A blog-meme

Flip tagged me on in a blog-meme. To be honest, this is my first blog-meme and I don’t know what I am suppose to expect, but still here it goes.

  1. Link to the person who tagged you.
  2. List 7 random/weird things currently on your mind.
  3. Tag more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
  4. Let the tagged people know by leaving a note on their site.

Seven random/weird things:

  1. A canonical line bundle of a complex symplectic manifold is trivial.
    I was asking my friend about this over lunch, but we were not able to come to a conclusion. After talking with him, I am not sure whether that this is even true for all complex symplectic manifold. Any ideas?
  2. I like Witten’s style of writing.
    I am currently reading Witten’s “Mirror Manifold and Topological Field Theory” for my “Calabi-Yau Manifolds and Mirror Symmetry” course mini-project. He has a very clear style of writing papers. I like it because he writes comments like “I do not know how to do this”, and he knows which details can be hidden so that the reader could easily get the big picture.
  3. Squash is good for the soul.
    I played squash in the morning at 7:30am. It’s a good way to start a new day. Currently, I am working on my backhand and volley. I used to run, do push-ups and sit-ups, but I found out that playing squash is more fun!
  4. The end of the term: party!
    At last, all of my lectures for this term is over! Yesterday, I went to Prof. Philip Candelas’ last string theory course for the term. I will miss talking about strings with Philip over coffee after his lectures - he is good at explaining things, but I could use some extra time on reading papers. My friends and I went out for dinner and had some drinks.
  5. The ftplugin for php files in vim is overwritten by another file, but can’t figure out which one.
    I am trying to use folding for php files in vim. Folding is quite powerful and convenient when I am trying to understand the overall structure of a document. When I try this for a php file by setting commentstring to \<!–%–\> in ftplugin, it resets to /*%s*/ when I actually open the file. It is strange since all the settings I wrote in the ftplugin for php works, but only the commentstring has a problem. I guess when vim loads it reads the ftplugin and another config file, and overwrites the one I wrote. But I don’t know how to get around this, any ideas?
  6. I need a better LCD.
    According to a research from the University of Utah, generally if you get a bigger LCD monitor, the productivity increases. (For full details and the assumption made in the experiment, read the linked document.) My laptop has a 12″ LCD monitor, and I think it is about time to buy a decent one.
  7. Firefox sucks.
    Firefox (more precisely, Iceweasel) died while I was writing this post. OK, maybe it wasn’t Firefox’s fault, but I just opened three tabs and it just halted. Maybe it might be the Youtube plugin for Firefox that had a problem. Anyway, I don’t really like Firefox, it is slow and needs to improve plugin management.

Now I am going to tag my friends. But be aware, there are lots of blogs written in Korean. (I am not sure whether my friend will write a blog-meme in Korean.)

I personally know all the authors of the listed blogs. I didn’t include other blogs I read, but do not know the blogger personally. I am going to break one of the rule slightly - I am only going to notify two blogs, the ones written in English, that I tagged them.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

~ by hwasungmars on March 13, 2008.

One Response to “A blog-meme”

  1. Hi Mars. I feel jealous that you manage to waste your time in such productive pursuits!

    To see why the canonical line bundle of a complex manifold with a holomorphic symplectic form is trivial, just look at the top exterior power of it. Then nondegeneracy implies it is nowhere zero, and so it gives a global section of the canonical bundle, and therefore a global trivialization of it.

    As for Witten’s writing style, I agree he has a way of making the opaque seem easy - but I’m not sure I would give him full marks. In particular, it is quite difficult to understand what is physics and what is mathematics - and what is proved and what is conjectured.

    Doing anything at 7.30 in the morning, let alone exercise, scares the hell out of me.

    And the beta versions of Firefox 3 are very good with lots of memory leaks/potential crashes/plugin instabilities patched.

    M said this on March 16, 2008 at 11:31 pm

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