Yay Sparky!
Hmm. Tomorrow was supposed to be my day of doing nothing except grocery shopping and laundry and other stuff like that. But I just agreed to meet with a student tomorrow morning. That's at 11:30, though, so if I set my alarm for 10, I should be OK.
Also, I just made someone fall out of her chair laughing when I tried to explain the African Hebrew Israelites to her. (I was trying for the basic explanation -- "Yeah, their beliefs sound kind of weird. But they make great vegetarian soul food. Want to go to their restaurant?" But she wanted more details.) The point that got her from incredulous to falling down laughing was their claim that the Hebrew word "ain," which is a weird sort of grammatical structure that doesn't quite translate into English, but is generally a negation sort of term -- "there isn't any" or "it's not true" or "it is not" can all be English translations, depending on the context of the sentence -- anyway, they claim that the word "ain't" is derived from "ain," and that African-Americans' use of "ain't" is proof that African-Americans are descended from the ancient Israelites and still retain pieces of their ancient language.
In my own research today, I came up with this result that I thought was really neat. Then my advisor pointed out that, while my proof of it was a fairly nice idea -- combinatorial rather than algebraic -- it was actually a known result. But I think I might be able to use the idea behind the proof to prove some other stuff.