Migraines
I get migraines occasionally. Not very often—probably on average two or three times a year for the past 15 years or so (though in the summer of 2005 it happened twice within three weeks of each other, not fun). They generally seem to happen in the late afternoon and evening on a weekend or vacation day, especially one on which my eating, sleeping, or caffeine-consumption schedule has been out of the ordinary, seemingly most often shortly after I've been under a lot of stress (but almost never while I'm stressed). But I didn't realize till a few years ago, when kepod suggested it, that migraines are what I've been having.

Migraines were always described to me as a kind of especially intense headache. And although my migraines do involve a headache (on only one side of the head, as advertised), it's not that intense, and it's definitely at most the third-most noticeable symptom. My migraines are principally characterized by fatigue and nausea, and the headache feels as if it's just a side effect of those. In fact, if I eventually actually throw up, the headache and fatigue go away too, which definitely makes it seem like the headache is caused by the nausea rather than vice versa. So the first few times, I thought what I had was just maybe food poisoning or something, and then for at least ten years thereafter I thought of it as "a stomach thing that happens to me sometimes, wait it out and it'll pass"—it definitely never occurred to me to connect it with what I'd heard about migraines.

After kepod suggested it was a migraine, I asked my doctor about it and she said if it was a migraine, ibuprofen would help; I should take it as soon as I realize that I'm having one. (I've gotten much better at catching them early—noticing in the afternoon that I'm unexpectedly tired and a little queasy and have a mild headache, before I start feeling really sick.) And it does! Ibuprofen makes the whole situation go away. And, well, ibuprofen is a painkiller; it doesn't treat nausea. (In fact, according to Wikipedia, ibuprofen can cause nausea.) So I guess this really does mean that it's the headache that's causing the nausea, rather than the other way around—it just seems really counterintuitive that that's the case.

(Also the last time I felt a migraine coming on I wasn't at home and didn't have any ibuprofen on me, but lowellboyslash had some Excedrin and that worked too. Except it turns out that two tablets of Excedrin contain more caffeine than I usually consume during an entire day, and I took them at 8pm. On the plus side of that, I got to see a beautiful sunrise.)

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Notes from the road
20 miles east of Buffalo, just passed two cars with Vermont plates, pulling a trailer and loaded up with luggage, with ALASKA HERE WE COME written on the windows.

I wish them well.

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To the tune of "Oy Chanukah"
Oy Canada, Oy Canada, a sheyne melukhe:
der friling iz a shneyiker, der harbst zaverukhe.
A gants yor hoki shpiln mir;
Getraye heymland-libe hobn mir.
Mir hofn az tsofn
zol blaybn gedayik un fray!
Es regnt un shneyt, nor men zogt vayt un breyt:
"Oyf der vakh shteyen mir dir bay!"
Es regnt un shneyt, nor men zogt vayt un breyt:
"Oyf der vakh shteyen mir dir bay!"

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Academic job market


I've been on the academic job market for a really long time now. I've been relatively lucky in that the short-term, part-time, and adjunct positions I've had have all been fairly well-paid ones, with good benefits, in cities I wanted to live in—I haven't been anywhere near the poverty-level adjunct horror stories one reads about. I'm fairly comfortable. But the precariousness of it all, and the repetitiveness of sending out job applications every year, is starting to wear on me a bit; the whole process has been a whole lot of work for very little benefit.

Here's a catalogue of my results on the academic job market for the past 7 academic years, to the best of my recollection:

2008–9 (before I defended my dissertation): 8 applications.
No bites.

2009–10 (during which I defended my dissertation): 11 applications.
Two telephone interviews.
One conference interview.

2010–11: 16 applications.
One telephone interview.
One Skype interview.
One on-campus interview.

2011–12: 7 applications.
Two Skype interviews.
Two on-campus job talks.

2012–13: 9 applications.
One Skype interview.
Two on-campus job talks.
Two non–tenure-track job offers (one accepted).

2013–14: 2 applications.
One Skype interview.

2014–15: 11 applications (one search canceled after I applied).
One Skype interview.
One on-campus interview invitation (declined because I decided to accept a different job first).
One on-campus job talk.

…I feel exhausted just writing that out. And it continues this fall!

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Creepy find in my office
For my birthday one year, one of my grad-school classmates gave me a little multicolored stuffed elephant, and one of those dragonfly toys that are weighted so as to balance perfectly on the point of their nose. I usually keep them both in my office, with the dragonfly balancing on on the tip of the elephant's trunk:



In my office today—after I'd been in for a couple of hours already—I noticed they were like this:



…with the dragonfly's tail stabbed into the elephant's back.

I'm kind of super-creeped-out by this. That doesn't look like something that could happen accidentally.

