I read a lot of webcomics. I know, a lot of people read some webcomics. (Actually, most people just read xkcd. That’s fine–it’s funny. Used to be funnier.) But everyone’s missing out on a lot of funny webcomics, and that’s a shame. Since a few people actually like my sense of humor, I figured that it is my civic Internet duty to point people to the webcomics I read, since I’m sure everyone will at least like some of them. (If not, where is your heart?)

Let’s pause here for my endorsement of Google Reader. Google Reader is my gateway to the Internet, and there’s no way I could read as much online as I do without it. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept: most websites nowadays supply feeds of their content, so you can check up on their updates without constantly visiting the site. I subscribe to 41 websites, which update on entirely different timetables with wildly differing frequencies. But whenever I go to Google Reader, all my new Internets are there for the reading. (And since it’s a Google product, the past Internets are, of course, easily searchable.) If you don’t use a RSS feed reader yet, why not? You already have a Google Reader account if you have Gmail. DO IT. I’ll wait.

Okay. Here are the 15 webcomics I am currently subscribed to (it fluctuates every month or so).

Totally awesome:

• Nedroid Picture Diary. Oh my. This is probably my favorite webcomic. Every single one is totally amazing. Stars Reginald, a bird (of some sort?), and Beartato, a bear-tato. You need to read this.
• chainsawsuit. It doesn’t really make any sense, but that’s sort of the point. The best webcomic for those of you with no attention span.
• Dinosaur Comics. Hard to explain this one. It has a fair bit of text but always hits…some sort of point…right on the head. Stars T-Rex, a pretty cool dinosaur and dude. Very excellent.
• xkcd. Yeah, it’s a great comic. Math and romance and stick figures and whatever you already read this.
• Chronillogical. It’s a webcomic about time-traveling students by my friend Greg Poulos, and his friend John Chouinard. Great art and a great story. You have to start from the beginning, but it’s not that old. Do it.
• Penny Arcade. These guys are the veterans of the webcomic industry. Unfortunately, this comic doesn’t really make sense unless you are up-to-the-day on video game news. (Maybe you should subscribe to a gaming blog!) Every comic comes with a long blog entry, and often is making fun of something announced that morning.
• Sheldon Comic Strip. If you’re feeling nostalgic, this is basically a daily newspaper comic strip that isn’t in any newspapers. One difference: unlike newspaper comics, this is actually funny. Centers around a typical 10-year-old billionaire and his talking duck.
• pictures for sad children. Funny, kind of depressing sometimes, in a funny way.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Quite funny usually-one-panel strips with a twist caption. Quite irreverent but worth reading (just not around your parents!).

Here are the rest (which are still excellent) but I am sick of writing blurbs:

• Hark! A Vagrant. Generally about history. Pretty good even if you don’t know much about history.
• Thinkin’ Lincoln. It’s sort of about Lincoln. Used to be a lot funnier, but still pretty good.
• Gunshow. Just subscribed recently. Pretty funny.
• indexed. Funny graphs drawn on notecards.
• Buttersafe.  Reminds me a bit of pictures for sad children but more peaceful.
• Simulated Comic Product. Sometimes I wonder why I am subscribed to this. Then I remember it updates infrequently and is sort of funny.

Read away! If you have any suggestions for webcomics that I don’t subscribe to, leave them in the comments!

(This is the act I performed for the second annual IU undergraduate math talent show. I also served as emcee.)

I’m glad all of you made it out here tonight. One great thing about math is how diverse it is–not just of mathematicians, but of the entire field itself. Math ranges from the purest, most useless subjects–the ones I like–to applied fields, like engineering; at the same time, some fields like computer science straddle the dichotomy, strangely both applied and pure at the same time.

As some of you know, I’ve recently come to like computer science a lot. I’m still learning the ropes, but it’s already pretty easy for me to find the computer scientists at a breakfast buffet. They’re usually in a queue by the hash table.

See, the choice between math and related fields is a tradeoff between purity and utility. The more applied fields actually get some important results.

For example, in computer science, they recently deduced the best way to walk: the logic gait. Of course, if you do too many logical ands, your ampersands may get inflamed, a serious condition called conjunctivitis.

