...that means I'm the new AADS Webmaster, hosting the new AADS site on the domain that I created for pre-registrations for the tournament. And as it has many times over the years, George's wisdom comes back to me.

This is the last in a series of vaguely related posts.

How did this happen? Well, there are three rumors going around (and I can't imagine who came up with any of them).

---

Oh, she fought well, the Lady Carolyn did. The AADS owes a debt of thanks to their WebMistress for how well she served them over the years, and how bravely she fought at the end.

But the end was never in doubt; for she faced no mere man-of-arms. Nay, she faced a man of great skill, a veritable wizard of the virtual (and yet still, some have said, a man of great humility). And so, despite her protests ("Short answer, it's yours, with my blessing."), he hath wrested away the AADS WebMaster throne, and ensconced it in a new desmesnes: the new realm of http://www.AADuelist.org, now the virtual home of the AADS. The old site now resides there at http://www.AADuelist.org/Club.

And yet the WebMaster throne was but a mere incidental in his larger campaign; for in truth, he crafted this new realm as part of the effort to bring the chaos that is the tournament of tournaments, The Ann Arbor Duelist, into the digital age. And so in consultation with Lord Krueger, Master Emerson, and Lady Carolyn (who did not suspect his perfidy at the time), he has crafted a new virtual registration table, where knights from all the world can join the lists to do battle at The Ann Arbor Duelist. And you too can see this new table and even join the lists at http://www.aaduelist.org/DuelistRegistration.aspx. And Lord Krueger has granted his blessing upon this new table: he has decreed that those who register there shall pay $3 less per weapon that they fence!

So the word must now spread across the land, wheree'er men and women take up arms upon the fencing strip: the Ann Arbor Dueling Society may now be found at http://www.AADuelist.org; and you can pre-register for the Duelist and save $3 per weapon at http://www.aaduelist.org/DuelistRegistration.aspx.

Tell your friends!

(And if you run into any problems, PLEASE tell me!)

---

Carolyn has requested that I take over the Web thingie, since she has a lot on her plate right now. If she would like — or if you would like, for that matter — I can grant FTP rights to the Club folder to whomever you think should be able to edit there. I was in the middle of that when Carolyn clubbed me over the head and said, "It's your problem now, buddy," and then ran cackling into the woods, shouting, "I'm free! I'm free! I'm free!"

(No, I don't expect many people to recognize that reference...)

---

And now, it's mine! All mine! Heheheheheheheheeeeeee...

Hey, wait a minute. This potato's hot. Hot! Bill, Carolyn, somebody take this thing!

Bill?

Carolyn?

Anybody...?

---

But I think the simplest explanation is: I have fallen into the hole that I have dug for myself.

The second in a series of vaguely related posts.

Did you ever read The Princess Bride?

No, no, no... Not this Princess Bride. That's the movie. And like most fencers I know, I've watched it way too many times, and can quote from it extensively. It is, in my opinion, one of Rob Reiner's finest moments. And that's saying an awful lot.

But as much of a cliche as I know this is: the book is better. Mr. Goldman (who also wrote the screenplay) had time to tell how his characters got to the story in the film. They each had stories only hinted at on screen. And the important story for today's purposes was thet of Inigo Montoya. ("Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." See, I told you I could quote from it excessively — I mean, extensively.) In the film, Inigo hunted the six-fingered man who had commissioned his sword-maker father to make a custom sword, but who then refused to pay for it and killed his father.

But in the book, we learn the story that came before the six-fingered sword. It tells of how the elder Montoya was one of if not the finest swordsmen in the land, and his swords came to be prized beyond any others. He had so much work that he couldn't keep up. So he raised his prices to try to drive business away. But buyers decided that such expensive swords must be even more valuable, so the demand increased. Soon he couldn't keep up with his own standards, and he openly said that the quality would suffer; but people didn't care, because only a genuine Montoya would do. And besides, despite his protests, he was too professional to ever let the quality really suffer.

If he hadn't been such a hard worker, he wouldn't have had to work so hard.

Same lesson, different story: Star Trek. The Enterprise crew is exhausted. They haven't had a rest in months. And on their way to some much-needed shore leave, Starfleet throws them another certain death challenge. And McCoy demands, "Why do they keep giving us all the hard jobs?" And Spock answers, "Because we keep succeeding."

No good deed ever goes unpunished. I really believe this is a law of human nature: the more you succeed, the more people expect from you.

Eight years ago, we of the Ann Arbor Dueling Society decided the time had come to finally do what we had been wanting to do for years: host our own tournament. We were complete newbies; but with a lot of help from the Division and a lot of patience and support from the Y, we pulled it off. We were tired and dirty, but we pulled it off. And we learned. And we vowed to do even better the next year.

And we did. In fact, much better. And better still the year after that.

