Head against the wall

Actually, things are going fine; it's just I've spent most of this week frustrated by the manuscript. There's a lot of sorting out details, making sure notation between chapters is consistent, filling in biographical details (I insist on including quick sketches of people named, at least for those historic enough that we're not citing recent research papers), pulling out typos and the like. Biographies I'm mostly satisfied with and typos will take forever. Subscripts is another thing; I want to keep the indices j and k, and reserve i for a number for which i² = -1 (one of the odd bits of rigor I'm sticking to not to say ``i is the square root of -1,'' which the mischievous can use to prove 1 = -1); but there's, like, equations on every page.

It's consistency across chapters that's really nasty because (particularly) the energy formulas used include some arbitrary constants and we seem to have a knack for choosing a different one each time. There are also little things like how to use commas in subscripts with multiple indices, or whether to use subscripts or superscripts in describing the sets of square-integrable functions on arbitrary spaces. On the bright side, I'm falling in love with my own prose again. I just want to appreciate it from a greater distance.

Submissions are gathering at Raffles City, not just for the 2012 Olympic Host City, but for the Inter-Varsity Manga Art Competition. This year's contest theme is ``The Pirate.'' While I don't at all mind the attractive, scantily dressed pirate woman on the advertising poster, the purple dragonette with an eyepatch is just darling, and somehow seems like a terrycloth character.

Trivia: Elisha Otis's first elevators were steam-powered. Source: Skyscraper: The Search for an American Style 1891-1941, Editor, Roger Shepherd.

Currently Reading: Charlie Chaplin And His Times, Kenneth S Lynn.