Beware of the Train

I was recently delighted to receive an email from someone saying that he'd just started a PhD with my old supervisor, and did I have any advice for him? You'll be unsurprised to learn that I did; I thought I'd post it here in the hope that someone else might find it useful. Some of what follows is specific to my supervisor, my field, or my discipline; most is more general. Your mileage may vary.

• Your main problem for the next 3/4 years will be maintaining morale. Don't beat yourself up for slow/no progress. Do make sure you're eating, sleeping and exercising properly. Consider doing some reading about cognitive behavioural therapy so you can spot negative thought-patterns before they start to paralyse you.
• Try to get some structure in your life. Weekly meetings are a minimum. Set yourself small deadlines. Don't worry overly if you miss them: if this stuff were easy to schedule, they wouldn't call it "research".
• Sooner or later you'll discover that something you're working on has already been done, probably by Kelly. Do not panic. Chances are that one of the following is true:
  • his technique applies in some different domain (actually check this, because folklore often assigns greater utility to theorems than they actually possess)
  • your technique is obviously different (so there's an equivalence theorem to prove - or maybe not...)
  • your technique can be generalised or specialised or reapplied in some way that his can't.
• Start writing now. I know everyone says this, but it's still good advice. It doesn't matter if you don't think you've got anything worth writing up yet. Write up background material. Write up rough notes. The very act of writing things up will suggest new ideas. And it will get you familiar with TeX, which is never a bad thing. As a category theorist, you will probably need to become more familiar with TeX than the average mathematician. And writing is mostly easier than doing mathematics - important, since you'll need something to do on those days when you just don't have enough energy for actual research.
• Even if you don't start writing, you should certainly start maintaining a bibliography file, with your own notes in comments.
• Speaking of fluctuating energy, you should read Terry Tao's advice on time management for mathematicians.
• Keep your TeX source in version control. It's occasionally very helpful to be able to refer back and find out what changed when and why, and using a properly-designed system avoids the usual mess of thesis.old.tex.bak files lying around in your filesystem. I like Git, but other systems exist. Mercurial is meant to be especially nice if you haven't used version control before.
• Make sure you have up-to-date backups (perhaps via a source-code hosting site like GitHub or BitBucket). And try to ensure you have access to a spare machine. You don't want to be futzing around with screwdrivers and hard drive enclosures when you've got a deadline.
• Tom's a big fan of using rough sheets of paper to write on in supervision meetings [and perhaps your supervisor will be too, O reader]. You'll need to find a way of filing these or otherwise distilling them so that they can be referred to later. I never managed this.
• For my own rough working, I like paper notebooks, which I try to carry around with me at all times. Your mileage may vary. Some people swear by a personal wiki, and in particular the TiddlyWiki/Dropbox combo.
• Speaking of filing: the book Getting Things Done (which I recommend, even if I don't manage to follow most of its advice myself) recommends a simple alphabetical filing system for paper documents, with those fold-over cardboard folders (so you can pick up your whole file for a given topic and cart it around with you). I find this works pretty well. Make sure you have some spare folders around so you can easily spin up new files as needed.
• Don't be afraid to read around your field, even if your supervisor advises you not to. I really wish I'd ignored mine and read more about rewriting systems, for instance.
• Try to seize that surge of post-conference inspiration. My major theorem was proved in the airport on the way back from a conference. Also, airports make great working environments at 2am when hardly anybody's around :-)
• Don't forget that if things get too bad, you can quit. Sometimes that's the best choice. I know several people who've dropped out of PhD programmes and gone on to happy lives.
• The supply of newly-minted PhDs now outstrips the number of academic jobs available to them, and category theory's a niche and somewhat unfashionable field (in maths, at least - you may well have more luck applying to computer science departments. Bone up on some type theory). When you get to the end of your studies, expect finding an academic job to take a long time and many iterations. Try to have a backup plan in case nothing comes up. Let's hope the economy's picked up by then :-)

Just realised I never posted these here.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Dan and I went along to watch the first round of the Scottish Tooling Series at Glasgow Climbing Centre. Drytooling, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is climbing (usually outrageously overhanging) rock using ice-axes and crampons. It initially developed as a way of reaching large free-hanging icicles (common in the Alps, apparently), but soon developed as a branch of climbing in its own right. If you're careful to protect the walls and the holds you can drytool on an indoor climbing wall, and that's what the STS was. A number of drytooling routes had been set, and entrants scored points for completing them in as few goes as possible.

I'd just been intending to watch, but then I bumped into Mark from Glenmore Lodge, who asked me why I wasn't competing.

"Er, well, it's too late to enter now."
"No it isn't."
"Oh. But I haven't got any gear."
"Don't worry," piped up one of the organisers, "you can borrow mine."
"Great! But I haven't got enough money for the entry fee..."
"I'll lend you it," said Dan.

So I ended up entering after all. Luckily for you all, Dan made videos of my attempts (the first of which has loud music):





tl;dw: I really need to work on my drytooling.

I found a used syringe in the street today.