But at the same time, the Y became a little more strict about the clock. There were various, justifiable reasons — cost of maintenance staff, building security needs, etc. — but probably the biggest was that they were saving and budgeting for a new facility. So while we were getting better at running the tournament, we needed to get better just to keep up.

But here's the thing about fencing tournaments (and I would assume other sports as well, but I can't say): people appreciate a well run event. They like it when things go well, and they get more time to fence and spend less time waiting for things to happen. And when they like a tournament, they're more likely to come back the next year — and to tell their friends about it, so they show up, too. So when you get better at running a tournament, more people show up.

And here's the thing about the Duelist: for various reasons, we chose to hold it in late August. That makes it the first tournament of the season; so people who haven't fenced in a tournament all summer are just a little more eager to show up. And also, it's one of the few tournaments during the pre-Labor Day summer season, when people tend to travel a bit more. So that's another pair of reasons why the Duelist has tended to grow.

And then here's another thing about fencing tournaments: when more people show up, more people want to show up. See, fencers (present company excepted) are all obsessed about improving their ratings. It's like horse racers wanting to run at pole position: a better rating helps you in small ways, and also just indicates that you're a better fencer. And the rules for awarding ratings state the you have to place at-and-such a place with so-and-so-many fencers including a minimum number of fencers of a given rating in order for you to advance in rating. So as more people start showing up at a tournament, the chances for a rating go up, enticing more people to show up at the tournament. It's a vicious positive feedback loop. Yes, we're proud of the size of our tournament; but at the same time, it's vicious.

And yet another thing about fencing tournaments: while the sport is still way less popular in the USA than seems right to us (good grief, one evening I caught two hours of competitive hot dog eating on ESPN, but they still won't air fencing tournaments), the popularity is growing. There are just more fencers out there looking for tournaments. (In our own miniscule way, we like to think we're helping that growth.)

Now here's one more thing yet about fencing tournaments: unless you can add fencing strips and directors, adding more people tends to make the tournament take longer according to the square of the number of people. See, initial fencing is divided up into roughly equal pools, where the number of pools is pretty much limited to the number of directors you have. (Michigan has some fine directors, but doesn't have many directors over all.) So if you add more people without adding more directors, you have to make the pools larger. And since the rules for pools are that each person in a pool fences each other person in that pool, well, that's an n-squared growth problem. Actually, its (n-squared + n) / 2 (George could explain why; but because I studied under him, the answer's intuitive to me.) Six people in a pool means 15 pool bouts. Seven people in a pool means 21 pool bouts, so a 16% increase in fencers means a 40% increase in bouts. And eight people in a pool means 28 pool bouts, or nearly double the 15 we started with. Adding people slows you down. A lot.

So while we have been doing everything in our power to get better and better at running a tournament, the very success we achieve makes it harder to run the next one. Every year we have had to learn from our experience last year and do just a little bit better; but since that sort of improvement can only go so far, we have had to invent new techniques for getting lots better at things we thought were pretty darn good already.

And that's the sort of game that can give certain sorts of control freaks (hey, I resemble that remark — and thankfully for the tournament, I'm not alone) a certain thrill as you try to find ways to beat your past performance. But in all modesty, last year's tournament (The Duelist VIII) was run as close to picture perfect as any of us could imagine. In our post mortem review (that's fancy talk for "hanging out in the bar afterwards"), we shared stories from the day; and we learned from each other of a half dozen to a dozen different catastrophes that didn't happen because someone on our very capable and conscientious staff happened to be in the right place at the right time and noticed the problem and had the presence of mind and the experience and the ingenuity to deal with it in the most efficient possible fashion. If we had simply had normal human failings just once, the whole schedule would've collapsed. And we are only human, after all, so we had to count luck as a significant factor in our success last year.

But with all that on our side — ingenuity, experience, willingness, determination, and lots of luck — we barely snuck out the door 30 seconds before the Y's closing time. Literally: they locked the doors behind us. Luck alone is not going to cut it this year.

On the plus side, the Y has lengthened their schedule by one hour this year. That will buy us some breathing room; but if the tournament grows at all, or if one catastrophe goes unaverted, we're at risk of the whole house of cards falling apart.

And yes, to the control freaks among us, that's a sick kind of game: how do we do measurably better than the best we could do last year? It's sad, I know, but we find it fun. We have to do better.

All of which is preamble to my next post...

Very late update: Courtesy of Deb Piranian -- daughter of the great man, designer of the T-shirt in question, and a scholar in her own right -- I've made corrections. It's important to tell the man's story accurately. Accuracy was one of his hallmarks.

The confluence of events this weekend makes for an interesting interconnected web of thoughts. It's going to take multiple posts to tie them all together. This is the first.

Query: what do Martin and Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) have in common?

[Insert theme from Jeopardy here. Also insert some cheap jokes from my good friends, I'm sure.]

