It's incredibly windy up here at the minute - as in, second floor lecture theatre doors blowing about and banging, and a physical struggle to walk uphill into the wind - and the immediate ramifications were that I came home at 6:30pm to find our entire section of the road plunged into darkness. Apparently the power had gone a couple of hours previously. We found torches, lit candles, emptied our cupboards of all reasonable edibles as we didn't want to open the fridge or the freezer (breaking the thermal insulation), and invited the others round for a power-cut party! Until the electricity came back on at ten past nine, six of us sat in candlelight, eating a thoroughly unhealthy supper of crisps and biscuits and dry cereal and brownies and olives and bread and fruit, playing Consequences and listening to Pippa's battery-powered iPod.

 

And you know what? Apart from the minor inconvenience of the rest of the house being pitch black and the worry about the frozen food, it was really lovely! Nobody could sit typing at lab reports. Nobody could cook, or watch TV, or bum about on the internet. And even though Max had been going out anyway so he wasn't there for most of it, it was really nice to be forced into one room together and have to make our own electricity-free entertainment. It's not that we don't spend time like that on occasion anyway, but it's something that I wish we did more, especially during the week. We don't have a table big enough to sit us all round, so supper ends up on our laps in front of some programme on the TV that nobody's really watching but so that nobody can really talk to each other either - and then people disappear into their separate rooms to work for a lot of the time, or go out to societies or whatever. Maybe it's because I come from a very family-orientated household that I notice it so much, but for once I do understand those middle-aged Tories who lament the lack of traditional evenings round the wireless, so to speak.

 

Helen's Dad called her while she and Roz were round. She told him what she was doing - apparently his response was, "Well you can tell you're students. Most people would congregate in the house with electricity, not the one without!". He may have been right, but it's at these times that I love being a student!

 

 

Bed for me now. I've managed to pick up some virus or other, and having been awake since 5:30am with no small amount of earache/gland-ache/general congestion, the prospect of going to sleep is quite a nice one...

 

Imagine the scenario. A housemate tells you that she has fallen quite badly for a mutual close friend, and that while she does not want any engineering to go on, it would be nice if she and the friend could be left alone for a bit sometimes so that she could pluck up the courage to say something. The housemate finds these situations very difficult.

 

Do you

    a) give them some space

or b) cling like a limpet to the mutual friend on every occasion for the next three months ?

 

As a hint, a) will go down better...

 

Being engrossed in my own self-absorbed bubble as I have been of late, I managed to miss hearing about this. I feel vaguely guilty, although I'm sure I'm not the only one...

 

 

Right. Who's for taking me on?!

 

When I was little, I had one of those plastic toys where you have to hammer shapes through the appropriately shaped holes. In fact I think we've still got it, used by both my sister and my brother, and subsequently put in the 'for when toddlers come round and need entertaining' box (mainly because none of us can bear to give that sort of thing away. My beloved stacking beakers are there too!).

 

Either way, the story goes that I was once playing with this toy as a toddler while being supervised by a family friend and my grandmother. I picked up the circle (or the triangle, or something), and no doubt proceeded to attack it with great vigour with the plastic hammer - not for me the frilly-pink-doll style of upbringing. The family friend, keen as most adults are around kids of that age to further their education, asked me what the shape was. "A circle," I replied. Next came the square, and I correctly identified that too. Next came a quarter-circle - y'know, two edges at ninety degrees and a connecting arc. "And what's that, Lucy?" I was asked. "A quadrant," I replied. The family friend was apparently terribly impressed, while my grandmother sat there, caught between mirth and the smugness that her two-year-old grandchild had just one-upped an adult visitor. I don't supposed that I noticed - evidently either Mum or Dad had told me that that shape was a quadrant, just as they'd told me that this one was a triangle.

