In order to make machine readable cassettes, the user had to use a very sensitive tape recorder. Besides the recorders, users also had to buy media, which was way more expensive than standard floppy disks.
Sorry- that wasn't the case. Commodity standard cassette recorders worked really well for storing Integer BASIC and machine language code and they used ordinary cassette tapes that were way way cheaper than floppies, particularly at that time.
It's always depressing when a news source happens to write about something that you know about (in this case, National Science Foundation funding) and they muddle up many of the facts- it gives you less confidence when you read stuff they write about with which you are not so familiar. In this case, I note after a quick check some errors about the NSF funding:
From the article: Brent, who received a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop Qualrus
According to Brent's departmental web page he intends to apply for an NSF award- there is a big difference between applying and getting those awards- those are very hard to get. His personal webpage makes no mention of NSF funding, and an search on the NSF award search site shows no such award. It does appear that there was an old $99,900 NSF award to the company Idea Works where he is president (same address as his home address, BTW), but that award lists someone else as the principal investigator and yet someone else as the former principal investigator, and seems to be for a kind-of related project on coding data. I'm not sure what the story is, but it is clear to me that at least some of the facts are wrong.
Professors get paid over $70,000 a year, some over $100,000 a year, they work 20 hours a week, and they have job security and a union.
Well, there are some professors that meet that description, but at a reasonable university, those tend to be in the minority. At a reasonable university, most faculty work more like 60-80 hours a week, particularly if they are active in research. I certainly have pulled many more all-nighters as a professor than I did as a student and I pulled a lot of them as a student. A few things that students tend to overlook:
Usually, students have a choice about professors and courses and in my experience, don't sufficiently take advantage of that choice. A reasonable strategy is to "shop around" and visit multiple sections of a course, and choose a professor who seems engaging and valuable. If there is no such professor, it may make more sense to concentrate on something else and to wait for that course in another term. It may make the first two weeks of the term very busy, going to lots of extra classes, but it can be an excellent investment.
Short term concerns about which professor is the easiest are often overvalued compared to which professors do a better job getting their students to understand. Don't complain about how lousy your professors are if you are always taking the easiest route. Consider the source when taking recommendations about which professor is "good"- if it's from a student who doesn't wan't classwork to make a dent in social activities, keep that in mind.
You may have to strategize to get the really good professors. Research superstars do not always make great teachers, but often they can do a great job conveying the important notions, and research superstars tend to have reduced teaching loads. If you are choosing instructors who are teaching four or five classes a term, they are more likely to be less engaged in research and perhaps more likely to be overwhelmed by or disengaged from their increased teaching obligation as well.
Pick your university wisely, if you have a choice. One of the key variables that many people underestimate is how important strong classmates are. You can have the best professor in the world, with one strong student and nineteen weaker students (poorly prepared, missing prerequisites, distracted by other attractions, unwilling to work hard...) and the class may end up being not so useful for the strong student, simply because the choice is to have 19 people are lost and one person understanding, or 19 people kind of understanding and one person who is bored. At universities where teaching evaluations matter (most places they matter at least somewhat), the choice for the professor in that case is usually to reduce expectations and try and make the class valuable for most people, even if the class will end up being not so useful for the strong student.
There are terrible professors and great professors at every university- the fractions may change from place to place, but with some seeking out and strategy, usually it's possible to do well.
I for one welcome our new robotic theorum proving overlords.
You may find some agreement with some of Rutgers University math prof Doron Zeilberger'sopinions, particularly Opinion 36: Don't Ask: What Can The Computer do for ME?, But Rather: What CAN I do for the COMPUTER? where he suggests that eventually, computers may be doing the research in mathematics. There is a great line in there where he compares proving theorems by hand to jogging- yes, it may be reasonable, but a better way of getting someplace is to use a car/computer... If you get a chance to hear him speak, he is hilarious, BTW.
