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My blog-by-email system seems to be on the fritz, which is unfortunate. Also keep an eye on my flickr page, where I can email updates.

Our decision to stick around is looking better and better as time goes on. Not in terms of the hurricane’s strike probability, of course; the storm track has bent northward again, sending the eye over the ship channel (pretty much the worst case for Houston). However, the highways leading out of Houston are now so full of cars that the drive is taking hours and hours (24h at last report to Dallas), causing almost all motorists to run out of fuel and become stalled, causing the roadway to move even slower. In computer networks, we call this scenario congestion collapse: without any kind of organized back-off protocol, links can become so bogged down that the utility of the link goes exponentially to zero. [Note that reverse flow is being implemented—too late, perhaps.]

...RITA BECOMES THE THIRD MOST INTENSE HURRICANE ON RECORD...

We’ll be holding down the fort in Sugar Land while Rita reads our meters. Will update.

Ugh. Here we go again. This time, the A/C is working, but the heater is also on, fighting with it. Update 9/18: 87°! [Previously: 1 2 3.]

Consider this article that appeared on February 18, 2004: Fuck everything, we’re doing five blades.

Followed by Gilette unveils 5-bladed razor with two lubricating strips which appeared on CNN.com on September 14, 2005.

The Rice network is down again tonight (a planned outage to replace the ancient power supplies in the data center, in anticipation of some Very Big Iron they’re getting next month), so I can’t do my homework. Yay! Update: See below.

I’ll take this opportunity, though, to express a thought I had about college courses.

There are three ways a student emerges from a course with true mastery of the material:

1. Gifted student. The material comes easily, naturally, instinctively to the student; with a moderate amount of work the student outstrips the lecture, tosses off the homeworks, etc.
2. Brute force. The material doesn’t come naturally to the student, but she works every example problem she can find, goes to office hours, attends study sessions, makes study sheets, and passes the exam. [This is probably the most common case.]
3. Gifted teacher. This is perhaps the rarest, and the best case; gifted students and the hard workers will always do OK, but only the gifted teacher can make the material come alive for everyone else.

The gifted teachers are the ones you talk about years later; they’re the ones who turn average students into gifted ones.

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