This is an improvement over the lot of many, many others out here with me. For them, it falls mainly in their CHU.

I mentioned that the weather here was unseasonably wet. Well, I am no meteorologist but I declare the drought here to be broken. Water is standing feet high in culverts, living areas are like lakes, and streams cut rivulets across formerly featureless terrain. Most of the living quarters were never designed for such vast quantities of precipitation and now many people finally have the running water in their rooms they have wished for so often—although not in the manner they wanted.

I woke up this morning to the sound of hail machine gunning my rooftop and thunder rocking the whole FOB. Also, it turns out my CHU is perfectly watertight. The gravel I had delivered in March, which everybody said was pointless since the rainy season was over? It was awfully nice to walk on. So much better than the glue-like mud that covers the rest of the base.

This very night, at approximately 1915, history was made as uniformed representatives of the United States, for the very first time in Iraq since the start of the war, prepared a batch of peanut brittle. It is believed, on the basis of no evidence, and zero research, that this is actually the first time peanut brittle has ever been prepared by US forces in the entire CENTCOM theater of operations.

Truly, a day that history will little remember and long regret.

Kids, even grown up ones, ask the darnedest things. During class yesterday we talked a little bit about geometry, and one asked, “How many kinds of triangles are there?” We had been discussing the concept of congruency, and I drew some examples of right triangles, equilateral triangles, and isosceles triangles.

I was actually stumped by this question. I vaguely remembered that triangles were sometimes called obtuse and acute, but I wasn’t sure if that was a common use, or if it was more typical to describe them as having “an obtuse angle” or “all acute angles.” Somebody said, “I think one is type is scalene.” Right, there is that. I was able to do a simple proof in class that a triangle could only have one obtuse angle. That is, since the inside angles of a triangle come to 180º, and since an obtuse angle is one that is greater than 90º, it follows that the other two angles must be acute (less than 90º). I still wasn’t sure if I could enumerate all types of triangles, or if it was even possible to do so. I promised them I would give them an answer. Here it is—or at least, close enough.

Triangles can be classified according to the size of their interior angles. Based on the fact that the interior angles must add up to 180º, it follows that there are three kinds:

• All of the angles are less than 90º (acute). For example, 80º—60º—40º. This is known as an acute triangle.
• One of the angles is obtuse, that is, greater than 90º. The other two angles must be acute. This kind of triangle is an obtuse triangle.
• One of the angles is exactly 90º. As expected, the other two must add up to 90º (for example, 1º and 89º), so they are acute. This is a right triangle.

It turns out you can also classify triangles according to the relative lengths of their sides.

• Suppose your triangle’s three sides are the same length. This is an equilateral triangle. It turns out that there is only one way to make such a triangle to work out, and that is by having all of the interior angles the same. Since they must sum to 180º, each angle is 60º.
• Perhaps only two sides are the same length. It works out here that the angles of the “odd” side are identical to each other. This shape is an isosceles triangle.
• Finally (since there are only three sides to consider!), there is the possibility of having a triangle where all three sides are different. This rogue is the scalene triangle.

So, pop quiz. How many types of triangles are there?

Just now finished teaching the first session of our second math improvement class. This class will go much better. One reason is that I learned a lot in the previous course about how to teach the subject matter effectively, but the biggest reason is that in this course we had a large enough population to cut the applicants who were below a 10th grade math level. I had no problem teaching individuals at any level, but in the previous class the population, based on our initial test results, consisted of students performing as low as third grade math to beyond high school level. Since we are all doing our full time job in addition to the class, it was virtually impossible to manage.

I just did an introductory overview today, quickly covering many topics that we’ll later cover in depth, but in many ways it felt like we already went further in this class than we did in two weeks in the previous class.

In other news, I received the news today that I am cleared to spend at least one, and probably two more years in my current assignment and location. Now, we just need to figure out the lodging and commuting puzzle and we’ll be settled.

I’ve started a transition into a completely new job, in charge of computers, radios and communications. I miss my old job dealing with logistics. If I were looking for a different job I would strongly considering making the leap into a new field in some sort of logistical support role. I cannot complain, however, that this new job offers me a lot more free time, and obviously plays to my strengths.

This morning, over espresso (how terrible war is), somebody wanted to play with my iPad (again, this war, right now: terrible) and started an impromptu game of Scrabble. We started a “pass the iPad” multiplayer game, and to my surprise the demo turned into a serious contest. Time passed, and finally somebody suggested that it would be great if we had a multiplayer computer version to play on our laptops, taking turns during little breaks throughout the day.

Surely, I offered, some enterprising programmer has created a free version of Scrabble that can be hosted on one computer and played locally with other computers on the same network. Probably, I hypothesized, this programmer had even made it possible to play through your web browser. The other two agreed that this was virtually certain to have happened.

“Well,” said one, “you should probably go back to your CHU to download whatever it is since the Internet is so slow so we can have this set up by tonight.”

“Right,” I agreed.

Six hours gone, and many vast and deep Internet searches later, I had to give up. I realized that the challenge to find this thing on the Internet had been like a perfectly aimed special munition into the very heart of my personal Death Star. A whole perfectly splendid idle Sunday used up in futile sifting through the bed of the web’s Mariana Trench.

“Well played, friend,” I admitted to my new enemy, many hours later.

Perhaps all was not lost. I have been casting about for something to work on to keep my coding skills sharp. A locally shareable game like Scrabble, with an HTML5 client, would have a pretty deep stack of the technologies I’m interested in. So I may pursue it.

Around dinner time I got a late invitation to go barbecue with our Lebanese friends. The food tonight was really, really good. I think that perhaps my culinary interest in Lebanese food has prompted our host to up his game, or it may be that improving economic conditions have made it possible for him to acquire better ingredients and equipment (for instance, tonight he had actual hard wood charcoal as opposed to briquettes). Whatever the cause, it’s great to be able to enjoy simple food, well prepared.

We were going to make peanut brittle afterwards, but everybody was stuffed, and I owed this to the blog.

Tomorrow I start teaching math class again. We learned in the last that having the class five or six times a week was likely too much, so we’re cutting back to every other day and placing more emphasis on homework.

I felt the blast from a bit under four miles away. It was impressive. We heard it, and we felt it. We thought, in fact, that it must have been a shell landing inside the FOB. There’s nothing you can do if something like that happens. There might be another one on the way, but it will follow within seconds if it’s going to come at all. It could also have been a controlled demolition of ordnance that wasn’t announced over the public address system. So we didn’t really think much of it.

When the second one came I knew something significant was developing, something outside the FOB. I thought that it was probably just a short way down the road. Often a second bomb will be used to attack the people responding to the first one. In this incident, the attack was not organized like that, although it was a very complex attack. The follow-on attack against the first responders and the original victims took place at the hospital, a sign of the increasing derangement of the losing side in this conflict.

The wave of pressure, which we sensed as sound and whose effects we felt as a tremor, traveled in 17 seconds the space between the explosion and where I experienced it. Enough time for the badly wounded, who lay dying, to die. Strange to think that in those seconds we were chatting amiably and stirring our coffee idly.

The Iraqi police and army did not need the help of the US military that day, and I do not think that they will again.

(Via The BBC.)