Actually, the proofs under discussion are not generated by a computer nor do they use "computer reasoning systems" like Prolog. These are computer-aided proofs, where the outline of the general argument is constucted by a (human) mathematician, but some of the details are reduced to computations, which are done by computer. I don't know in what language these particular computations were done, but I know that the computations for the computer-aided proof of the double-bubble conjecture was done in C++, and the source code is available if you want to have a look. I am familiar with other such computer-aided proofs that use a diverse set of languages, including C, assembly, Perl, GAP, Magnus, Mathematica, AXIOM, and many others. Mathematicians, like other researchers, tend to have diverse opinions about what suitable computational tools are and also tend to use the tools with which they are most familiar, even if that tool is not really optimal for that computational task.
There have been a number of times when due to moving, living in a different state than my spouse, etc. we had to file taxes in two, sometime three states and even sometimes two municipalities in the same year. Different states and municipalities have different ways of taxing part-time and non-residents, and in every case in our experience (seven states total, not counting those that have no state income tax), the formula has been such that it was more taxes than if we had been a full-year resident of each state for that portion of the income. That is, if it had worked out that we spent 50% of our time/income in each of two states, we paid 57% (or so) of what the taxes that we would have paid had it been a full year in each, more or less. It kind of makes sense politically to favor full-year residents, from the standpoint that in general part-year residents and non-residents do not make a powerful voting block.
I did think (niavely) that at least once, living in two states would work out in our favor, but that hasn't happened yet! State tax laws do seem to have covered that aspect well.
There have been a number of times when due to moving, living in a different state than my spouse, etc. we had to file taxes in two, sometime three states and even sometimes two municipalities in the same year. Different states and municipalities have different ways of taxing part-time and non-residents, and in every case, the formula has been such that it was more taxes than if we had been a full-year resident of each state for that portion of the income. It kind of makes sense politically to favor full-year residents, from the standpoint that in general part-year residents and non-residents do not make a powerful voting block.
One thing to watch out for with passwords that "just flow from your fingers"- not all keyboards are the same! European keyboards often have few keys in odd places relative to US QWERTY ones and the punctuation is often quite different (Green Alt-5 for @, instead of shift-2, for example, and for French keyboards, you need to press shift to get the numbers, the reverse of most other keyboards.) So if you only know your password from how it feels on a standard keyboard, it can be a big hassle to login in when travelling. Not an issue for everyone, but it can be something to keep in mind when choosing a password generation method. I've known people who really struggled to figure out what their password is when faced with an odd keyboard, to the point of getting locked out of their account from repeated failuers or having to type it in plaintext to puzzle out what it is.
Note- if you are stuck on a Mac in a French internet cafe and cannot for the life of you log in to your home machine, set the International control panel temporarily to your home country. The keys will do what you are used to having them do- not what they are labelled, which can be a huge help in this situation...
As a scientist, I've stopped collaborating with people who don't use LaTeX. I have enough people who want to work with me that I can choose and I make my doctoral students learn it, so that covers the bases. I found that not using LaTeX at least doubles the amount of time to write stuff up so it's not worth it to me to deal with anyone who can't cope with LaTeX. I've had less trouble collaborating with people who don't speak English than with people who don't use LaTeX...
What the actual article said was just that landlines had been a cash cow- the word "tuition" does not appear in the article. And for good reason- usually, the dormitory/residence expenses and tuition are kept separate and some effort is made to balance things according to expenses. A reasonable college/university would not raise tuition to subsidize caviar in the cafeteria and would not expect to fund a new science lab with increased dorm fees.
Double-blind peer review is not so common in many techinal fields, and there are standard methods to hint as to who the author is that are widely employed. It takes a fair amount of work to write an article with no evidence of who wrote it, and most people don't go through the trouble. In fact, many people who are big shots and accustomed to being cut slack for being big shots make sure that they throw in a few gratitous references to themselves in the their citations, making it clear to the reviewers who the real author is.
The root of the problem is that careful, thorough reviewing is hard word and is largely unrewarded. Everyone is very busy working on their own stuff and doing adminstrative crap and reviews are just not very high on most researcher's agendas. So reviewers often skim and puzzle out who wrote it, then get back to what they would prefer to be doing.