In electrical engineering, they’re working on making even better semiconductors. I think adding gallium to silicon is totally dope.

In physics, they recently discovered a new salsa a thousand times better than pico de gallo. It’s called nano de gallo. And they excavated a derivative of the velociraptor: the acceleraptor.

Seriously, though. You probably saw that Wall Street Journal article about how mathematician is the best profession, since it pays well, and sitting in a chair doesn’t really have any occupational hazards.

Still, some mathematicians have gotten into entrepreneurial endeavors. I’ve been eating out lately at Markov’s chain of restaurants. They’re kind of artsy; you don’t actually get to order off a menu. They just choose your dish randomly based on the probability that you’ll like it. I highly recommend their Chinese, though. I quite enjoy their random wok.

Even the Ghostbusters have gone into math lately, studying Hilbert spaces. They’ve already made a lot of breakthroughs in spectral theory.

But Rick Astley hasn’t had as much success in game theory. He’s studying the prisoner’s dilemma, but he just can’t get past his moral hangups about ratting out the other prisoner to lessen your own sentence. Even if he knows the other prisoner won’t rat him out, Rick’s still never gonna give him up.

And ever since the economy tanked, cartesian products of rings have become more popular, since grad students can only afford to study free modules.

The military pulled out of some math research, too. At the NSA they can’t even generalize any more; they’ve been reduced to lieutenantizing. They’ve also been reconsidering some policies at their complex prisons. The problem with conjugal visits is that sometimes they result in those elements multiplying, which becomes a real problem of square magnitude.

But really, now. I’ve been making it sound like math isn’t good for anything, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I use calculus in the grocery store all the time. For example, how do you differentiate between cuts of beef? Prime rib.

And algebra comes in handy on the dance floor. You know the robot, right? It’s composed only of rigid motions, so it turns out it’s actually a subgroup of isometries.

And analysis is indispensable in the kitchen. The other day, I made a sequence of sandwiches for myself: first a p-naught butter and jelly sandwich, then a p1 butter and jelly sandwich, then a p2 butter and jelly sandwich… I tried to eat the whole series, but I realized the sandwiches didn’t get smaller, so I diverged from that plan.

To me, at least, math is really exciting. Seriously. I just get really excited whenever I’m doing math. Like, the other day, I had the surface integral of the curl of a vector field, and I was really stoked to turn it into a path integral instead.

One problem I’ve noticed in math classes is that there’s so much material in each class, but it isn’t compact enough to cover finitely. Good professors know that it’s easier once you add on a point at infinity; then you can always cover it finitely.

Anyway. Probably a lot of you have AT&T Wireless plans, right? They changed their name one and a half years ago or so; that’s because they realized how important linear algebra is, and they wanted to be invertible. So now they’re no longer singular.

A recent medical study found that Viagra works on some ring members with zero powers. After the trial, they were no longer nilpotent.

Anyway, I think it’s time for the next act, so I’m going to leave you with a little physics problem… (A demo ensues.)

I asked Twitter what albums I need to hear, and as usual, legion friends responded. (After all, everyone likes music.) Here are the albums I heard for the first time in the past week, grouped by my opinions, but otherwise in no particular order.

If I hate your favorite album or something, it doesn’t mean I’m a terrible person.

Definitely will be played a lot

• The Joshua Tree, U2 — Surprisingly enough, this is the first U2 album I’ve heard, and I definitely want to hear more.
• Chutes Too Narrow, The Shins — Several fantastic tracks, and many great ones.
• Turn On the Bright Lights, Interpol — It’s really hard to write things about albums you like! Ummm, I like it?

A++ would listen to again

• Jaydiohead, Jay-Z/Radiohead mashups — I’m generally not into mashups, but these were really quality.
• Awake, Dream Theater — See next.
• Falling Into Infinity, Dream Theater — Didn’t strike me as much as some other DT albums, but I’ll still come back to these two.
• Grand National, John Butler Trio — Not my typical sound, but it has a number of standout tracks.
  