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Missing calendar crossword
My 2015 crossword puzzle calendar uses New York Times crossword puzzles from 2011 and 2012. For example, yesterday's calendar page used the puzzle from 16 December 2011.

Today's calendar page uses the puzzle from 19 December 2011.

The 17 December 2011 crossword is skipped, for some reason. (18 December is skipped because it's a Sunday, and Sunday puzzles wouldn't fit on the calendar page.) This means that for the rest of 2015, I'm going to be doing Monday crosswords on Saturdays, Saturday puzzles on Fridays, and so on. That's kind of not ideal.

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Tony Awards writeup
My TV still can't receive the station that broadcasts the Tony Awards in the Toronto area, so I ended up tagging along to watch the Tonys at, like, a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend's birthday party at a bar downtown. It wasn't great conditions for watching the awards show—the pop music playing in the bar proper kept playing on the speakers of the room we were in, and sometimes overpowered the Tonys show, and in a crowded room even in which most people were trying to watch the show the miscellaneous background chattering sometimes made it hard to follow what was going on as well. So I have the impression that the sound mixing for the show was really poor, but that might just be the interaction between the sound mixing of the show and the environment in which I was watching it.

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

• Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth were pretty terrible as hosts. Their jokes weren't funny (and they had basically one joke each, "I have sex with everyone" and "I'm an egotistical diva" respectively), their chemistry with each other was awkward, and the musical numbers they performed as hosts were pretty boring.


• Helen Mirren, winning a Tony for playing Queen Elizabeth II: "Your Majesty, you did it again."


• Starting the show with Best Leading Actress in a Play, but only coming back to the other lead-acting awards two hours later toward the end of the show, seemed like an odd order. I guess they wanted to lead off with Helen Mirren's star power to get the show off on the right foot? This brings me back to a question I've wondered about before: do the people who choose the order for the awards know who's winning?


• Paule Constable was nominated for two Tonys in the same category! (Lighting design, for her work on both The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Wolf Hall.) I didn't know you could do that! Would they do that with a higher-profile award? Could the same actor be nominated for Best Actor twice if they happened to be in two shows in the same season?


• Tommy Tune is super tall, you guys.


• I'm sure John Rando is a great director, but his name really sounds like they just pulled some guy off the street. "Who's directing On the Town?" "I dunno, some John Rando I guess."


• Comments I make every year: I really wish they could show clips of longer than a couple of seconds from the Best Play nominees. And I really don't understand how they can relegate the Best Book and Best Score awards to the commercial breaks. For people who can't get to New York to see the Broadway productions of these musicals, in a sense Best Book and Best Score are the most important awards, since the book and score of these shows is what they'll be engaging with once regional and community theatres start to perform these shows in a few years. And if Best Score had been during the commercials in 2008, we wouldn't have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda's acceptance speech for In the Heights that year, and that would have been a crying shame.


• Speaking of the Tony for best score, go Jeanine Tesori! Fun Home is certainly the one of these musicals that I came away from this show most wanting to see. 11-year-old Sydney Lucas's spectacularly nuanced and affecting performance of "Ring of Keys" was the highlight of the show for me.


• Way too many of the musicals performed medleys instead of a full number from beginning to end. I understand why they do that—they want to show off multiple members of the cast and the range of musical styles the show encompasses—but it means they don't perform anything long enough to get really interested or invested in it, and the result is kind of underwhelming. I love On the Twentieth Century, and I saw the production so I know how good it is, but their performance of, what, half a verse from "I've Got it All" and then one chorus of "Babbette" and so on didn't really sell the show very well.


• An American in Paris looks amazing; I understand why it won the set design, lighting, and choreography awards!


• Best name of a nominee: director Moritz von Stuelpnagel. (Also, his play, Hand to God, looks at least very weird and interesting.)


• Some of the people at the party I was at knew Ruthie Ann Miles, so there was a lot of rejoicing when she won her Tony. In the okayish community theatre production of The King and I I saw last fall, Lady Thiang was by far the best actor, and as a result of that performance that I saw I've come to have a much deeper interpretation of this really interesting character, so I'm glad that the current Broadway production has a great actor in the role now.


• The Visit looks super-weird. That video doesn't show you the backup dancers in creepy mime makeup. But you could tell as soon as the music started that it was Kander and Ebb.


• In the recent tradition of having performances from new musicals that weren't nominated, Matthew Morrison and Kelsey Grammer performed "Stronger" from Finding Neverland… and I see why the show wasn't nominated. The lyrics were the most inanely generic thing this side of "This is the Moment", and the context is a vision of Captain Hook persuading J.M. Barrie that he's strong enough to take the bold step of… writing Peter Pan? I'll pass
.