Anoynmous author reviews can lead to odd situations: a colleague of mine who is really top-notch had the following interesting episode. The reviewer in a double-blind situtation reccommended rejection because the article didn't include enough references to the groundbreaking work done in the field by experts. The particular work that the reviewer that thought had been snubbed had all been done by her- so the editor had a good laugh and it was accepted...
There is a nice package ppower4 which gives presentation effects to LaTeX, generating PDFs that work well for presentations. Many audience members will not even realize that it's not Powerpoint, which is either an endorsement of ppower4, an indictment of ppower4, or a statement about the preponderance of clueless people, depending upon your agenda. PDF viewers of all sorts have "full screen mode" and aside from needing to set the pagesize to something that works well with that, it is very effective. I usually use ppower4 to make computer projector presentations, and can just save the PDF to a USB keychain drive for the odd circumstance when the host university's projectors have difficulty with my laptop.
Either the quality of the copy-editing at the NYT has gone down significantly over the last 20 years (much more likely) or I have become much more eagle-eyed over that period- I routinely find 10 or 20 errors in a typical day's paper. It used to be that I was particularly pleased with myself when I found an error in such an esteemed publication- now it is quite routine. I suppose that it is a question of "high quality" product not being cost-effective since most people do not care or cannot distinguish the difference, as with other consumer goods. Sigh.
British intelligence and self-destructo laptops
on
Location-Based Encryption
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This has come up before- here is a link to a 2001 Wired article about the British intelligence services using laptops with ``a built-in electronic self-destruct mechanism that erases a laptop's hard drive if the case is opened by force'' when a code is forgotten, as well as ``a tracking feature that allows a computer gone astray to call home." This was after a spate of embarrassing episodes where laptops with lots of important info went missing. I don't know if it's been implemented but this does seem to have some interesting applications, potentially...
Try electoral-vote.com. The maintainer does a great job following current polls state-by-state with electoral vote totals and has promised to keep the site current tomorrow as results come in. Sometimes the site has been flaky under heavy loads, in which case you should try electoral-vote3.com, electoral-vote4.com as well.
My wife has a fleet of about 12 iBooks that her research students use for developing code to execute on their clusters. Those iBooks have held up really well and her students are not gentle with them. Over the course of the last couple of years, some of them, including the one she uses and her spare/loaner, have been sent back and for the most part the exchange has been great. Apple send the box quickly, you can wait and decide when to send it back when it is convenient for you to be without your machine, and the machines come back quickly from repair. For the ones that failed, there were the classic symptons - lines on the screen, weird display artifacts, and so on. Out of all of them, there was only one difficult-to-diagnose problem and that involved the old extra 512MB RAM module becoming flaky with the replacement motherboard. Apparently, some (slightly) defective modules work fine with the old motherboards but not with the replacements, so keep that open as a potential problem if things don't go smoothly and you have intermittent problems after the upgrade not related to the display. Since it was being flaky, we thought the problem was with the new motherboard but in fact a warrantee replacement RAM chip set that machine straight. The only other glitch in all those upgrades was one machine that came back without booting- they wiped the drive but forgot to install an OS, oops. At least they sent the disks...
One thing to keep in mind is that productive research faculty tend to be very adept at avoiding committee assignments that have little potential upside and are primarily administrative, such as one overseeing adminstrative computing in a case like this one.
I remember someone who was a reasonable faculty member who had been doing a good job as department chair, who agreed to become chair of a university committee that was overseeing a tranistion to PeopleSoft, in fact. I tried to talk him out of it and it did in fact become the huge morass with fingerpointing that I was worried it would become, but when deciding to do it he was sure this was a straightforward ticket to moving up the administrative food-chain to dean and so on. In my experience, research faculty tend to work much better in environments when the success is primarily determined by their own efforts, and being in a situtaion where you are depending upon an outside entity (particularly one from another (non-scientific) universe, like PeopleSoft or other huge corporate entity) is a recipe for disaster.
The point is that a university is a community and in general, people end up in different roles, perhaps at different times in their careers. Some faculty are effective researchers throughout their careers and would be unlikely to ask or be asked to serve on what I would think of as a "committee from hell," whereas others who are not contributing research-wise are often the ones who feel obligated or are asked to shoulder more of the adminstrative burden. Remember that faculty generally have no particular preparation in adminstration, and it is pretty random as to whether or not anyone works out well.
