quivering through sun-drunken delight

Tigers as social animals

2007-06-02T20:32:00.000-04:00

I found out a little more about what this book is about today.

As I walked the narrow road down to campus last night I began to feel like I was in the middle of a 1920's Broadway musical. There were all these people, walking the other way, for some unclear reason (no one comes to visit us). They were all dressed quite similarly: straw hats, like from Citizen Kane or a carnival act, with bits of cloth or a ribbon tied to it, in orange or black or both, and flimsy-threaded suit jackets cut in matching, antiquated style, with checkered diamonds of orange, black, and white, or vests with the same pattern, over white or black shirts and white pants. Everyone is wearing these buttons over their breast with class numerals in large font above their name. Later I determined that they had some kind of event going on in the courtyard one over from my room, but I didn't stop to ask questions.

Later still I saw a paper posted with some kind of schedule on it (yes, it was orange paper), and from this I gleaned that there is something going on called Reunions 2007.

Since yesterday it's been all tigers, all the time. Blouses of orange, or mottled orange and black and white. T-shirts of orange, of course, and t-shirts with the university name in that ubiquitous arched font, or t-shirts in black with an enormous orange letter “P” on the back, as though everyone knows what that means. Kids dressed up like their parents, the poor guys, or in coloured shirts and caps. A sea of orange shirts and khaki shorts under carnivalesque tarps (good planning: between spells of awful heat it rained something fierce here last night, thunder and lightning, for a few hours). Suit jackets in orange and black stripes, of variable width, for some; slick sporty rain jackets in black and orange, patterned after the university crest, with class numerals on the back, for others. A few groups in what might have been track suits in orange with black piping, but the impression given was more somewhere between astronaut and construction zone traffic warden. Hats and caps of all styles for the sunny weather, though I didn't see any tiger-themed parasols: not just straw hats or American hats but Texan hats and cloth hats and English bonnets. For the gents, ties, solid orange or striped or a black field with pattern of orange crests or shields with black relief. Handbags in a plurality of styles, if not colours, for the ladies. Cloth belts of orange and black stripes – well, it would be better if no one at all wore those. All this and still more besides, but not all that ornaments is orange.

I saw three kids riding the back of a bronzed Bengal, getting their picture taken. I think I want my picture taken, and you know where.

Lawn signs were posted for the mayoral election in orange and black and white. Actually, signs for the Democratic primary for the mayoral election.

I saw an elderly man on a scooter with an orange pennant flag. No stripes that I could see. You might think that would be brash, but I got the impression that the older alumni were enjoying things rather more than their newer brethren.

Shops with Princeton pennants in the windows, shops with plush tigers reclining on rails, shops with signs offering a fifteen-percent discount to anyone wearing orange and black (meaning they gouge the locals but not the tourists? – counterintuitive.)

An enormous inflated triangle, in orange, half again as tall as I, with black lettering promising "Princeton's Famous Triangle Show!" Elsewhere, balloons, in orange or black, of course, or orange with black strokes, but not as many as you might guess. It may be that the main balloon-using events occurred before I came by, or are yet to come.

And, heavens guard us, I spotted no less than four tiger tails, two apparently attached to people, so that they became human-tiger hybrids. (Science has gone too far, I say.) No, I couldn't quite see how they were being worn. One kid was sitting with his back to me. The first one I saw was trailing a woman as she walked. I did a double-take, but she quickly vanished from sight. It seemed to be hanging from a back left pocket, or possibly from a belt loop on that side.

Quite a show. Makes me want to buy that book. Je suis désolé, but I've no photos to show you. In truth, I was too frightened to try. Well, who can say how a tiger might startle?

Dandelions: thick as goblin arrows in the sky

2007-05-24T14:48:00.000-04:00

This entry goes out to all the weed-haters of the world. Ignore the dubious photoshopping around the fringes; or, for fun (or not), spot where the car used to be (dratted things always getting in the way). For best viewing effect, click through, imagine you live in a castle twenty meters this side of the road, pan across field slowly from left to right while noting differential composition of flower heads and clocks, play music of horns, strings, and male chorus tinged with dread and heroism in the dark, and read passage in the voice of Ian McKellen.

* * * * *

...they are coming.

They have taken the bridge and the second hall. We have barred the gates but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes, drums... drums in the deep. We cannot get out. A shadow lurks in the dark. We can not get out... they are coming.

* * * * *

Naturally when researching this entry I also came across the equivalent passage from the book, which perhaps you can try to play with an Ian McKellen synthesiser in your head, if you can figure out what those diacritcal marks mean.

We cannot get out. We cannot get out. They have taken the Bridge and second hall. Frár and Lóni and Náli fell there... went five days ago... the pool is up to the wall at Westgate. The Watcher in the Water took Óin. We cannot get out. The end comes... drums, drums in the deep... they are coming.

* * * * *

I remember one time that I looked down and saw a dandelion in the grass. It was dead, and it looked awful, an organic crater in the ground. I thought: here's an absolutely useless plant. It gets everywhere, doesn't do anything, looks wretched, leaves a mess behind. But they always keep coming back. And I wondered: what's it for? How did it get here? And I knew the answer: a dandelion is a machine for making dandelions. That's enough.

JoaLDG: no coin flipping in the exam hall!

2007-05-17T23:12:00.000-04:00

Leave your calculators and quarters at home: yesterday was the linear algebra final exam. So today it was graded. It took a little under five hours, from nine-thirty to a quarter past two, for maybe a hundred and fifty papers. I had one problem to grade. For five hours. A little numbing, but not so fatiguing as you might think from it being doing math for so long at a stretch: it consumes much more energy to shift to thinking about a new problem than to continue looking at the same kinds of solutions to the same problem. Grading in parallel is easier as well as more consistent.

Actually this one problem was in two parts, a and b, and the two parts didn't have anything to do with one another, so really it is two problems. They were couched as “true or false” questions, but when they add “Explain.” to the end that actually means: “prove or disprove.” Since this isn't the math majors' linear algebra class, it will perhaps be not too surprising to you to read that generally speaking the option taken was “not prove.” I was not unduly burdened by doing “really two problems.” It turned out that the composer of part b badly mistook the difficulty of his problem: the average over the entire class for that problem was about one-and-a-half percent. There were earned a total of twelve points in all those hundred-fifty papers, eleven points from seven hundred and fifty. (After a vast, vast number of zeroes were awarded, after I began to feel that I was back in kindergarten learning fine motor skills by forming the numeral 0 over and over again, well, I started counting.) And of those four people sharing twelve points only one earned full credit, so congratulations to MJA.

This is, I confess, a fair disgrace. (I should mention that part a was rather better done – I wasn't counting but I'd guess the average was somewhere around forty percent, plus or minus ten. So I wasn't just a zero-scribbling bit of broccoli for those hours. Maybe you find that a fair disgrace too, but at least it's a spread.) The other one is really just a waste of everyone's time. I can't blame the problem-poser for this disaster; the problem was merely a great blind-spot for almost everyone.

Something is shameful if it's counter to some law – what law do I mean here, calling this a disgraceful situation? Really just what I said: no spread of grades.

Grading problem sets I am acutely conscious of their existence as a pedagogical tool. Ultimately everything I do is predicated on the need to indicate to the students the deficiencies and successes of their technique. So for example if the problem is to compute some certain numbers or vectors and the bottom line is incorrect and the reason why is exactly that there was an error in carrying out one step of an algorithm a little while earlier then substantial partial credit is earned. This is only natural: I am not grading the answer but rather the mastery of the material and the techniques of the class. This mandates more nuance than up-or-down.

There is, of course, a different point of view, that overly discretised up-or-down view, which we'll call the “either the building is going to stay up or it's going to fall down” vantage. I think we can all agree this is the standard to which we'd like to hold our civil engineers, but it seems a little draconian for first-year math students, and moreover, as I said, unpedagogical. I must even object: what do I care for the right answer? If I wanted the right answer then I'd do the problem myself. And if some miss the nuance in my nuanced feedback, all the worse for them, but I don't mean to pander nor panic.

And yet there is a well-known and popular case of this discrete approach. The Putnam contest for undergraduate math students applies a similar rubric: “not a solution” gets in the range of zero to two points (from ten); “solution” gets in the range of eight to ten. The problems are, to be sure, not easy, but the easiest problem on the Putnam paper isn't so hard that you couldn't manage it in three hours (if you were an energetic young undergraduate math student), and yet the median score, the score which half the contestants don't exceed, is perennially zero or one point, out of one hundred and twenty. (One year the median score was three, and some wag remarked that this was a reflection of how “ridiculously easy” the contest was that year.)

Well! If I graded linear algebra problem sets in this style, I can only think I would quickly discover how expendable I am – just after all but a handful of students from forty drop out in fear of failing the class. And if this seems draconian even in a prize exam, well, in the first place, it is the rule of the game, and everyone comes to play the game. But moreover it has after a fashion a certain logic: every problem in our linear algebra textbook may be all-too-easy for me to solve three different ways – there's a reason I'm qualified to grade this stuff – but if you give an incorrect solution to a problem no one knows how to solve, how can we really say how close you are? Every false theorem is one mistake away from being proven. It's not a hopeless problem to say how near or far a proof is – there's a reason they pay those research mathematicians so well – but the iron prison of the idol called Rigour lets no one free who hasn't really a complete and correct solution.

So when I grade prove-or-disprove problems on a final exam, what am I doing? Really my goal cannot be pedagogical. The students are permitted to look at their papers in the sequel but my understanding is that this is not typically done, and in truth I don't expect it to be otherwise. I sympathise with those who, coming to the end of a difficult course which they have not yet totally arranged into comfortable, familiar parlor room furniture in their head, would rather take a long, quiet, contemplative silence by the koi pond. So I have no belief that I am still teaching anyone anything.

Rather I am evaluating: who has it and who hasn't it? We need our grades to give a spread, to differentiate the students, and form them into some groups, the men and the boys and those in between, linear algebraically speaking. This does inform one's granting of partial credit. For example, it is very far from my mind that a simple response of “true” or “false” should beckon my pen hand to form anything other than a zero. (No doubt you have already guessed this, since it really beggars belief that only four people should have their coins come up tails, even if your name is Rosencrantz.) If there is no evidence that a proof could be in the offing, there is no reason to say that anything good has happened.

This problem of credit for the right single word has been a serious challenge to me: how could it be that any credit at all is earned by an utterly confused answer merely because one key word happened to be correct? Yet at the same time I want to encourage students to make guesses, develop their intuition, and so forth, even if they can't finish it off. After all, a good conjecture is the first step to a theorem. So on problem sets a one-word answer should worth a little bit of partial credit – typically one or two points from five, depending on the depth of the problem in question and the credibility of the notion that the student just didn't want to bother justifying their answer. (That unmathematical practice I strenuously discourage, even to economics students.) But to avoid giving the slightest encouraging word (or numeral) to errant nonsense I have developed what I have been privately (now publicly) calling the egregious weirdness doctrine. (I like to give names to these sorts of things, as you may have gathered from my discussion of the ultimate linear algebraic sin, but typically I'd rather terminologically paint myself in a more temporally-based judicial role.) This doctrine states that if I am considering a range of possible grades for a submission then if there is egregious weirdness present I will err to the low side. To clarify, some silly examples of egregious weirdness; pretend I've added parenthetically “(good grief!)” after every last one of them: claiming a matrix with a row of zeroes is invertible; writing down two vectors that are parallel after applying Gram-Schmidt; citing a theorem's converse despite having disproven it in, well, every single problem for the last two weeks; and so forth. They're the kinds of mistakes that are manifest and impossible for me to believe derive from anything but the coupling of linear algebraic ennui and the sort of deep confusion I called “the fog of the Nothing,” which “roam[s] between the sky and the space which is beyond, fantastic, undreambound,” in the first JoaLDG entry.

If the egregious weirdness doctrine explains how I can give credit for one-word answers on problem sets without seeming to punish people for just “writing a little bit more” (shouldn't it be a principle that writing a few more lines oughtn't worth an answer less credit?), perhaps its dual explains how I can't do the same on the final exam: only if there's something to praise can I say it worths something on the high end.

I just wish we hadn't ended up with a Putnamesque lack of hosannas on that problem.

* * * * *

Though it's the end of linear algebra for the school year, this is not, I should assure the gentle reader, the end of Journal of a Lower-Division Grader, nor the beginning of a hiatus. At my current rate, and at their tendency to bifurcate themselves into two and three parts, I have stories enough percolating on note cards to keep you and me over the summer.

JoaLDG: Artin on matrices

2007-05-12T19:25:00.000-04:00

Preface. This entry is a first part of two planned about the mathematician Emil Artin. It's a little heavy on the math, (no surprise!), so let's heed in advance some advice we're about to quote and remember to pass gently over the oppressive parts without letting ourselves be burdened by their gravity. Listen to the music and not the song -- or was it the other way around? -- never mind, they're both light and airy.

Emil Artin (1892-1968) was one of our most formidable expositors of mathematics for mathematicians. To give just a most obvious and striking example of this talent, there is a reason why all introductory texts on Galois theory sound the same, and that reason is that they all borrow very, very heavily from Artin's book on the same. Artin on this subject was original: it was he who reformulated the work of Evariste Galois (1811-1832) from a theory of the symmetries of roots of polynomials into a theory of the symmetries of field extensions. Considering how this view now completely dominates it is a little surprising to learn that it was only so recently developed – Artin's book Galois theory was published in 1942, from his lecture notes, being fruit of work from the preceding years.

(But maybe not too strange. A long parenthetical digression giving context could be placed here. Let it suffice to say that even the notion of a quotient group was only formalised in the 1920's, and one can hardly state the “fundamental theorem of Galois theory” as we know it today without understanding group-theoretically what a normal subgroup is.)

I don't know what I'm doing in the fall but there's a certain chance I'll be teaching a section of this linear algebra class I've been grading – and I surely will be doing so sometime before I graduate – so some things Artin has written, and one passage in particular which I'll quote presently, have been a little on my mind. How do you tell people about linear algebra? At heart all I can answer is: Really, the same way as you do for anything else. Karl Jaspers thought that the problem of communication was one of the fundamental problems of philosophy. But we needn't feel abstractly pessimistic or overburdened: there are plenty of fundamental problems we manage willy-nilly to cope with every day. We have twenty thousand purely practical facts to draw on. And in this case, one of them is Artin's legacy.

Artin's book Geometric algebra is curiously organised: he deposits in the first chapter, prior to the main subjects of the book, all the external tools and apparatuses he'll need in the sequel. ("Curiously?" Well, normal people would put this in an appendix.) In the very thoughtful short preface labelled “Suggestions for the use of this book,” he explains:

The most important point to keep in mind is the fact that Chapter I should be used mainly as a reference chapter for the proofs of certain isolated algebraic theorems. These proofs have been collected so as not to interrupt the main line of thought in later chapters.

He goes on to say that “the inexperienced reader should start right away with Chapter II,” which to me reads like an agreement that Chapter I ought to be adjacent to the other cover. (Is he saying that the experienced reader shouldn't start right away with Chapter II?) He continues on, to give some of the best advice possible for reading mathematics, namely,

This skipping [of “a few harder algebraic theorems” in “a first reading”] is another important point. It should be done whenever a proof seems too hard or whenever a theorem or a whole paragraph does not appeal [!] to the reader. In most cases he will be able to go on and later on he may return to the parts which were skipped.*

Probably the students will object: there is hardly time for all this, to first skip and then to come back. Perhaps so. It is certainly unrealistic to think that the students will understand something that's unlike anything they've ever seen before in time to give clear and concise solutions on the weekly problem sets. But by the end of the class there should no longer be any mystery about the material of the first week, and the gap between the end of lectures and the beginning of the exam period (in Princeton's fall term, this is a gap of a whole month!) is enough time to start to put the entire course into perspective. On this time scale, the advice is not only reasonable, it is the only sound thing to do, if one operates according to the principle that no one ever learned a thing the first time he saw it. (Well, how could he?)

I want to convince you that Artin is super-cool. For that purpose there is at bottom only one thing to do: namely, show you that he's a rebel. A wild, wild rebel. Just thirteen pages into this book, not far into his appendix-at-the-beginning**, he has stated a theorem whose content is that when you fix a basis (of some vector space -- you're skipping that link, right?) there's a correspondence (“isomorphism,” in the vernacular) between linear transformations and matrices, (and change of the choice of basis corresponds to conjugation of matrices). He goes into a lamentation/screed for a page and a half, (emphasis added):

Mathematical education is still suffering from the enthusiasm which the discovery of this isomorphism has aroused. The result has been that geometry was eliminated and replaced by computations. Instead of the intuitive maps of a space preserving addition and multiplication by scalars (these maps have an immediate geometric meaning), matrices have been introduced. From the innumerable absurdities – from a pedagogical point of view – let me point out one example and contrast it with the direction description:

Matrix method: A product of a matrix A and a vector X (which is then an n-tuple of numbers) is defined; it is also a vector. Now the poor student has to swallow the following definition: A vector X is called an eigenvector if a number λ exists such that AX = λ X. Going through the formalism, the characteristic equation, one then ends up with theorems like: If a matrix A has n distinct eigenvalues, then a matrix S can be found such that S^-1AS is a diagonal matrix. The student will of course learn all this since he will fail the course if he does not.

Instead one should argue like this: Given a linear transformation f of the space V into itself, does there exist a line which is kept fixed by f? In order to include the eigenvalue 0 one should then modify the question by asking whether a line is mapped into itself. This means of course for a vector X spanning the line that f(X) = λ X. Having thus motivated the problem, the matrix A describing f will enter only for a moment for the actual computation of λ. It should disappear again. Then one proves all the customary theorems without ever talking of matrices and asks the question: Suppose we can find a basis of V which consists of eigenvectors; what does this imply for the geometric description of f? Well, the space is stretched in the various directions of the basis by factors which are the eigenvalues. Only then does one ask what this means for the description of f by a matrix in terms of this basis. We have obviously the diagonal form.

I should of course soften my reproach since books have appeared lately which stress this point of view so that improvements are to be expected.

It is my experience that proofs involving matrices can be shortened by 50% if one throws the matrices out. Sometimes it cannot be done; sometimes a determinant must be computed.

He then re-enters the stream of the exposition. “Talking of determinants,” he says, “we assume that the reader is familiar with them.” And we're off.

But, by the by, and coming back to our concrete problem, is that prophecy correct, that future books will move toward Artin's geometrical view? I have a vast number of linear algebra books, and on inspection it's not so rosy. Some do exactly what Artin decries, without any apparent shame. Some even make linear transformations into second-class objects by introducing hideous notation for the matrix of a transformation with respect to such-and-such bases (not necessarily the same basis for the input as the output – good grief!). Some try to “motivate” the problem with differential equations, which from the point of view of an engineer may not be so ridiculous as it seems to us on the face of it (and anyway systems of first-order linear DE's are a classic application in such a course). Bretscher, the book they use here, is actually not so bad. It claims to emphasise geometry, and seems to do so pretty well, for the level of the class.

But there's the rub: Artin's approach is too difficult to teach to the students and still expect them to also master the matrix material they'll need to, you know, actually do some problems and not fail the course. In the end it is not a way to teach “something that's unlike anything [the students have] ever seen before,” because its emphasis on geometric character presupposes some geometric intuition to which one can appeal – in other words, some underlying familiarity not necessarily with linear algebra but, absent that, with some other and really more difficult mathematics. Bretscher's compromise, and it seems a reasonable one to me, is to give examples of matrices with special geometric meanings, transformations we've seen before (rotations, reflections, projections), and ask what their eigenvectors are. The students should be able to answer right from the geometry they already understand, without ever writing down a matrix, (although they could write it down if they wanted to, or felt the need to).