• On the other hand, It Shoulda Been You at least looks interesting, and the performances were good. And David Hyde Pierce's introduction of it, reading an email from a fan about how much the show meant to her, was really sweet.


• Is The King and I really one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "most beloved shows"? I mean, it might be their best show, but I'd guess The Sound of Music and Oklahoma! are both probably more beloved.


• With the other nominees for Best Revival being On the Twentieth Century and On the Town, I kept hoping someone would slip up and say On the King and I.


• At every commercial break, Kristin Chenoweth and Alan Cumming kept kvelling about how the audience should stay tuned for JOSH GROBAN!!!, because JOSH GROBAN!!!! would be performing soon. It turns out Josh Groban was singing for the "In Memoriam" segment, which in retrospect makes all the hype for his upcoming performance seem even tackier than it seemed at the time.


• Bernadette Peters introduced the Best Actor in a Musical award, I think. She read her remarks off note cards rather than the teleprompter, for some reason; it was a little awkward, but seemed more authentic to me. I kind of liked that.


• Michael Cerveris has weird dimples that make him look like he has Joker scars.


• Kelli O'Hara's acceptance speech was lovely.


• And the closing number is… Jersey Boys? Wait, why does anyone care about Jersey Boys?

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Unexpectedly high tolls
I've had to drive on the Express Toll Route 407 through Toronto's suburbs a few times in the past couple of months. It's the type of toll road where there's no booths or gates; they just photograph your license plate and send you a bill in the mail later.

I just got the bill.

Apparently a round trip on the ETR from Route 404 to Ninth Line and back costs $16.30. That's about equal to US$13.25, for a total round-trip distance of 22.8 km.

On the New York Thruway and the Mass Pike, that amount of money will get you about 400 km. So I was kind of taken aback to get a bill in the mail for $55 for just a few round trips to the doctor's office.

Next time I think I'll try to find an alternate route.

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A weird little cycle
Queen's is in Kingston.

Kingston is in Jamaica.

Jamaica is in Queens.

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Yorba Linda
The town Richard Nixon was born in is called Yorba Linda.

Am I the only one who always wants to set the name of that city to the tune of "My Sharona"?

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Semester names
So in the University of Toronto calendar there are four instructional terms per year, ending with final exam periods. The teaching dates of these terms and their names, as of this year, are as follows:

September 8–December 2: Fall term
January 5–April 2: Winter term
May 11–June 19: Summer session (1)
June 29–August 10: Summer session (2)

…I realize that it would probably cause more confusion than it resolved if the May–June term were called the "Spring term", but I'm still sad that it isn't.

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Good timing, I guess
Conveniently, I lose my scarf on the first day that's warm enough for me not to need it.

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Heard on the news
"They were looking for love, but what they got was taken advantage of."

Does that count as zeugma, or what?

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Convoluted calculation
Trudgill (1972), "Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich":

There are two possible pronunciations of this variable: [iŋ], which also occurs in the prestige accent, RP, and [ən ~ n]. The former is labelled (ng)-1 and the latter (ng)-2. Index scores were developed for this variable by initially awarding 1 for each instance of (ng)-1 and 2 for each instance of (ng)-2. These scores were then summed and divided by the total number of instances, to give the mean score. Indices were finally calculated by subtracting 1 from the mean score and multiplying the result by 100.

…Nominee for the most convoluted way of calculating a percentage.

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Puzzles in the sea
Here's the post where I comment on some puzzles from this year's Mystery Hunt that I found worthy of comment!

( spoilers ahoyCollapse )

Some puzzles that I worked on and enjoyed, but don't have any specific comments on: Captain Ager's Puzzling Adventure, the Optics Lab meta, The Accumulator, Memory Lane, A Toast, Funny Shapes, Dr. Nautilus's Secret Notes, and the Golden Tower meta. …And as I look through the puzzle index to make this list, I find several puzzles that I never worked on or even saw during the Hunt that I think are extremely clever, including Time is Out of Joint, p1ctures, and Dory.

Anyway, thanks to Random for an excellent Hunt. (Of course, it was probably inescapable that a team affiliated with Random would produce a high-quality Hunt.) Great job!

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Sea of puzzles
The 2015 Mystery Hunt was last weekend! A solid Hunt in all respects. It strikes me as a lot like last year's Hunt in overall character: not extraordinarily structurally ambitious; not, from my vantage point, a lot of blow-your-mind awesome puzzles (though that might just be a consequence of which puzzles I happened to work on), but a well-organized, well-balanced set of puzzles with some fun surprises and a lot of good solving. Although in writing this, it occurs to me that the very fact that a Hunt with three meta-metas could be described as "not extraordinarily ambitious" says a great deal about how much the structural sophistication of the Hunt has increased over the last decade or so.

