Hurrah!

My paper has finally been uploaded to the arXiv. Gaze in awe upon its higher-dimensional beauty at http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0607423. And if you should chance to meet the authors of the diagram package XY-pic, please give them a good kicking from me. Does anyone know of a less painful way of typesetting pasting diagrams in TeX? XY-pic has the most insane and line-noisy syntax I've ever had the misfortune to encounter, and I speak as someone who used to write Perl for a living and still does so occasionally for fun.

Since then (Tuesday afternoon), I've been taking it easy, watching a lot of Spaced and Black Books and going shopping (to the Tiso sale for hillwalking trousers on Wednesday, and to Ikea for odds and sods on Thursday). This was my first trip to Ikea, and it was pretty interesting to see what the fuss was all about: I managed to avoid the "Ikea syndrome" of buying masses of stuff you don't need because it's so cheap, but it was a close-run thing at times. I noticed that most things are merely averagely cheap, but every so often you come across something that's totally, insanely cheap, which has to be a loss-leader: the batteries, or the £2 four-way plug extensions, or the £5 toolkits, for instance. I already had most of the stuff in the toolkit, but seriously thought about buying one because it would be cheaper than buying a hammer and an adjustable screwdriver elsewhere.

And the meatballs were very nice, though the restaurant reminded me of school cafeterias :-)

Then we found a midi stereo system abandoned on the street: one speaker was broken, but I've got a spare set of speakers anyway, so wormwood_pearl can have that :-) It's insane what people throw away, though thanks to the wonders of bulk uplift day, throwing things like that away in Glasgow is almost a form of recycling. In the same pile, we found a piece of shelving that I was able to use to fix the seat on the swing in wormwood_pearl's back garden. Hurrah for handymanning! Though I don't think my woodwork teacher would be very impressed with my sawing (always my weak point). He'd probably also have been unimpressed with my using duct tape to bind the wood to the existing plastic seat rather than making a new seat from scratch. The tape stretches quite a bit, so the seat still bends a centimetre or so when you put enough force on it (say, by swinging on it).

Para-style and Marine-style selection

The article about Harvard's selection procedures I linked to a while ago drew an interesting distinction, between "treatment effects" and "selection effects". Harvard, it claims, is largely a selection effect institution, which means that it produces outstanding graduates basically by selecting only outstanding students. By contrast, it claims that the US Marine Corps is a treatment effect institution, which is "confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier". I'm suspicious of this, but I'll get back to that in a minute. It reminded me of a related distinction: I don't know if there's a proper terminology for this, but I've always thought of it as the "Para-style selection versus Marine-style selection" distinction. Allow me to briefly explain.

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So, readers: what do you think? What approach did your university take? Do you think this is an interesting distinction?

[As for the US Marines: I suspect that, ironically, they use Para-style selection. They'll take anyone, but they're confident that if you don't meet their standards you'll drop out at some point during training. Certainly Jarhead gives that impression: Swofford says that the marines who assessed his sniper induction would have been happiest not to pass any candidates, as it would confirm the elite status of their unit.]