New website! http://users.jyu.fi/~kewildri/

Hi folks. This post is really just a pathetic attempt to get google to recognize my JYU homepage. The address of the homepage is http://users.jyu.fi/~kewildri/

Feel free to stop by. I've updated the citations for my papers (we-ooh that's exciting). Also, any tips on how to get my current homepage to pop up first under a google search for my name would be very welcome.

Home Soon!

Hi Folks! Well, since last writing, I've been in Poland, New York, and Alaska. I now sit in the Anchorage airport (free wireless!), and though I don't really have the time/energy to give a full update, let me just say this. Alaska is big. And amazing. I've been doing a lot of hiking and eating salmon. I haven't been able to get as much work done as I wanted too, but I still have about a gazillion hours on a plane to work.

Anyway, check the photos as well!

Kevin not in quasiland :(

Well folks, this is probably my last post from abroad. I haven't decided yet if I will continue using this blog, but perhaps! Anyway, I'm now in Warsaw, Poland, having just returned from the Bojarski Conference. It was great! The organizers did a fantastic job. I really felt like a king - literally. There was a castle and everything. The math was really amazing too. I learned a lot, including two interesting open problems which are related to my research. My talk seemed to go pretty well, despite the fact that I spelled an important researcher's name wrong (that's twice, dammit!). Anyway, I had a lot of fun hanging with the crowd from Michigan, which has become quite identical to the crowd from Finland. And it seems that soon there will be many Polish mathematicians who are also dubbed "quasifinns".

The next few days will be spent doing math, probably. I have a lot of writing to do for Pekka and also for my dissertation, and I feel very close to a solution to another problem. I must say that about a week ago I really wanted to go home. Right now I'm eager to go home, but I really miss finland. I could use a sauna and a dip in the sea....

More photos are available, as always... here's a bonus:

Busy busy!

Things have been pretty crazy over the past two weeks! I've been to Turku (one of the larger cities in Finland), Porvoo (a small town in Finland), an island (twice), Stockholm (sweden), and now I'm in Helsinki (again). In the meantime, I've been working like crazy on a paper from my research this semester as well as preparing for the Bojarski conference (only one week away!) and trying to find time to work on my dissertation as well. So, rather than give you a blow-by-blow of the past few weeks, I'll let the photos do the talking. Here are a few samples:

Oh Lordi

Some of you asked me about Eurovision and the Finnish reaction to winning the contest. So here's the deal in brief. (You could also check out this nice explaination from Slate Magazine).

The Eurovision Song Contest has been around for about 50 years. Basically, each country in Europe (this is broadly interpreted - and happens to include Russia and Israel) sends a song and a performer/group and the winner is determined by phone-voting. The contest is broadcast on tv and is widely viewed despite the fact that the performaces are often terrible and most established musical groups shun participation like a trip to the proctologist. The music is often called "schlager" and is either bubble-gum pop or cheesy ballad (one song this year included the lyric "Why do angels cry? Why do babies have to die?"). However, some widely admired music has come out of Eurovision, including some of ABBA's greatest hits. You get the idea.


So some of you have asAnyway, Finland usually tanks badly in the contest, and this year to shake things up a heavy metal bad, Lordi, was entered. This met great consternation in Finland, as the band is basically a Kiss-meets-Freddy Cruger latex-costume band with pseudosatanic rhetoric. They insist that the whole thing is in good fun and that their music is just entertainment. That's not to say the music, or even the concept of the band, is any good. By the way, the title "Arockolypse" reminds me of the classic Mel Gibson flick Mad Max 2: Road Warrior, where the bad guy is introduced as the "ayatolla of rock and rolla". But I digress - some people were pissed.

The contest was two night ago, and before hand the general concensus was accurately summed up by the Finnish TV host when he said, "We'll find life on Mars before Finland wins Eurovision." Sure enough, Finland won, and in fact set a new record for the highest score. Reaction of Finns ranged from "It was just a fluke. Don't worry, we won't win next year" to "This is as important to Finland as peace and happiness in Iraq is to America." My personal favorie reaction was "Lordi is the next Beatles, only uglier and with less talent." Lordi is getting a hero's welcome in Helsinki and will probably not be forgotten by Finns for many years. Their mark on the rest of the world remains to be seen.