Perfect games more common now than before
on
The Physics of Baseball
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is an interesting NYT op-ed today noting that perfect games seem to be more common now. From 1900-1960, there were four; since then, there have been 11. Michael Coffey attributes the increase to:
More emphasis on individual performance in the post-1975 free-agency era and greater media coverage overall
The expansion of the number of teams to thin out hitting talent.
Apparently, when Cy Young pitched his perfect game in 1904, he wasn't even aware until the last out that he had a perfect game going (the term in fact did not even exist at the time.) These days, if someone takes a perfect game into the sixth inning, it's mentioned on all the broadcasts of the other games and on any of the "sports news" programs that are on at the time.
It's not clear if these are the most important contributing factors but I think these are some reasonable points.
This is anecdotal, but there do seem to be a disproportionate number of research mathematicians who are serious rock climbers and whitewater kayakers. Furthermore, there have been/are a number of top climbers (John Gill, Robert Underhill, Hassler Whitney, eg.) and strong kayakers who are mathematicians or former mathematicians. I've thought about why this might be but haven't come to any satisfactory conclusions. Mathematicians do like challenges, but that doesn't really narrow things down to climbing and kayaking particularly.
The overall point is that math courses often develop abstract thinking skills, which may be more important for developing efficient, correct code than learning a specific toolset which may not age well. I know Keith Devlin has written other articles about this but this was the only one I could find online.
The NSF Fastlane website (you need an account set up by your campus/organization Sponsored Reseach Office to see anything, though) is modern and reasonably efficient. You upload proposals, check on their status, file reports, make budget requests all in a reasonable way. I have NSF funding and can't say anything about applying for DOD or NSA grants, but for the NSF, Fastlane works well and is quite efficient. People complain about NSF but it is a massive improvement over the old (send 15 copies of your 150-page grant application in this very specific format, and make a table of contents by hand please, and a bunch of other tedious junk...) It's not the webpages that are sending people elsewhere to look for grant funding. It's the fact that these grants are very hard to get, and even top researchers with excellent track records of doing things with funding are not getting grants. It seems like a greater fraction of the NSF money is used for certain programs inspired by the latest trends, and there is less money for the less glamorous "basic research" that fuels scientific progress.
The NSF grant search website is far more primitive than Fastlane, but if you haven't used it to see who has NSF grants at your institution, it can be revealing. A good way to search is to look for "investigator contains ucla.edu" and "start date after 1-1-2002" to find people at UCLA who have recent grants, though only the PI's email addresses are listed under investigator, so that won't find grants where the UCLA person is a "co-principal investigator." But it's a good start.
A good parallel to understand is if you were an ant living on the surface of a basketball. Your travels can go in any direction at any point, as if you were on a plane. If you had no memory, you may not noticed that when you travelled you were visiting places you had already been and you might think that you lived on a plane. In fact, the outside observer can see that your universe is curved.
If you haven't read Flatland it is a gem that illustrates these notions of higher-dimenstional space wonderfully. It was written in 1888 and is in the public domain now, availble free online through Project Gutenberg or for a buck or two as a physical book.
A wonderfully-done video is The Shape of Space, produced at the Geometry Center and uses nice animations to make these points. If you haven't see the Shape of Space or two of its Geometry Center sibling videos (Not Knot and Inside Out) you are seriously missing out.
There are plenty of ways that something can be infinite in extent yet have finite volume. The point that just because you are adding up infinitely many things, you do not necessarily get an infinite sum. For example, 1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16+... is an infinite sum which converges to 1, or a repeating decimal like.33333 can be thought of as 3/10 + 3/100 + 3/1000 +... which converges to 1/3. For volume, we can imagine a horn-shaped region which gets skinnier as we move along, so the first meter of length may have volume 1/2, the next meter may have volume 1/4, and so on. It will be infinitely long yet have a finite total volume of 1.
There are plenty of examples of phenomena such as this illustrated in a standard calculus text, so you can look for more details there.
