Derelict of the Year 2014
2014 Winner:
Angel ChavezParty Info
TIME AND DATE: 8:00 p.m. this Friday (05/9/14)LOCATION: 408 Joesler Ct. (Please park on 8th Ave.)
TANK TOPS: encouraged
Feel free to bring food, drinks, or donations.
Nominations
Tea Crew
I nominated the Math Department Tea Crew, a ragtag group of graduate students who would graduate in four years if they didn't spend every afternoon of this past year playing chess and Go, drinking coffee, and eating snacks.
Since an award cannot be given to what is essentially a third of the math and applied math grad programs, I propose that the award is given to Dr. Sergey Cherkis. Although he is not a derelict himself, Teatime Dereliction (TM) could not happen without him!
The Calcubus
Coming soon!
"Milers" of 2013
I hereby nominate the "milers" of 2013. "Milers" here denotes those who succumbed to the dangers of the beer mile.
When one agrees to host the DOTY party, it is accepted that a certain amount of clean up will be necessary following the party. However, witnesses of last year's race can attest to the "contribution" made by some contestants which offered a unique experience to those who cleaned up the next day.
Join me in honoring these"milers" so their dereliction (and the time I spent hosing off the sidewalk and wall outside my house) can be memorialized forever.
Angel Chavez
Angel Chavez more than anybody I know lives his life by "the greedy algorithm". That is to say, his time in graduate school may be characterized as a sequence of locally optimal decisions (i.e. a mixture of procrastination and eating free ketchup from the student union) that while reasonable in the moment, upon greater reflection perhaps leave something to be desired.
This is best exemplified by what I shall refer to as the "key incident". It was one fateful Saturday morning (TWO YEARS AGO) when, as he tried to unlock the Math building, his key broke in half, triggering what I can only imagine to be a small-scale existential crisis.
As I am sure you recall, the key office is located on essentially the other end of campus -- across Speedway, near the medical center. And while I think it is a rather charming rite of passage that all first years must suffer this trek under the scorching August sun, it is not something that any of us wish to repeat.
Thus the myopic logic of the greedy algorithm plays out: the actual act of getting a new key is so inconvenient that Angel has found it energetically optimal to simply go without. Whenever he needs to unlock the building, he looks through his address book, searching for whoever may be around to open the door for him. And thus for the past two years I have received, without fail, a text message every weekend. "Hey what are you up to?" Nice try Angel, but I'm at home.
In his defense, he once tried to break the cycle. In an act of pure willpower, he made the arduous journey to the key office, only to be informed that the signatures on his key request form were more than 30 days old and hence the paperwork was invalid. Finding himself unable to placate the bureaucrats who control his destiny, the room began to spin and in a moment of anguish he vowed to never return to that horrible place.
So that's it. He does not have the grand trappings of dereliction. He is not a boisterous derelict. No, he has internalized the game to the point where he makes it look graceful and effortless. Angel Chavez is the zen master of dereliction, and for that I nominate him.