No, it's not "blowing things up". While I got good grades in high school chemistry, it's really not a subject that ever got through to me. I may know people who can make bombs out of common household items (BCL, DB, RAM, CW, MB, DJ, TL, DL, and JN, just to drop a few initials); but aside from mixing hydrogen and oxygen to make a big wet boom, I'm explosive impaired.

No, it's not living in isolated cabins in the woods. And it's not writing long, rambling nonsense screeds. (Do blog posts count?)

Time's up! The answer is that not only did we both attend the University of Michigan (a generation apart), but we both had the same math instructor: Professor George Piranian.

Now it's safe to say that we weren't in the same league. By George's own words (I wish I could bring myself to use the respectful name, as is my usual blog habit; but darn it, he connected with you, and you just had to call him George), Mr. Kaczynski was smarter than him. Mr. Kaczynski made his mark at U of M by solving in under a year a complex problem that had eluded George.

I, meanwhile, was horribly underprepared for advanced college calculus. My high school offered six weeks of pre-calc at the end of senior year. At U of M, there was Math 115, Intro to Calc; and there was Math 185, Honors Calc; and then there was Math 195, simply Honors Math, but dubbed "Math for the Gods". There was no way I was ready for Math 195; and I wouldn't have made it through without one of those sets of initials above helping me out (Mr. "My high school offered two years of calc, and so I placed out of this requirement, but I'm taking it anyway — because of George"). But when I did learn something in that class, I learned it at a deep, fundamental level that gave me a glimpse of real, underlying order in the universe that still astonishes me today. And that was because of George: a renaissance scholar who was as at home climbing the Alps as in a class room (and who usually came to class in his hiking shorts, T-shirt, and hiking boots)... A Bavarian Swiss gentleman who, with his wife, was a ballistics computer for the Allies back in WWII (that's an old, seldom heard usage of "computer" from back in the day)... And a man who made his students care about math.

But it almost wasn't like that. The year before I arrived at U of M, Math 195 under the previous instructor had a different approach: "If Math 185 students are going through chapters twice as fast as Math 115 students, then Math 195 students should go through them three times as fast. They should do at least a chapter a night, plus homework problems, and more." And so, sometime in early 1981, the Math department met to discuss canceling Math 195/196 all together. See, in the Fall 1980 class, 9 students ignored the horror stories of Math 195 and signed up. Three of them made it to the end of the semester. One of them signed up for Math 196. He quit half-way through. Students decided it was just too hard; and worse, it was destroying their GPAs, when those same students could've just as easily taken 185/186 or even 115/116 and aced the classes, doing wonders for their GPAs. Consensus in the department was that the class was doomed.

But George said, "Wait!" He said, "Slow down. Don't give them more work; teach them more. In 115 and 185, students just learn to apply formulae. They learn how. In 195, they should learn why. They should come out of that class with a deeper understanding of where math comes from, how it's discovered, and why it matters."

And the department collectively looked at him, and said, "Fine, George. You teach it."

And that was the explanation for the famous T-shirt; and fool that I am, I was gullible enough to feed him the straight line. See, as part of his quest to expose the 195 students to mathematics the discipline rather than just a collection of formulae, he hosted a wine and cheese party for the two sections of 195 students to get to know each other and the math department. Uncharacteristically for me, I went to the party. I and the explosives expert put on our finest duds to go to this big department affair.

And there, sure enough, was George: hiking shorts, hiking boots, and T-shirt among all those dressed up students trying nervously to not embarrass themselves among the grown-ups. And sooner or later, as these affairs go, we circulated over for "our turn" talking with George and his peers. And I saw that his T-shirt was even more unusual than usual, in that I couldn't even recognize the language of the message that was written on it. So when it came my turn to make small talk, I commented on the T-shirt, and admitted that I couldn't make out the language. That was the straight line he was waiting for. "It's Sanskrit Glagolitic," he said, knowing he was likely the only one in the room who could read Sanskrit Glagolitic. "It means, 'I have fallen into the hole that I have dug for myself.'"

And then he looked me straight in the eye with a piercing stare that still sticks in my mind today, and said, "That means I'm teaching Math 195." And then that rolling, Bavarian Swiss cackle washed over the room.

And he did it. I mean, he really, really did it. I was just not prepared for that class. It probably set me back on learning calculus, really. I could've been a star in 115, or even 185. But what I learned, I understood, thanks to George. I have a gut feel for continuity and what derivatives mean and why and how we discovered them that I think serves me much better than any memorized plug-and-chug techniques could do. I have learned how math induction gives us a grasp on infinity. I have some grasp of the different kinds of infinities, and why it's not nonsense to talk about one kind of infinity being larger than another. I have an understanding of functions that no computer programming class can ever touch.

So that's my brush with greatness. Oh, not Mr. Kaczynski, whom I never met and whom I could never consider great. He's just a hook I use to get people listening so I can talk about George Piranian. Human computer. Mountaineer. Hiker. War hero. Comedian.

Teacher. And it doesn't get greater than that.