This balance between the conceptual and the formal the would-be instructor must maintain with care and deliberation. Maybe I won't stake my infant career on Artin's throwaway comments. I could just photocopy that page as a handout. If that handout wouldn't confuse anyone. But in that case I can always give it out to them, on my didactic authority if they don't feel comfortable judging it for themselves, that it's all right to skip it.

Endnotes.

* I am reminded of an English teacher from high school who wondered why it was, or how it came to be, that everyone thinks they should read a book by starting from page one and continuing to read page-by-page. Clearly there are many more ways to read the book, although most make no sense. Probably this habit is out of respect to the author, who presumably (though this belief is often well-characterised by the negative, skeptical connotation of "presumption") has put his industry and his learning into crafting a well-structured book. A reader inexperienced in some subject hasn't necessarily the knowledge to know what parts he needs to read to do whatever. But if all this is so it merely makes us wonder instead (1) why a well-structured book means a linearly-structured book; and (2) why more authors couldn't write such helpful "suggestions for the use of this book."

It is a custom, I should mention, in many corners of the textbook world to outline a couple of different options for the use of the book in a one- or two-semester class: cover these chapters but not those sections, and so forth.

** We need a good archaeologism, but for that one needs good Latin. “Precedix” is tempting, coming fairly directly from Latin “praecedere,” but doesn't carry quite the right meaning: it is “a thing coming before,” whereas Artin's appendix-at-the-front is more like elementary material. We could try “fundix,” from fundere, (cognate with to found: “found a city,” “a foundation,” and such), but it sounds ridiculous. Maybe “precedix” is better; after all, an appendix in English doesn't literally mean “a thing hanging on,” either.

Nachtblogging: "deeper than day had been aware"

2007-05-04T23:37:00.000-04:00

I've been collecting night-time photos for a little while, since last summer, casually, whenever the fancy struck; and for a few weeks I've had it in mind to start posting some. At first it was going to be just one post, but I think I have too many of them for that. And besides, I tipped my hand with the last entry. So here's a first stab at it.

Each picture below is a thumbnail; click through for more.

* * * * *

The other day I was returning from my after-dinner walk to pick up this week's problem sets when I happened to look down.

Just some flowers? This is a long-exposure shot (one second); I'm sitting on the stone path behind our viewpoint and using my bag to try to stabilise the camera. If you click through, you can see I wasn't wholly successful. On first appearance you can't really see too well what first caught my eye, which was the grouping of the purple bulbs around the one orange-red bulb. The blues are a little too strong to let the purple flowers stand out -- actually, the ones on the left are well-hidden. In the click-through the bulbs are a bit easier to pick out. But whatever my original intent was, this scene has taken on its own character.

This shot summarises the palette that attracts me to night-time settings: forest greens, deep blues, and burning reds. The set is suffused with an almost unholy dim glow, and the long exposure yields powerful juxtapositions of light and dark. The backlight brings up the gothic architecture beautifully, the foreground flower is curiously emphasised, and the whole thing takes on a dramatic energy. In short, it's interesting: no, this isn't a picture of flowers; it's a picture about flowers.

Compare a roughly equivalent day-time shot:

This is the same plot, (a few days later, when I decided I wanted a comparison shot to show you: if you look carefully you can see the flowers are noticeably further along in bloom). The click-through is not as big and I haven't tried to crop it for composition. Nonetheless I think it's clear that even if the photo doesn't outright fail it is at best "just some flowers." The only thing close to interest is the upper-right corner, where the grass and the jagged shadow meet the wall. We can try to rescue it, like so:

You can decide for yourself if you think this merits being called a "rescue." It has a few merits, yet at best "it is what it is," and that is nothing close to the evening scene.

Let me share something curious from the same set. It's a bit nerve-wrecking taking these photos at night because of course I don't know until I get home whether the photo is bright enough, or too blurred, or whatever other failures might have happened -- the camera's LCD is hardly good enough to tell me this, especially when the ambient no-light makes it difficult to judge the brightness of the image! When that happens I can (short of trying to retake the photo -- not always possible) only hope for a software solution.

The software I'm using has a button suspiciously labelled "Photo fix." This runs a half-dozen or so algorithms to try to correct some problems -- colour balance, contrast, saturation, others. (You can also run these algorithms individually at a strength you specify, in case you actually know what you're doing.) The result of running this thing, as you might guess, is usually more entertaining than usable: although it often does a good job of identifying perceptual objects in the frame that are fairly-well washed out to mortal eyes, the end product of this process is typically pretty far-removed from reality. I would be very reluctant to use such a thing unless I needed an illustrative photo and all of mine were useless.

However, sometimes it can surprise you.

This came from a failed (too dark) shot of these flowers by running this "photo fix" algorithm. As a photograph, this obviously fails. The colours are wrong, too washed out; close-up, everything looks grainy, like it had been taken with a high-ISO film; and it's also blurred -- probably a consequence of the smoothing algorithm rather than my unsteadiness. Yet despite all this the effect is not altogether awful if I forget that it came from my camera and instead imagine it came from some novice impressionist painter's workshop. Looking at the click-through, the colours at the interface of the wall and the garden are still not good, but move away to center on the red flower, with just the green surrounding it:

Very striking! Call it found art.

* * * * *

This night-time photo series gets its own tag, "Deeper than day had been aware." There's an explanation behind this which is too long to give in entirety on the "About labels" page, so I'll take a page from what I did before there were labels and introduce it here, on the second entry under this tag (I retconned the previous entry into this grouping).

The quotation is from a poem in Nietzsche's Zarathustra:

I was asleep --
From a deep dream I woke and swear:
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.

As always, the translation is Walter Kaufmann's. (The other day I was in the bookstore [ahem] and a new translation caught my eye -- I might pick it up one day -- aren't you proud of me, that I didn't the first time I saw it? -- but wait, maybe it won't be there when I go back!) In the original, it is:

Ich schlief, ich schlief --
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:
Die Welt is tief,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.

Kaufmann's translation is obviously fairly literal, but I like the fact that "Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht" sounds every bit as good as "Deeper than day had been aware."

This is a quatrain in a song that occurs several times in Zarathustra. It is, I would say, a rather important poem to the book. Unfortunately, I can't quite tell you its name. It first appears in Book III under the title "The other dancing song" ("Das endere Tanzlied") and in Book IV under the title "The drunken song" ("Das Nachtwandler-lied" -- more on that later). On the other hand, in that latter setting Zarathustra introduces it like so, in Section 12, after quoting pieces of it in the previous eleven parts:

Have you learned my song? Have you guessed its intent? Well then, you higher men, sing me now my round. Now you yourselves sing me the song whose name is "Once More" and whose meaning is "into all eternity" -- sing, you higher men, Zarathustra's round!

In the original, that last sentence is:

Singt mir nun selber das Lied, dess Name ist "Noch ein mal," dess Sinn ist "in alle Ewigkeit," singt, ihr hoeheren menschen, Zarathustra's Rundgesang!"

These German originals, by the way, are courtesy of Project Gutenberg's e-book. The declared name and meaning are given literally in Kaufmann's translation; a "Rundgesang" is a kind of chorus song (in the sense of a circle of people singing -- "runde" is cognate with our "round").

So what about that "Drunken song"? It will surely not surprise you to hear that this isn't exactly what "Das Nachtwandler-lied" means. A wandlung is a change or transformation (cognate with German "wandern," same as our "to wander"; so a change in the sense of a wandering away from the original), but according to my dictionary (thank you!) it also has a meaning in the German Ecclesiastical tradition -- it refers to the transubstantiation of Christ! Since Zarathustra is filled from cover to cover with Biblical allusions, it is not a difficult guess to make that this is the meaning intended. So I might guess at a rather more literal translation: "The night-consecrating song." All this just demands the question: what did Kaufmann have in mind?

Of course, "Night-consecrating song" is pretty good for our purposes here, too, even if it does miss some meaning there.

By the by, Mahler set this song-of-indeterminate-name to music in his Third Symphony, (Fourth Movement). The symphony is good but the movement in question is just eight minutes so I can't recommend it on that basis alone. Mahler's certainly isn't a drinking song, but a fairly ethereal piece with a light instrumental accompaniment (horn and clarinet solos with strings) to a soprano.

Tech envy

2007-05-01T23:26:00.000-04:00

There's been a thunderstorm going on here for the last few hours, with a lot of lightning casting blue across the sky. There was even something pretty close once, a few hours ago -- close enough that I heard thunder not as Zeus' far-off rumbling but as the angry, stabbing cry we best know from sound-effects shops. (That was a little creepy. I got a little surge protector from Belkin when I found myself running out of outlets but I'd rather not find out exactly what the asterisk next to the "ten thousand dollar guarantee!" was referring to.)

Anyway, having had a long-standing affinity for the mystery and romance and beautiful colours of the night, I thought I should try my luck at getting a nice blue-backlit shot of the tree outside my window. Alas, predictably it came to nothing. "If only I had a camera with a massive lens," I thought, "and a ten-frame-per-second continuous drive mode. Then I could cast my net wide as Orion's bow and gather up all the colourful shells of the sea."

But, no, there's nothing to do but sigh and think nighttime thoughts, about a future of digital rebellion against analog transience.

The Future of Credibility: “everything is what it is because it got that way”

2007-04-28T22:51:00.000-04:00

It's Pandaemonium. I came to praise it, not to bury it.

In his tendentiously-titled Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett suggests an outline of a theory of the generation of speech. His outline is expressly directed against the classical notion that when I say something it is because I mean it. More precisely, he is arguing against the claim that there is necessarily within me a Central Meaner, perhaps that being myself or else a kind of homunculus, who holds safe the semantic meanings that I intend, and against which all my attempts to frame utterances are compared for semantic fidelity.

Imagine a great horde of senseless daemons, he says to us, rather than a single central homunculus, each with a phrase or piece of a phrase to suggest. These pieces are mere “found objects” and most are senseless or irrelevant. Irrelevant to what? -- to some kind of goal being held, but, crucially, not necessarily a semantic goal. (Dennett gives an example caricature of a person responding to hostility, starting with the angry flush “Go on the offensive!” and passing through “Cast aspersions on some aspect of his body!” on the way to “Say: 'Your feet are too big!'”. He assures us that we can then go home and curse ourselves for not having thought of a wittier retort.) All these “word-daemons” compete to put their mark on each others' candidates for a verbal utterance, and the stream of language they generate is adjudicated over, “yes or no”-style, by a horde of equally senseless “content-daemons.” This chaos does not end when the daemons together have assembled something that meets a Central Meaner's review. Rather, the putative semantic intention is itself modified by the judgments of the content-daemons upon the candidate utterances of the word-daemons.* The intention is “drawn” through an abstract semantic space toward the candidates, just as the candidates are drawn to the intention. What one has is not a kind of bureaucracy but (in Dennett's terminology) Pandaemonium, and it is “a process that is largely undesigned and opportunistic.”

This, if I may remark, is not a model that would have been taken too seriously as recently as the mid-nineteenth century. It is a thoroughly post-Darwinian conception, this supposition that all this chaotic variation can with only subtle environment constraints and interactions nonetheless construct something complex, something with significance, an utterance with a Meaning. Dennett directs this schematic model against the suggestion that the need for a Central Meaner would give necessity to the opposing theory of consciousness that he calls the Cartesian Theatre, (which is, roughly speaking, the idea that there is a single [physical or abstract] place where consciousness “all comes together”). In doing so he links our naïve sense that there must be a Cartesian Theatre to explain our experiences with our naïve presumption that there must be an agent's design behind anything complicated. There is indeed a commonality between them: both are a kind of turtle-stacking. (Check out the graphic on that page!)

We therefore stand properly advised that in our new century we will brook no contention anywhere that sophistication mandates design. To now pass instantly from the ontologically profound to the perhaps merely interesting, and to keep up to the promise of the title and opening paragraph of this post, we in particular note that in the new society of the Internet there is no compulsion to subscribe to a Central Content Provider.

This is a change from the old model, the model of cable television and publishing houses, where the expense of broadcasting mandated a few powerful players. To be sure, Peter Mansbridge isn't going anywhere, but there's a reason why he's now reading out viewer e-mails on the air each night. It's spelled out in this article, which was first published in a magazine and only later reprinted in the author's blog – so don't hold it against it, that it didn't come from a Central Content Provider, that in fact you (maybe) first heard about it from my pointing it out.

For this is the basis for our Internet Pandaemonium: if you know me and trust me, if I have credibility, then my endorsement of content brings that content to your attention. If you agree it's view-worthy, you refer your own close neighbours to it. If not, it need not branch any more along that path, but remember that my other readers might feel differently. The more it's passed around, the more credence and significance it gains in the greater community: some memes gain tremendous attention, or tremendous notoriety, as any longtime Internet reader can verify. As for where that content came from before -- maybe I found it purely by chance, or from another blogger whom I read, who may himself just be another citizen marking out prose or maybe someone with a mission to find selected or special content, like a museum curator, or from a newspaper or other kind of dedicated, professional content provider. (As exciting as our new century is, we would be too reckless by half to lose our professional content providers: they still deserve our respect, even if their roles are changing.) In this particular case it's all-of-the-above: the article I just linked to isn't the link I followed to that blog. This fellow's blog is in my queue pending final decision on whether I should bookmark – add him to my trusted content providers. The ultimate origin of the article, for our purposes, is the author's blog, (strictly speaking, this origin is in the sense that “eukaryotes come from prokaryotes” rather than “eukaryotes come from primordial soup”, to anticipate parenthetically some ideas from the sequel); but every blogger is an author waiting for his work to be cited and to come to prominence, possibly as part of a greater content-complex (an organelle in a eukaryote). It doesn't happen often: the price, the scarce resource that demands differential survival (speaking so as to continue to anticipate), as always comes from the opportunity cost of a person's limited attention-bandwidth for consuming media. So most bits of content don't achieve total renown, but rather roam and hover between heaven and earth. (Mostly around earth: renown like flight is very expensive to support.)

Now let me make good on those anticipations. I used that word -- memes. If you've never heard it, maybe as always the Wikipedia summary can be helpful. In short, an idea is a meme, or more precisely an idea at the size that can be replicated. It might be as small as an idiom of language or the refrain of a song or as big as the text of a book. This is in analogy to the way that a gene is some span of codons in DNA, not of fixed length but rather defined in terms of its being able to be selected for or against. A gene is supposed to do something meaningful to the phenotype, which is either fit or not according to the environment, and this by backward-translation is a selection pressure against the various genes in the gene pool. The notion of a meme is, I believe, an idea whose time has come. Of the increasing number of contemporary popular works on the subject I can't sanction or sanction any, since I haven't read them. I can, however, (not to use my pulpit to promote too many more books) both on general and specific principles recommend Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which to my mathematician's eye reads not so much as a book about biology as an extended worked example to support a nearly-axiomatic theory about differential survival of replicators. (This description is not meant to put you off it: that's good praise!) The memes, the so-called New Replicators that “live” not in space but in peoples' minds (hence why they're new – not so long ago there weren't any minds), are first introduced by that name in Dawkins' 1976 book, although I imagine the notion was anticipated by other authors previously.

With the meme as part of our vocabulary, more or less everything we've described so far today takes a single shape. They're all stages of memetic evolution.

And while we're here, what about that Wikipedia? I cited it so casually to give a reference to memes, but isn't that where Wikipedia itself came from – some kind of memetic evolution? Take a listen to this talk by the Wikipedian progenitor himself and decide whether it sounds like the same thing. Not to be tendentious myself but I think it does: each Wikipedia article is itself a meme complex adapted under the pressure of its editors and its editors' minds – that last meaning, perhaps, the memes living in the editors' minds? So a Wikipedia article is a complex adapted to the memetic environment that the editorial community represents. If you think the situation is disqualified because the editors are agents with intentions, remember the parable of the Central Meaner: those intents themselves are memes, or perhaps more precisely certain products of memes (in the sense that the phenotype of an animal is a product of its genotype).

This is encouraging in the sense that it seems this is an example of memetic evolution, but, to get back to the original objection of the last paragraph, if we were inclined to be suspicious of the memes and the prospects for memetic evolution, the fact of a Wikipedia citation about them is not going to be terribly convincing. The mere fact of the citation is mere question-begging! On the contrary, it is good and well, we imagine, to say that animals rose from natural selection; but why is it that we suppose the conditions are present in our world of discourse to make possible a memetic evolution by “natural” selection, even if we believe (“in our new century”) that this is possible in principle?

For if the conditions are not there, a Wikipedia citation must surely be a deeply suspicious thing. Supposing that daemons can make wisdom just by nattering suggestions is no better than saying that monkeys can write Hamlet given typewriters nor than saying a mammal came about by accident. Even Plato knew, despite not having Darwin's idea as a counterexample, that sophistication does not imply an agent's design; but chance alone does not gain sophistication without selection pressures causing differential survival. (The “nonrandom survival of randomly varying replicators,” in Dawkins' one-sentence summary.) So rose the animals, and so rise the meme complexes – supposedly. But is there or can there be really such a thing as the so-called “wisdom of crowds”?

What, for example, to make of such a famous experiment as Kasparov v. The World? Let me recall the circumstances of this event to you. In Summer 1999, Microsoft sponsored a chess game played (at correspondence time control, about one move per day) on their website. Garry Kasparov, recently having regained his status as the invincible champion with spectacular triumphs at Wijk an Zee and Linares in the first quarter of the year, commanded the White pieces, (with the assistance of his usual seconds). Captaincy of the opposing Black forces was given to – everyone who showed up: any person could log on to the MSN Gaming Zone and submit a vote for their team's play. The move with a plurality of votes would be the one made. The match was not so uneven as it sounds: four strong junior players were enlisted to provide brief recommendations to The World team, and still more strong players volunteered, including Alexander Khalifman, who went to Las Vegas in Fall 1999, while the game was still being played, and there won the FIDE World Championship. (At this time, the world championship was still a divided title, and Kasparov refused to play in FIDE's events.) Or perhaps after I, and Dennett and Darwin, praise Pandaemonium you might think the game unfairly balanced in the other direction?

No, it was not so. After several months of tough play, during which at times all three outcomes (win, lose, draw) seemed equally plausible, Kasparov was victorious, (in a queen-and-pawn endgame). Is this the logical triumph of expertise? I would be quick, in my Platonic prejudice, to think it so: understanding trumps grasping because that's what understanding is. Similar one-versus-many contests have been held, albeit with less fanfare and publicity, and they have often been decided for the expert and not the putative wisdom of the mob, but far from always. More recently, Arno Nickel, who holds the ICCF (international correspondence chess federation's) grandmaster title, bested the computer Hydra, by a score 2.5-0.5, in correspondence games; and this unthinking computing beast the same creature of awful power that beat Mickey Adams 5.5-0.5 over the board! But Nickel too has lost a game against The World, in the form of the community on the website ChessGames.com; it concluded in January of this year.

So what to make of all this? In a phrase, it's the difference between a mob and a crowd. Fickle folly can be incendiary, but it knows not how to aim itself nor cares what it burns. If a man leads a mob, it is at most as wise as he, and often less. Irina Krush, one of the World Team coaches Microsoft hired in the match against Kasparov, expressed her displeasure when some of her mob's decisions decided against her and Khalifman. A mob can beat Kasparov if Khalifman can. After it gave such a tremendous fight it is ungenerous, to say a minimum, to put that World Team closer to the monkeys than to Shakespeare, but one idly wonders if simply the presence of better tools, like a ChessBase wiki to replace the primitive forum design of the MSN Gaming Zone, might have made the difference.** Anyway, it's quite possible that to beat Nickel in correspondence games is more impressive than to beat Kasparov, so the proper tools have surely been developed. But the lesson is clear: It is the networking of the crowd that sets the stage for the miracle of memetic evolution, and not the noisy, violent hub-bub of the mob.