The School of Fish round (say, it just occurred to me—did Random choose the ocean as the theme for its Hunt because their team name last year was "One Fish Two Fish Random Fish Blue Fish", or was that a coincidence?) was the major structural innovation this year—a round consisting of a large number of mini-puzzles, rather than a smaller number of full-length puzzles. This was an idea we talked about a lot in writing the 2011 Hunt—the Street Fighter and Pac-Man rounds were proposals for mini-puzzle rounds that we ended up not using—so I'm glad to see this concept finally making it into the Hunt. Aside from the novel feel it gave that round and meta, having a designated round full of easy puzzles seemed like a friendly gesture to beginning solvers to give them a better Mystery Hunt experience—like the beginning "mini-hunt" rounds with easier metas that a lot of Hunts have had recently. I did find myself personally wishing some of them were longer, though—I'd be working on a fun puzzle, and it'd be over before I knew it!

My one complaint is that the pace of unlocking of new puzzles often felt kind of sluggish to me—I had kind of the same feeling I had in 2007, where it seemed like solving one puzzle on average unlocked one new puzzle, so the number of unsolved puzzles you have stays relatively constant. The problem with this is that the unsolved puzzles you have are likely to be ones you're stuck or stumped or frustrated on, or just ones you're not interested in, and each new puzzle you unlock has a nonzero probability of joining that list. So if the number of unsolved puzzles stays constant, the number of puzzles you can productively work on solving declines over time, and that's kind of frustrating. I realize that there was timed release of DEEP as well, but we weren't so far behind as to get much out of that either.

Metaphysical Plant came in about 10th—yet again, one of the last teams to finish endgame before the Hunt shut down, so we achieved our goal of getting to see the whole thing without having to rush unduly. Still, the fact that we came in 10th, rather than, you know, 4th or something reminds me what an uphill climb it would be if we decided we did want to win again—we're kind of out of shape, as a team! If Random hadn't opened up hinting on metas after the coin was found, it's not clear to me whether we would have finished at all. Comments on endgame: I liked that it was modular, in that the five stations were independent of each other and could be undertaken in any order; but I kind of miss having more of a literal "hunt" element where the team looking for the coin at some point has to make some decision about where to go and look for the coin instead of being steered around campus deterministically. The deterministic station-visiting does probably make it easier to write an endgame that can accommodate multiple teams getting there at the same time.

The Hunt is racking up a large number of corporate sponsors, which still feels a little weird to me, but if it means that the Hunt can do things like give each team a beautifully designed treasure chest and tickets to the Aquarium, I can accept it.

Next post: thoughts on specific puzzles!

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Desk locomotion
My entire desk seems to have moved 1 foot north and I have no idea when or why this happened.



Note the 12-inch gap between the desk and the little bookshelf to the left, and that there's not enough space to open the file cabinet on the right.

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Addendum


MONK #1: so if i have three elevators
MONK #2: uh huh
MONK #1: and i put up a poster saying "two elevators" will be in service
what does that mean
MONK #2: "two elevators"
refers to elevators with the number 2 on them
MONK #1: oh ok whew
i thought it meant something different for a minute there
MONK #2: nah bro
you're cool

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Itinerary, 2014
What follows are the places I've been in 2014! Places I spent the night are in bold; places I'd never been before are in italics; places I went to on multiple unconnected occasions are underlined.

Ocean Grove, N.J.
Philadelphia, Penna.
Syracuse, N.Y.
Toronto, Ont.
Cambridge, Mass.
Arlington, Mass.
Ann Arbor, Mich.
East Lansing, Mich.
Lansing, Mich.
Mississauga, Ont.
Beverly, Mass.
Salem, Mass.
St. Louis, Mo.
Clayton, Mo.
Town and Country, Mo.
University City, Mo.
Kingston, Ont.
Stratford, Ont.
Potsdam, N.Y.
Waddington, N.Y.
Massena, N.Y.
Corinth, N.Y.
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
New York, N.Y.
Gouverneur, N.Y.
Alexandria Bay, N.Y.
Groningen, Groningen
Aberdeen Township, N.J.
Matawan, N.J.
Marlboro, N.J.
Old Bridge Township, N.J.
Chicago, Ill.
Albuquerque, N.M.
Danvers, Mass.
Peabody, Mass.
New Britain, Conn.
Kensington, Conn.

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Calendrical coincidences?
So I just noticed this:

In the Western secular system, the calendar day is considered to begin at midnight; and New Year's Day is near the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year.

On the other hand, in the Jewish tradition, the day is considered to begin at sunset, and New Year's Day is near the autumn equinox.

Is this a coincidence? In cultures where the year begins in spring, does the calendar day begin at sunrise?

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