Last Night at the Cafe

1. I think I got negative work done. When I went there, I had written about 90% of the questions for each final exam. On the exam for the pre-service teachers, I unwrote 2 questions; on the exam for the gen-ed class, I unwrote almost the whole thing. Then I tried to do some real work and read about Hopf algebras satisfying a polynomial identity, but the paper turned very homological very quickly, and I understood nothing and felt stupid. The entire reason I went to the cafe was to lift my mood, as I could have avoided work and been in a bad mood at home. I could have made coffee at home.


2. Two tables over from me were two guys gossiping; they were there for hours. One was very clearly gay, and I couldn't read the other. The gay guy was telling his friend all about his first relationship and other overlistenworthy topics. Unfortunately, he spoke softly, so I missed a lot of their conversation.


3. I talked to the nuclear engineer for a while. He has electron micrographs of a porous surface, and he's trying to write an algorithm that counts how many holes are in it. We had very different approaches to the problem. For me, once I started considering the image as an array of numbers (pixel intensity), I immediately disregarded the source of the problem. For him, it was essential to keep in mind that these numbers represented light. So his approaches used Fourier transforms and correlations and convolutions and whatnot.