I use function keys for switching applications and it works well on my Powerbook and other Apple machines. For the Powerbook, I have been using the "Boot into OS 9, set the prefs there, then boot back to OS X" method for quite some time and complained about this on the apple support forums so it is good to see it finally addressed. From time to time, such as when the PRAM was reset or after some particularly hard crashes, the keyboard would revert to the annoying F1=dim, F2=bright default which would require a trip to OS 9 to correct, so this is definitely better.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry- that wasn't the case. Commodity standard cassette recorders worked really well for storing Integer BASIC and machine language code and they used ordinary cassette tapes that were way way cheaper than floppies, particularly at that time.
From the article: Brent, who received a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop Qualrus
According to Brent's departmental web page he intends to apply for an NSF award- there is a big difference between applying and getting those awards- those are very hard to get. His personal webpage makes no mention of NSF funding, and an search on the NSF award search site shows no such award. It does appear that there was an old $99,900 NSF award to the company Idea Works where he is president (same address as his home address, BTW), but that award lists someone else as the principal investigator and yet someone else as the former principal investigator, and seems to be for a kind-of related project on coding data. I'm not sure what the story is, but it is clear to me that at least some of the facts are wrong.
Well, there are some professors that meet that description, but at a reasonable university, those tend to be in the minority. At a reasonable university, most faculty work more like 60-80 hours a week, particularly if they are active in research. I certainly have pulled many more all-nighters as a professor than I did as a student and I pulled a lot of them as a student. A few things that students tend to overlook:
There are terrible professors and great professors at every university- the fractions may change from place to place, but with some seeking out and strategy, usually it's possible to do well.
You may find some agreement with some of Rutgers University math prof Doron Zeilberger'sopinions, particularly Opinion 36: Don't Ask: What Can The Computer do for ME?, But Rather: What CAN I do for the COMPUTER? where he suggests that eventually, computers may be doing the research in mathematics. There is a great line in there where he compares proving theorems by hand to jogging- yes, it may be reasonable, but a better way of getting someplace is to use a car/computer... If you get a chance to hear him speak, he is hilarious, BTW.
Actually, the proofs under discussion are not generated by a computer nor do they use "computer reasoning systems" like Prolog. These are computer-aided proofs, where the outline of the general argument is constucted by a (human) mathematician, but some of the details are reduced to computations, which are done by computer. I don't know in what language these particular computations were done, but I know that the computations for the computer-aided proof of the double-bubble conjecture was done in C++, and the source code is available if you want to have a look. I am familiar with other such computer-aided proofs that use a diverse set of languages, including C, assembly, Perl, GAP, Magnus, Mathematica, AXIOM, and many others. Mathematicians, like other researchers, tend to have diverse opinions about what suitable computational tools are and also tend to use the tools with which they are most familiar, even if that tool is not really optimal for that computational task.
I did think (niavely) that at least once, living in two states would work out in our favor, but that hasn't happened yet! State tax laws do seem to have covered that aspect well.
There have been a number of times when due to moving, living in a different state than my spouse, etc. we had to file taxes in two, sometime three states and even sometimes two municipalities in the same year. Different states and municipalities have different ways of taxing part-time and non-residents, and in every case, the formula has been such that it was more taxes than if we had been a full-year resident of each state for that portion of the income. It kind of makes sense politically to favor full-year residents, from the standpoint that in general part-year residents and non-residents do not make a powerful voting block.
Note- if you are stuck on a Mac in a French internet cafe and cannot for the life of you log in to your home machine, set the International control panel temporarily to your home country. The keys will do what you are used to having them do- not what they are labelled, which can be a huge help in this situation...
As a scientist, I've stopped collaborating with people who don't use LaTeX. I have enough people who want to work with me that I can choose and I make my doctoral students learn it, so that covers the bases. I found that not using LaTeX at least doubles the amount of time to write stuff up so it's not worth it to me to deal with anyone who can't cope with LaTeX. I've had less trouble collaborating with people who don't speak English than with people who don't use LaTeX...