And, to get back to our Wikipedia problem after an extended parable, a fringe article is only as good as its first and only editor-progenitor, but a well-eyed treatise is a tremendous thing – as long as Wikipedia itself is properly built to encourage the right selection pressures. Remembering the talk, the last pieces come into place. You have administrators, (Dennett's content-daemons, the judicial counterparts to the word-daemons striving to craft prose), and they, of course, don't need to be experts in the article subject areas, no, not in anything but encyclopaedia mediation, -- and then, more or less, the “undesigned, opportunistic” process of evolution can start. Alexander Khalifman is a tremendous “chess expert,” but that's a word-daemon: he isn't on the right ontological level to exploit a Pandaemonium to challenge Garry Kasparov.

After so much chatter, let us remind ourselves that – it is a fait accompli; Pandaemonium is already here! It came in the form of the blogosphere and YouTube and other networking sites. (Pre-Internet models suffer from limited connectivity and content distribution – somewhat deficient for good examples of a functioning Pandaemonium, and so every film studio executive dreams of that rare word-of-mouth buzz.) Bloggers write and post content and link to each other; YouTube users have schematic personal pages on which they can, in addition to posting their own videos, link to particular other videos or to other users' personal pages. This is the minimum requirement. It doesn't have to be one or two sites in particular, and may not be in future. Indeed the Internet crowd can sometimes be fickle in its endorsement (the various blog-hosting services all rise, compete, and fall among themselves). What's important is just the structure on which the community builds itself, and any sufficiently self-connecting framework could do. From there we little daemons, simultaneously both word- and content-, we take care of things themselves.

And quite well, too. So ends my speech of praise.

(Endnotes.)

* For example, consider the "seductive turn of phrase." Where did the title "The future of credibility" for this entry come from, anyway? It's apparently a play against an earlier entry entitled "The end of credibility," (which, if you're looking for it, was the last of "Three Short Comments from Princeton"). Is this really the best I can do? The two entries don't seem to have a lot to do with each other, other than being about blogging. Maybe they're both about content distribution, from two different sides. Maybe it's just a weak play on words. But it has such a hold that the word "credibility" even gets a mention a little later, in the middle of a very important paragraph. There's supposedly an abstract semantic idea that this paragraph is to communicate, and that idea is independent of its instantiation in text, but in particular the "trust metaphor" to explain the low-level links between blogs is directly connected to this curious title. Can I say which came first in my thinking? For surely the meaning of the text would not be quite the same with a different metaphor.

In other examples, a "seductive turn of phrase" becomes its own justification, divorced from any external semantic concept. An easy way for this to happen is from grammatical ambiguity, say due to excessive editting for style over content.

Incidently, the titular quotation, "Everything is what it is because it got that way," is from D'Arcy Thompson's "On Growth and Form." (Peter Medawar called this "the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue." I haven't read it. It's about 1200 pages, which is rather longer than this post.) It is a little more obviously connected to the technical side of the subject matter.

** Everyone who has ever spent a little time slumming on a forum whose theme yields to certain frequently-asked-questions knows that Sisyphus himself hadn't such a futile task. I have examples in mind, but they're such dangerously contagious and stultifying memes I don't dare quote them – they're the memetic equivalent of the flu.

Postscript. Sorry about all the broken links; I've fixed them. They were there because I was composing this entry in a word processor (for the obvious reason) which was automatically turning all the quotation marks into smart-quotes (that angle toward text, like “...”) rather than the (uniformly-oriented, like "...") quotation marks that one needs to put in HTML tags.

Lost Blogging: from before there were blogs

2007-04-21T14:04:00.000-04:00

Going through some old papers today I found this quotation written out on a scrap. I'm certain, from my weak recollection and from the strata in which I found it, that the paper well predates our journal here, so we understand from the first the title 'Lost Blogging' in a metaphorical or, even, existential sense. I was sure the quotation (which was unattributed) is from Aristotle, according to my recollection and to the style of writing, and, behold, I found it in the Ethics, at the place designated X.9.12, under the editorial heading "From Ethics to Politics: Moral Education." Aristotle is talking about how to ensure that people are "finely brought up and habituated" in order to be "someone who is good," and his thesis is that one must study politics to this end.

A father's instructions lack this power to prevail and compel; and so in general do the instructions of an individual man, unless he is a king or something like that. Law, however, has the power that compels; and law is reason that proceeds from a sort of prudence and understanding. Besides, people become hostile to an individual human being who opposes their impulses, even if he is correct in opposing them, whereas a law's prescription of what is decent is not burdensome.

Presumably one understands the first sentence to be speaking of the case when the child is not a prince or something like that.

And, under the same title, a maybe-related addition to our pantheon of plush or graven idols, icons, and hangers-on, a Hawaiian war deity:

Kū-ka-ili-moku, "Kū the seizer of land."

Tigers as capitalists

2007-04-14T13:47:00.000-04:00

I was in the local university store, which is a kind of hybrid of a book/textbook shop and dorm appliance outlet and, well, other things, with my imaginary interlocuter.

"What," he said, "are these for?"

I verbalised a grunt. "What's what?"

"These," he said, and I saw him gesturing slightly, as though he felt he was about to be bitten by some rough texture, or that someone, maybe a salesperson, would see his shock-stopped interest.

"These," I said, gently picking one out, struggling in time pressure for the mots justes, "are for showing everyone how much you like tigers."

"By attaching a tiger's tail to yourself?"

"Yes," said I, "or maybe for twirling about at a football game."

"Only if our team wins. And -- good heaven!" he exclaimed on lifting his sight-line from the hypnotic illusion of writhing orange and black. "What is all that for?"

"Those," I said, "are table accents. They're for giving a bit of interest to your Ikea products."

"And the big ones?"

"For Afghan rugs? Are there tigers in Afghanistan? Well, near them, anyway. Maybe they're for people who don't want to feed cats, they can have these just lazing around, the mighty predator in your home, or if you have a kind of lobby or cloakroom at the front of your home you could put them here -- "

"And are those backpacks on the far wall? Good heavens, I wouldn't want to be that kid!"

I was becoming anxious. "Yes, you know, I think they are. Hey, didn't you want to see the books? Let's go downstairs and take a look."

My imaginary interlocuter can hardly resist looking at books. "I always say I won't buy any," he quipped in a quick about-face, "and then it's Kaufmann this and Heidegger that and, oh, look, one volume on the philosophy of mathematics, that would be a nice resource, and while I'm getting something anyway I've been meaning to read Aurelius' book and let's see what's new and cool in the world of Plato scholarship or what they're saying Nietzsche was arguing for this month and I walk out with three or four or five of them and -- will you look at that?!"

I hardly had a choice.

He had stopped in mid-stair, right foot forward a half-step, right hand suddenly tight on the rail. "How did that happen? What's with these people?"

What could I say? but that Princeton tigers paint it orange and black.

Metablogging Redux: About labels

2007-04-11T23:09:00.000-04:00

Nota bene: I am now using this post in its capacity as a page-in-the-web, and leaving only the skeleton of the journal entry that was here. So things will be added, deleted, and changed to keep its new functionality. Pay it no mind: as I wrote in the original draft, "it turns out that you can make your chronometer an organ of goodfact around here," referring to the fact that I can give a post an arbitrary timestamp. Please let me know via comment if any links are broken or things like that.

The new purpose of this page is to explain the newly-implemented system of post tags. If you've never wanted to find an earlier entry but couldn't remember its date, this can't be of the slightest interest to you.

* * * * *

"I'm trying out the latest Google-given gadget," I wrote in the original draft, "the blog post label. They're tags you give to your weblog entries, like themes, that let readers easily find or catch up on the history of a recurring thought by using a built-in search for the tag. Since I'm very much for being able to have a discussion that lasts more than one post and doesn't have to constantly recap what came before, I've decided I need to embrace this little classifying tool." These tags show up at the bottom of each post, after the word "Labels:", and before the signature/timestamp line.

Here's a current list of the tags in use at Sun-Drunken. I break them into two classes. The first group is roughly "things that make posts," and consists, in alphabetical order, of:

Day by day, a catch-all category for posts and reports about things that just happened to happen some day. These posts are the journal side of Sun-Drunken, rather than the soapbox side.
Deeper than day had been aware, a series about the night and night-time photography. The label is a line in a poem of Nietzsche. See the second entry in this category for an introduction, and an explanation of the label's meaning.
JoaLDG, "Journal of a Lower-Division Grader." These are the entries about my experiences grading linear algebra papers and my contemporaneous thinking about pedagogy. See the earliest post in this category for an introduction.
KUCA, the Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award, an annual (so far) citation of a person or group whose continued survival has never been of the slightest use to any creature. See the earliest post in this category for an introduction.
Lost Blogging, a quasi-behind-the-scenes series in which fragmentary posts that got lost or just never came together are given for what they are. See the earliest post in this category for an introduction.
Metablogging, mainly posts of an administrative about the weblog, and not blogging-about-blogging. That typically falls under "Shameless whinging" or "Wordsmithing," depending on the tone of the article.
Photoblogging, a series of posts built around annotated photographs. This is a catch-all category for the heavily photographic posts, and they have no other common identity, although in most cases they are pictoral tours of someplace I went or thing I did.
Schachblogging, posts about chess or involving chess. (Schach is German.)
Tigers Paint it Orange, a record of Princeton University's fascination that became Sun-Drunken's as well, the tiger. Also includes a few other bits of Princetoniana that made it to these pages.
An Underground Den, a series about the places I live in. Photoblogs about my rooms fall here, as do stories about locks. The full quotation is "Behold! human beings living in an underground den," the words Socrates uses to introduce the famous allegory of the cave in Plato's Republic.

The second group of tags is roughly of themes that sometimes occur in parts of posts, and consists in alphabetical order of:

Allzumenschlich, signifying instances of human failure or by extension general moods of existential brooding. Allzumenschlich is usually rendered in English as "all-too-human." This is the melancholy counterpart to "Man is something that shall be overcome."
Man is something that shall be overcome, signifying things about or exemplifying our Sun-Drunken spirit of "Nietzschean optimism." This is the hopeful counterpart to "Allzumenschlich." Indeed, the tag is a direct quotation of Walter Kaufmann's translation of Zarathustra's "highest hope."
Shameless Whinging, which is just that, because it happens to everyone now and then.
They Should Have Sent a Poet, meaning usually just what it says: some image, thought, or other bit of phenomenology that mandates an articulate sense of wonder. Sometimes this tag is used ironically, as in, "they should have ... instead of me." This quotation is from the film (book?) Contact, when Ellie sees during her voyage cosmic conjunctions she likens to visual poetry.
Three Thousand Years, that being about the duration of human history to date, (not counting highly scattered records of earlier times). Sometimes these posts are literally about history, but more often they are about the story of man, our place in history, and especially the history of thought. The full quotation is from Goethe, "He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand-to-mouth."
Truly You Have a Dizzying Irony, or, "shameful (as in self-conscious) whinging." This tag is to be read in the voice of Cary Elwes.
Wir mussen wissen, wir werden wissen, indicating mathematical content, these being famous words of David Hilbert. They mean, "We must know, we will know," referring to his belief that "there are no absolutely unsolvable problems." He said this in a 1930 radio address, which in fact was recorded, so you can listen to this mathematical titan say them in his own voice: just listen.
Wordsmithing, or, writing about writing.

Please note that some posts are unlabelled. Usually these are the "Into the West" and "Toward the Rising Sun" posts that signal I'm about to shift locations. A few others I was inclined to leave unlabelled for other reasons: sometimes because they don't seem to fit any of our tags very well, sometimes because I'd just as soon leave the entry in a more obscure position.

* * * * *

Let me close on my original joke:

If you're wondering why someone would waste their time going back to sort, catalogue, number, index, and file something that will likely never be of the slightest interest to anyone but for the completeness of the thing, please find the nearest male and ask him to explain it.

JoaLDG: Negative Reinforcement (or, Sin and Redemption in Mathematics)

2007-04-11T22:49:00.000-04:00

In his book Innumeracy John Allen Paulos, the veteran professor and exegete of mathematics and statistics, recounts a story about some pilots and their instructors.

This phenomenon[, regression to the mean,] leads to nonsense when people attribute [the regression] to some particular scientific law, rather than to the natural behaviour of any random quantity. If a beginning pilot makes a very good landing, it's likely that his next one will not be as impressive. Likewise, if his landing is very bumpy, then, by chance alone, his next one will likely be better. Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman studied one such situation in which, after good landings, pilots were praised, whereas after bumpy landings they were berated. The flight instructors mistakenly attributed the pilots' deterioration to their praise of them, and likewise the pilots' improvement to their criticism; both, however, were simply regressions to the more likely mean performance. Because this dynamic is quite general, Tversky and Kahneman write, "behaviour is most likely to improve after punishment and to deteriorate after reward. Consequently, the human condition is such that ... one is most often rewarded for punishing others, and most often punished for rewarding them." It's not necessarily the human condition, I would hope, but a remediable innumeracy which results in this unfortunate tendency.

He goes on to give two paragraphs' worth of further examples about movie sequels, music albums, baseball players (what is it with Americans and baseball?), and stock markets, but the lesson for would-be pedagogues is clear: don't treat your subject with statistical rigour and suffer the fate of all pseudosciences that came before.

The contrary view alluded to in the first quoted sentence, namely, the ascription of intentionality and significance where there are only the capricious mechanisms of probability, is, I believe, a symptom of a whole another and different ontology of the physical world than the scientist/naturalist's, one which is surely mistaken. And it is one which is far too vast to take on in the screed of a single evening. So we'll consider ourselves admonished on two levels, namely with regard to our evaluation of our methods, and with regard to our concepts of praise and blame, and press on.

(By the way, every living person in the developed world, I kid you not, should read one of Paulos' books. It doesn't really matter which one, they're all more or less the same. Innumeracy is good and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper is too. Go read!)

Not to put it in too maudlin terms, but I think I believe in positive reinforcement. As a very general principle this is connected to the Nietzschean optimism that (on our weblog's happier days, if I have succeeded) is our spirit here. (I keep saying that's our spirit, anyway.) If one "doubts with well-founded suspicion" that good things are possible, I want the courage to build a world, speaking literally or of the world as a metaphor for my ontology, which those good possibilities populate. As a principle of pedagogy it is maybe a reaction to something, some grousey grouch in my past, or maybe a recognition that the undergrads of today are the colleagues of tomorrow -- put another way, that the aims of a class are largely but not entirely about the students' command of the syllabus material and I am judged not merely by the standard of review for an educator-as-mechanism.

On the face of it, there's something very suspicious about negative reinforcement. I don't insist on being loved or liked -- I'll settle for respected -- and I don't repudiate Burrhus Skinner (entirely). It's just unclear how this negativity is going to get any desired result, particularly when many students are already very anxious about math, or about their academic position. What intermediate steps have failed that we need to take out this big club with its dangerous and indeterminate consequences? I fear that its advocacy comes from exasperation, but my perverse optimism tells me it could still lead to good things.

Because there's exasperation to be had. I read an article, "Teaching Freshmen to Learn Mathematics," whose author, Steve Zucker, (a professor of mathematics), took the following extreme (?) position. "We shouldn't," he argues, "overlook the power of negative reinforcement." He goes on to describe two mathematical errors often committed (in the past -- he tells us that their frequency has since dropped off) by his Calculus II students which he calls the "ultimate sin" and the "penultimate sin."

(They are, for the interested and mathematically inclined, respectively (a) the belief that a series, say the harmonic series, converges if its terms vanish; and (b) the computation of a limit of a sequence whose terms are given by some expression in n, like (1 + 1/n)ⁿ, by selectively letting instances of n go to infinity -- in this case, inside and then outside, concluding that the limit is 1, when, as everyone knows, it is in fact e.)

He says that the demonstration of these sins by his students argues some very dire things about the relationship of the student to the course and even to the instructor. (It's clear at any rate that the students don't understand what they've been taught if they make such errors, but naively we might wonder about the value of introducing eschatological language to describe these mistakes.) He informs his students that commission of the penultimate sin on any submitted work will immediately earn zero credit for the problem, and commission of the ultimate sin will earn negative credit.

I have to admit that I'm a little envious. I'm pretty sure I couldn't get away with that.

Anyway, since we're all here to hear about linear algebra, and not about calculus, which no one understands anyway, I have a couple of candidates for confusions that drive me up the wall. Following precendent, I would like to propose, as an "opening bid," the:

Penultimate linear algebraic sin -- phrases like "the vector is linearly independent" or "the vector is linearly dependent." I would also like to take on the concept of a "redundant vector," which to my view is simply pedagogical lemonade encouraging a nonexistent intentionality, but them lemons are in the textbook, with a footnote about how "redundant vector" isn't actually a linear algebraic concept but the author has found it "useful" in teaching, if you can believe that, so I'll save that one for another post.

Ultimate linear algebraic sin -- any sentence of general type, "a basis for the kernel of matrix A (or another space) is the span of such-and-such vectors."

I'm not wedded by iron chains to these as my two least favourite things to read on students' papers, but it's hard to take a shot at things like co-ordinate chauvinism or implicit inner products which are, among other things, too far advanced errors to strenuously indict. (We'll see if I still feel the same way about co-ordinate chauvinism in the next two weeks, when eigenvectors and similarity of matrices are the topics of discussion.) The two cited transgressions show, roughly, that the student is confused about the relationship between vectors and vector spaces: the role of linear combinations in general and their significance to the concepts of independent sets and spanning sets (and bases) in particular.

And besides, these not-silly-mistakes (as Zucker would put it) -- especially the ultimate linear algebraic sin -- show up with depressing regularity. So I think I can summon a roughly analogous frustration to our poor calculus instructors -- though, mind you, I'm just grading these papers, not teaching the class. So how do I feel now about negative reinforcement?

I'm giving it a try. As I said I don't think I could get away with negative credit for problems, and anyway it would be a completely unfounded move for someone who doesn't even have any interaction with the students to tell them why. I mean, I can't even explain to them verbally what's wrong with what they've written, but commission of the ultimate linear algebraic sin is cause for loss of two points from five, no matter what the problem was about, and no appeals, damn it. It's not right for this nonsense to get written and for me to say nothing: that doesn't do anyone at all any favour.

How's it working? It's a little tough to evaluate, as I said, not being the instructor. I don't recall reading an instance of that sin lately. It drives my blood pressure up a notch to see so I'm pretty sure I'd remember if it had been there -- and, hey, I have been privately calling it the ultimate linear algebraic sin for a couple months now. Forgetting that would be like forgetting another fall of man. On the other hand, the students haven't been asked too many times to give a basis for the kernel of some matrix, and when they do, now that I think about it, they've been saying things like "the kernel of A is the span of such-and-such vectors," and not even using the word basis, as though they'd like for me to draw an inference, just answered like they would have in the first weeks of the class.

I...

I think my plan may have had some unintended consequences. Like apostasy.

Negative reinforcement, huh --

At this stage I'd like to remind everyone that it's not my fault, I didn't do anything, it's just regression to the mean. Somehow.

I'm going to abruptly end this post on the pretext that it's already long enough and, umm, further data must be collected to continue the discussion.

Happy Assyrian New Year

2007-04-01T22:05:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow will be a wonderful day. I'll wake up and check the news and know that don't-believe-a-damn-word-you-read-online day (aka 1 April) is as far away as it possibly could be.