 

 

When we were in Suffolk at New Year, we went one afternoon to do a walk on Dunwich Heath. Now I could sing the praises of Dunwich Heath for a long time because it really is spectacularly beautiful (although I won't right here or right now!). There's a three-four mile round that we often do when we're over there, leading down over the heath, through some woodland, and then out round onto the coastal footpath. It's lovely, springy turf for most of the route, so quite a good walk for families as well as keener walkers. We were there as dusk approaching. It was a bitterly cold afternoon - which is unsurprising given that a chill easterly wind was blowing in straight off the sea - and as we rounded the corner, coming out from a bit of woodland with the heath rising up in front of us, we saw on the horizon no less than sixteen or seventeen deer. Some were silhouetted against the sky, the white and brown fur of the rest highlighted amongst the fading bracken. All the walkers stopped silently, caught by the beauty of the scene and not wanting to disturb such shy and magnificent creatures.

 

Two parents stopped next us, their child in a pushchair between them, and were pointing out the deer. "Look there!" whispered the mother. "Look at the cows!" - then in an undertone to the father, "We'll call them cows for him, it's easier."

 

 

This is the thing - it wouldn't have been much harder for a child of that age to process the fact that these animals were called deer. For one thing he would end up less confused about what cows look like, but for another, he would have started to gain more of an understanding of wild animals, more of an appreciation of the diversity of nature in this country. OK, so there probably haven't been many deer in his on-the-farm children's books, but isn't that all the more reason to see the real things for what they are when in the wild? As a city girl, I realise just how damn lucky I am to have seen deer at all.

 

And I'm ultimately glad of the fact that my parents didn't shy away from trying to introduce concepts such as a quadrant to me as a child. Sure, I got abuse for a good week when I used the word 'psychologically' in a Y8 RE lesson, but it was the appropriate word at the time and my education's been all the better for refusal to be daunted by words of six syllables! Maybe it's easy for me to say this with the upbringing that I've had, but I get really frustrated by this patronising assumption that you should never challenge people to learn, never take them out of their comfort zone. If you say to a child (or indeed an adult) that something is too difficult for them, too complicated for them to understand, then they'll take that at face value - and next time somebody suggests that they learn it, they'll have convinced themselves that they can't. This is no way to go through life, and if you ask me, this is where Maths teaching falls down at an early age.

 

 

I bring this up in the context of yesterday's Numerical Analysis practical. 'Practicals' involve sitting at a computer, using Maple [mathematical software] to investigate aspects of the theoretical material that we learn in lectures - basically using the computer as an advanced calculator that can deal with matrix decomposition or whatever, and taking the sweat out of calculations that would take a human hours and hours to do and that would very probably go wrong just from the sheer number of decimal points involved.

 

Yesterday, however, was the first time that we were asked to approach Maple from the point of view of a programming language, which is really what it is first and foremost. As it happens, I was all right - I like computers, I have the sort of logical brain that can deal with that sort of thing, and indeed the 'Introduction to Programming' module that I took with the Computer Science dept. last year has stood me in pretty good stead (- granted, that was Java, not Maple. But it tends to be the particular syntax that differs between languages, not the underlying concepts). A lot of people, however, really really struggled, at which point one asks why this was only being introduced three quarters of the way through the teaching year. Yes, we're mathematicians not CompScis. Yes, the point earlier on was to investigate the effects of floating point arithmetic on rounding errors, not a load of tedious coding. But had they taught us the basics of coding in Maple right from the start, I have a feeling that most of us would have had a better idea of what we've been doing at 5:15pm on a term-time Friday for the past x months. Assuming that we couldn't cope with the level of coding knowledge required has in fact backfired - because at this late stage, it's appeared to people to be a lot, lot harder. It seems a funny way to learn.

 

Our Linear Algebra lecturer, in our 5:15pm lecture today: "So in tomorrow's [non-compulsory] problems class, we'll be doing so many examples of Gram-Schmidt orthonormalisation that you'll lose the will to live."

 

Sounds like an invitation not to attend to me...!

 

The girl whose attitude to Maths/Durham I was finding frustrating a few days ago spent the whole of the lecture talking, loudly. As her housemate points out, she doesn't seem to have the concept of whispering. Now I don't find Gram-Schmidt particularly hard or indeed particularly interesting at the end of a long day either - but by talking she was distracting everyone around who was still trying to write and listen. On having it pointed it out to her by her housemate that she was being completely selfish, her word for word response was, "Why should I care?". Where do you start??

 

Tired, grumpy, tired, having to miss a Choral Soc rehearsal that I particularly wanted to go to because my housemates decided that tonight would be a good night to hold a dinner party... tired, not in the mood for said dinner party... Yes, I'm being grouchy again. But although it's left me with a massive backlog of work now, my sister and her friend (who might as well be another sister really) came up to stay for the weekend, and that was really really lovely :-) She can be a complete pain in the backside, but of all the people who I miss while away at university, Rachel tops the list by miles.

 

One of the more amusing emails I have received recently, sent to the whole of our Algebra and Number Theory lecture group at about midnight last night, reads as follows:

 

"any lonely hearts looking for it? hit me back

 

 

 

x"

 

Don't know how the lad (or indeed his mates) got access to the email address, but I looked him up on Facebook anyway, as you do! We have A+NT later... this is going to be gooood!

 

I have a potentially awkward situation on my hands - it reads as follows...

 

The group of five of us (after a little hesitation, mostly on my part, but that's another story) have decided to stay living as we are and keep this house for next year. As a result, we have paid accommodation for an entire summer up in Durham, which is quite nice! One of my housemates has an older brother also up in Durham, who has been living in college this year and who has found work up here over the summer. Not unreasonably, he has asked if he can come and live here in his brother's room, so naturally his brother has been checking with us.

 

In essence I don't have a problem with this - in fact, it would be ludicrous to pay for additional accommodation elsewhere, especially as they are not a particularly high-income family and I don't have any trust issues or anything like that. What I did say was that if he's living here for two months, please could my housemate ask him to keep the place clean and tidy? On this my housemate sort of grimaced... And I'm sorry to sound nagging and mother-hen-ish about this sort of thing, but yes, I do have a problem if he's going to come here for two months, only leaving right at the start of the new term and leaving everything in a complete mess.

 

Thing is, I know that it's not that unlikely a scenario. This particular housemate does considerably less than his fair share of tidying and cleaning, in the kitchen in particular (seriously, don't get me started on washing-up issues...), and it's often heralded with the justification "If you think this is bad you should have seen my brother's house when he was living out!". They don't have any sisters, and my housemate has explicitly said that at home it's his Mum who does everything - all the cooking, all the washing-up, all the cleaning, all the washing. Occasionally the lads have helped dry up on Christmas Day so they can open their presents sooner (his words, not mine!). Little tasks that I don't even think about like rinsing out jars and sticking them in recycling or wiping some tomato up if I spill it on the hob become incredibly labourious in his hands, and he can get quite defensive about being asked to do things. To then say that he's conscientious compared to his brother does not endear me to the prospect of having a 22-yr-old slob in the house. Two days staying over would be one thing. Two months living, rent free, is another.

 

Am I being unreasonable? I'd ask the same of any of my friends. The difficult part is going to be getting across the fact that I mean what I say without seeming anal and self-righteous about it...

 

 

(I think I'm OK writing about this on here. I've had a fairly strict policy of not using this blog to complain about my house/ housemates, simply because it's not fair - I'm much better sorting the issues out in person than I am bitching about it to the internet, especially when I'm ever aware that they or people who know them could read this. And yes, there have been a few issues, although not any major ones I'm glad to say :-) )

 

Chem Café yesterday, lecture break. Sitting with the usual lot (- Michael, Rob, Simon, Laura). Having explicitly said that he's going to try not to insult my belief in God, Michael then turned to an advert in the student magazine that we were reading and picked his next topic for generic abuse - bone marrow transplants. His talent for putting his foot in it is quite unbelievable, especially as this time I knew that it was completely unintentional. While stupidly tired, I was in a level enough mood to just let it pass :-)

 

 

No pancakes yesterday despite it being Shrove Tuesday. But we had a pancake party with t'other house about ten days ago so I don't feel that I've missed out too much, and we did have chocolate-and-marshmallow nests that Eleanor and Pippa made with the start of a large unwanted box of Shredded Wheat (a substitution on the Tesco order that no-one noticed in time to send back)!

