Tuesday, January the thirty first

2006-01-31 USA

Well, the end of January has finally arrived. Since my last note here, nothing much has changed. The weather is slightly warmer, sun sets a little later and we have finally managed to do our laundry. From the practical side, we have made another shopping visit to Harris Teeter and also canceled our phoneline. Most of the phonecalls we ever got were advertisements anyway and what's the point of paying 25 bucks just so that you can be woken up by a guy wanting you to participate in a lottery?

Other than that, the tutoring has (unluckily) taken off, and we usually get a good share of people to tutor. And (thought it is not surprising) their average (math) abilities haven't increased. On the contrary, it seems. One person that I tutored even needed a calculator to find out what 2 divided by 2 is. Wow. I never thought it could be that bad. And he is taking Calculus and in a few weeks will be doing limits. Hmmm. (To be fair, I wasn't very patient and he might have been so terrified, that he wasn't able to think clearly. Poor he. Poor me!)

But except for the tutoring, the school turned out to be pretty interesting. We are taking a course in PCF (I never would have hoped, that someone would teach me PCF), and the lecturer is Juhasz! And also a course in algebraic topology, which is very nice. I also started working on my theis. Well I had to, since last week Vaughan told me, he wanted to see something by today. It is not very encouraging, especially since all that I have managed to write is just a compilation of a few definitions and theorems. But on the positive side, I finally came up with the space I needed. So I might have some results for my thesis after all. Hopefully.

On the personal side of things, I try to read a lot. But I have discovered, that the books I brought with me, weren't a really good choice. Either I don't understand them (some essays from Eco), or I strongly (very strongly!) disagree with them (E. Radl: Dejiny filosofie, I don't understand how anyone could read that. But then again, I am probably missing something...). Anyway, I'll have to go send some letters, which I should have sent already a week ago, so this is it for today...