What the actual article said was just that landlines had been a cash cow- the word "tuition" does not appear in the article. And for good reason- usually, the dormitory/residence expenses and tuition are kept separate and some effort is made to balance things according to expenses. A reasonable college/university would not raise tuition to subsidize caviar in the cafeteria and would not expect to fund a new science lab with increased dorm fees.
The root of the problem is that careful, thorough reviewing is hard word and is largely unrewarded. Everyone is very busy working on their own stuff and doing adminstrative crap and reviews are just not very high on most researcher's agendas. So reviewers often skim and puzzle out who wrote it, then get back to what they would prefer to be doing.
Anoynmous author reviews can lead to odd situations:
a colleague of mine who is really top-notch had the following interesting episode. The reviewer in a double-blind situtation reccommended rejection because the article didn't include enough references to the groundbreaking work done in the field by experts. The particular work that the reviewer that thought had been snubbed had all been done by her- so the editor had a good laugh and it was accepted...
There is a nice package ppower4 which gives presentation effects to LaTeX, generating PDFs that work well for presentations. Many audience members will not even realize that it's not Powerpoint, which is either an endorsement of ppower4, an indictment of ppower4, or a statement about the preponderance of clueless people, depending upon your agenda. PDF viewers of all sorts have "full screen mode" and aside from needing to set the pagesize to something that works well with that, it is very effective. I usually use ppower4 to make computer projector presentations, and can just save the PDF to a USB keychain drive for the odd circumstance when the host university's projectors have difficulty with my laptop.
Either the quality of the copy-editing at the NYT has gone down significantly over the last 20 years (much more likely) or I have become much more eagle-eyed over that period- I routinely find 10 or 20 errors in a typical day's paper. It used to be that I was particularly pleased with myself when I found an error in such an esteemed publication- now it is quite routine. I suppose that it is a question of "high quality" product not being cost-effective since most people do not care or cannot distinguish the difference, as with other consumer goods. Sigh.
This has come up before- here is a link to a 2001 Wired article about the British intelligence services using laptops with ``a built-in electronic self-destruct mechanism that erases a laptop's hard drive if the case is opened by force'' when a code is forgotten, as well as ``a tracking feature that allows a computer gone astray to call home." This was after a spate of embarrassing episodes where laptops with lots of important info went missing. I don't know if it's been implemented but this does seem to have some interesting applications, potentially...
Try electoral-vote.com. The maintainer does a great job following current polls state-by-state with electoral vote totals and has promised to keep the site current tomorrow as results come in. Sometimes the site has been flaky under heavy loads, in which case you should try electoral-vote3.com, electoral-vote4.com as well.
My wife has a fleet of about 12 iBooks that her research students use for developing code to execute on their clusters. Those iBooks have held up really well and her students are not gentle with them. Over the course of the last couple of years, some of them, including the one she uses and her spare/loaner, have been sent back and for the most part the exchange has been great. Apple send the box quickly, you can wait and decide when to send it back when it is convenient for you to be without your machine, and the machines come back quickly from repair. For the ones that failed, there were the classic symptons - lines on the screen, weird display artifacts, and so on. Out of all of them, there was only one difficult-to-diagnose problem and that involved the old extra 512MB RAM module becoming flaky with the replacement motherboard. Apparently, some (slightly) defective modules work fine with the old motherboards but not with the replacements, so keep that open as a potential problem if things don't go smoothly and you have intermittent problems after the upgrade not related to the display. Since it was being flaky, we thought the problem was with the new motherboard but in fact a warrantee replacement RAM chip set that machine straight. The only other glitch in all those upgrades was one machine that came back without booting- they wiped the drive but forgot to install an OS, oops. At least they sent the disks...
One thing to keep in mind is that productive research faculty tend to be very adept at avoiding committee assignments that have little potential upside and are primarily administrative, such as one overseeing adminstrative computing in a case like this one.
I remember someone who was a reasonable faculty member who had been doing a good job as department chair, who agreed to become chair of a university committee that was overseeing a tranistion to PeopleSoft, in fact. I tried to talk him out of it and it did in fact become the huge morass with fingerpointing that I was worried it would become, but when deciding to do it he was sure this was a straightforward ticket to moving up the administrative food-chain to dean and so on. In my experience, research faculty tend to work much better in environments when the success is primarily determined by their own efforts, and being in a situtaion where you are depending upon an outside entity (particularly one from another (non-scientific) universe, like PeopleSoft or other huge corporate entity) is a recipe for disaster.
