It's true!

From: studentservices@grad.washington.edu
Subject: Master's degree approved by Grad School

Congratulations *******, your request to graduate with a MASTER OF SCIENCE (MATHEMATICS) has been reviewed by the Graduate School and is approved.

Official transcripts with the posted degree will be available approximately four weeks after the end of the quarter in which you graduate. When requesting transcripts, make certain you request that the transcripts be sent after the degree has been posted.

(blah blah blah)

Best wishes in your future endeavors,

The Graduate School

So yay for me. Time to start dressing all in black and hypnotising people.

Today's music video: the Wet Spots present 'Do You Take It?'

...This may not, as the kiddies say, be entirely safe for work. Depending on where it is you work. If you're, say, a priest, then of course you'd want to be a little careful, whereas if you work in a dildo factory it's not likely to cause any fuss at all. For most of us, the truth lies somewhere in between. Much like the Taint.

Some absolutely charming photographs of a container ship running aground near a Mexican port from the San Diego Union-Tribune. I find shipwrecks oddly romantic, somehow. This one's quite good, evocative and somehow ethereal or possibly surreal, something in the way the ship is lit in the background. But for sheer grandeur and majesty, this one must take the proverbial cake. Just look at the size of her! And to think, wee tiny little humans like us built it...And then crashed it into a sandbar. How many species can say something that? Makes you proud to be a hominid.

A night shot! Don't you love that colour? Maybe I should chuck the maths thing in the bin and become a sailor. Pity I can't swim.

Here still waters reflect.

Apparently the ship is owned by a German firm called Mare Britannicum Schiffahrtsgesellschaft MBH & Co. I never could figure out how the German language can include words like that when they have so much decent beer about. "Schiffahrtsgesessellshigafahrsg...shiffiffifigafis..shis...oh bumsen es. Wo ist das crapper?"

Something to think about.

Last night I saw an act called Hot Chip open for Stereolab. My mind was just blown all to pieces here. They're amazing. It was like they'd just stepped right off the set of Revenge of the Nerds. They looked more Eighties than the Eighties themselves. (At least according to my hazy recollection of the Eighties, which is in all honesty mostly given over to Mutual Assured Destruction.) With the big glasses and the blazers and ties and maracas and glowing star-shaped tambourine and the waving the guitars about...It was quite a performance. They also glowed in the dark. Especially the heavy guy. He was like a little sun. My comrade described them as being like 'the Pet Shop Boys on acid'. You really should check these people out. They're very easy on the ears, too, very smooth and melodic. Let me try to find you some video footage of them...

Let's check YouTube!

They sound more discordant in this one than they really are...

Here's a music video.

Here's some dark, blurry footage of them live.

And more...Great song, though.

Here are some small videos courtesy of the BBC; the sound's better, but the look isn't quite what it was live...

I guess you'll just have to see them live to appreciate them fully. So do it.

Well bang me like a front-loading washing machine; I just read a whole 70-odd page math paper in French.

(René Thom, Quelques propriétés globales des variétés differentiables. Comm. Math. Helv. 28 (1954), pp. 17-86. It's quite good. A real page-turner. Cobordism groups and representing homology classes by submanifolds. The man was an animal.)