Better Quasi-Ordering and Cthulhu

I made it to Robertson's Graph Coloring class (math 870), and am I glad I did! It was a two hour marathon of well quasi-orderings, better quasi-orderings, trees of WQO's, lower ideals of WQO's, and Nash-Williams theory. All in the service of the Robertson-Seymour Theorem, arguably the most significant theorem about graphs.

Then, I get home to find out that that bastard Fabrizio bought me a really great book I wanted, to thank me for letting him stay with me. He didn't have to do that! Ostensibly, it was because he's such a great guy, but I know that it's secretly a selfish ploy to get me up to speed on the math he's doing so that he can talk to me more about it... He'll get more than he bargained for.

Ran the farthest I ever have in the snow, inspired by all the great math around me. Worked on and solved some BQO problems I had while doing it, too. Robertson is using a different, new, definition of BQO (Q is BQO iff union of all chains of lower ideals with length < \omega_1 is WQO) rather than Nash-Williams' combinatorial characterisation, so I had to work out their equivalence and some nagging questions.

Also, I ran out of batteries for my optical cordless mouse so I have been hindered by having to use only my keyboard to navigate lately. I found a program to make my own hotkeys (who knew that I really used right-clicking and the scroll-wheel so much?) While that makes things slightly easier, I still usually suck out and wind up using Mousekeys for more than I'd like.

---

Oops! Where's that $9,000,000,000?





Seriously, can anyone do better than 22 at THIS?