When Stack Overflow announced the creation of Math Overflow, I was very excited. The platform that Stack Overflow uses is easy, intuitive, and well-kept, providing a great place to get quick answers to all sorts of problems. Math overflow brought that to mathematics.

Now, there is a stack exchange network specifically for Theoretical Computer Science, and I couldn't be happier. For me personally, this will be a great resource, and something I hope to contribute to.

Scott Aaronson appears to also be excited, hoping that such a website will reduce the number of P=NP proofs and other spam he receives in his email inbox everyday. Indeed, already the CS Theory stack exchange has three purported “proofs” resolving the P=NP question.

Additionally, my Flickr account now has photos from our recent road trip to St. Augustine Florida (here), and more.

As promised, here is a photograph of the massive hole in my pants that developed moments before I began my two hour long PhD proposal defense.

I can't believe that my boxers managed to stay in place (among other things) and none of the five members of my committee noticed.

Must go now... Meghan McCain is on Wait Wait and it's hysterical!

Today from 12-2pm I successfully defended my PhD Proposal! Many thanks to my committee members John Schlipf, John Franco, John Martin, George Purdy, and Raj Bhatnagar for their presence and comments. Extra thanks for John Martin who was out of town but agreed to do the defense over the phone. Super-Extra-Thanks to my PhD Adviser John Schlipf, for his teachings, guidance, and beard. Without any of those my proposal simply would not have been possible.

And yes, the presence of 3 John's on my committee made for some humorous dialog during the defense.

I wasn't terribly worried about the defense itself but the preparation was murder. I find it immensely difficult to write about what I'm planning to work on and not get distracted with, you know, actually working on that stuff. The paper is finished. The slides completed. The arguments defended successfully. All is good.

I was planning on coming home and sleeping for about 64 hours but the experience today left me wanting to work right now on my research, regardless of my exhaustion. It's fun!

The best part? Roughly ten minutes before my defense started I bent over and ripped my pants wide open. Hilarious? Certainly. I don't think anybody noticed, and I'm inclined to think that if any of them had they would have been the type to immediately crack a joke or two. None the less, it did cause me to start my proposal feeling a little more uneasy than I had expected. As in,

• Was I afraid that one of the professors would find a critical flaw in one of my arguments at the last minute? Nope.
• Was I afraid that one of the professors would find my terrible choice of underwear (or worse) hanging out of my pants? Yes. Yes I was. And that was simply not a feeling I was expecting.

Pic of my ripped pants will be posted shortly. It's too good not to post. Further, once you see just how big the rip is, you'll understand why I had to do so much “wobbling” and crab-like walking throughout my defense, which must have made my committee members curious at the very least. It must have appeared as if my knees were recently sewn together.

Both flickr and jQuery/Galleria rock! So does flickcurl... I know, I already mentioned all of this in my last blog post, but I just had to reiterate.

Check it out here:

http://www.ryanflannery.net/pictures

That is all. Back to my proposal...

Since moving my blog to Blogsum, I decided to switch my photos over to using a pre-made & hosted service: Flickr. I know, I know... I've always loved/bragged-about writing everything myself, but dammit, this is just so much easier, and I really don't enjoy spending time on the tedious problem of cross-browser/OS compatibility of HTML/CSS.

Anyway, all of my pictures are now being moved over to my flickr account, available here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanflannery

Thank god for flickcurl, which has made uploading everything both easy and quick. I'm currently playing with various jQuery gallery scripts to re-make my pictures page.

As a result of this, our wedding photos are now available online! Finally! You can view an organized collection here, including one set that contains all of the photos,

For all of the video... I'm now contemplating *gulp* youtube! We'll see... I'd love to get some spare time to play around with the new video tag in HTML5, though of course it will be a decade or so before Microsoft/Internet-Explorer supports this (even though OpenBSD already supports it).... *sigh*

UPDATE: Forgot about my wife's flickr account, available here. Many more photos of me looking silly available there.

UPDATE #2: flickcurl Rocks! Just under 1,500 photos uploaded in less than 8 hours, using flickcurl and a ~20 line shell script that took me 10 minutes to write, and no interaction (with full dating/tagging/geo-tagging). Nice.

Not much new here... I'm mostly chugging-away at my PhD, working on some theorems, and looking for work.