 

And so starts Lent. Instead of 'giving up chocolate' or whatever, which I know won't happen, I have decided to make my un-religiously-oriented Lenten goal to have another go at some of the New Year's resolutions I made in a fit of optimism a month or so ago. The one I've been best at, actually, is the utilising-my-gaps-at-the-Science-Site one. But a little, erm, work is still needed on some of the others...!

 

Something that annoyed me today (or rather someone. But it is the principle that annoyed me rather than them in particular): Why, if you don't like Maths and you don't like the North of England, would you come to do a Maths degree in Durham? Think about it for a minute.

 

This person was complaining that she doesn't like the Geordie accent and that she doesn't trust any of the 'locals'. On being quizzed further, it transpired that she has never bothered to try and actually talk to one the locals, she just knows that she doesn't like them and 'can't' (read 'won't make any effort to') understand them. Similarly she does not make a particular effort to talk to other students outside her particular circle of friends, and has made it quite clear that she is here to get a good, respected degree before returning to her home area to start climbing the career ladder. Her intended career, while incredibly well suited to her abilities, has nothing to do with Maths - indeed she can't stand Maths, but she refuses to change to a more relevant course because she thinks that Maths will look better on an application form. Good luck to her! But what's the point?!

 

And I have heard a lot of people complaining about the Northern accent thing, actually, along with the fact that it gets quite cold, that you can't just nip to London for an evening, and that Waitrose is set to close because (surprise, surprise) the locals and indeed most of the student population can't afford it.

 

I fully realise that people change, that things don't turn out like you expected. I have particular sympathy for that argument when it applies to degree courses and the like because which one of us fully could predict the nature of what we'd be doing two or three years down the line? What really annoys me though is the proportion of students who treat Durham as an extension of their own narrow worlds, and who wish to have no contact with the area or people around them - and yes, it is in the most part southerners (although not most of southerners, I'm glad to say. What boggles me is that these people have the intelligence to get into a reasonably good university but they can't work out that by going North things might get a little... northern) - and also people's inability to make the best of a bad situation.

 

I came across this Facebook group the other day. A lot of the discussion has descended into a typical slanging match, but sheesh, do I have sympathy with the title... and I'm not even Northern!

 

 

*sigh* I'm tired. And grumpy. And achy. You might be able to tell.

 

On the plus side, Michael apologised today, and I spent a lovely abuse-free hour (admittedly without Rob. But even he didn't try to goad me when I saw him briefly at the start of Linear Algebra). I think the apology was less for the mocking-your-entire-belief-system-and-core-values and more for the grabbing-onto-your-bag-and-swinging-you-round-when-your-back-and-hip-were-already-in-quite-a-lot-of-pain, but it's a start. I actually like both Michael and Rob a lot. They just go too far occasionally.

 

Here's something which confuses me. What is the point of getting so drunk of a night that you can't remember anything about it the next day?

 

I can understand drinking alcohol 'cos it tastes nice. I can understand drinking to gain confidence, to lower one's inhibitions, or to relax if that's how alcohol works for you. I can even understand the attraction of getting drunk and of the risk of not knowing where the night will take you (- not a risk I'm very good at taking). But what is the point of deliberately getting so drunk that you literally can't remember anything afterwards? Sure, you might have had fun at the time but isn't that just an evening wasted in the grand scheme of things?

 

 

Something else which confuses me is jars of artificial-looking pasta sauce. But we'll leave that for another day...