A few weeks later, and things are basically rolling along.
Progress on the textbook has been slower recently than I've wanted. I've been getting caught up with a couple other things, plus I'm working through a chapter on basic geometry. These problems have taken much longer to write because I have to draw a lot of figures. I'm hoping to be done with this chapter by the end of next week so that I can get back to writing new material.
I finished the revision of my article and submitted it, which means it's back into that nebulous place of review. Since I've added an entire appendix, I expect to have a new set of comments to respond to on that part. But that's okay. I will be happy when it's finally completely accepted, but that will come in time.
I registered for the Joint Math Meetings in San Diego at the beginning of January. There's a minicourse on a program called WebWork, which is basically an online math homework program. I'm a little skeptical, but at least the program is free and open source. It's also open source, which means that we can go in and tweak things (assuming that we understand enough about how it's programmed to re-program it). I'm actually a little bit excited for this, except that it will turn into something else that requires a lot of work to develop.
I've also got a few students who are looking to do a research project and present a poster at the meetings. I like the direction that they're headed in, but they will need to follow through with the work if they're going to be successful. Also, I think the project that they're doing is fun. Consider a deck of cards labeled 1, 2, 3, ..., n. The cards are turned up one at a time until either the 1 is revealed or the player decides to stop. If the player stops before the 1 is revealed, then his score is the total value of the revealed cards. If the 1 is revealed, the player scores no points. What strategy should be employed to maximize the player's expected score. (I don't think this part is actually that hard.) You can then turn this into a multi-round multi-player game, and suddenly it becomes far more intricate. For example, you can play to see who has more points, or play until one player reaches X points.
There's nothing in particular to report from church. Small groups have launched, and the small group leaders are generally doing pretty well. That doesn't mean that everything has been perfectly smoothly, but everyone is managing the difficult process of building authentic community in reasonable ways. We have a leader meeting next week, which will be the first formal meeting in this new coaching format.
What else is going on these days? Not much. I've fallen behind in my various reading projects (there's a stack of books on my bed and bed stand that is not getting any smaller). I haven't done anything too intricate or exciting with food recently, either. I did visit the new buffet at Caesar's. It was a good quality buffet with a lot of variety (especially the meat counter -- instead of just prime rib and ham, it was prime rib, sausage, chicken, and at least a few other options).
But next month is Thanksgiving, and then Christmas. There's lots of fun and activity associated with both of those.
