the riddle of moving to another country

growing up, i absolutely loved riddles, puzzles, and jokes. oh my.

the guesser can ask the riddler yes/no questions until the puzzle is solved:

a man lives on the 14th floor of a building downtown. everyday when he leaves, he rides the elevator down to the ground floor and walks to wherever he is going. when he returns, he takes the elevator to the 8th floor and walks the rest of the way. unless it's raining, then he takes the elevator all the way up to the 14th floor. why?

and so on...

ze frank has created an interactive matchstick version of the first puzzle i really remember solving. my dad introduced it to me one time when he took my sister and i to hear the cincinnati pops orchestra. while we were sitting on the lawn waiting for the performance, he set up this puzzle with some blades of grass.


move two matches to form 4 equal squares, using every match as part of a square in the solution.

i have no idea where he discovered this puzzle or if he even remembers this event. i was occupied and frustrated for a good while, but when i surprised myself by actually solving it, i was hooked for life!

i think my interest in solving puzzles and riddles initiated a curiousity in figuring out how things in the our universe work. i also find that it's an advantage to like such things when traveling around the globe. moving to another country is like a gigantic series of puzzles and riddles (and sometimes jokes that either i dont get, or i'm the only one who understands!).

at least during this move, the language puzzle is more entertaining than frustrating, but there are still constant mysteries to figure out. for instance, what is a person from nottingham called? why do they drive on the left side of the road here, while most of the other countries in the world have chosen to drive on the right? is there really a different and/or proper time to say cheers instead of thank you, or are they completely interchangeable? why is there a mysterious trick to flushing half the toilets i've encountered in this country... and what is it?

there are new puzzles to solve everyday.... and luckily, i thoroughly enjoy nearly all of them (for now)!

30 shades of red

i've actually been looking forward to turning thirty. i've celebrated thoroughly by enjoying a sunny weekend in the peak district with friends (pictures soon), despite acquiring tonsillitis last week. how many 30 year olds get tonsillitis, anyway? i dont know, but this one did!

i never created a list of "things to do before i turn X years old." i certainly have things i'd like to experience in life, but it seems silly to me to put a timeframe on most activities. why create pressure like that for myself? most likely my interests or circumstances will change over time, and i want to allow freedom for that to happen! expectations are inevitably met with disappointment when we're so focused on a goal that we forget to enjoy the intervening events!


for a bit of birthday fun, here is a picture of my big-cheeked self on my 3rd birthday. my family jokes that when i was a baby, you could see my cheeks from behind!


since trying to recreate old photographs is highly entertaining, here is my 30 year old self today:


i've nearly grown into my cheeks, i think.

it's also a good day to remember this piece of wisdom from jessica hagy...

mathematician joke

just to forewarn you, this is a raunchy little joke i recently heard from a mathematician...

what did the constipated mathematician do?


he sharpened his pencil and worked it out!

read previous non-vulgar nerd jokes here and here.

carnival of space #58

the 58th installment of the carnival of space is up at universe today. many good articles this time around, but i was particularly amused by a few dorky jokes posted at the orbiting frog blog.

Q. How many general relativists does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Two. One holds the bulb, while the other rotates the universe.

what is intelligence, anyway?

this is a particularly interesting insight as i'm stuck in the depths of writing my dissertation and studying everything i think my committee members might ask me i should know to earn my doctoral degree. unfortunately, the insight isnt terribly useful for my current predicament, but it's interesting nonetheless.

What is intelligence, anyway?
By Isaac Asimov

When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me.

(It didn't mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)

All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too.

Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?

For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was.

Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test.

Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too.

In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly.

My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

Consider my auto-repair man, again.

He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me.

One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand.

"The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?"

Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers.

Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, "Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them."

Then he said smugly, "I've been trying that on all my customers today." "Did you catch many?" I asked. "Quite a few," he said, "but I knew for sure I'd catch you."

"Why is that?" I asked. "Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn't be very smart."