As you've probably noticed, my blog has changed! And it looks 100 times better than before! I've always enjoyed rolling-my-own-software-for-my-own-thing, but the look of Blogsum (the software that now runs my blog) was rather enticing. Also, it's written by an OpenBSD developer (+100 nerd points), with a nice, simple, sane setup. Note that the address of my blog is now:

http://blog.ryanflannery.net

In addition to that, I've recently switched from using CVS to Mercurial for all of my projects and other version-managed stuff. I like Mercurial... a lot. As a result, serving projects online is a bit easier than using the old cvsweb cgi that perpetually caused me problems. You can now browse my central repository online at:

http://hg.ryanflannery.net

I'm only switching projects over as I touch them, so only three are currently in there.

Update! Comments are now working!

My father passed away about ~24 hours ago. We were so close, and always getting closer. God I want to write so much more here, but nothing would do him justice, and I'm finding it difficult to type. Perhaps I'll write more later. It's still quite surreal for me, but I wanted to post this now for friends/family with details about the arrangements (there are so many to call).

He swore he would never die of cancer, and still die with his full head of glorious silver hair. He did just that.

The visitation is this Thursday, July 22 from 4-8pm at Middendorf-Bullock in Covington, Ky, on Main St. The funeral, burial, and reception start this Friday, July 23 at noon at Mother of God Church, also in Covington, Ky. There is an online obituary that is far too short to do justice to the man, but adequate enough for details, located here (Enquirer) and here (Middendorf-Bullock).

He was an amazing guy who knew so many people, so far and wide, so well. I miss him so much already.

Some of my favorite photos of dad, from our Ireland trip

Much has happened, and much hasn't. I still haven't posted the pictures & video from the wedding, but they will be coming soon. The last few weeks have been rather busy and, for the most part, very satisfying.

For the last two weeks, UC's Computer Science department held a summer camp for local area high school students, and like last year, I was able to teach most of the kids (18 of them!) introductory programming with Java! You can see all of the examples/notes we covered my section's website, here:

http://cs.uc.edu/~flannert/camp/

I'll be posting the individual projects of each student shortly.

The camp was a blast. We got some great feedback from the parents, some of which reported that after the first week, their kids had already decided that computer science was the field for them, and they like UC. Even in my beginner section (where few students had any prior programming/CS experience), there were some outstanding kids who learned so much, and even built some rather cool projects. Everybody learned something, and some are still working on their projects now that camp has finished, occasionally emailing me for advice.

Concerning my PhD... I'm still chugging-away, and have a few nice theorems completed already. A few more, and the end will be in sight! I'm so excited!

Also, yesterday was τ-day. You all celebrated, right?

Super-nerd, science writer, math writer, magician, and too-many-more-titles-to-list awesome guy Martin Gardner passed away yesterday. For everyone who enjoyed his writing (which is anyone who ever read his writing), this is a loss.

I read a collection of his Mathematical Games columns when I was a junior in high school (nerd!) and it really started me down the path of mathematical curiosity (Curioser and Curioser! as Carroll said, and Gardner loved to cite).

Sagan inspired my scientific curiosity from an early age, but Gardner inspired me mathematically. Before reading his columns I was an OK student in mathematics, and not terribly interested in the subject. I struggled, and found the subject tedious. After reading a collection of his columns one week, I couldn't help but scream in my mind “Really? Really? Really? It's that easy! And fascinating!” He had a gift, and used it to affect millions. I'm only one.

I'm genuinely sad to hear that he's passed.

If you've never heard of him, or have but simply don't know that much about him, I highly encourage you to watch this video. It's a video containing an interview with Gardner himself at one of the “Gardner Gatherings” that were often held in his honor. This one person connected so many people in such a positive way, all in the pursuit of intellectual curiosity. He really was an amazing person.

Link to video:

http://vimeo.com/7176521

We have our wedding & honeymoon photographs finally and they should be posted soon. Thank you all again for attending and making it the wonderful evening it was.

Most at the wedding were surprised by my short hair and shorter beard. Well... I now have shorter hair and no beard. Egads I'm freezing most of the time! I plan to post pictures soon, after my face heals from the first shaving (where I lost ~1 lb of skin). I have a large zip-lock bag full of hair that I plan to give to my father for Father's day... it should please him greatly.

PhD is progressing nicely. I hope to be finished with my proposal shortly and graduate not too long after that (standard grad-student claim: “~1 year!”). It will be at least 7 months (required), but probably not much more than that. In all honesty though, I'm very excited about school and my research. It's really fun, and though the end is in sight and I'm excited to start anew, I will really miss the freedom and routine of grad-student research.

Best News: Neal (groom's man #2) will be visiting us this weekend. Much fun and intellectual intrigue is anticipated.