By the way, I took more pictures. You can see them on Flickr. Here is a sneak preview:

Repetition: Helsinki, Sickness, Math, Photos

With my time here in Finland quickly coming to an end, I travelled once more this week to Helsinki for the Joint Centers of Excellence Seminar. There were lots of famous mathematicians there, but the talks were mostly by young people, including me! I talked about the work that Pekka and I have been doing, which has recently decided to somewhat miraculously solve itself (Hölder's inequality is a panacea if applied cleverly enough). However, the talks were only 30 minutes long, so I had to rush a bit and came off sounding a little hoity-toity (ie I just had to pretend that the audience knew what capacity and modulus were). Anyway, it's over, and I have only one more talk left to give before Poland, this time to in the Grad Student Seminar at Helsinki. My title is "What's a quasi-schmasi?" (apologies to John Lott).

Unfortunately, I've also gotten sick again. Suck! Nyt, mulla on vähän kipea kurkku ~ Now, I have a bit of a sore throat (kurkku = cucumber = throat = I love finnish).

The past few weeks have seen a variety of events, including but not limited to: the melting of the ice on Jyväsjärvi, Vapu (labor day), and lots of finnish speaking.

Vapu was really neat. Basically, it's on the weekend of May 1st, and though it is traditionally about labor, it is now more about students and student life. It's starts on Friday with huge parties attended by university students wearing brightly colored coveralls. The different colors represent different majors, and the students studying the same thing party together, in general. As far as I can tell, the main practical purpose of the coveralls is to keep your clothes clean during a night of falling down and puking. Anyway, on sunday evening there is a ceremony in which a "student cap" is placed on a statue of a famous Finn (in Jyväskylä, it was Minna Canth). The student caps are worn on Vapu by everyone who has graduated from highschool - and people really do wear them. It's a really neat tradition - can you imagine if everyone in the US wore their mortar caps once a year?! On monday, everyone goes to Harju for a picnic, and picnic we did, repeatedly.

So, here are my plans for the next few weeks.

• Do math like crazy so that I can finish the project with Pekka
  
• Buy souvenirs
  
• Go to Turku and Stockholm
  
• Visit Karoline's mökki (summer cottage)
  
• Write my dissertation
  
• Get to Poznan by June 18th
  

Don't forget to check Flickr for more photos! Bonus photo:

More Helsinki, Bum Knee, Speak Finish

So my mother visited for easter, and that was great. We spent a few days bumming around Jyväskylä, seeing the sites, going for bike rides, listening to choral concerts, and drinking beer. We had pretty decent weather, so that was nice. Then we headed to Helsinki for the weekend, and did a lot of sight-seeing. The best part was a visit Suomenlinna, a old military fortress on an island just off of Helsinki. The day was really warm but SUPER foggy, so being on the island seemed other-worldly, with lots of chunks of ice floating by and the city seeming centuries away. Unfortunately, I left my camera in Jyväskylä, so you'll have to wait until my mother sends me some of the photos to see what I'm talking about.

Since then, I've just been working alot. Pekka has another project for me to think about, and there are still some things to work out on the first project we had, and of course there's my dissertation to think about (oh yeah...THAT.) The weather has been really fantanstic...finally kevät tulee (spring is coming). Unfortunately, while walking in Helsinki I managed to really screw up my knee - I think that I've irritated the tendonitis I developed after the Chicago marathon a few years ago. The down side is that it is really hard to do ANYTHING in Jyväskylä without biking or walking a few miles. The up side is that I don't have to worry about running out of ice to put on my knee. Thanks for the bottle of Ibuprofen, Jess! It's been a life saver! For those of you unfamiliar with Finlanomics, a package of 10 pills of ibuprofen costs a little less than $6.

I've started attending a Finnish conversation course. It meets twice a week for 3 hours at a time, which means ALOT of speaking in Finnish. Which is good, but I find that I'm really exhausted after our course meetings. Especially since many of the people in the course have been in finland for a lot longer than I have. No niin...(yeah, well...) I'm trying.

Ok, I'm going to break the cardinal rule of blogging - don't ever say anything negative about anyone - just this once because I'm so fed up. The resident of the third room in my flat recently returned from a semester abroad in Brazil. He's a Finn. He's also the WORST FLAT MATE EVER. Loud, filthy, inconsiderate, unfriendly down right rude, and steals my food and beer. Also blatantly ignores requests to modify his behavior. What the hell? Why can't I live with any of the nice finns I've met?


Sorry. I won't let that happen again. Don't forget to check out my photo stream for some new photos, like this one!