@amWhy Was that whole thing about being held to higher standards of conduct b/c of gender a response to you being told to "be nice" earlier? I'm having difficulty determining what triggered that comment

@DavidReed Best for me not to answer this question. Some of it is because of historical reasons on this site, and I'd really rather not rehash all that right now.

@amWhy Ok. I am sorry. I am remembering our first conversation now a little better I think

So I met my new class today and gave my opening spiel about the requirement that work be written in good grammatical English or Russian (since those are the only two languages I can follow), and I actually had not one but TWO students attempt to take me up on that

10 years, and I have no Russian speakers

and now I get two in one class

nice

I am currently laying on an inflatable mattress in my new apartment with no tv, food, etc

using hotspot on mobile for internet access

Yay!

My landlord has just tried to screw e

me*

(out of money) already too, which makes me nervous

yikes

I once had a landlord not understand the idea of prorated rent

I came in and turned on the furnace/heater. After 3 min the smoke alarm went off, blah blah blah because of the rental agreement she says I am responsible for it

for the sake of argument, suppose that my rent was $500 per month; I moved out on (say) the 10th (one third of the way through a month) and she insisted that if she prorated the rent, then I owed $667

@DavidReed This was (1) more than 15 years ago and (2) in the state of Nevada, not California

that said, I did not pay the $667

and eventually just paid the $500 for the month

the basic issue was that the woman was so very innumerate that when she punched the wrong buttons on the calculator, she didn't understand that her answer was wrong

Ah no I was referring to my heater, sry I hadn't even noticed your post. The link I have given you is a California law that basically enumerates which rights a tenant cannot waive in a lease agreement. In legal jargon any such provision is deemed void

in this instance, it stipulates I cannot waive my right in a lease agreement to have her be responsible for fixing my heater

I shall now read what you have just written, sorry I really hadn't seen it previously

@XanderHenderson Why did you not manage to convince her that you should be paying less than the full month's rent?

Not saying that you should, but wondering why you didn't.

@user21820 The response was essentially "Yeah, it makes sense that you should pay less, but this is what my calculator says!"

Lol...

Kudos on choosing the non-confrontative path

Yeah, that was a frustrating afternoon. It started with the statement "Hey, I'm moving out, is there any chance you can prorate the last month's rent?", followed by an incredibly frustrating slice of time watching this poor woman incorrectly manipulate her accursed machine

Well it depends also on the actual agreement. In many cases, the owner reserves the right to charge the full month's rent anyway.

@user21820 I was expecting to pay the full month's rent, but I figure that it never hurts to ask. Now, unfortunately, I own a home and have to deal with a leaky roof :\

Oops!

Yeah... getting home yesterday was a good news / bad news situation.

Bad News: THE ROOF IS LEAKING!

Good News: The leak is right over the bathtub!

@XanderHenderson what turned you onto fractals?

Honestly, I don't know. I thought they were pretty, and had a masters advisor who knew some stuff, so I started there.

Now its what I do, I guess. Though, to be honest, it looks like analytic number theory as much as fractals anymore

Just out of curiosity, on which part of the internets are you stalking me?

I honestly don't know much about them. Are there interesting applications

You will not believe this

"Applications..."?! GRODY!

The first time I ever posted on this site you voted to delete my post and I clicked on your icon and it just stuck with me :)

ha!

Its an unusual pick I suppose is why

I like your attitude towards applications :)

Honestly, I have that attitude because I am mostly not clever enough to see the applications.

Personally I think, just because of the nature of reality, the most useful math tends to be the more tedious

Like PDE

Barnsley seems to think that they should be useful for image compression

I always heard them used in reference to chaotic systems but never got the connection

and my masters advisor was interested in Navier-Stokes (the stable and unstable manifolds might be fractal? something something somthing)

my current advisor fell over some fractals while trying to crack Riemann's zeta

and there seem to be some pretty close connections between fractals and number theory

but, again, that is above my pay-grade

yes?

oh...

(removed)

As to the connection with dynamical and/or chaotic systems: my understanding is that certain sets associated to certain systems (such as the attracting set, or repelling set, or the orbits of initial values) can have "fractal" structure

Ah

thus one might attempt to use fractal-y tools to study those things

again, that is way above my head

though Steven Strogatz has a book on dynamical systems that gets into that a little

I wonder if theres any fractally 3d prints I can make

I shall check

whats a good one? (don't say Mandelbrot or Koch)

Oh theres the pyramid one available here

One of my academic siblings printed off a Menger sponge for our advisor (or, really, two halves of a Menger sponge, cut along a diagonal to show the fractally cross section)

that ones available as well

I have a Lego sponge on my desk...

yozh.org/2014/04/16/lego_fractals

I'm still going nuts tuning everything. There's 50 million settings you can tweak for each print

I can actually print ABS plastic (which is what legos are made of), so could likely make that one

that seems like cheating...

I really want a 3d printer

I could run it off of my Raspberry Pi, like a real nerd!

Mine runs on rPi :)

YAY!

at 3d printed Lorenz attractor might be nifty

You can actually make your own pretty cheaply and use open source software for it

a lot of ppl do that. That is actually how the movement got started

let me see if they have that

the rossler attractor looks more interesting

thingiverse.com/thing:1425939

yarp

okay, bedtime... I need to be able to wake up and drive to San Diego in the morning...

@DavidReed I particularly like what I call the broccoli fractal.

See above transcript for two fractal curves that function as counter-intuitive examples in real analysis.

The two curves look like this: