Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
August 2010
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Bad pun 2

In an ironic twist, it has been discovered that the aliens from the planet that circles Vega — in the constellation Lyra — are, in fact, rabid carnivores.

(Okay, that’s slightly obscure and really pushing it. Sorry. A bit. […]

Horatio Hornblower for PM

I have just spent a couple of months on a leisurely and interrupted re-reading of the Hornblower novels of C.S. Forester, having last (and first) read them nearly four years ago. (One volume is stained with tell-tale red dust, which reveals that I read it at the 2007 Scout Jamboree, held at Elmore during the peak […]

In the footsteps of Burke and Wills … kind of

Last Friday was the 150th anniversary of the departure of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, famous in Australia not so much for what they did achieve (completing the first south to north crossing of mainland Australia) as for what they didn’t achieve (completing the return north to south crossing without dying). They left Melbourne on […]

Gastronomic reminiscing 1

A long time ago one of my Canadian friends asked me to provide some data for her Masters thesis concerning the role of food in shaping identity and relationships and memories and … well … a whole bunch of other neo-Jungian (or something!) stuff that I didn’t entirely understand about the social role of recipes. Anyway, […]

12 of 12, August 2010 (the 12th 12 of 12)

An ordinary work day, with some other odds and ends squished in, and then circumstances conspired — relatively dramatically — to prevent me from getting to the Scout AGM that I was supposed to be running. So here’s the day: not quite the celebratory twelfth 12 of 12 I might have wanted, but the set of […]

A geomorphic intrusion of the upper cleft palate*

There was another good Scout camp this weekend, with the usual collection of amusements, activities, achievements and so forth.

One of the highlights, for me, was the half-day leisurely hike we did on Saturday to a gully in the bush a couple of kilometres from the campsite. I’ll confess there were a couple of geocaches in the […]

Axioms for technology

1. If everything is working fine, then it won’t be after you upgrade.

2. There WILL come a point when you cannot put off upgrading any longer.

Theorem: If everything is working fine then there WILL come a point where everything is not working fine.

Proof: If everything is working fine, then Axiom 2 says there will come a […]