This evening we went to the beach and we played what is apparently a standard Italian children's game in the water where you bounce a ball and count the bounces and when you get to seven you whack it at someone. It was quite fun, although nobody was quite clear on the rules until at least an hour into the game. We created a great metaphor for it, in which the people standing in the circle around the edges were roots of unity and the person in the middle (we needed someone in the middle to keep the ball up in the air at all, but it turned into a sort of penalty box) was the p-sylow subgroup. Then we counted up and when we got to seven, seven ramified so something happened but it varied a bit. And the Sylow subgroup contained a lot of the action, which was kind of fun but not somewhere that you want to be all the time. And we weren't really sure of the rules; people had pretty good ideas for what the rules were but they were all conjectural results and nobody could really prove anything. When someone was surprised by some decision we made as a mob, we would say "nothing changed, it was always like that we just didn't know before. That's how mathematics works!"
We had some cheap Sardinian beer then had a barbecue dinner on the beach, with some delicious steak, steak fries, bread, and fried eggplant and zucchini. There were also a few bottles of wine that went about; a mild red, a rather forgettable white wine, and then nearer the end of dinner a buttery white wine. A friend of mine had gotten a glass of white wine beforehand which was much better than what they served with dinner; it reminded me of carrot juice in a weird way and had almost no aftertaste.
We had some great conversation trying out accents, telling old jokes, talking about the social dynamics of tutoring for attractive young women.
Overall it was a great night. I'm quite tired and going to go to bed soon.
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