• You’re Living All Over Me, Dinosaur Jr. — I didn’t really anticipate liking it, but now I’m curious about other Dinosaur Jr. stuff.

Probably won’t listen to again

• Beat Happening, Beat Happening — I just couldn’t get into this album at all.
• Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair — I appreciated the writing, but I really can’t dig the bare lo-fi sound.

There are still ten other specific albums I was told to hear–damn you, people who follow me on Twitter–but I’m going to take a short break from this OVERLOAD OF UNFAMILIAR MUSICKS.

It occurred to me today that I have a lot of things to say, and I should say some of them here. I often don’t end up blogging because I hate putting my thoughts on the record for the world to see unless I’ve taken a lot of time to consider them. But it doesn’t really matter, especially since I don’t think about things that really matter–after all, I am a math major.

I noticed that I’m more willing to tweet than blog, since you really can’t put that much thought into a tweet anyway. I figure I will be more likely to blog if I don’t feel a need to write very much each time.

As a side note, I’ve started getting fairly into music. I mean, sure, I’ve always been interested in music, I guess, but I haven’t always thought about it very much. Lately I’ve been trying to place what exactly ties together my musical interests, and I think the answer is largely complexity. In the classical world, I like complex, layered music like Bach and Beethoven. Similarly, my favorite artists rely on the entire ensemble to create a thick, complex sound that varies from song to song.

I think my next few posts will probably be about music; I will be writing about some of my favorite albums, and why I like them so much.

Possible future topics: why upper-level math books suck, and what I think is missing in most math pedagogy.

Nick and I just bought books from Caveat Emptor (the used bookstore on the Square) for tomorrow’s NAQT Indiana State Qualifier. The prizes:

First and second place teams:

• Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of American Writers
• Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History

Individual prizes:

• Aristophanes’s The Clouds, The Birds, Lysistrata, and The Frogs
• García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera
• Lewis’s Babbitt
• The Lake District (a Lake Poets anthology)
• Mann’s Der Tod  in Venedig (and other stories)

Neg prize:

• Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot

Behold, gentlemen. The world’s first LOLCATION.

So here are some things that are delicious:

• Whole wheat apple muffins. (I’d give you the recipe, but then I wouldn’t be able to lure you over to my apartment with them.)
• Hot cocoa with chilis.
• Any dark chocolate.
• Keebler Grasshopper cookies (i.e., thin mints).
• Aaaand potentially, blueberry crumb bars. They’re cooling right now!

So who has some recipes that I should try? I have an absurd number of dessert recipes in my queue, so I need entrees or appetizers to balance them out.

Hopefully on the menu some time next week: Chicken marsala, chili, mushroom bourguignon. I don’t really have time to make desserts during the week, but maybe rice pudding or something?

Consider, my friends, the orbit of WTF under the action of S₃.

• WTF = What the fuck. Alternatively, World Taekwondo Federation.
• FTW = For the win. Google suggests Fort Worth Meacham International Airport.
• FWT = A sucking noise made with the mouth. Also, Flimsy West-African Textiles.
• WFT = Whale Fighting Tactics. An international martial art created in AD 2101 to eradicate all whales, who turn out to be the masterminds of the illegal seizure of all your base.
• TFW = Triboluminescent Fragmentation of Wint-O-Green-Life-Savers. Shorthand for well-known effect that chomping on Wint-O-Green Life Savers in the dark makes sparks.
• TWF = Tricky War-time Fortifications. Famously used in World War I in the form of bunkers.

I was just thinking about something in the shower–in RPGs, even after you’ve been universally hailed as the only person able to save the world from sure destruction by demon hordes, you still have to pay for armor and weapons and even health potions.

You’d think that vendors would realize that, since the world is about to end, they should probably be more interested in helping the hero save it than earn money and let the world be destroyed? I know people are greedy, but I don’t have any personal experience with how people act when faced with demon hordes.

This is a bit of a contrast with Half-Life 2, which I’ve recently been playing; there, the resistance forces do everything they possibly can to help you, knowing that you’re the only hope for the human race.

Actually, maybe that’s it–it’s set on Earth, unlike most RPGs. I suppose Earth’s denizens are more rational than those of alternate worlds?