I am your sunshine?

Mia nominated me for a "Sunshine" blog award. I am not really into these memes usually, but I really liked the questions she asked, so I answered them. But I am not going to nominate anyone else. The buck stops here! (But thanks, Mia, I had fun thinking about these. I'm trying to do "NaNoWriMo," but with a few short stories rather than a novel, and all writing exercises are helpful.)

The "rules:"(which I am breaking, since I'm not doing 4 or 5)
1. Include the award logo in a post and/or on your blog sidebar.
2. Link to the blogger who nominated you.3. Answer 10 questions about yourself.4. Nominate 10 other fabulous bloggers and ask them 10 questions.5. Link to your nominees in your post and let them know about the reward.

1. Are you left- or right-handed? (Or ambidextrous?)

I am right-handed but left-eye dominant, and I naturally stand on my left foot if called upon to stand on one foot. I figured out the eye thing the first time I shot a gun (it is not a regular occurrence , and I couldn't aim for crap because I was holding it on my right side and trying to use my left eye to aim. If I were to become a marksperson, I would start shooting left-handed.

2. What was the last thing you drew or doodled?

Since I'm a mathematician, I doodle all the time. Mostly I draw genus 2 surfaces. (I study surfaces of genus greater than or equal to 2, and apparently I'm a lazy doodler, so I just make two holes, even though the surfaces could have 800 holes, or seventy billion.) I've been drawing a lot of triangles, too, and I have some ideas for cool pants and dresses that I have been doodling. But most likely a genus  2 surface is my most recent doodle.

3. What’s the best present you ever received?

This was a toughie. I have a great family and awesome friends who really know me and find things that are perfect for me. My grandparents got me a sewing machine when I was in middle school, and obviously I've enjoyed that for over a decade now. I really like presents that are activities to do together. I think spending quality time with someone is really important for sustaining a relationship, whether romantic or not. Jon got me tickets to a Chicago symphony concert that I really wanted to go to last year (and that wasn't really up his alley), and I really enjoyed that. I've gotten tons of wonderful, really meaningful presents, but those are just two that come to mind as especially nice.

4. What’s the best present you ever gave?

Jon went to take a temporary job in France three weeks after we got married, and I made a book for him before he left called "Jon's Evelyn Book." It has pictures of me and us together. Every year for our anniversary, I make him another Jon's Evelyn Book, filled with pictures from the past year (or old ones I've dug up and think he'll like). 

5. What words do you have difficulty spelling no matter how many times you look them up?
I have always been a good speller, but mountain was a hard work for me for a long time. Occasion too. I know how to do it now, but it took me years. I am currently working on infinitesimal. I think it should have a double s, but I am wrong.

6. When you’re putting on shoes and socks, do you do sock-shoe-sock-shoe or sock-sock-shoe-shoe?

Hrm, I think I do sock-sock-shoe-shoe. Just yesterday I was thinking about how socks and shoes are a good example for understanding commuting and non-commuting. Commutative actions don't care what order you do them in, like putting on your left and right socks. It doesn't matter what order you put them on in. Non-commutative actions do care: putting on shoes first and then socks is not the same as putting on socks and shoes.

7. Did your parents make things up about the world when you were a kid? What’s the best/worst thing they told you? (My dad told me there was whale blubber in ice cream. I told everyone.)

I honestly don't remember. They probably tried to give me as much accurate information as possible, especially when it came to scientific facts about the world. They're boring that way. This isn't quite the same, but I do remember my dad trying to tell me about higher-dimensional space. (So like fourth dimension and beyond.) I insisted that he was being ridiculous and obviously the world was just three dimensions, so we couldn't even say anything about four-dimensional space or higher. Then he told me that there might be situations where there were more than three inputs in a problem, and (alert: this is my interpretation now of what he was probably trying to say then) the way you can think about modeling those inputs would be a graph in four or more dimensions. It made me think, but I stubbornly held my ground for that argument. I couldn't let him know I thought he might have a point. 

8. What’s your favorite punctuation mark?

The semicolon. Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors, didn't like it (something about a transvestite hermaphrodite; I don't have a problem with transvestite hermaphrodites, although I have never met any), but I think it's grand. It's a nice understated way to connect two ideas without having to decide between "and," "but," "because," or other conjunctions. I think that lets you have a little more creativity.

9. What’s your favorite single-use kitchen implement (or other single-use household implement, if you don’t spend much time in the kitchen)?

We try not to have too many unitaskers, but a pastry cutter is one. I don't use it a ton, but there's really nothing else that can help you incorporate solid fats into pastry dough as effectively. Cheese graters are good, too. And my tea maker. And when we move and have more room in our kitchen, we want to get one of those seltzer makers you sometimes see in Sky Mall catalogs.

10. What’s your favorite “unsolved event,” mysterious creature/person, or otherwise creepy weird thing that hasn’t been figured out by modern man? (I find the Dyatlov Pass incident fascinating.)

I recently learned about these things called "fairy circles"in Namibia. They are these circles where grass doesn't grow, but eventually (over the course of a few decades) the circles are revegetated. Scientists recently documented the whole life cycle of these circles, but various hypotheses about why they occur have been discredited. The hypotheses include fungi or other diseases, ants or termites, and natural gas deposits beneath the surface. I'm also curious about who poisoned Victor Yushchenko and who poisoned some tourists in Thailand. (The tourist story is very sad.)