School barbecue

That the last few entries to the PhD diary have been filed in the "off-topic" category should tell you something about the mathematics I am concentrating on at the moment: it doesn't make for interesting reading. Actually, that is not true, for it does make for interesting reading: it's just that I haven't been keeping a worhtwhile track of it here for the last few months and so am putting off what will prove to be quite a task in bringing things up to dats mathematically speaking. Hence the dependence on discussing matters of an off-topic nature.

The School of Electronics and Physical Sciences (SEPS) held its annual summer barbecue on Wednesday, in which everyone paid £3 for unlimited trips to the, erm, barbecue. Very nice it was too, since there was a choice of burgers, chicken, salads, sausages and a very large selection of sauces (including the much vaunted burger sauce that I thought was made by Hellman but in fact isn't). In exchange for your paper ticket, there was also an ice-cream, so the overall value was very good.

Even the queue trailing back a good 100 yards from the cooking area wasn't to dissuade me from joining in the festivities, mainly because it afforded me the opportunity to indulge in some academic spotting, a sly game that I like to play on the side whilst walking around campus. The basic premise of the game is to try and identify which department an academic belongs to; it's a fairly simple game that often results in high rates of success, as well as a glorious tarring everyone with a great brush labelled "stereotypes". If ever you are walking around a campus, please do try it some time.

Anyway, the queue for the barbecue made for some prime-time academic spotting despite the fact that I was at an advantage since I a) knew some of the people there and b) knew that they belonged to SEPS; thus they were either engineers (and all the different flavours they come in), mathematicians, physicists or members of the computing department. There were also non-academic staff, comprising of secretarial, administration and support staff.

I'd say that my academic spotting success rate was around 95% on the day. The rules by which I made my guesses are as follows:

— members of the computing department like to think they have a proper job and thus keep fairly regular office hours. They wear work-like clothes and their appearance is generally very tidy: trousers, tucked-in shirts, shoes. Generally speaking (which is of course what all of this will be) they also have a tendency to be very serious about everything they do and laugh in a restricted way

— on the other hand, members of the engineering department tend to be much more casual and far more energetic. Baggy combat trousers or anything with pockets half-way down the leg usually suffice for the bottom half (complete with Converse trainers) whilst the top half is wearing a flannel lumberjack shirt over a t-shirt. Sometimes there is just the t-shirt for those that probably go climbing more than three times a week. You'd feel hard done by if you didn't spot a carabina, too. Unfortunately, I am yet to be able to distinguish between the various types of engineers (civil, electronic, mechanical, chemical etc.) but hope to sharpen my eye by the time next year's barbecue comes around

— physicists tend to come in two varieties: loud or quiet. Their dress-sense looks like they have the computing department as the model for their aspirations, but often fall a little way short and end up looking a little dishevelled. They tend to walk a little flat-footed and generally look as though they would prefer to be somewhere else

— finally, mathematicians seem to sit somewhere in between all of the above. Obviously, since I am part of the maths department it is difficult for me to identify the stereotypical attire of a mathematician (although I can tell you that jumpers come in an astonishing array of colours that you wouldn't ordinarily think might fo together on a fabric that may not initially seem comfortable). Similarly, it would be difficult to identify any defining mathematical characteristics.

Having probably offended the great majority of people that I come into contact with on a daily basis, I will stop this post short of dissecting the stereotypes presented above any further. Thanks to a kind soul within the school, a representative selection of photos of the barbecue are available here and should that link bring me any trouble, I'd like to say that all of the above is meant in jest.