This day is painful. Yesterday FIDE (the world chess federation) did YAST (yet another silly thing -- I won't explain that thing, it doesn't have a good length-of-exposition to payoff ratio) and apparently said they weren't going to fix it, or something like that, and there was a protest from the Indian Chess Federation, advocates of the injured party, Vishy Anand, and now Chessbase is reporting that FIDE has reversed its position, except the article in question was published on 1 April, and these Chessbase guys are incorrigible pranksters, they really delight in it -- I mean, they're usually more obvious about it, but I read this thing, this news report, and I'm even doubting the factual basis -- and if I had that kind of doubt when reading a newspaper, why would I waste my time with that? Editorial indiscretion, what a bother.

But, you know, it's more like next week that I'm free, because today's debris will still be there tomorrow. For days yet I'll be checking the dateline of everything I read.

Postscriptum primus. Last entry updated today [1 April] with some pictures, because we haven't had any pictures in a while.

Postscriptum secundus. Turns out they were serious. "I never doubted you," said C-3P0, "much."

Postscriptum tertius. Turns out a lot of people doubted them too :

The day we published our April Fool's prank we also carried an important news item: in view of wide-spread protests FIDE had decided to correct their April 2007 rating list and to include the Morelia/Linares event in the calculations. This, many readers believed, was the April Fool's joke. In fact a colleague had told us on the previous evening that he intended to use it as his prank: "FIDE admits error, vows to correct it immediately" was the hilarious article he was working on. On April 1st we received irate messages from him accusing us of poaching his joke. It took a while to convince him that the FIDE decision was for real.

Well. There it is.

Postscriptum quartus, (since, hey, we've followed up on our story a couple times already.) Thanks to the nonflat nature of the Earth and the roughly Copernican character of our solar system, it turns out that Vishy Anand thought the first part was a prank, until he was informed likewise by a vast number of concerned well-wishers. (Take that, medievalism.) I had no idea they celebrated Assyrian New Year in India.

Lost Blogging: from the Omo River Valley

2007-03-29T13:12:00.000-04:00

Sometimes my notes disappear for a long time. It doesn't bother me much to have them sit unattended or even lost. From the writing point of view, if the note was to have prose value, it just allows for better editting. From the pedagogical point of view, if the note has a pedagogical purpose, it is true that almost no one learns something the first time they see it or write it down. And there is a certain strangeness to uncovering something a year or two past or older, a not unpleasant strangeness if it's not overcome by awkwardness. (Well, Aristotle's been dead a long time, so he can wait patiently while I change my mind about what I said about him.)

Usually the point is to polish them, if they're supposed to become journal entries, to embelish them with context and make out the rhythm of a full entry. It's not too infrequent that my point (there usually is one) is very short and I want to make it in a sentence or two. (I am reminded of the desire of my often-aphoristic dead German mentor to "say in twenty sentences what another would write a whole book on" -- I paraphrase this quote from memory -- good advice for philosophers.) But sometimes I think: These little sentences are just too cryptic. Who will know what they mean? If I had read them yesterday or the day before, would I know what I'm talking about? When I read them tomorrow, will I have an idea about what I supposedly meant? To be fair, do they really mean anything? If am I not understood, and there was something to understand, isn't it really my fault? (My "Gangasrotogati-living" dead German mentor, despite famously upset on this score, probably agreeing -- according to the proposition: man who uses Sanskrit in a passage about how he's not understood must be making a joke; I mean BGE section 27.) So I must draw out a verbal recording of mental context.

Dawn over the Omo River Valley

Anyway, not to tediously furnish yet another example of what I'm talking about in Sun-Drunken's most common bit of irony, but this entry was just supposed to be about a short, expository note to myself I found that I wrote last summer, in July or August, I'm not sure, that I figured I'd post with only a few fingerfehlers ("finger blunders") corrected. Editorial parentheses [...] in the original. (It's a compulsion.)

There's a BBC program they['ve] show[n] on CBC Newsworld called Tribe. It follows a Brit, Bruce Parry, on travels to see and live among various indigeneous tribes of the world. Once he went to live with the Nyangatom of the Omo River Valley, in Ethiopia, near the Sudanese border. The Nyangatom are proud [warlike] people living in ancient-style huts, drinking cows' blood in the daytimes, and wearing traditional clothes and raiments, with a few recent additions: t-shirts, AK-47's, and pierced bullet jewelry. There he was adopted by the village elder and made an honorary member of the Ibex, their corps of young fighting men. During the initiation ceremony they were harangued by their elder, who remarked that today's young men aren't like those who came before, that they laze around all day and can't protect their cattle, and drink too much alcohol. He might as well have added that civilisation is doomed for it -- but the Ibex warriors were quite keyed-up by it, and vowed to shoot and kill anyone who tried to steal their cattle, as the womenfolk sang a song about "Lokloram, the lion" (Bruce Parry's adopted name) and about how their enemies were afraid to cross the river.

Call it: From the

civilisation is doomed! because the youth are unruly

file, thinking of an (apocryphal?) ancient Sumerian (Akkadian? Babylonian?) text said to already have been making that argument. Of all the things I wonder about Sumer, the one I'd want answered most is about what it's like to live in a world that has no history.

(Insert externally-silent mental struggle about how much to amplify that remark in an already-burgeoning entry. I'll just leave a reference to the last sentence of the previous entry so we remember there's a theme being developed. Myth only counts as history at half-weight.)

Bullet-case earring?

Three quick remarks about the quoted text:

Brackets on "warlike" because this is a word that comes as naturally as it sounds cheesy. It makes me think I've been deeply influenced by Zulus with tanks in Civilisation. I mean, people don't really talk like that, do they?

Yes, I really wrote "womenfolk." I'm sorry. I swear that would never make it to the second draft, nor would the massive run-on final sentence. It's just a summary note to myself, damn it.

Check out the similarity to the Wikipedia entry, whose current revision I note uses the word "warlike," with a placeholder for a citation (!), in the first sentence.

More Lost Blogging to come. I have a thing somewhere around here on airplane pictures which I promised back in December but actually dates to September. And I have a full Page-a-Day Calendar page of subject titles for Journal of a Lower-Division Grader I scrawled the last time I was marking papers.

Bruce Parry &c at the well

Pictures ~~shamelessly borrowed~~ fairly used from the BBC Tribe website.

Someone's birthday

2007-03-26T14:37:00.000-04:00

Happy 66^th, Richard Dawkins.

Tiger-in-the-world

2007-03-21T09:56:00.000-04:00

It turns out that Wikipedia really does know everything: take a look at the caption/description on this photo. Well, almost everything: take a look at the publish date. Not quite timely enough, Wikipedians.

(Refresh your memory of Sun-Drunken's longest-running joke, dating back to the beginning of October 2005. Not quite timely enough.)

* * *

This is a one-line joke, as it's meant to be, but the truth is I was a little impressed when I by accident stumbled on this.

(Seriously serendipitous accident: I was trying to fill out my state income tax return, which asks in part what municipality I'm in, and I couldn't find out whether I'm in Princeton Borough or Princeton Township. It's not as easy as you'd think: compare, if you feel strong enough to enter the bureaucracy, the bottom-left quadrant of this Borough map with my location on this Princeton University map -- select "Graduate College" from the dropdown. I think I cross municipality lines when I go to my bookshelf from my desk. Apparently the municipalities split more than a century ago, over a school board dispute, and two subsequent referenda to recombine them have failed. Alas, I don't get a vote.)

My native caution once led me to be suspicious of Wikipedia, but judging by how often I've linked to its entries from these pages you can tell my thinking has evolved. At first it was just the convenience and the breadth. Many of the math articles even seemed good. Over time the general quality seems to have jumped, and there appears to be a large collection of people working on scores of "Wikiprojects" to put the face of professionalism all over the site.

In the end it was the romance of the encyclopedia that converted me: the quest to summarise all human knowledge. A link to the Foundation article might be appropriate, but still more apt would be one to the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition article. (Irony?). And if I went to fiction, I'd be more apt to link to this bio of Cordwainer Smith, whose book reminds me that while happiness is man's ultimate good, as Aristotle tells us, there is still a little more we'd wish for when we write the history of mankind.

Journal of a Lower-Division Grader: Introduction (and if you warned me,...)

2007-03-01T19:50:00.000-05:00

"I despise your despising," spoke Zarathustra. "And if you warned me, why did you not warn yourself?""

There's something very dubious about work-related blogging. It seems to get people into trouble (cf. brief remarks here under "the end of credibility," or elsewhere at more length and erudition), for one thing. But more than that, and in its pervasity worse still, it seems all-too-often both unprofessional and morosely self-indulgent. How often do we read only glib snark cooked up from the catalogue of the daily travail? Endow it with vices and malfeasance beyond its station, and speak of it with the dryly clownish condescension of sufferance yielding to exasperation! But sad occasions are only sadder still when they command the service of powerful prose.

How often have I jotted notes on nothing-in-particular only later, a day, two days later, to find that I no longer had any interest in the subject? It is not that I am fickle or capricious, though perhaps I am. It's that the fundamental cost of all art, all media is viewer attention. The literature of forgettable pettiness only worths its price when it seasons itself with bile and hyperbole. It's the thing-of-the-moment that mistakenly universalises itself in a search for absent significance when it in truth has no such power. It's Guildenstern stabbing the Player King.

And it's really bad writing. Maybe not bad prose, maybe often not, but badly misspent. I think we ought to command better from ourselves. Call that a re-statement of our mission at Sun-Drunken.

If you remember the last time, or the time before that, or --, that I went on a tear immediately prior to doing, or while doing, exactly what I'd just railed against, I'm sure you know what comes next. It's not just self-conscious irony, the plainest special pleading, a seeking to convince the reader that really nothing wicked passes here by sending him through loops and whirls until he's too dizzy to figure out whether it's satirical or just crass. It was never the despising that was at fault. Returns are still being earned when Guildenstern furnishes his "art to creating suspense" with a "law of diminishing returns."

Here, however, Zarathustra interrupted the foaming fool and put his hand over the fool's mouth. "Stop at last!" cried Zarathustra; "your speech and your manner have long nauseated me. Why did you live near the swamps so long, until you yourself have become a frog and a toad?... Why have you not gone into the woods? Or to plow the soil? I despise your despising; and if you warned me, why did you not warn yourself?

"Out of love alone shall my despising and my warning bird fly up, not out of the swamp.

"... What was it that first made you grunt? That nobody flattered you sufficiently; you sat down to this filth so as to have reason to grunt much -- to have reason for much revenge....

"But your fool's words injure me, even where you are right. And even if Zarathustra's words were a thousand times right, still you would always do wrong with my words."

Anyway, when the preface puts the body of text into the smallest corner of its shadow -- it could be bad writing, or it could be the preface was the point.

* * * * *

Way-back-when at UBC I took a class in Euclidean geometry. After the midterm a friend told me a sad story about the grading of one of the problems. It had asked for a statement of some theorem or definition or thing like this. As always in Euclidean geometry a good diagram was central to the issue, and she had included a helpful exegetical diagram. Alas, the instructor had not found it so helpful.

"I didn't label it a circle," she explained to me at some length. "That's why he took points off. You tell me, what else could it be?"

Obviously I couldn't say. I'd labelled mine.

"He said, 'Maybe you thought it was an ellipse'! What? What?! When in this class have we talked about ellipses?"

Well, it wasn't the most circle-like circle. They're not the easiest thing to draw.

"When has Instructor-Man even mentioned the word 'ellipse'?!"

Never, of course; if you have neither co-ordinate geometry nor solid Euclidean geometry at your disposal, and this was a strictly plane-geometric class, it's a bother even to say what an ellipse is.

So she went to work on him again, but it didn't help. He was the kind of person who helps earn a reputation for eccentricity for mathematicians. (It's a math pun; click the link to convince yourself it might possibly be funny.)

In truth, although I wished I could back up the professor's take, I really couldn't figure it out. I dislike unlabelled diagrams as much as the next guy, but this ellipse business couldn't be a serious criticism.

I have since recanted my naivete. A term or two grading papers has given me a somewhat more storied perspective. My understandings about what other people might mean when they speak what they say or write what they scribble are no longer Earthbound -- heavy, constrained by the gravity of consequence. Rather they roam between the sky and the space which is beyond, fantastic, undreambound. It's the fog of the Nothing, of the confusion-of-being, of the not-understanding and the not-communicating. It's sadness on a page.

And that's why I couldn't give examples. It would take a callous knowledge-worker not to empathise. Or at least it would if the clever critters didn't try their damn'dest to dress it up. And yet, heavens guard us, maybe now and then I've only rouged it -- I am on a deadline.

Three Short Comments from Princeton

2007-01-12T22:52:00.000-05:00

I. Many machines on Ix...*

Today as I went for dinner I saw a cardboard box, sitting by the trash at the bottom of the stairwell. A big Dell box, bigger than the one I found last time.

(Oh?... yes?)

So I took it. I have plans for it. Plans within plans. For storing things.

No laughing at my new box, now. It's a newcomer and doesn't have the history that the others do, but it will. It's strong. It's capable of eating the old box, as you can plainly see. I'm resisting saying that it can bend like a reed in the wind, because that attempt would likely destroy it.

* For many good reasons I translate any Latin that might come up, so why not Geek, which is still more obscure? Whatever you feel about the qualities of the adaptation, there are many wonderful things about David Lynch's Dune, and this snippet of dialogue is one of them.

II. More lock stories

I mentioned that I've not yet locked myself out. In truth when last fall I arrived on the contrary I felt locked in. The first time I put my key in the lock it became stuck; I had to brace myself against the door and hook two fingers in the ring of my key chain to wiggle/yank it out. This scene repeated itself. I began to fear that one day I would open my door and not be able to retrieve my keys. It would close and my housekey would just sit there. What would the lock do for me then?

But as often happens the problem went away by itself, or was helped by a little bit of use.

Now I have a different trouble. The lock is a deadbolt with one side tapered so that when the door falls into the frame the bolt draws back until it locks in place in the slot. I've noticed quite a bit over just the past 3 days -- already in the fall, irregularly, but often recently, right now, even -- the door not recessing the whole way. I've set my feet against the ground and pushed and the damn'd door doesn't fall far enough to let the bolt fall into place.

Just fiddling with the lock right now I've discovered that it has a second deadbolt, which can only be set into place from the inside, if you can make sense of that. (The key does draw it back, though.) It also has a little switch set into the side of the door which apparently toggles the autolock on the first deadbolt (the movement of the door-knob/handle draws that bolt back, and the switch releases or freezes the outside knob). Sometimes I wish I could live in an unlocked world, but my natural caution and my laptop make me think my wishes won't be like fishes.* Last year I left the door unlocked whenever I could, but those NGC buildings have a keycard entry system the OGC lacks.

I figure it -- the lock -- it's setting me up. When I stop compulsively jiggling the keys in my pocket every time I step through the threshold -- one day, somehow, I'll miss them and then it'll be click! like the assassin's blade. Sometimes, you know, I walk in and, carefree, drop my keys on the desk. They're camouflaged there. And then I think: that's just what it wants, and quickly replace them in my pocket. When those keys jingle on the desk, that to me should be like the sound of the nightingale floors of the Tokugawa fortress.

Apparently any life can be a little like an episode of The Outer Limits if you work hard enough at it. I'm thinking of the ones with a twisted set-up and diabolical reversal. Like the one about a (male) POW on an alien world who falls for the female human POW target of cruel alien interrogators and to whom he mentions, to cheer her a little, about the starships massing at the Lagrange point behind the sun that'll turn the war. Predictably (I always tried to figure out the most depressing ending possible consistent with the set-up, and wasn't too often surprised) she turns out to be an alien in human make-up, as it were. The next episode in this story line, by the way, has Wil Wheaton accidentally annihilating the Earth instead of the alien homeworld.

* "If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets" -- ancient Caladan proverb.

III. The end of credibility

I'm sure everyone's heard a story, probably many such stories, about someone who made trouble for themselves without quite realising it by posting something on-line. It might have been humourous or harmless, a little off-colour, a confession that shouldn't have been announced-in-principle to the entire English-speaking world, a phrase worded more strongly than it deserved, whatever. (Some of us are especially guilty of that one, multiple times per post, and a recent Globe and Mail column fairly took us to task. I've said it in passing, but just to be clear, the Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award is firmly ironic in character.)

Some pundits even remark that future political careers are being ruined by such seeming-harmlessness. This on the face feels unduly pessimistic to me. After all, the underlying problem, as it so often is, is about data organisation, and not capacity. Still, perhaps there's something to it.

More worrisome to me at the moment is the casual and accidental intrusion of someone making a serious inquiry and getting their Google returns clogged with my useless prose. It doesn't happen so much, and there's a little thrill in the search engine's compliment. But something I read recently elsewhere (you know who you are) brought me back to the subject. Apparently someone got here looking for the Monster sporadic group, and I'd apologise to them, but I looked myself and I wasn't in the first fourteen pages, thank heavens. On the other hand, someone with a light-hearted interest in Ed Witten discovered me buried only three pages deep (mostly behind other, more well-known math-physics blogs) repeating a rumour that he sometimes plays at the local chess club. (At the time it was to me a rumour, anyway.) Frankly, half the embarassment in this "http referrer" business (when you click a link your browser tells the new site what page was linking to them) is that I feel like I'm snooping on someone else's affairs.

Speaking of which, the good news is that I am no longer "south of zealots and smut-mongers". There are some strange things about that particular query (the titular quotation of this journal). For example, the third result is to a result page of another crawler that turns me up on a different query. My Blogger user profile is right below the afore-mentioned zealots but above an entry from oldpoetry.com, which error I now ameliorate. The smut doesn't make it into the first page, but truncating to just "sun-drunken delight" shifts things around -- now my user profile is below. On truncating yet further the good news is that we have considerable standing. The very bad, bad news is that there's an actual thing -- a thing with a website -- and, well, I didn't have the heart to pursue it much, but I suspect certain kinds of smut are unbeatable. I wouldn't mention it except that this has been an important source of incoming traffic for me lately. Oy.

[Predictably, I note in a brief update a little while after writing this, the presence of the keywords in this entry hasn't helped. Oh, well. Fight the fights you can win, they say.]

On a brighter note, and returning to the data organisation theme, if at the beginning of this year you searched a thing called IceRocket Blog Search (which I've never heard of until now but which site possesses a curiously Google-like layout) on a certain Dune-related theme, you might find your way here. The reason you'd have to do it then is that this search engine organises apparently returns first by date. I note with a hint of schadenfreude that someone else has mentioned this book in a parenthesis and thereby opened their own definitely-not-for-the-dinner-table discussion to public scrutiny. (Let's just say that I shortly determined that it wasn't grammatical ignorance causing all those first-person pronouns to be capitalised.) Fortunately for them, they're getting buried, day by day, by more of the same.

ambivalence resolved

2007-01-01T01:40:00.000-05:00

I visited Chapter's at Robson one time during the summer. I had mischronometrised and arrived quite early for a lunch appointment with Craig and Papa. It's very pleasant to visit all the old haunts: see what's new, what's old that's reprinted and new again, what never went away. I have a mental checklist: any new-old Silverberg? or Heinlein? or Herbert? or --

Alas, that there could be new-old Herbert; alas, there only is new-new Herbert. Instead of a re-issue of Destination: Void, which even Papa doesn't seem, to my frustration, to own, or of The White Plague or The Jesus Incident, we get, at best, The Road to Dune, which, well -- it styles itself thus, above the oversized "DUNE" in that characteristic font that now means another wretched volume has come upon us:

The companion to the New York Times bestsellers including never-before-published chapters from Dune and Dune Messiah, original stories, and a new novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

This book first came to my attention that summer day. It was sitting there in hardcover. There is barely a hundred and twenty pages of actual Frank Herbert material, but such is the hold of it over me that I was tempted to grab it right then. But my better senses prevailed, and I left it alone.

A few days ago I was again in the Chapter's at Robson. It was the day after Boxing Day. It was very obviously the day after Boxing Day. The shelves often contained gaps great and small and many books on them showed curled corners and scuffs on the cover and ruffled pages: surely they'd been bought and returned and reshelved this Christmas season. With two gift cards whispering in my pocket and no prospects to use them for many months anon I was eager to increase the burden of my space-crunch. So when I saw The Road to Dune in friendly paperback size I was certain I had to have it.

And at home as I started to read I was not disappointed. I read a summary of an article that Frank Herbert was thinking to write in the 50's, about how for the first time a system of plantings had been developed to stop the encroaching sand dunes from burying the little town of Florence, Oregon. The dunes are driven some twenty feet a year by wind, like water in tempo largo. More than ten thousand types of grass had come into the experiment to find one that would set down roots that would help fix the top sand in place. Reading this, reading Frank Herbert's excitement at the ecological solution to an historic problem and his agent's nonplussed replies, I thought of green plants in the desert, of ornithopters, of the opening of the film Koyaanisqatsi with Philip Glass's awed score over waves of water and clouds and cars, of (Mother of Muad'dib!) rain from the sky of Dune --

I decided that if I was ever in the area I should drop by to see the environs of the town of Florence, Oregon, this place that set in motion these thoughts in Frank Herbert's head. A quasi-hajj to Mecca-on-the-West-Coast. I discovered that my friend Daniel, a.k.a. Billy, formerly of UBC Math and now of Oregon Math, attends school just two miles from the town. That started me thinking.

From the reportedly many boxes of notes and text uncovered by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson in the pieces of Frank Herbert's estate they gave us some hundred pages of drafts and excised material from Dune. Some of it requires no explanation:

Paul stepped out of bed in his shorts, began dressing. "Is she [the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim] your mother?" he asked.

"That's a fool's question, Paul," Jessica said. She turned. "Reverend Mother is merely a title. I never knew my mother. Few Bene Gesserits of the schools ever do; you know that."

There are so many things wrong with this passage about the only piece of interest is to know that even the pen of Frank Herbert scribbled the kind of things that I'd write and strike out instantly. There's no indication of where this fragment came from, and I imagine it was indeed quickly discarded, and survived by happenstance among the many pages of unused material.

Much of the discarded material is like this in character, almost pure exposition either dropped or strongly reworked into more natural settings. A little is reasonably polished work from earlier drafts of the plot, like a visit of Jessica and Duncan and twelve-year-old (!) Paul to Dr. Kynes. Some, a very little, is really literarily indistinguishable from the finished product; for example, a deleted scene from Dune Messiah wherein Paul receives Otheym's message from the Tleilaxu-made dwarf Bijaz, which ends:

"The spice, M'Lord," Stilgar said.

"Of course we'll stop all shipments of the spice," Paul said. "Let's see how they like that." [...]

Bijaz began to giggle.

Paul turned toward the dwarf, noting how the creature had the attention of everyone in the room.

"How they'll wish on the morrow they had no teeth," Bijaz sputtered between giggles.

"What in the name of the worm does he mean by that?" Stilgar demanded.

"Without teeth they'll be unable to gnash," Bijaz said, his voice reasonable.

Even Stilgar chuckled. Paul stood silent, watchful.

"Who do you mean by they?" Paul asked.

"Why, Sire," Bijaz said, "the ones who planted that stone-burner on you. Could it be they wanted you to stopple the spice?"

The prose is clean, smart, and beautiful, and paced like poetry. No coincidence: we are told that many passages in Dune began as Haiku and the like before being enlarged only as necessary to make grammatical English, and if Frank Herbert later discontinued this practice it's clear he'd mastered the lesson.

The Road to Dune contains a re-constructed short novel entitled Spice Planet, apparently based, how loosely one couldn't say, on original notes (characters and events) for a story about narcotics and feuding noblemen set principally on a planet known as Duneworld. This, it seems, was the first draft of the Dune concept, later expanded into a whole new universe shot through with themes of ecology, politics, leadership, history, religion, -- and so many more besides. It would be interesting to see the story of Duneworld written from Frank Herbert's hand, but mostly because it would be from Frank Herbert's hand.

The volume also contains a hundred pages or so of short fiction by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. Most of it pertains to their books which they claim tell the story of the Butlerian Jihad. The last of them they describe in the introduction as in part a bridge between the end of Chapterhouse: Dune and their Hunters of Dune, the new first part of "Dune Seven" that they're writing. On the basis of this I sat down to read it. It's called "Sea Child," and it's a little over fifteen pages long. Someone please explain to me, then, why the first two are a summary of the current state of galactic politics. It's difficult to pick out something as representative of their prose, but this paragraph, towards the end of that summary, offends me particularly:

In moments of despair, Corysta [the Bene Gesserit protagonist of the short story] felt she had two sets of enemies, her own Sisters and the Honored Matres who sought supremacy over everything in the old Imperium. If the Bene Gesserits did not find a way to fight back -- here and on other planets -- their days would be numbered. With superior weaponry and vast armies, the Honored Matres would exterminate the Sisterhood. From her own position of disadvantage, Corysta could only hope that her Mother Superior was developing a plan on Chapterhouse that would enable the ancient organsiation to survive. The Sisterhood faced an immense challenge against an irrational enemy.

There's no sentence of this dreadful paragraph that doesn't make me cringe. The centerpiece of its naivete (as opposed to its rotten, cliche-ridden prose, which is a sample representative of the whole) is that little aside about Mother Superior. It reads like bad fan-fiction: the blunder is of assigning paramount significance to exactly what was in the text of the prior books, no less and no more. If we the reader spent two books following Mother Superior, surely Mother Superior is on everyone's mind. Truly she must have some awesome cult of personality to be solely responsible for the course of galactic politics. As to the details of the war, it's clear they don't understand that the weapons and battles are incidental. The motives of the foe, moreover, were revealed slowly and imperfectly to us, and I don't remember "supremacy over everything in the old Imperium" being anything more than a means; but this is the level of subtlety that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson will pitch to us.

For the lesson is that there will never be a moment in the books of these two like when Bellonda drops into the scene with an anguished cry: "Lampadas!" We know what she means: the training planet has been found and destroyed; all the Sisters and Reverend Mothers and the soldiers who defended them and their marshal, who we knew, died there. It is a crushing sentence for our protagonists and for us, and it's one the like of which we won't see anywhere in Dune Seven. They'd blow one word into a full scene and the content would be shot away, unrecoverable, just like they spammed us with two pages of irrelevant galactic simplifications in a fifteen-page short that barely gets off the beach before it delivers its metaphors with a heavy, Harkonnen-sweaty hand.

So what I'm saying is -- the spirit of restlessness that came years ago with the production of new books with "DUNE" in great letters upon them has fallen still. There is not now and will not be more old Herbert. The shlock released between those covers is puerile and clunky in equal measure. It is by me simply unreadable. There is no other thing to say about a book that can't pass half a page without dropping some dreadful nonsense, say:

In the floating image, the bristling ships opened fire, unleashing incineration waves with devices the Bene Gesserit had since named "Obliterators,"

to borrow a half of a single sentence from the first page of the excerpt of Hunters of Dune helpfully included at the back of Road.

So what I'm saying is -- I'm not buying any more of their damn'd books.

So what I'm saying is -- if anyone manages to get through "Dune Seven," let me know what's up with the Enemy. I'm all right with not knowing, but hey -- as with the transcendentality of π, if you could know, wouldn't you want to know?

That's all I'm saying.

Benedictions: "and the shadows of things that might be?"

2006-12-25T11:32:00.000-05:00

The merriest, sunniest of winter festivals to all.

Domicile Tour Extravaganza 2006 continues

2006-12-17T10:20:00.000-05:00

This morning I find myself with quite a lot of time and an interdiction against making a noisy pest of myself. For somehow I woke up about three hours on the clock earlier than usual. This spate of temporal gratuity left me questing for things-to-do, and the fact of my seeing the family later today gave me a hint.

Something... I'd neglected. Something I'd forgotten. Willfully? Nolens, volens? I'm no six-o'clock-in-the-morning-philosopher, which surely lessens my prospects for escaping from Elba Island should I find myself banished by a vengeful, fearful Europe, so I'll skip right past the Chairman Kaga impersonation to the narrative crutch -- I mean, the object of interest around which I have to spin a cohering net.

First, for reference, let us go anachron a little ways, so that I can demonstrate I was planning ahead. The date is 9th September 2006. I had arrived in Princeton the previous night.

As you enter the suite and, well, walk about two-thirds in and look right and back you see this view. The fireplace is not operational (the chimney is sealed) and that's a carbon monoxide detector in the socket. It's not the only carbon monoxide detector in the suite. In fact, it's not the only carbon monoxide detector in the room. Redundancy -- saving lives since the dawn of man.

Here's my desk. This view is from the middle of the room; you can see the bedroom through the door on the right. The desk is too small -- you'll see what I mean in a minute -- and the desk-chair is quite inferior to the type they have in the New Graduate College rooms. Those chairs, as you can see with careful inspection, are actually of a rocking variety. Their paleolithic counterparts are orthogonally built of rigid wood in inhuman proportions, the sort of inplastic thing which I cannot believe is ergonomically sound.

Anyway, there's nothing of especial interest here. I just thought it seemed a bucolic scene.

Speaking of pastoral New Jersey, here's the summertime view from the window in the room we were just in. The suite is situated on the west wall of the North Courtyard, half of which you see here. If you go up those steps in the back, under a short archway, right twenty paces or so, and turn left, you'll see something like this, except without the snow. So that's where I am in the complex.

Naturally (naturally!) I was concerned about my boxes. Long-time readers and, umm, blood-relatives will need no wordsmithery on this occasion to conjure a sense of the scene, which is good, because it would probably just come out as a bunch of mixed metaphors. Yes, after my little-blogged-about struggle with Moving & Storage, the student-run, well, moving-and-storage concern, I was touched nervous. In fact at this time I couldn't even confirm that my things had been in storage. However, being made of stern stuff, I was not even close to panicking when it happened on this lovely Saturday afternoon that I heard some boxy noises thump-thump-thumping outside my chamber door. Engrossed in my business, I had time only to turn and see several large people retreating along the stone path.

Yes, indeed, I was about ready to forgive. Not only had they apparently in fact picked up and stored my boxes -- without, as I would shortly find out, even any water damage (phew!) -- but they had managed to deliver them directly to my door, on the second floor, in the residence that a university-politics war was fought to keep past the edge of campus. Someone anonymous had not, as I would also shortly find out, gotten the message about not picking them up by the handles, but this minor fault I am eager to wink at, for after all I have done the same now and then.

Especially observant long-time readers will note, however, two interesting facts about this picture. First, that the door is propped open with a chair. (You will all be delighted to learn that I locked myself out not once all term.) Second, that something is missing. Not to turn this into an obnoxious "what's wrong with this picture?" problem, but compare an earlier portrait of The Thirteen.

Hmm.

(Preternaturally observant readers will note a third thing, namely that I have adopted a different file-naming convention. Good-bye, room_0.jpg; hello, window.jpg.)

Not to keep you in suspense for too long: as evidenced by how you're only hearing this tale now, three months later, instead of at gruesome, abusive length before, things concluded happily an hour or so later:

After another thump-thump-thump I checked the hall, to be greeted by this wonderful tableau. Hosanna in excelsis! Thanks be to Moving & Storage for their timely aversion of the rending of garments and full-throated curses in Cerberus' name under the next full moon.

Now let us away, friends, to a moment closer to the present one. Just two days ago, here was the state of things.

The bookshelf, which holds some of my books. It's a little small. There was some overflow. Here, and... elsewhere. In case you're wondering, I'm pretty sure that kettle is fire-safety-inspector-approved. I guess I'll find out during the spring inspection. The click-through is just small enough that you can't really read the titles on most volumes unless you already know them. Sorry. Anyway, I'm a little disappointed with this shelf, to be frank. It feels like something just stuck on the wall; whereas last year's integrated desk-shelf combination made for a quite nice picture.

On the plus slate, you can see some empty floor space, which was lacking in the quite-easy-to-vacuum previous apartment.

Before we move to the back room, here's the desk, circa today. Not much to see here. The strange, ugly green thing on the left is a towel over the small table (same model as last year). Said table is so small about the only functional thing I could manage with it was to turn it into a poor-student's Ottoman. (There's a sitting chair left, off-camera.) More books on the desk. You can't really see the second tier, a small mess of papers, behind them. That's a little bottle of honey on the right end of the window ledge, if you were wondering what was up.

So... it's another bookshelf. This is the view if you're leaning back on the foot of the bed and, well, staring at the bookshelf. There's Sha-naqba-umuru with the textbooks, and that curious blotch of colour in front of the compact discs is the Phantom of the Opera table accent.

I saved the most boring shot for last. Think of it as a sad, wistful denouement, because otherwise it was just a pothole in the narrative road. There's, umm, a picture frame behind the open book.

* * *

The squirrels are stirring outside. The world is waking up. Airplane pictures (I'm sure you can't wait) later.

Tigers, as ecological conservationists

2006-11-27T21:30:00.000-05:00

The recycling bin in my room.

Second Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award

2006-09-12T18:06:00.000-04:00

It's been a while. Let's get right to it: it's a little part of the story of the past week in the form of a glamorous and prestigious awards banquet.

Let me recall to you the award description:

Lord Kelvin, the famous British physicist, once wrote,
Quaternions came from Hamilton... and have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way. Vector is a useless survival... and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.
In honour of his getting one out of two, and being hilariously mistaken on count of the one he missed, the Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award is given irregularly to "those entities that in the estimation of the award committee have never been of the slightest use to any creature."

You must be thinking: competition was tough this year. I haven't gone back and checked but I know I was publicly threatening at least one collection of miscreants crossing my path with a bit of perpetual disgrace. I can't remember if I said that it was Moving & Storage or Dining Services that was "in line for one, missing only the requisite irony." It was probably MS, because DS certainly has a lot of irony going for it. The awards committee had about made up its mind for an honourary citation one Saturday evening last February when they booked Procter Hall during the dinner hour for some random group who desired a big room for their random self-congratulatory shindig. And I swear that their failure to expand breakfast hours, instead tacking on an hour to dinner, missing the recommendation of a task force created to report on their operation, would be worth an honour by itself. But no: like a gift from the improbable child of Melpomene and Thalia came a late entry that stole the show. Dining Services will have to settle for a Lifetime Achievement Award around the time I graduate. The only trouble will be tracking down all their nonsense to stick on the citation.

But back to the darling of the hour, my own financial servitors here at Princeton, the PNC Bank. It's not just that they won't let me re-order cheques online until I've re-ordered at least once already, yet give me no instructions on how to do that. That's already doubly useless, but they're far more useless than that. Let me give the balance of the award citation in the form of a little story about how they got my mountain goat, and then tried to take away my other goats.

Last Wednesday I was out shopping for some things, starting with my glasses. I placed an order for those early in the afternoon, and after finishing up with the optometrist shining a light in my eyes had a few minutes to spare while the lenses were shaped. I had wanted to get some new shoes, so this seemed an opportune occasion. Surprisingly, I quickly found something I wanted. However, there was a slightly difficulty at the counter.

"Your card has been declined," the cashier told me.

"What?" said I, somewhat ineloquently, leaning down to read the transaction receipt before me, a formidable task with my pupils still widely dilated and adding to my disorientation. She repeated herself as I scanned to try to find the words that said this. "How can it be?" I asked myself. The card is not a true credit card, but my chequing account with a credit-card-number to access it; there is no chance something could have gone wrong, and the timing, say fourty minutes after purchasing my eyeglasses and paying for the eye exam before that, made me feel I had stepped into a Dali canvas.

I chalked it up to a most curious fault, until the next time I tried to use my card in this capacity. "Authorisation declined," I was informed enigmatically by a machine. "What?" said I, somewhat ineloquently, to no one at all.

I resolved to find out what was happening, soon, before Amazon tries to ship my books and discovers that my money is suddenly no good.

As it happens, to take a little digression, I had further reason to have a word or two with my bank. Back last fall they sent me a little Form W-9 in the mail, basically an information request, looking for my SSN. I, of course, neither had nor was eligible to obtain one. That's OK; I can give them an ITIN -- if I had an ITIN; if you recall the aftermath of last year's KUCA imbroglio, I discovered that none of the threatening letters were applicable to me since as a citizen of Canada my country's government has no tax treaty with the American state and I am permitted to apply for an ITIN only at the time of actually filing my return. So I filed away this request for a future time, like next year, after my spring tax return is processed.

Sometime over the summer my bank apparently became quite agitated with this situation, sending me duplicate forms with stern warnings about backup withholding. Their problem, you see, is that they didn't know how much tax I was meant to pay on the interest my account bears. Considering said amount was about seventy cents, I had been quite prepared to forego the whole amount and think myself the richer for having saved myself the anxiety of working out another stultifying form.

But now that I had a real ITIN, things seemed to have improved on the throwing-them-a-bone front. There was only one remaining problem: the last item of the statement about the signature line, the one I'm certifying under penalty of perjury, is that I'm a U.S. person. A little investigation (online; they didn't bother to include any instructions, the useless critters) revealed this is synonymous with citizen or resident alien. I am neither; I'm a nonresident alien, and will be for the duration of my stay as a graduate student.

Well, what to do? I had to speak to someone at the bank. So I went to do this.

We tackled the second problem first. After a little time, I was advised to merely cross out the offending part of the certification and sign the damn'd thing. "Isn't there a different form I'm supposed to submit?" I asked meekly. Well, yes, but no.

At this stage I broached the first problem. After a minute or two of data-hunting on the PC, my consultant informed me that this had been the trouble.

"What?" said I, somewhat ineloquently. She elaborated. My failure to submit a Form W-9 was at cause. "Oh, really," said I.

Presently I left the bank, hobbling my way down to Fine Hall for the next of the day's errands. And I thought: It's not just that this is the first chance I've had to possibly submit the damn'd thing. What are these useless creatures doing, declining my card because they don't know if I'm supposed to pay fourteen percent or thirty percent on seventy cents?

And that's what it'll say on the plaque. Congratulations, guys.

* * *

But at least she was right. Amazon has already started to send me some things.

Toward the Rising Sun

2006-09-08T00:42:00.000-04:00

Here we go, here we go, here we go -- to Princeton via Seattle and Newark early tomorrow morning -- awake, arise, or be forever fallen -- wohlan! Noch Ein Mal!

(One-quarter Milton. Guess which.)

Busy week. Got new eyeglasses. Pricey but spiffy. Also got new (prescription) sunglasses at the same time, which I thought were slightly showy (they've a silver frame, with a second bridge between the lenses at top, in the "aviator" style) but which two salespeople and Mom talked me into. (The frames specifically; the siren-song of the massive discount had already gotten me into the sunglasses. That and the drops the optometrist put into my eyes, I think.) Otherwise running around getting all the ends put together and missing one or two somehow (four months in?!). Sorry to everything that got missed.

Got a photo or two but having trouble uploading them. Got fresh batteries in there this time, too, I swear.

Much more later.

* * * * *

Update, the next evening. Here we are! Arrived soundly. Uneventful but quite tedious. The in-flight movie was "Mission: Impossible 3." I didn't watch it. Presently got to finish moving things in et cetera.

Trapped in a Menger Sponge

2006-08-01T21:33:00.000-04:00

Saw something amusing today on a math blog. Under the heading of "weird things math/CS/physical science students build," this entry from the Cornell math club:

"Math Happens"

It's a Menger sponge, an object like a Sierpinski carpet, but in dimension 3 and with cubes, (he said like that instantly explained everything). You start with a big, solid cube and divide it into a 3-by-3-by-3 grid of smaller cubes. Then you knock out the centre piece of each face and the centre piece of the whole thing, leaving 20 pieces left, like a cube with a jack hollowed out in the middle. Repeat with each remaining piece, "ad infinitum," as they say. The Menger sponge is the limit of this process (more precisely, the intersection of the intermediary constructions). It has the really cool property that every curve (topological space of [Lebesgue covering] dimension one) embeds homeomorphically into the sponge, according to the Wiki article, making it a universal object for (these, topological) curves.

Needless to say, the first thing that flashed through my mind was half a script and the byline for Cube 3. One small problem: the thing is Lebesgue null. On the other hand, the reasonably high Hausdorff dimension (about 2.73) suggests something can be worked out, either by holding our noses and going or switching to the four-dimensional analogue.

I'm afraid the ol' UBC Math Club hasn't constructed anything quite so, well, intimidating. There's just this fun guy:

Pumpy the Irrational Pumpkin

I can't recall seeing any curiously intriguing math-themed objects at Princeton, although I haven't been keeping my eyes open. It's more of a tigers-and-abstract-statuary sort of place. Next time I'm there I'll snap a shot of the bust of David Hilbert in the common room.

Tigers: "did He who made the lamb make thee?"

2006-07-02T00:27:00.000-04:00

You may recall some time ago I made a brief survey of the faces and forms of tiger iconography at Princeton. At that stage we bid adieu to one mystery, or more appropriately, in line with a famous Pkunk saying^*, one aspect of a greater enigma. I'm pleased to say that further research has once again expanded the frontiers of knowledge. And I didn't even have to buy the book -- this book:

For, you see, I found this capsule review:

"Where Are The Tigers?", a children's book written by alumnus Mandy Lee Berman '92 tells the story of a little boy named Freddie and his trip to Princeton for Reunions Weekend with his parents. Young Freddie soon becomes confused, having taken his parents literally when they promised him he would see tigers at their destination. But he soon comes to understand that these "tigers" are the people he sees everywhere – Princetonians are "tigers" for life.

Satisfied, Freddie dons a tiger costume and joins in the fun. "I'm a tiger, too!" he says. Berman's picture-book charmingly captures the excitement and spirit of the weekend, a hallmark of Princeton tradition, showing everything from the famous P-rade to the invasion of alums in flashy orange and black blazers.

I guess that about says it.

^* namely: "The mysteries of the universe -- try to solve them, but can you? -- nope, they're mysteries."

Postscript. For the record, let's not forget this most recent example. Oh, Professor Albert, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Unrelated post-postscript. Looks like I got my U.S. tax refund yesterday. That's a little weight off my mind. With so much bureaucracy there's always one or two things that seem like they might be a little off. I suppose with the successful conclusion of this episode I should forgive all the numbskulls who made the process more stressful than it had to be with their irrelevant advice and threatening letters. On the other hand, said refund is about seven dollars greater than advertised. I feel a little like Chekhov when he saw the plaque reading "S.S. Botany Bay."

Home: "Behold! human beings living in a underground den"

2006-06-26T04:52:00.000-04:00

Nervous prefaces should be expunged. It's elementary. At worst they're an ad misericordiam special plea, at best merely bad prose. But in the medium of the blog I think we will have to get used to them. There is a lot of nonsense out there and sometimes people realise when they're writing it. If you feel exasperated with mine, keep in mind I've already given you my one-page take on Hamlet. There are any number of indulgent existential whiners who couldn't write three coherent sentences on the man who beat them all to it.

This, then, is a nervous preface. This post is going to get a little weird, and I thought it would be best to explain beforehand, in the hopes that by the end the reader will think I'm a nervously clucking hen and the untoward sleeps breezily tonight. That would be ideal.

It's a certain special brand of weird. I've been putting it off. Today I was baking cookies, though, and remembered that once and not so long ago I posted my cookie recipe here. (Actually, I think it's at least half Grandmother's. Hi, Grandma.) So some curious things have shown up now and then. This is another cookie recipe.

So I've got some photos to show you. Here ends the nervous preface. There lie dragons.

* * * * *

Once and not so long ago a man packed his books and music and linens into eleven sturdy boxes and sent them off with a "Godspeed, sturdy boxes" to the other side of the world. They braved the road and the customs agent to arrive, eventually, safely, a little battered, with a little more packing tape than when they left, but whole. The man met them there and unpacked them with a "Thank you, brave boxes" and flattened them and put them under his bed. There they lay for a half-year, waiting for their time of glory.

And it came. They poured from the underworld and, armoured with the steel hide of duct tape, readied to once more take up their charge. And yet, and yet, they were too few: for in the intervening time the man had bought more books and more music and home appliances, and these things no longer fit into the eleven. "I need another box," the man said to his heart. "I have this one here spare, which someone sent to me and I kept safe; now they number twelve. And yet, and yet, they are still too few, and too small besides: my home appliances will not fit in a box a foot and a half on the diagonal."

So warned, he wondered where a youthful, bountiful box might bloom; but no one sold him boxes, not even the ineptly run local storage concern. Time passed and trees flowered -- until one morning something remarkable happened. The man awoke and stumbled from his home to break his fast; and there, on the side of the road beneath an arch, discarded haphazardly, unwanted, in a pile of refuse, lay a great bear of a box, two feet on a side! "This is it, my champion!" spoke the man to his heart. "A box of the proportions we desire. And yet, and yet -- is it possible -- could we -- might one just take it?" And he thought about it still. "Here it lies, on the side of the road in a pile of refuse," he mused. "Soon the garbageman will come and take it away. Look you here! No one wants it. Take it now!" And so ordered by himself, he obeyed, and took the box to his home. Now they numbered thirteen; and when the man returned not so much later from his breakfast the refuse all was gone.

	So these are the Thirteen. Umm, except that there is obviously an even number of them. I guess I had already packed one and it's hiding behind the camera. (Also, this file is called "room_0.jpg". Some people like to start counting from zero, but I'd better just confess. Apparently I started numbering my pictures from the last in the series and couldn't count. Well, at least it's not room_negative_1.) This is the south-east corner of the room. (You can see one of my speakers, and the subwoofer under a pillow -- that was to hide the bright green light at its back, which was clearly visible from where my head lay at night. To regain a little lost cred, that book on the table is called "Automorphic Forms and Representations.") This was an ideal place to put the boxes, with one minor drawback--
	--namely, that if you wake up in the dull, suffused glow of dawn, it looks for all the world like there's a two-metre-tall thug with a Darth Vader-esque head standing at the base of your bed. (Apparently I was so shocked by the recollection that I called this file room_2. Oy.) This parable, by the way, has a moral; it is: "On a long enough timeline, good things happen, just by chance." I seriously was thinking (as opposed to thinking seriously) about this problem for four weeks before I found that discarded "Dell" box. Special thanks to A.N. for ordering a laptop at the end of the year.
	So this the south-west corner. My desk and shelving. It's looking like there's space because I've already started taking books down at this stage. A certain party was encouraging me for some time to take pictures of my living space but I the unruly son was quite belated about it. By this stage it was "If not now, when?" and "It's cleaner than usual, and anyway I can blame any disarray on the fact that I'm moving. That's the ticket." So that answers your question, if your question was, "Why are we getting a tour (of some place he doesn't even live in anymore)?" Click through for a bigger version, my voyeurs -- I mean, concerned parties. Umm... ignore all the Amazon boxes. They send huge boxes for the smallest items, a manifest waste of space, I swear. Moving on, I want to introduce someone:
	Say "hello" to Professor Albert. In tiger form. (Wait... room_5? I give up. Seriously, this time I just changed my mind about the flow of my narrative.) This one is really its own punchline. (In truth, I think he's adorable in addition to hilarious.) You may recall there was recently a major anniversary in the physics world -- one hundred years for the "Annus Mirabilis," the year in which Einstein published a large number of revolutionary papers, including the original Special Relativity paper and the Nobel-prize-winning paper on the photoelectric effect. You may not recall there was recently a major anniversary for the Institute for Advanced Study -- seventy-five years since its inception. You may also not recall that recently there was the fiftieth anniversary of Einstein's death. (Ugh.) These were the same years. I do not recall for which the plush is commemorative.
	Let's zoom out a bit. This picture has nothing of especial interest (no, I do not normally make my bed, this is not in situ, it is staged), it just completes the tour and gives the reader a break before we press on. If you look closely back at my desk, you can see another figure, adjacent to Professor Albert, partially obscured by a bag of tea leaves. Now who could that be?
	It's -- my word -- it's Little Richard Wagner! You can even wind him up, and he plays a music-box version of "Ride of the Valkyries." Now this demands an explanation. Back in March, two-thirds of Party the Third (that's Mom and Bruce, if you're keeping track) were passing through the area and took me to the New York City Opera, where we saw a production of -- Don Giovanni, by Mozart. At the gift kiosk downstairs they had Little Mozart and Little Wagner, too. Since stormy petrel Little Wagner is clearly superior to, umm, stormy petrel Little Mozart, the rest is clear. He comes with a little tag identifying the queer fish that made him: a little shop called the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild. A branch of their merchandise is a little suspect ("indictmints"?) but if you stick to the non-political you can spend a few happy minutes exploring their stock. I'll mention two I especially enjoyed:
	"Nietzsche's Will to Power Bar," his name spelled correctly on most pages. "When your Wille zur macht is a flagging or you're just a little tired of transvaluating all values.... These bars, like other 'energy bars' are packed with protein, vitamins and chocolatey goodness. Whether you're philosophizing with a hammer, or just trying to get through your day, these will help." In case you were wondering, that's an hilarious bit of copy.
	"What Would Nietzsche Do?" I ask myself now and then. I also ask myself if this "100% cotton" shirt is Egyptian or some low-quality knockoff, because this is about one of two pieces of apparel with text other than "No bleach, tumble dry medium" I'd consider wearing. I'd feel very cheeky doing so.
	That brings us to this guy, who you can't even see on my desk in that picture. His name is Sha-naqba-umuru, and everything about him clearly demands an explanation. Where to start? Hum, let me ponder for a line or two. All right, where it came from: Last year Craig (the other third of Party the Third) visited Las Vegas (with Cindy and their friend, Ted) for a weekend. They brought back a little present, this "Excalibear," which is what passes for clever at the hotel they were staying at. (Try to guess what it was called.) Which leaves the name: Sha naqba umuru is ancient Sumerian (or possibly Akkadian) for "He who saw the Deep." (There's no chance the punctuation is correct -- there's an apostrophe in there somewhere-- and I don't have my book handy to check.) It's a name for Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. (Now that I think on it I'm not entirely certain to what "the Deep" refers, although it's evidently a really cool sobriquet.) Anyway, in context of our magical bear here, it refers to his position as a personification, an avatar if you will, of my Platonist mysticism. That wand he carries is not fabric, cardboard, and glue, but a fantastic relic, the Reifying Juju, which instantiates in the physical world things which existed theretofore only as perfect, Platonic abstractions. To put it in more down-to-Earth terms, the Reify is to the Platonist as the Force is to the Jedi.

Now don't I feel silly. That wasn't curious at all. You know, it's good to branch out a little. With so many varied people potentially reading, I worry about what people see. Falling silent -- driving the readers away -- solves it simply.

* * * * *

Update, the next morning. I changed the pictures so that they're now thumbnails (width 240) for slightly larger pics (width 320, except for the two "this is just a picture of my room" shots, which I think were 640) to correct the unreadable vertically-stretched text in the second column. (Well, that's just what bad planning gets you.) As a bonus for your forbearance, here's another picture of someone else's merchandise (which is, umm, maybe not for public use, now that I think of it, just like the other two):

"Here's Looking at Euclid"

That, by the way, is the diagram for the elegant and extremely useful Proposition I.1 of the Elements, "To construct an equilateral triangle on a given line segment AB." Snazzy, but a little on the nose, don't you think?

ambivalence, n.

2006-06-22T05:39:00.000-04:00

So, they finally got around to writing Dune 7.

I know I should feel something, but I don't know what. Twenty years on, the end of Chapterhouse seems less and less disturbing. We kinda wonder what's with the two Face Dancers and the Enemy and whatnot, but really, we already know in our hearts, the gentle clues lurk between the words and letters, just like we know that the crisis has passed for the Bene Gesserit and left man better off. There's a universe of possibility, but a pregnant world is the natural condition of things. Do we really need that hack to continue to ply his work? Will I end up reading the damn'd book regardless, despite the risk inherent and the knowledge that I'll constantly be wondering whether this or that comes from the deceased man's notebooks or the diseased man's?

More questions our heart knows how to answer. But not in hardcover, damn it.

Into the West (again)

2006-05-05T08:40:00.000-04:00

Time passes and preview becomes post-mortem. The books are packed, the shelves scoured, the desktop lightly dusted, and the heroic songs yet unsung, alas.

I'm home this evening. See you soon.

Resurrection: "aufersteh'n, ja aufersteh'n wirst du"

2006-02-14T22:31:00.000-05:00

Hi, everyone. Long time no see. Qu'est-ce qui se passe?

The big news at the beginning of the semester is and must be the new classes, but we're still easing into that (one hasn't yet begun, even), so I'll hold off for the moment. Suffice to say that this year's crop looks to surpass that from the fall, with two number theory classes, including one taught by Andrew Wiles (which hasn't begun, so who can say if it will be beyond the horizon), and a geometry-flavoured class. Indeed, all would be perfect except for a foul scheduling accident that I had to watch happen, in person, with all the dread of watching two trains ram, from a distance, slow-motion-like. The other number theory class was originally at 1630-1830 Monday evening, so it was no surprise to me when the first order of business there yesterday was to negotiate a new time. Alas! Miserere, misero me, the time picked was 1400 Tuesday, consuming, like Jormungandr, the likewise-located discrete math class of Paul Seymour that I had so anticipated. An embarrassment of riches, verily. If this is the mightiest problem we encounter --

-- but it is not; finding the damn'd local chess club is far thornier. It is far more difficult than checking their website. However, I heard today that Ed Witten (yes, that Ed Witten) plays chess at such-and-such a location Fridays at nine o'clock in the evening or so. Needless to say I was struck profoundly by this remarkable confluence, and will have to investigate this rumour.

I should say where I heard it: over dinner. The dean of the graduate school, Bill Russell, hosts monthly gatherings for a small number of random invitees. Tonight my ticket came up. Despite having several days to think about it, though, I didn't manage to ask for a suggestion on dress. This kills me every time. I end up coming with the most mongrel compromises. Today I interpolated my blue sweater between the lavender shirt (and tie) and my suit jacket, with the light pants (and the good shoes, needless to say). I think this worked quite well; in fact the assistant dean had a red sweater-vest type under his suit jacket, and I managed not to be better dressed than the host, which would presumably be unforgiveable. (That was my fear, anyway; you can set me straight on protocol, a subject which didn't quite come up in the past.)

Anyway, dinner was quite the usual story: I managed to definitely not impress before and during dinner but relaxed into the setting afterward. I had a lovely chat with variously an historian, an architect, an economist, and a neural microbiologist. I asked our economist whether he feels (as I had read in a paper recently) that his field has gotten out of touch with the real world, and he told me that he likes the elegance of his theories. I suggested he move to Fine Hall. Architects, it turns out, have a huge breadth of knowledge that they draw on professionally, and we found a mutual interest in Greek philosophy and Bach, inter alia. Finally our historian friend won my heart by enthusiastic interest in my mathematical anecdotes and asking to keep my demonstration napkin.

I'll spare us all the meditations on the nature of happiness and our relationship to the Platonic Realm and instead present a preliminary trifecta of anecdotes.

Birthday Surprise. This is a fun trick to warm up with that consistently astonishes people who've never heard it. It has a good moral, too, that statistics does not come intuitively to people in general. The question is: how many people do you need in a room before it's more likely than not that two of them share a birthday? I observe, trying out some showmanship, that of course you'd need 367 to be certain of it. Now no one ever ventures a guess about number, but on first impression 23, the correct answer, is rather small!
Bottle Imp Paradox. This is one of my favourite problems, but you might want to replace it with something else, because I've never yet met someone who thought the same way. The set-up is this. You are offered a chance to purchase, for any price you care to name, a bottle imp. This bottle imp grants an unlimited number of wishes for you, with the sole condition that you must in turn sell (not discard or gift) the bottle imp to someone else after some finite time span, say twenty years. The condition of sale is that you must sell the imp for a strictly smaller amount of money. (Now, this is a game theory problem, not a gedankenexperiment in the value of a thing, so what this means is that if I pay one hundred cents then I sell it for at most ninety-nine cents. There is no such thing as a half-cent or a peso or inflation or whatever.) Failure to sell (by you, or by the next person, who inherits all the conditions) results in a terrifically gruesome, unspecified penalty exacted by Mephistopheles, from whom you cannot hide. (Or maybe Samiel, the Dark Huntsman.) The question: Do you buy the bottle imp? And if so, for how much? The rational answer is that you do not buy it, for any price: for clearly you would not buy it at one cent, for then no one would be able to buy it; but then not at two cents, for then no one would be willing to buy it; or if not n cents, then also not n+1. But, and I think I'm not alone here, I definitely would buy the damn thing, for as much as I had in my piggy bank. (The bottle imp can make currency, so it's all funny-money anyway.) I'm not saying the bottle imp's wishes would make me happy, technically speaking, but it's got to be worth it; and after all if I'm being irrational in buying it, I can bet there's an irrational person to sell it to....
Angle trisection. Save the best for last, assuming they're still paying attention. Many people (most, frankly, considering the audience you've got to have even to consider telling these stories) have heard that it's impossible to trisect an (arbitrary) angle using straight-edge and compass, or at least can think back to their high-school geometry and what it means. (Bonus points for me: mention that one uses Galois theory to show this, giving a beautiful application of the theory which I tell everyone I study when they ask.) Regular listeners will of course recollect that this can be done by origami, and the construction is wonderfully simple and easy to demonstrate with a pen that writes well on napkins.

So, a very pleasant evening. Moving on, more miscellany. Of course the Olympics have started. I hoped to catch highlights on cbc.ca, as they stream their daily newsprograms -- but the perverse Olympic broadcast regulations force them exactly not to stream their shows for the duration. So I'm completely blanked out, with the sole consolation that the curling scores are updated more-or-less in real time. It would have been nice to see the figure skating program (heck, to watch the curling!) although it seems my favourite guy, Alexei Yagudin, has bowed out (he was having knee problems last I heard, which was years ago... it's been a while without television, really).

Also: you may have heard there was a lot of snow here recently. We're relatively south and still got quite a bit. I'm told it's expected to warm up very shortly, and then it will all be gone. Already much of it seems to have melted. This meant only that I had to act fast, of course. So I took a quick jaunt to get the shot I needed, and picked up a few incidental ones along the way. My batteries, let it be known, did not fail me.

The view almost immediately outside my room. Continue past an archway hidden by the tree:

For those worrried I would catch my death of chill going to eat breakfast and dinner, the far building opens into the dining hall, so splice this one with the last and you'll see about how far I walk. Speaking of which, time for a little indulgence in an old passtime.

A dragon and a monkey and some other things guard the door. And look up a bit?

More. (Click through for the original.) And -- what's that? -- how can it be?

For he is the Kwisatz Haderach! Oh, yes, more tigers.

Lastly, what we were waiting for:

Click through and compare and compare.

It was a little hard to get the shot, for this reason, but we did all right.

Which brings us about to the end, or a good enough place for one. Good night, all. Magnificent dreams.

Happy 250th, Wolfgang

2006-01-27T20:00:00.000-05:00

I know the perfect way to celebrate, but I don't have a copy of Amadeus handy.

What we want, or, Election Day

2006-01-23T14:37:00.000-05:00

I want justice. I want peace, order, and good government. I want not to fear injury or illness because we have doctors and medicine to banish sickness, nor to fear living because we have poets and art to dream everything between heaven and earth. I want good schools so that people may see what we've learned about man and the world -- "he who cannot draw on three thousand years..." -- and good academics so that we may know what world we can have and what world we want -- "wir muessen wissen, wir werden wissen" (we must know, we shall know) -- and good government so that we may build it. I want society to make us think it is not so bad to be human. I just wish I knew how to pay for all of it.

Election day comes but once a year. Have you voted? (I did. Last week.)

I'll be watching it on-line, starting from ten o'clock Eastern, live on cbc.ca. They say they'll be streaming their 'election special' video live again, an excellent practice which I commend. It is a little sad that it starts so late. In fact it begins before the polls close on the East Coast, but it cannot be broadcast to those on the West until polls there have closed due to local laws. Probably this is a good law but it makes things a little less dramatic. Instead of hearing about it while there's still a sliver of day's light (there, I mean, not here) we wait until the stars are out to find what kind of government we get. Care to guess?

* * * * *

In the meantime, a pair of pretty pictures for us, just because I said I would.

Last view of Vancouver: twenty-six consecutive rainy days

"Look, Sulu: the sun's come out" no rain above the clouds as the wind brushes the windows clean

Arrival redux: "here we are!"

2006-01-17T23:13:00.000-05:00

Once again we've arrived largely without incident. I'm beginning to forget the bittersweet memory of connections barely made and connections missed, multiple delays on Toronto Pearson tarmac leading to missing the bus and adventuring on the New Jersey transit system.

Indeed, the largest vexation of the day was my camera's batteries giving out very quickly. I swear every time I go out those things don't work and I come home and recharge them, both pairs, and then they also fail to work the next time. But I guess it's more likely I only plan to recharge them each time but upon arriving home put it low on the priority list, my initial fury faded, and thereafter remember only the fierce conviction that this travesty not be repeated. Trying all (6 = 4 choose 2) combinations bought me a handful of stills of the first minutes on the plane. For the first time yet I had a window seat on the Vancouver-Toronto leg and was looking forward to some scenic mountain-watching over the Rockies. It was scenic indeed, a classic tableau of foothills and peaks, rolled and cragged, donning white caps of snow and gray cloaks of fog. Alas we will have to wait until this time next year, I suppose, to get the photographic evidence (from my camera, anyway), and for the meagre pickings we did get, until tomorrow, since I can't download anything until I get some batteries with gusto in them.

Vancouver-Toronto was slightly bumpy at the two ends with the strong weather; in Toronto, too, it was raining, reinforcing the slight solipsistic feeling I get with this modern travel business. I dozed a little and listened to Turandot on the handy portable mp3-playing device Craig bought me and read a little and stared into space a little. Complimentary meals were not served, so sad. We touched down a few minutes ahead of schedule, which just meant I got to spend time sitting at the next gate instead of on the plane -- a minor boon.

Toronto-Newark was a little longer than it should have been, which could have cost me semi-dearly, but we made it with ninety seconds or so to spare. Many months ago (November) I made a reservation with the shuttle bus company for both legs of my vacation journey. At the last minute (two days ago) I was informed that my reservation this go around would have to be moved. It had been at 8:15, a safe time with the flight ostensibly landing at 6:45 and in fact being a precious quarter-hour late. At a guess I'd say I was the only person with a ticket for that bus, since there were just three on the 7:15, which I scarcely made, (apparently they categorically refuse to allow someone to confirm their booking unless they have baggage in hand at the time of the call), and of which I was the sole student. I would stop using these people after the dreadful service they've displayed (last time they lost my reservation altogether, I might have mentioned at polemic length and bombastic temper about three months or so ago) but there's really no alternative. One can only hope such an administrative error does not benight one of the reservations which really matter, say for a bus the day after classes end. On the bus I listened to The Original Three Tenors Concert.

I stopped off at the pad just long enough to drop the luggage and deploy the very essentials (laptop e-mail), since this was now eleven and a half hours after egress in the morning: nine o'clock, Eastern time, and quite late in the evening by this town's standards. I took a page from last March and went to a nice Italian place which I knew closes at eleven o'clock -- you may recall why I remember that. This was slightly hasty, since it did start to rain, twice, briefly.

So: vini, vidi, alea iacta est, -- vici. I believe I'll spend the rest of the evening catching up with the news and then reading quietly. I'd say I have an "early day" tomorrow, "six o'clock" rising, but in truth the hours back home in Vancouver I kept were so blastedly irregular (after the first week I knew I needed to shift things around so as not to collapse on the bus ride home New Year's morning, and thereafter things got out of hand) I'm not really converting back to West Coast time, which I wasn't on anyway.

Postscript. By the by, those who gave me breakable things this holiday will be relieved to know that once again the worst damage to my luggage was some fierce wrinkling to my shirts.

Into the West

2005-12-16T22:06:00.000-05:00

Warm winds set on a warm night. Rise again early tomorrow -- around six o'clock -- and take in the still land before starting the pilgrimage. This time tomorrow, back home. Until then, triumphant dreams.

* * *

Update, Saturday night. Safely arrived in Vancouver, now at home. Tired. More later, perhaps. Might make entries here now and then while on vacation but otherwise hopefully my readers will see me 'in the flesh'. I am now in the same time zone as everyone so you can even call, IM, etc.

Inferno: "lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate"

2005-12-14T18:19:00.000-05:00

Dante, in what seems to be a considerable break with tradition both Catholic and polytheistic, conceives the deepest regions of the underworld realm not as a lake of fire-and-brimstone, a black, shattered, noxious and bubbling volcanic parody of grassland and clear rivers, not, in a word, as a hellhole, but as a desolate and chilled wasteland, frozen and cooled in perpetuity by wind from the flapping of the great demon's wings as he chews in his mouths the carcasses of Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.

I'm sure this was a shocking plot twist at the time. I lived in a temperate zone and from time to time went skiing. Therefore Siberians, Vikings and Mongols may laugh, but like Robert Frost before me I will say only that from what I've seen ice is a credible way for the world to end.

Temperature dropped precipitously today -- still single-digits-below in celsius during the day, but I'm quite ready to move on. Next two days I'm hiding at home, drinking my tea, and listening to Mahler.

Postscript, Thursday night. I've kept to my agenda and Old Man Winter to his. Example of headline I'd rather not see with a stopover in Toronto: "Storm brings transportation chaos to southern Ontario". The article continues with a cheery sub-headline including the phrase "...a massive snowstorm struck with a vengeance, cancelling and delaying air travel and gnarling road traffic" which situation is expected to "continue through Friday morning." Suddenly I don't mind anymore that my plane is a day or two later than it could have been scheduled. But hey, there's a sun peaking out for Saturday.

Postscript, Friday morning. -- Look, Sulu: the sun's come out. It's a miracle. Nay, Mr. Chekhov, some unholy pact has reordered the seasons. Today I woke and checked the local paper (online) and thought the reported temperature, over 40 (!), was victimised by a typo, and not because it's in degrees Fahrenheit. But when I poked my head outside I found it had indeed warmed thirty-odd degrees (Fahrenheit) over -- yesterday; for the mounds of snow accumulated (including from a brief snowfall two days ago) looked sad and desiccated, muddy ground was everywhere visible, and no one hunched against the wind. It was eerily calm. I just hope apocalypse can hold off a few days.

Speaking of which (ho, ho!), debate's on tonight! cbc.ca promises to stream [not in RealAudio or equivalent as erroneously reported earlier] this stultifying tradition live, with analysis, too, in case I don't understand it or something. I know no one watched last night's, but do you notice anything curious about, say, the front-page picture on theglobeandmail.com? I observe that three of them (Mr. Duceppe's is hard to see) are wearing very similar striped ties. No wonder Mr. Martin is smiling, having barely avoided faux pas and instead looking like the leader he is on the tie front.

Winter: "away is the blue bird"

2005-12-04T15:09:00.000-05:00

It snowed last night, a couple of centimetres. Today the mercury hovers around freezing (water freezing, that is, not mercury). Two weeks remain in the term. I face with mild disquiet the prospect of carting luggage about with snow on the ground. (Postscript. The next day I woke up to a pleasant surprise: apparently the walks on campus are shovelled. I say 'surprise' because I don't recall UBC being particularly fastidious in this regard.) Saturday 17 December, in case you've not heard, is the day.

Last week, fearing the approach of snow which would destroy the opportunity for which I had waited, I took a moment to try to right an old wrong. The day was cloudless, and the sun encroached, but I had a notion that autumn's touch might yet be the vengeance of the earth I had hoped for. You decide: withered or unwithered? I think I'll have to try a winter series, too, dual to the picture of green.

Beast stands watch

I want to caption this 'Fenris eats the world' or such, but a wolf isn't a cat

An old summer photo, south and east side of Fine Hall. The thing on left is called "Five Discs, One Empty." You can't really see it but one of the discs has centre cut out.

Zwischenzug: winter holidays

2005-11-23T18:46:00.000-05:00

Today I used the word "toque" in a sentence and no one knew what it meant. Oops.

Still no snow here but it's below freezing in the evenings, e.g., right now.

The Bilbao tournament finished today (just a short exhibition) not in the total disaster augured by the first day; man only lost 4-8 (+1=6-5). Huzzah. Meanwhile, Sunday the World Cup starts in Siberia. Convenient for the 23 Russians (not "former Soviets") attending (out of 128, to be fair, but next highest I think is China or Ukraine at 9 or 10 each).

The town is shutting down for Thanksgiving, beginning tomorrow -- even Fine Library is closed, and Fine Library is open to one o'clock in the morning on weekdays (only eleven o'clock on Sundays, and seven o'clock on Saturdays). Blessings to the bureaucrat who decided they should still serve meals here during this time, including something labelled "holiday dinner." (They even did something like this last week, although I didn't recognise the turkey stuffing as such until I tentatively bit into it.) One imagines the only thing in a couple kilometers that won't be closed is the local 24-hour convenience store. -- and I thought living in North Vancouver was parochial.

* * *

Postscript, that night. I went to a concert the other night. I've been meaning to go to something, anything, since I got here, since generally they're free or very cheap for students, and probably they have some adequate talent. Various things intrude. This one took place at the local chapel, which is an enormous and impressive structure.

(In fact I was putting off writing about this because I took a few pictures and I was trying to figure out what to do with them. In the end I decided "nothing at all," because the pictures aren't any good. This is because (a) it was nighttime and quite dark; (b) I didn't feel good about wandering around to gawk and get the shots I might have wanted; (c) I didn't even try to make the best of the ones I did get. Shameful. Here's the best of the lot, and it's blurred and has distracting things in the foreground which I can't get rid of without (a) killing the perspective and (b) chopping off the column. Ugh.

And of course since there's no light outside the magnificent stained glass windows looks slightly less impressive. Close parenthesis.)

They have an 8,000 pipe organ, which is what I went to hear, really. It was an organ concert, more or less, and it made quite a noise in there, to the extent that the building seemed to vibrate slightly during the most intense parts. I wished I was sitting about seven pews further ahead, which looked acoustically superior, but that section was marked "Reserved." It was supposed to be music of Bach, and anyway it was in a chapel, so they had a few cantatas, sung by a nice mezzo-soprano whose voice was given an ethereal reverberation. Also of note: chaconne for unaccompanied violin, which a colleague tells me is just about the most remarkable unaccompanied violin music ever written. ("Basically nothing notable happened after Bach until Bartok," he remarked. "Sounds less impressive if you don't know Bartok's dates," I quipped, thinking of the usual "from A to Z" rhetoric.) It's BWV 1004, if you're wondering, 'Chaconne from Partida No. 2in D minor'. I heard a fugue I hadn't before, BWV 532 in D major, which was unremarkable, to put it gently.

Schachmaschinen: "a horse, a horse, my kingdom--"

2005-11-20T15:53:00.000-05:00

An item on the list of Things Everyone Knows: that, without qualification, computers are better than humans at chess. Ever since Kasparov lost the first game of the original 1996 match against Deep Blue it's been downhill for chesspeoples looking to protect their mystique. It seems the Royal Game is fit just for calculators. Whereas in the 19th century it was held that a master's gift was for inspiration and fantasy, and optimism so reigned it was felt that a player could in the most seeming-rotten position discover some extraordinary resource to save the day --

-- or so the chess mystifiers and hagiographers tell us. I would doubt it, except that not too long before Everyone Knew that all functions are continuous and with one or two silly exceptions differentiable and so forth, which is a right bit of fantasy itself -- albeit abetted by ambiguity in the meaning of the operative terms.

Anyway, Kasparov lost the game, then stormed back to win the match 4-2 (+3=2-1), winning the sixth game in a particularly gruesome manner; he was in such high spirits as to spontaneously agree to a rematch during the press conference; and then next year came and crumbled in front of the world, losing the 1997 rematch 3.5-2.5 (+1=3-2) after another particularly ignoble sixth game, dual to the previous match; and that was it, chess is something you can calculate, and, incidently, all the hopes of the early AI pioneers that it would take real intellect to make a fine mechanical chess machine -- just vapour, like so much else.

But one didn't have to be a chess mystifier to know it just wasn't so. The computers were still weak relative to the best, demonstrably so, to those wanting to take enough time to demonstrate it, even if it was long past the time a humble patzer could hope to score a few points off his laptop any more than off a flesh-and-blood master, and Kasparov's loss was far from convincing.

So despite Deep Blue's "retirement" the experiment continued. The computers got better. Man still had some triumphs; for example, Ilia Smirin's 2002 match against four leading programs, which he won, 5-3 (+2=6-0). The game against "Gambit Tiger" was particularly curious and prompted one commentator to remark ironically that although computers were superior in strategy to humans, we could still overpower the machines tactically, (as Smirin did in a dubious position).

Fast-forward to 2004, with two high-profile matches between leading players and leading machines: Kramnik v. Fritz and Kasparov v. Junior. (You can always tell which side is computer by the goofy name, and which side human by the Russian name.) In the former Kramnik looked to be coasting to an easy victory before dropping two points in the second half to end 4-4 (+2=4-2), once simply hanging a piece and once playing a slightly speculative combination with a very deep refutation which the machine very impressively found. In the latter things looked up when Kasparov cooked the machine in a knife fight in the first round, then slightly down when in a later game he overlooked a mating attack from the machine, then slightly askew when in the final game he agreed to a draw in an unbalanced position -- in front of millions (maybe), since the game was televised on ESPN (!). Ending up at 3-3 (+1=4-1), one could be forgiven for having lost almost all interest in Man-Machine matches.

Then, of course, there was Hydra, which pretty much made it mandatory to lose all interest. ("Lasciate ogni interesse, voi ch'entrate"?) Finally the knowledge that the tail wags the dog came true with a painful demolition in Adams v. Hydra. (Finally not a Russian, but still, to be sure, a world-class talent. For the record, Smirin is Israeli.) This travesty took place just a few months ago and saw the bon vivant Englishman lose 5.5-0.5 (+0=1-5). Ugh. Even worse, the prize fund was structured so that money only came for scoring points (unusual: usually the purse is split in some specified way to the winner and loser of the match, irrespective of the score), so for enduring this drubbing poor Michael Adams picked up only 10 thousand. (For comparison, Kasparov and Kramnik pocketed mid-six-figure sums for their labours -- minus pay to their seconds, and so forth.)

Finally, today started the second annual (so far) Man v. Machine tournament in Bilbao, Spain. Three men, all former "world champions" (so to speak; they comprise an Uzbek, a Ukrainian, and a -- Russian), against three leading programs, two microprocessors you too could own (Fritz and Junior) and one supercomputer (Hydra, again). Care to guess the day's score? Yes, that's right.

Certain chess fans might note encouragingly that all is not yet completely lost: correspondence chess players, who play games over duration of months instead of hours, sending moves by post, still know how to take the machines' measure. But this wagging wolf will just give a desultory woof!. It's all true. If a chess titan spends months preparing for a match, then we'll watch it, for sports' sake. But these sideshows are dispiriting.

Zwischenzug: "Das Leben, doch nicht den Ring!"

2005-11-12T21:32:00.000-05:00

This week I went to see a short lecture series entitled "Love, Justice, and Power in Wagner's Ring," just for a bit of colour, you know, break up the 'math, math, math' monochrome monodrome. (Speaking of math jokes.) It was staged by a visiting professor, who gave three lectures ranging from understanding the Ring in terms of Kant's philosophical anthropology to the epistemological (?) and dramatic status of the leitmotif. He gave his talks in a lecture hall in the musicology building, where they have pianos and large speakers, of which he took advantage.

Almost needless to say, this was quite too much for me to handle; I broke down and ordered that seven-DVD set of the Ring. I felt a little shameful, some pathetic Puritan atavism, so I got Neurkirch's "Cohomology of number fields" too, which promises to be entertaining reading.

Getting chilly here (single-digits centigrade). Still no snow, I guess not for a week or two yet. Not especially looking forward to walking to Fine Hall in the snow but I've been advised there's actually a shuttle bus to there (among other places) from the Graduate College (and back) which might obviate this difficulty. Since I need new shoes (among other things) I may have to avail myself, but then where would I take walks?

Realpolitik: "but by blood and iron"

2005-11-04T20:56:00.000-05:00

With all this chit-chat about Civ IV, I finally broke down and got the Civ III CD from where I'd hidden it away. Fortunately, this was well-timed to occur during the (drum roll) Fall Break. It's a week-long lacuna, during which your scribe has evidently been too busy building the envy of the world and fighting wars of ~~aggression~~ defence and, from time to time, condescending to read his Safarevic and recall his old forbidden configuration problems -- not to mention the squirrel-like scrounging -- to communicate with the Outer World.

These people are break happy, but I guess you have to do something about your woefully misplaced Thanksgiving holiday. (I believe it's the week after the midterm exams.) Since many students have taken the opportunity to ditch this joint, it's relatively quiet; but there are still us local globe-travellers who must endure the fardels heaped during this time when the weather is temperate and no one ostensibly is here: the film crews, the steam system maintenance, the absent dining service, though in deference to the squirrel analogy they've continued to serve breakfast throughout.

Well, I guess this is about what I learned this week:

Bismarck definitely is responsible for World War One.

If you can't have desert power, at least have air power.

If you don't have iron, you're going to have blood. (In this way history diverges from biology.) No wonder Rome eclipsed Egypt et al.

Railroads built the world. Thanks, Cornelius Vanderbilt, despite being a shift competition-ransacking robber baron.

When in doubt, analyse the group of locally mimsy borogroves modulo globally mimsy borogroves. You'll learn a lot about jabberwock lairs.

I hear it's snowing or about to back in the various parts of the old country. I don't know what it's like here. Still sunny but I couldn't tell you the temperature -- the university newspaper doesn't print during the break.

Math jokes: "your lie when you said to me, 'I did this only as a game'"

2005-10-23T21:13:00.001-04:00

Famous math-joke punchlines: "Ah-ha, a solution exists!," "thus reducing it to a problem previously solved," "totally true but completely useless," "assume we have a jabberwock," where a jabberwock makes the problem trivial, "there is at least one borogrove at least one side of which is mimsy," and so on. If you've never heard them, you've not been listening to math jokes, you sensible fellow.

But there are others, call them sporadic math jokes (that's one of them), which don't fit into the mold. Those punchlines above are jokes about mathematicians more than math; the closest I can think of to the latter is "let epsilon be less than zero," which presumably is completely cryptic to non-mathematicians (that's the whole joke, not the punchline), or maybe one of the waitress jokes ("one-half x squared,... plus a constant," "in characteristic two"). Here's another one that bridges the gap:

A mathematician keeps a diary. It reads:
Monday: Tried to prove theorem.
Tuesday: Tried to prove theorem.
Wednesday: Tried to prove theorem.
Thursday: Tried to prove theorem.
Friday: Theorem false.

Sometimes it's just one of those weeks.

It cuts even more when the "mathematician" is a student and the "theorem" is an assigned exercise. Sometimes this happens, quite by accident, even on an exam (oops! -- I've seen a couple of these), say if a little hypothesis gets left out or if the problem is copied without discrimination from another source.

On the opposite side, firmly in "not funny," are Stiller's monsters. Computer scientists who play chess and have too much computing power sitting idle engage in the following project: to enumerate and evaluate all legal chess positions with some small number of pieces, say, five or six or seven. You can download complete six-man tablebases, as they're called; that's the two kings plus four other pieces. They'll only cost you several gigabytes. It will also be extremely boring to blindly wander through them, although in normal chess praxis from time to time it would be helpful to have a computer program capable of not just crunching moves with grandmaster vision but of perfectly evaluating every six-man endgame.

In the famous rematch Deep Blue v. Kasparov the machine had six-man tablebases, and it must have weighed on Mr. Kasparov's mind that if the board got too light with material the computer would begin to play not just mortal chess but mathematical perfection, as though announced on the trumpet from the throne of god, or if you prefer, gleaned from the immodest prostitution of the Platonic Form of Chess itself.

And god and Plato can be inscrutable: this is where Stiller's monsters come in. They're a couple of six-man endgames, winning for one side, but where the shortest forced win is around 250 moves; they're named for the man who first enumerated the six-man endings and found them while looking for long forced wins. In the linked article, Tim Krabbé writes:

They are beyond comprehension. A grandmaster wouldn't be better at these endgames than someone who had learned chess yesterday. It's a sort of chess that has nothing to do with chess, a chess that we could never have imagined without computers. The Stiller moves are awesome, almost scary, because you know they are the truth, God's Algorithm - it's like being revealed the Meaning of Life, but you don't understand one word.

The seven-man tablebases of course will be downright huge, but a couple of endgames, like KRRN v. KRR (king-rook-rook-knight versus...) have already been worked out. There is a position in this class which is winning for the superior side but it takes 290 moves to prove it. The last ten or so, mind you, are pretty easy; but the first ninety have to be perfect.

It's the dark side of discrete math. Sometime's there's an obscure obstruction to a general claim ("theorem false") and sometimes ("file under Stiller's monsters") it's true but you have to beat the devil to prove it.

Paths: "we apologise, but it avoids writing 'induced' about 600 times"

2005-10-16T21:04:00.000-04:00

Somewhere between the marathon chess matches, the wide-eyed tourist photography, dinner, the operas and incidental books, breakfast and tea, and talking about the aforementioned (although not at a regular or prolific rate, my readers will attest), some work gets done.

A quick update on the status of the various classes that have come to my attention. I don't remember precisely where we were last time and somehow I don't want to look it up. So, beware repetition.

Introduction to Algebra, which induced a long discussion on the word "introduction," which along with cousins "basic," "elementary," "trivial," "easy," and so on does not seem to mean what the mathematicians think they mean. This got ditched in favour of two other classes at the same time. Same goes for Introduction to Analysis, except that it only overlapped one other class. While you're pretending to laugh at yet more ironic pedantry, let me observe that I was never taking Introduction to [Differential] Geometry, for I knew from the start that I wanted to take the other class at the same time, meaning that none of the three basic classes introduced by the department have done anything for me. Thanks for the thought, guys; fire the goobers who arranged your schedule. Moving on.

Langlands Correspondence and Representation Theory are the two overlapping the first above. I have a hazy recollection of mentioning this along with a bit of the sentimental side.

Algebraic Geometry, this time for real, not fake, not "introduction," not pretending to be "basic," is what induced me to let Analysis drop by the side this term. The trouble here, however, is that it's not an introductory class. Fortunately, due to a remarkable confluence of events, beginning with the fact that the class only meets once a week and ending with the professor's plane touching down an hour too late, it's been suspended for most of a month -- reconvene mid-November. I say this is fortunate because it will give me a little time to look up what all those words mean.

Discrete math is very interesting. The instructor is a resident professor named Paul Seymour; he is doing this class for the fall and another in the spring. In each case the topic of the class is a theorem he and his various teams have proved -- "Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture" (now "Theorem") for the fall, "Graph Minors Theorem" for the spring. This is neither amok vanity nor petty parochialism. Rather it happens that this man has to his name a couple of the biggest, splashiest results in graph theory. Selah. Is this not why one goes to such a school in the first place? Just to hear this man talk is breathtaking. It's not just the rapid dictation of diagrams and arguments or the hundred-fifty-page paper sitting on the desk that constitutes his lecture notes, not that he frequently checks it. It's the chit-chat about how he used to work just on graph minors, then started on induced subgraph problems, then got a grant for his team to study Berge graphs with an eye to the Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture, spent months studying the things, proved a nice result, found out someone beat them to it by just weeks, and anyway went on to solve a major outstanding problem.

In summa, it's sunny out these days even when it's raining.

Zwischenzug

2005-10-13T17:15:00.000-04:00

Apparently it's raining a lot here.

I didn't notice. But I did spend some time watching the rain fall. It feels very soothing, somehow.

But they do have rotten drainage and water pooling everywhere. A colleague told me his roof is leaking -- he's on the second of three floors. I think this is how Torontonians feel when they come to Vancouver and it snows and the city shuts down.

While we're here, a few more gargoyles, which give the relative worth of various specimens of the animal kingdom. These are the last two from the local gymnasium.

Ape with a book

Scholar with a book

Tigers: "old New Jersey in that far-off jungle land"

2005-10-11T20:58:00.000-04:00

I hope the subtext from previously-quoted tidbits like the cherubim iconography and the Grotesque Tour of Princeton Campus and is clear: these people are nuts. And from the long-standing "what are they" question below -- that it's a stylish nuts.

But in this vein aside from the tiger-siss-boom-ahh! I think I've not justified my seeing tigers everywhere. So let me tell you about these people and their tigers. They have tigers everywhere. Most of the following I shot just while I was out taking pictures for the statues of the previous post.

(Now that I've figured this thing out, every picture is a thumbnail. The large versions vary a lot in size; only three are over 400kb, most of the rest under 200kb. Not that it matters with every single person in North America having broadband. But scroll down, because I still don't know why there's white space in front of my tables.)

	They have roaring tiger gargoyles, stone fixtures silently challenging passers-by give up the watchword.
	There are many of them on this building, interspersed with more traditional undead-goat motifs.
	Naturally it would be tedious to see the same face everywhere, so they have stylised mutant tigers, too. Or maybe this one is a man with a tiger mask; the structure of the jaw looks a little unclear and there's something suggestive about the eyes. There are a few other types, too.
	They don't have tiger door-knockers, just for the obvious reasons, but they make up for by putting overtop of a door a relief of tiger with ring hanging from snarling jaws. Or, say, more than one door. Note the whiskers on this guy.
	Here's a slightly more traditional-looking relief: just some mighty animals sitting next to a shield, a classical chivalric tableau. Apparently I wasn't standing flush when I took some of these. Shameful.
	Or, for the stalwart conservatives on campus, a yet-more-traditional rendering, complete with Latin 'motto' (VET NOV TESTAMENTUM, "new and old testament"). But what are those bizarrely contorted, ephemeral figures growing from the back? Someone tells me monkeys, and a shower of leaves. This is the most surreal tiger carving I've seen, although I've heard about one with a tiger and two cannon (!).
	Before we move on, the mother of all tiger gargoyles. This one hangs near the 'footballer' gargoyle seen here previously.
	Of course they have large bronze statues, too. These are Bengal tigers, male and female, 133% actual size. Guess how I found that out. Yeah, that's right.
	"All right," you say to me. "So they've got a few little stone trinkets and a statue or two and they cooked up some informational brochures on the subject. That a fixation does not make! -- no, not even the creepy anthropomorphic one." Fair enough. Let's move onto Exhibit B:
	This highly creepy metal statue stands taller than I. It was installed just a few years ago, at the north entrance of the stadium, shortly before a big game, I guess, demonstrating the longevity and potency of the fad.
	By the way, while we're here, you may recall that the stadium is adjacent to the math building. (As in, fifty-second-walk entrance-to-entrance adjacent.) I'm sure you know what I was thinking when I heard that there were actually huge metal tigers next to a building next to Fine Hall -- so also what treatment I had in mind for these thrice-blasted (not enough times, apparently) trees in my way.
	Moving on, to Exhibit C, we have one of the exhibits in the Frist Campus Center, a social hub: the skeleton of a Bengal tiger, eternally pouncing. Below it is a little statue of an actual bengal. And to the right?
	Showing their fine sense of history, they also obtained the skeleton of a sabre-tooth tiger. Below it, too, another statue showing what (they think) the tiger actually looked like. Never mind the apparently lack of connection; let's take a gander at that dedication plate.
	Right -- so that's the guy who made the statues. And below it, they have taken the opportunity afforded by this juxtaposition to summarise a few of the contrasting features between the Bengal and the extinct sabre-toothed tiger Smilodon.
	I sense the point is about made, so we'll finish this little tour with a phenomenon which I think speaks quite eloquently for itself. The store was closed at this point, so I don't actually know what this book is about.

Yes, the last few pictures were taken separately from the others, at night-time. Yesterday I was organising my tiger photos and thinking it was a shame that I didn't have a picture of those skeletons to 'seal the deal', as it were; when I came across them originally I didn't have my camera on me. It was about 8 o'clock and I was feeling vexed up until I realised that it is not a fifteen minute walk to get there. Suddenly I felt an incredible thrill, and infused with a giddy anticipation at brazenly flouting the most basic habits of my youth I immediately gathered my bag and umbrella. Then I realised I should put on a warmer shirt, since it is getting a little nippy these days.

Finally, I should share this little passage I came across, which sheds a small amount of light on the subject of last entry's mystery.

Blair Hall (1897), the first Gothic dormitory built on campus [there was a decision around this time to adopt Gothic architecture for future buildings --BKF], was given by and named for University trustee John Insley Blair. It was designed by Walter Cope and John Stewardson.... Between Blair and Little is a gateway planned by the architects, linking the two halls. The Daily Princetonian told its readers in September 1899, "The tigers, four feet in height, which will besurmount the posts of the gateway between Blair and Little, will be the finest pieces of carving connected with the building." These two bellowing stone beasts, installed in 1902, were the first free-standing tigers to appear on campus. They sit up facing west, propping up shields, each atop its own gatepost.

So, it seems we now besurmount our quandry.

Before we sign off, one last item I can hardly resist. Since there are no references to New Jersey in the extant literature, and certainly not as the jungle it clearly is not, you may guess something about the titular quotation. Yes, here it is, from the "can't-make-this-up" file, the Princeton Jungle March:

Way down in old New Jersey in that far-off jungle land,
There lives a Princeton Tiger, who will tat right off your hand.
But when he gets in battle with the other beasts of prey,
He frightens them almost to death, in this particular way:
Wow... Hear the Tiger roar. Wow... rolling up a score.
Wow. Better move along, when you hear the Tiger sing his jungle song.

(Kenneth S. Clarke, '05, Carmina Princetonia centennial ed.)

Particularly peculiar.

Tigers: "more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of"

2005-10-03T20:56:00.000-04:00

They provoked interest and speculation unprecedented at Sun-Drunken. What do they mean? Who made them? What are they? Tigers? or prototigers? Lionesses? or not even mammals? Hybrid gone deformed? Groundhogs? or beavers? Giant prehistoric beavers? Obscure Japanese cinema amok on otherwise dignified campus?

Because a man knows to give the people what they want, here it is, no more nauseatingly wimpy polemics against bad lock design (I swear those clowns are half-way to a KUCA, specifically, the "useless" half, missing only the necessary irony) and bureaucrats: up close and uncut, you see what I see. These below are real thumbnails; click through for the massive (650-850kb, 1700x2270) originals.

Note the distinctly non-flat tail, sleek skull with slanted eyes and swept-back ears, and characteristic growl with saber-like fangs. Contrariwise, the pose of course is very distracting, and I didn't realise they could have haunches like that, nevermind the protruding bellies.

Here's a real tiger for reference, courtesy of Google (and, uhh, Associated Press, apparently).

But, you know, as much as I make light of them, in truth I'm envious. I wish I could have obscure and bizarre statuary. Couldn't really move them around with me, though.

On a related subject: Ever since I found Gargoyles of Princeton: A Grotesque Tour of the Campus (I keep telling you about these people) I've had that "gotta-catch-em-all" one gets when just the right triviality comes along over which to obsess. Granted this was just last night; but the fact that I went out the very next day to snap some shots suggests I am just as Orpheus in the underworld. So now I've got fifty pictures of miscellaneous gargoyles. I think I'll make a checklist. Here's a sneak peak, one of the weirder gargoyles. This "see-it-or-disbelieve-it" gargoyle is on the local gymnasium. (Also a thumbnail.)

World Around Us: "the unexamined life is not worth living"

2005-10-01T19:21:00.000-04:00

The other day, looking in a certain vicinity for a particularly well-hidden building -- the local medical clinic -- I came across this specimen:

Truly, a building much like any other (I did not take more pictures to prove it, but maybe you can believe in the local homogeneity), and clicking for a larger version won't show you much more. But there is a little bit of something, dirt maybe, on the stone face above the door, obscured by the harsh sunlight? Take a closer look -- is it -- yes, it is -- huh!

Just hanging there, like you have to bargain with acolytes to enter and receive the cryptic wisdom of Apollo, ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ!

know thyself!

Judging by the postings on the billboards inside, this building does not belong to the Classics Department but instead to the biologists. I bet they always use the door on the other side, just to avoid blushing walking under this thing.

Another incongruity I walk by every day:

Seems someone in the Class of 1879 didn't get the memo: "Lions out, tigers in."

Classes: "will to the thinkability of all things"

2005-09-29T19:06:00.000-04:00

I've been trying out the local wireless internet service. I take the laptop down to Fine Hall and watch chess in the afternoons. In case you haven't heard (huh), the 'world championship' (long story) is taking place right now, in Argentina. (No more games played in east Siberia being over before I wake up in Pacific time zone.) As I type it's mid-evening here and Topalov seems about to pick up his second win in as many rounds -- against Leko and Anand, respectively, canonically described as the principal competition, which one would think would put him far ahead of the pack (twelve rounds remaining notwithstanding). It seems Topalov is playing like a man possessed, not exactly by Caissa, but with boundless fight -- today he refused to take back the exchange he sacrificed even when it seemed that he no longer had any compensation, just, somehow, to keep fighting. And it seems to have paid off, as Anand proves that not even Anand can play fifty moves of perfect chess. What an allegory: "If I can't be right, at least be bold--"

Which brings me to the list which has dominated my attention for the past week:

Analysis -- since the instructor was still unable to manipulate the digits of his hand, he -- got someone else to teach the class. It turns out that there is a class in algebraic geometry basically at the same time which I might go to instead. I had some notion that I should take some analysis-type class with an eye to that part of the general exam, but the overlapping of material seems to be non-existent, to the extent where one hardly even needs to recall the material salient to one side to execute the tasks on the other. So it looks like I just spend some time with Folland or Rudin (textbooks) sometime between now and next October (or whenever).

The Very Bad Characteristic -- a very pleasant surprise. It seems this class will be very accessible and very interesting. It is only too bad that it is so early in the morning, I can hardly wake up early enough to eat breakfast, make and drink my tea, walk over there, and so forth. (Today one of these got cut out. "Walk over there" wasn't it.)

While there is a lot of mathematics that I enjoy -- I don't hold with those who disparage commutative algebra or whatever -- I've a special fondness for Galois theory, (roughly speaking the study of symmetries of algebraic numbers), which I first learned as an impressionable young undergraduate. It is the most beautiful mathematical theory I have known, something which by the maxim "excess is proof of itself" demonstrates a fortiori that there is beauty in mathematics. To work on a problem in this field would be satisfying, indeed; and that it relates deeply to the study of algebraic geometry, the field I'm slighting when I say "most beautiful," well,...

Something, as we say in our reserved language, to keep an eye on.

Representation theory -- which I attend because my advisor is teaching it and it seemed like the politic thing to do. I think by the end I may be believing that "to impress this person" is one of the classically idiotic reasons to do something. Or some reflection along these lines (append some caveats and provisos). It is not yet clear where we are going with this theory so I'll soldier on for now, especially since my resolve to stay with the class in the previous bullet point means I won't be able to attend the "introduction to algebra" class further.

The trouble is that it feels like everyone else in the room is there because they're Really Serious about representation theory, whereas I'm halfway there on a lark, not a total lark, I like it fine, but it's pretty far from being a career interest of mine. It's a pervasive feeling, though.

Discrete math -- seems like a lot of fun, as discrete math often is. Rapid-fire graph theory. In the afternoon but not late enough that I can take a nap after the morning classes.

That's about where it lies. I bought some books online (what a miraculous form of commerce), and picked up a little something else, too -- Verdi's Rigoletto, and, under the hypothesis that the neighbours don't like Verdi like I like Verdi, some headphones. Not "extremely good" ones but not disposable, either. Seems like pretty good sound, right down to the singers' steps on the stage and the coughs in the audience.

Got to keep entertained here, you know.

I'm sitting here, kind of in disbelief, because it seems like Topalov may manage not to win after all. Such a sad story. Sitting partly entranced by what is happening and partly because Blogger is undergoing maintenance, preventing me from submitting this for the moment. Fortunately, I still don't know what's going on in Morozevich's game. Yet mysteries of the universe. ("--try to solve them, but can you? -- nope; they're mysteries.")

Intermezzo

2005-09-24T10:21:00.000-04:00

Weekdays they serve continental breakfast down at the dining hall: cereals, bagels, bread, last night's dessert (?!), from time to time a piece of fruit -- grapefruit or melons or something. It's far from fancy but I appreciate their consideration. It's a minor disappointment that they don't continue on weekends, leaving their students to forage. I am no good at foraging. I'm not even allowed to install a refrigerator here.

On the credit slate, it removes all compulsion to awake and arise by a specified hour, say, in time for half past nine, (when they stop serving breakfast). So the day can grow organically, like a malformed metaphor, without the spark of internal combustion polluting the pond, nor the lure of activity descending below the surface to catch an unwary fish or snag a plant reaching too high.

This morning I watch chess online ("European Club Championship," very exciting). Later I read books. Yesterday I went to the library in the vain hope of finding something I might potentially possibly be able to decipher on the subject of Galois representations. I was thwarted in this hope. Perhaps what I was looking for does not exist. All I know is I'd have had a better time of it if they'd bothered to put the math card catalogue in the math library, say where they currently keep the biology card catalogue. So I'm stuck with my current books. I got the compilation of Feynman's letters. Feels a little voyeuristic when he's writing to his wife and fifty pages of "congratulations on winning the Nobel" was slightly too many. But it makes something of a contrast to, say, Napoleon's memoirs.

By Tuesday there should be more work to keep my attention. A pretty pace they'll (I'll) have to make to make it worthwhile by December. Meanwhile: still sleepy, not quite prospering, just -- languid Saturday....

Lectures: "bounded in a nutshell"

2005-09-20T16:56:00.000-04:00

Sunday brunch included salmon. