Happy birthday cam!

So, by request, for distantcam's birthday today I made him choc-orange icecream. None of the recipes I could find online were quite right so I made one up. It was apprently very tasty :)(*)

Choc-orange Icecream
Picture
( Instructions )

Everything you wanted to know about sexuality but were too dumb to ask

ithiliana made a locked post(*) asking her flist what GLBT people wish was better known by their peers at uni, and what straight people wish they'd known at uni. I found this a really interesting question, since by uni most people have gotten past the basic "Gay people exist and aren't evil" stage. EDIT: I haven't included stuff on non-monogamous relationships and other misunderstood aspects of sexuality like S&M etc since that wasn't part of the original post. Feel free to discuss them in the comments anyway :)

So, this is my answer, including stuff I've seen other people get consistently wrong:
( Read more... )

So what do you guys think?
EDIT: I'm not going to correct this post since I'd be rewriting it forever and I think it acts an interesting snapshot into the brain of a well meaning but somewhat clueless straight person. But it's definitely flawed, and there's lots of important additions and discussion in the comments.

(*)to keep answers private, she said it was ok to mention it existed
(**)Well, not for straight people, anyway :)

Let me tell you about my thesis

An explanation of part of my thesis: Black box recognition of sporadic simple groups. Needs some more work but this will do for now. Let me know if it's confusing or there's any mistakes (assuming anyone can be bothered reading it)

Life has been trying really hard to get me to think about maths recently. A guy I met on webcomics (cdave) started talking about this book he read which just happened to be on the same topic as my thesis, which led to me digging it out to give him a reference. And then I went to a supper at my main supervisors house (they were throwing a conference for her birthday) and ended up chatting to two of my old collaborators about how they're going with some of the stuff I was working on (that's right, 2 years after I graduated and it still refuses to work. I'm glad I gave up on that bit :D) And then Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless commented that I never seem to talk about maths any more.

So here you go.

The reason tend not to talk about maths is that I got burned out on learning anything really hard during my thesis, and then got burned out on explaining things at a really low level at Scitech. Also after a while reading stuff like New Scientist started to feel like work and that feeling hasn't worn off yet. The one thing I have felt like doing is explaining my thesis a bit better, but then I'd get sad at the thought that noone would care.

Then I remembered that the whole point of having your own blog/website is not worrying about whether or not people care about what you're saying :D

It really doesn't help that the chronic fatigue has made maths in particular more difficult, so thinking about it is depressing when I am confronted with my own relative stupidity. But I'm coming to terms with that.

Maths links

And now I start remathsifying I can't stop myself...

• Theorem of the day 2009 Calendar My supervisor had one of these on her wall(*) and it was pretty cool. Added bonus: is feminist!
  
• Pop Quiz Math Clock
  
• Equation bookshelf Oh My God I Want One.
  

Last two links via sassamifrass.

(*)And they have a special theorem just for her birthday. She has a lot of maths cred :)