Much happened today.

In the morning shower, I realized a mistake I've made in the calculation that I did yesterday. It is a good realization, whereupon I rid myself of a pesky term that I hadn't until then figured out how to deal with and thus made a big step forward in my thesis. (Basically, I realized that as I was expanding a certain Lie derivative that I accidentally wrote a certain tensor down as covariant, when it is, in fact, contravariant, so the coordinate-differential terms from the Lie derivative carries an opposite sign that I had written, which means that an unfortunate doubling up of terms before now became a wonderful cancellation.)

The next step in my thesis work would be to look for similar cancellations in something that has about 4 times as many terms. I really did not look forward to dealing with that term before, but now that I have an inkling that I am actually on the right track (Sergiu calls this the Einstein principle: whenever working with general relativity, the right approach is the one what gives you the least number of terms; this reminds me vaguely of something Kirk McDonald said in class, that if you are on the right track, the answer to the problem sets should be amazingly simple.

In the afternoon, I had one of my wisdom teeth pulled. My third molar on my upper right was at a buccal angle (it points toward the cheek). The dentist when I was at Taiwan said that it should not be a problem as long as I remember to brush the side that is obscured by the growth. So I religiously reached back and brushed the outside of the tooth every day. And then, at a routine check up earlier this year, the dentist here told me that I have a cavity on that tooth... on the more accessible side. Apparently I spent all that time caring about one side that I missed brushing the other. As it is a wisdom tooth, the dentist suggested that I pull it instead of filling it, seeing that 1) it is at an angle and not useful for chewing at all and 2) the co-pay for extraction and for filling works out to be the same.

Meeting with the oral surgeon is the best experience I have had with Eastern dental so far. The lady is either Asian or Polynesian, and has this extremely jolly constitution. She explained everything that she does and was extremely reassuring: this is in much contrast to the Eastern Europe mafia that seems to be running day-to-day part of the dental practice. Unfortunately, due to OSHA rules, I am not allowed to keep the tooth as a souvenir.

Funny thing: I got fewer shots of Novocaine today than I got for my periodontal cleaning. I think that is the way Novocaine is supposed to be used: the swelling and numbness went away within 90 minutes, as opposed to more than 2 hours. The entire procedure took just 22 minutes, including explaining to me what she is about to do, having me sign a patient consent form, giving me the anaesthetic, and pulling the tooth. It was very pleasant.

After pulling the tooth, came home, and cooked some congee for my recuperation dinner. Ended up making way too much (a gigantic pot), and so my sister need not worry about her lunch for the rest of the week.

An amusing thing I saw today: Thompson's (co-author of UNIX) ACM Turing Award Lecture.