And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.

always right

get ready for a good groaning chuckle!

if the jokes seem obtuse, read up on types of triangles and angles here!  

from the argyle sweater comic series by scott hilburn via IFLS.

grasshoppers don't like infinity

in my seventh grade math class, i heard my first version of zeno's paradox in the form of a thirsty grasshopper. a tired grasshopper wants to drink water that is some distance away. he can only jump half the distance to the water, because he is tired. but he is even more exhausted after the first jump and can only jump half of the remaining distance the next time, then half of that distance the next jump, then half, etc... will the thirsty grasshopper ever reach the water?

my answer was no.

but what about when it comes to mathematicians and beer?


haha! more dork jokes here.

joke found thru talk like a physicist.

neil armstrong

the inspired face of neil armstrong, inside the lunar module, still siting on the surface of the moon, shortly after his walk on the moon on 20 July 1969:

Photo Credit:  NASA

one amazing thing that he did was to allow every other human being pretend they could be there in that moment to feel what is reflected in his face in that image.

he lead a private life after his moon walk, but you can watch a rare interview with neil armstrong, which occurred in australia just last year. 

also, i read on twitter that apparently neil used to tell unfunny jokes about the moon, and follow them up with "ah, i guess you had to be there."  :)

keep amanda weird

there exists a fantastic tradition among the astronomy graduate students at UT: when a person earns a PhD, the rest of the students honor that person by creating a special t-shirt which includes photos, memories from grad school, inside jokes and his or her dissertation research. the t-shirt is informally presented and explained at the official PhD party.

i don't know for certain how long ago this tradition started (any deas?), but the original t-shirts had a single plot from the dissertation and that was all! the rise of photoshop and gimp have initiated the development of quite intricate shirts over the years.

i admit i was super excited to join the PhD club *and* receive my official shirt at my party last weekend. it's a rite of passage, really, and i'm so pleased with the result!!! the front of the shirt generally shares random events from the grad school years, usually presented thru some sort of a theme. since the students found so many pictures of me from this blog and other sources, they chose to show pictures of me eating and drinking in all the places i've traveled to and spent time during grad school with the theme: on the road again!


the top left is me trying hard to keep my beer out of the water during one of our many boat parties on a lake just outside of austin. below that is "flat amanda" followed by my advisor pouring me a margarita while we were in mexico celebrating the wedding of former UT astronomers. on down the line.... drinking in brasil and eating homemade empanadas in chile. the right side features me eating a huge plate of meat in a viking-themed restaurant in sanitago, chile, and drinking a larger-than-my-head-sized mug of beer at the oktoberfestival while wearing my bona fide dirnd'l!

they also thought to include my evolving modes of transportation. although i've never owned a volkswagen, i've always been affiliated with people who have, and joined the austin aircoolers vw gang pretty much immediately after i moved to austin. i owned a car for a couple years, but upgraded to a scooter and a bicycle at some point. several months ago, i sold the scooter so now i'm down to my bike and the city bus system... and i love it (although its definitely summer now in texas so i'm little sweaty whenever i arrive somewhere by bike!)!

the back of the shirt is themed after the astropixie blog! the subtitle comes from cleverly changing a very popular phrase around here: keep austin weird, to "keep amanda weird"!! haha!


if you've been to austin, maybe you've noticed that it's a little weird in general, but the basis of the "keep austin weird" project is to support local stores and style so people can sustain their independent businesses, and the city can retain its unique subtlety without be run over by big money superstores that are frankly.. no fun at all!

the shirt superbly ties in so many memories from grad school, and even includes a tiny little plot from my research on the right.... just under the "science: it works, bitches" banner! as a play on the cartoon that i have at the bottom of the blog, they included several pictures of me "in disguise." they joked that they found way more pictures of me in costumes than they had room to include on the t-shirt... so i guess it's fair to say that i enjoy dressing up ;)

thank you so much amy, marty, andrea and everyone else!!








yippeee :)