It presented me with an ethical dilemma: on the one hand, I didn't like the thought of some kid playing with it and getting hepatitis C or worse, but on the other, what was I supposed to do about it? I couldn't see any bins or anything nearby, and even if I could, what about the guys who empty the bins? Leaving it alone would have ensured that I was in no danger myself, but if we only ever did the right thing when it was easy or convenient then it would be a pretty poor world. In terms that occurred to me later, the First Law trumps the Third. No doubt this situation is covered in detail in Situations You're Expected to Know How to Deal With Now That You're a Grown-up ("Nothing under 'heroin' - try under 'needles'"), but my copy must have gone missing in the post on my eighteenth birthday because I never received it¹. In the end, I picked the syringe up carefully by the plunger end through a convenient newspaper (probably the first and only time I'll be grateful to litterers), wrapped it in a bit more newspaper, then carried it down to a nearby doctor's surgery and asked them to put it in their sharps bin for proper disposal. Then I washed my hands very thoroughly, even though I hadn't actually touched it at any point :-) The nurse suggested that in future I should leave it there or call the police, who'd have the correct protective gear. Seems like a waste of police time to me, I dunno.

What would you have done?

¹ Wouldn't that be a fantastic book, though? Section headings like "My friend's just come out to me", "It sounds like my neighbour's beating his/her spouse", "Someone's having an epileptic fit in front of me", "Someone I know is feeling suicidal", "I've just been arrested", "I've just got a threatening letter from the council demanding money for x", "My kitchen's crawling with ants", things like that. Obviously it couldn't cover every situation or give step-by-step instructions in all cases - being able to deal with situations as they arise is, as far as I can tell, the point of being an adult - but you could provide helpful advice and facts. The trouble is, who'd be qualified to write it?

[Joint work with wormwood_pearl]

Due to an administrative cock-up, the £15 billion earmarked for Crossrail has been diverted into the Scottish transportation budget. The result is the construction of a London-Glasgow shinkansen-style bullet train.

English announcer: On behalf of ScotProRailCorp Limited, we'd like to wish you a warm welcome to the Carling FA Premier London to Glarsgow high-speed expressway, departing London King's Cross at 1307, calling at London St Pancras at 1308 to give you a chance to change your mind, stopping at somewhere called... I think it says "Manchester"? Somewhere Northern, anyway - and arriving in Glarsgow Central at 1437. If you decide that it's all too grim and Northern for you, the next train back South leaves twenty minutes later at 1457. They use the same time zone as us up in Glarsgow - yes, I was surprised too! - so there's no need to re-set your watches. A range of sandwiches and some perfectly delightful little cakes are available from our on-train branch of Carluccio's in coach E.

Scots announcer: Awright, bawbags? This is the 1307 London tae Glesga Get-It-Right-Up-Ye-Bawbags Express. We'll be crossin the Scoattish border at 1420, at which point there wull be a short burst o pipin and a wee dram will be served tae wis all. Onybody no jinin in wi the singin o "Scots wha hae" will be taen ootside an gied a kickin. Yous can git yer Buckie, yer Bru and yer fish suppers fae the chip shoap in Coach D. Any c**t starts any'hin wi any o ma staff, and we'll chib ye and throw ye oot the windae at three hundred mile an ooer, so gonnae no dae that? Enjoy yer ride. Yer maw sure did last nicht!

Gaelic announcer: <For those of you who have the Gaelic, welcome to the Fairy King Iron Messenger From the South, leaving one big city in the Godless South at 1307 and arriving into another at 1437. The connection for the remaining twelve hours of your journey home will be departing fifteen minutes later. When you arrive home you will learn that while you've been off gallivanting down in London the girl you loved has married your worst enemy, your sister Mhairi has given her maidenhead to the local laird and then drowned herself in the well, little Murdo has taken sick and died from drinking the well water, and your mother has killed herself over the shame of having her eldest son down in London and going into pubs. Meanwhile, your cattle have made veterinary history by developing myxomatosis; and consequently the family farm has gone into receivership. We hope you have a pleasant journey.>

Elizabeth came up from Oxford on Sunday to give the Geometry seminar on Monday afternoon. She was speaking about her DPhil work, which is fairly hard-core algebraic geometry (specifically, she's using geometric invariant theory to construct coarse moduli spaces for stable maps). None of us were very familiar with the background material, and so she'd put in some explanation of the ideas used: it was all clearly presented, but there was quite a lot of it, so the pace was a bit fast. I got quite a lot out of it, though. After the seminar, we went to dinner at Balbir (seriously posh Indian restaurant on Church Street) with susoeffl and the seminar convenor, then Elizabeth, susoeffl and I returned to my flat to drink gin and bizarre Welsh slivovice/whisky and to eat cheesecake that the lovely wormwood_pearl had prepared. Then we played a couple of rounds of Carcassonne until it was time for Elizabeth to get her train back to Oxford. It was excellent to see her again, and to hear her explaining her thesis topic at length and while I was sober for a change :-)

I'm increasingly impressed with Carcassonne. The game mechanics are wonderfully simple and elegant. It seems like it would benefit from more depth, but maybe there's depth there that I'm not seeing yet. And there doesn't seem to be much incentive to cooperate: maybe playing doubles (a la croquet) would help.

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about games of that sort recently, and this morning I came up with an idea for one.

( Tobacco Lords of Glasgow (working title) )

I mentioned this to wormwood_pearl, who immediately suggested a better idea:

( Escape from Cessnock! )

If either of these get off the ground at all, I'll post some more here...

¹: Buckfast tonic wine, the preferred drink of Scotland's disadvantaged young folk.
²: The aforementioned disadvantaged young folk. The Scottish equivalent of chavs. (spits, disinfects mouth after using foul classist word)
³: The upmarket, overpriced halls favoured by students with more money than sense.
⁴: As any student will tell you, the parks are full of gangs that will gang-rape you if you venture in after dark. the_barlow informs me that this is bollocks, though some of them are used as cruising spots by gay men.