The point is that a university is a community and in general, people end up in different roles, perhaps at different times in their careers. Some faculty are effective researchers throughout their careers and would be unlikely to ask or be asked to serve on what I would think of as a "committee from hell," whereas others who are not contributing research-wise are often the ones who feel obligated or are asked to shoulder more of the adminstrative burden. Remember that faculty generally have no particular preparation in adminstration, and it is pretty random as to whether or not anyone works out well.
From 1900-1960, there were four; since then, there have been 11. Michael Coffey attributes the increase to:
Apparently, when Cy Young pitched his perfect game in 1904, he wasn't even aware until the last out that he had a perfect game going (the term in fact did not even exist at the time.) These days, if someone takes a perfect game into the sixth inning, it's mentioned on all the broadcasts of the other games and on any of the "sports news" programs that are on at the time.
It's not clear if these are the most important contributing factors but I think these are some reasonable points.
This is anecdotal, but there do seem to be a disproportionate number of research mathematicians who are serious rock climbers and whitewater kayakers. Furthermore, there have been/are a number of top climbers (John Gill, Robert Underhill, Hassler Whitney, eg.) and strong kayakers who are mathematicians or former mathematicians. I've thought about why this might be but haven't come to any satisfactory conclusions. Mathematicians do like challenges, but that doesn't really narrow things down to climbing and kayaking particularly.
Here is an Keith Devlin article "Do software engineers need mathematics that addresses a number of these issues.
The overall point is that math courses often develop abstract thinking skills, which may be more important for developing efficient, correct code than learning a specific toolset which may not age well. I know Keith Devlin has written other articles about this but this was the only one I could find online.
The NSF grant search website is far more primitive than Fastlane, but if you haven't used it to see who has NSF grants at your institution, it can be revealing. A good way to search is to look for "investigator contains ucla.edu" and "start date after 1-1-2002" to find people at UCLA who have recent grants, though only the PI's email addresses are listed under investigator, so that won't find grants where the UCLA person is a "co-principal investigator." But it's a good start.
A good parallel to understand is if you were an ant living on the surface of a basketball. Your travels can go in any direction at any point, as if you were on a plane. If you had no memory, you may not noticed that when you travelled you were visiting places you had already been and you might think that you lived on a plane. In fact, the outside observer can see that your universe is curved.
If you haven't read Flatland it is a gem that illustrates these notions of higher-dimenstional space wonderfully. It was written in 1888 and is in the public domain now, availble free online through Project Gutenberg or for a buck or two as a physical book.
A wonderfully-done video is The Shape of Space, produced at the Geometry Center and uses nice animations to make these points. If you haven't see the Shape of Space or two of its Geometry Center sibling videos (Not Knot and Inside Out) you are seriously missing out.
There are plenty of ways that something can be infinite in extent yet have finite volume. The point that just because you are adding up infinitely many things, you do not necessarily get an infinite sum. For example, 1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16+... is an infinite sum which converges to 1, or a repeating decimal like .33333 can be thought of as 3/10 + 3/100 + 3/1000 + ... which converges to 1/3. For volume, we can imagine a horn-shaped region which gets skinnier as we move along, so the first meter of length may have volume 1/2, the next meter may have volume 1/4, and so on. It will be infinitely long yet have a finite total volume of 1.
There are plenty of examples of phenomena such as this illustrated in a standard calculus text, so you can look for more details there.
I use function keys for switching applications and it works well on my Powerbook and other Apple machines. For the Powerbook, I have been using the "Boot into OS 9, set the prefs there, then boot back to OS X" method for quite some time and complained about this on the apple support forums so it is good to see it finally addressed. From time to time, such as when the PRAM was reset or after some particularly hard crashes, the keyboard would revert to the annoying F1=dim, F2=bright default which would require a trip to OS 9 to correct, so this is definitely better.
The current JoyOfTech comic suggests an easy way to cut down to one cup a day...