Of course, she pronounced it blaughn shawd. Every morning, she made a big deal announcing my French name the first time I saw her. (That was funny. Here, they seem to just think I am so stupid I don’t know my own name.)
Saturday, 6 February 2010
"He's British."
A colleague, Andrew, and I have a written a letter to the editor of Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis (ACHA is the leading journal in our area of mathematics, which is called the same thing) detailing a very common misconception in our field that seems to be popping up in, unfortunately, ever single paper on a particular topic. Journals such as this have an editorial staff that consists almost completely of volunteers who are primarily mathematicians from academics who serve on the editorial staff as a “service” to the mathematics community. When you write a paper and submit it to a journal, it is first read by one of these editors, and then sent out to other volunteer referees. They read it, check the math, and decide if it is worthy of publishing in the journal. This takes a while, roughly a year from start to finish. Anyway, we got our letter back with a friendly review asking us to address a few points.
Andrew is a PhD student and therefore shares an office. I am a visitor and therefore share an office. We decided one day to meet about revising the paper with the referee comments in mind. In the center of The King’s Buildings (the awesome name of the campus on which The School of Mathematics resides) is essentially a student union known as KB House. The best part of this place is that they have 9 beers on tap. The bar is also a coffee shop and serves some food. The worst part of this place is the food.
So we had a table and I went and ordered a Panini. The chap taking my order seemed very put off by the fact that I was ordering food. It was not really lunch time so I figured this was the problem. When my Panini was ready, he didn’t say anything at all, just set it down on the counter and took my “your order is ready” beeper. Hmmmm. Andrew and I talked for about an hour, working out the details of when a certain condition could be useful. When leaving, Andrew and I put our dirty plates and such on the counter and Andrew gave the usual, “Cheers!” to the guy behind the bar. The reaction was a head nod, possibly with a mumbled return cheers, but certainly nothing like thanks for brining your dishes up and spending your money in our place.
As we walked out, I said to Andrew, “Gosh, that guy sure was angry. He was angry that I ordered a Panini, angry that he had to make it and serve it to me, and he seemed angry even that we put our plates on the counter.” Andrew just started laughing. Then Andrew says, “He’s not angry, Jeff; he’s British.”
Andrew is a PhD student and therefore shares an office. I am a visitor and therefore share an office. We decided one day to meet about revising the paper with the referee comments in mind. In the center of The King’s Buildings (the awesome name of the campus on which The School of Mathematics resides) is essentially a student union known as KB House. The best part of this place is that they have 9 beers on tap. The bar is also a coffee shop and serves some food. The worst part of this place is the food.
So we had a table and I went and ordered a Panini. The chap taking my order seemed very put off by the fact that I was ordering food. It was not really lunch time so I figured this was the problem. When my Panini was ready, he didn’t say anything at all, just set it down on the counter and took my “your order is ready” beeper. Hmmmm. Andrew and I talked for about an hour, working out the details of when a certain condition could be useful. When leaving, Andrew and I put our dirty plates and such on the counter and Andrew gave the usual, “Cheers!” to the guy behind the bar. The reaction was a head nod, possibly with a mumbled return cheers, but certainly nothing like thanks for brining your dishes up and spending your money in our place.
As we walked out, I said to Andrew, “Gosh, that guy sure was angry. He was angry that I ordered a Panini, angry that he had to make it and serve it to me, and he seemed angry even that we put our plates on the counter.” Andrew just started laughing. Then Andrew says, “He’s not angry, Jeff; he’s British.”
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