(In which I celebrate All Hallows' Eve. What are hallows exactly? I mean, not in the Harry Potter sense. In the Halloween sense. If you know, please tell me in a comment.)

Wow... I pretty much fail at posting regularly nowadays, don't I?

This will change next term. Promise. I'd even pinky-swear, but I'm over here at a desk in the Web Team Office in 2nd Libe, and you're over there behind your computer screen wherever in the world you are, and it would be hard to link fingers at this distance.

Anyway, here's my Late Post Excuse of the Week: I had most of a post on Monday. Then I deleted it somehow. That most-of-a-post is now toast.

So now, here I am, writing a new post. And it's going to be an even better post than the one I deleted! Hahaha! Take that, fate!

What this post is going to be about is...

Halloween.

Here is a picture of my Halloween costume:

I got mostly weird looks, but a few people correctly guessed what it was. Ready for this? ...It's the Cantor Set. Basically, it's what you get when you start with the line segment from 0 to 1:

---------------------------

...and remove the middle third of the points to create two segments 1/3 of the original length:

---------            ---------

...then remove the middle thirds of the remaining segments:

---    ---            ---    ---

...then remove the middle thirds of the remaining segments:

- -    - -             - -    - -

and repeat the process on and on to infinity...

The rows on my shirt are the first few stages of constructing the Cantor Set. The actual, final Cantor Set would be difficult to make out of notecards. (The cards in my costume are kind of askew because I'd been dancing and some of them flew off. Notably, the rightmost interval of C1. Oh well.)

Why would I dress up as a mathematical object for Halloween? Well, mathematicians used to be seriously freaked out by the Cantor Set. It's a scary set. For instance, just the fact that there is anything in the Cantor Set at all is surprising to many people when they first hear of it. But not only does the Cantor Set have points in it, it has an infinite number of points in it... in fact, the same number of points that were in the original interval before we removed any of them! And its surface is technically not 1-dimensional but rather about .6309-dimensional, as it turns out. That's right. Fractional dimensions. I think that's pretty scary. I probably had one of the scariest costumes out there.

The best conversation I had about my costume was this one:

But when I got to the Halloween Concert at the Chapel, my costuming efforts were put to shame by the sheer creativity of everyone else.

President Oden reprised his famous role as Indiana Jones, this time running down the aisle of the Chapel, fleeing a giant rolling exercise ball.

The winners of the Group Costume Contest were a pair of two guys, one dressed all in brown, and the other wearing a bulletin board across his chest, hitting each other with plastic bats. They were Brown vs. the Board.

One guy dressed up as a Sim from the best-selling computer game of all time, The Sims. He was dressed normally except for the green polyhedron suspended over his head.

On the theme of video games, another group dressed up as the characters of Mario Kart, complete with three balloons each. Apparently they are playing in Balloon Battle Mode. Thankfully none of them started throwing Koopa shells around.

One dedicated group dressed up as the Solar System, with giant spherical costumes, and I took a pretty clear picture of them:

My cousin, Jonathan dressed up as a beached whale. His costume was pretty huge- in fact, it was larger than the sun (look at the above picture- the sun's not that big). When the Halloween Concert was over, he and I and some of our friends went back to Myers to play a board game. It was pretty cold, and Jonathan was the only one who wasn't shivering, because of the insulation provided by the ten or so entire rolls of duct tape skin and the ridiculous amounts of cardboard blubber making up his costume. However, warm as it might have been, it still was pretty unwieldy; he tripped over the tail and fell.

Being the good cousin that I am, of course immediately took a picture:

Umm... I'm sorry for putting this on the internet, Jonathan. 

It's for the good of the environment, though. People who see this picture will feel sorry for beached whales everywhere, and they will realize that we need to be careful using sonar so this sort of thing does not happen to real whales.

I know what I'll do. I'll post an even weirder picture of myself, so hopefully my readers will forget about the whale picture after seeing this one:

Is this not the coolest hat you've ever seen? I got it in a care package from home yesterday. My mom made it. I was already wearing a striped sweater, and I decided that if I was going to put on this hat, I had to go the whole nine yards and wear the most ridiculous striped scarf I own along with it, so that's where the scarf is coming from.

I realize now that the only pictures you have of me are my profile picture with me dangling from the scarf, me as the Cantor Set, and me wearing the Best Hat Ever. I think I should reassure you now that I don't always dress that way.

But sometimes, the occasion just calls for it.

So, to conclude my Halloween story, here is all the stuff that happened that I haven't talked about yet, in no order:

-I went to the off-campus house of some of my friends, and we ate a pumpkin pie that was made out of a pumpkin. Not canned pumpkin. A pumpkin. It's a different experience, I tell you. There are a lot more fibrous strands of pumpkiny stuff in the pie. Also it is far more hardcore than a normal pumpkin pie. We also ate pumpkin seeds and an odd semisolid gluey chocolate confection whose name now eludes me.

-I went to Social Dance, where everybody danced in his or her costume. Some costumes (i.e. flappers) are better for dancing than others (i.e. ghosts). Mine was near the nonfunctional end of the spectrum, as previously mentioned.

-I played a board game in Myers with Jonathan and a bunch of other friends. Usually, when people play a board game at Carleton, it is the ever-popular Settlers of Catan. Mostly everyone plays or has played Settlers of Catan. If you are a prospective student who loves Settlers of Catan, you do not need to bring your Settlers of Catan set to Carleton, because everyone else will invariably bring theirs. If you do not know what Settlers of Catan is, you will probably pick it up when you get here, like you will pick up different weird ways of throwing a frisbee. But this time, we elected instead to play Dominion instead. Dominion has a much smaller following, but it is still really fun.

THE END

 P.S. I found a remnant of the post I deleted. It's a flowchart that I made to illustrate one of my points, following in the footsteps of my excellent fellow-blogger Jon. It's not as cool as one of his charts, but it sure looks mysterious when it isn't accompanied by any explanation at all. I think I'm going to leave it that way, so you can puzzle over what it might be, and I'll explain it in the next post, which should arrive shortly.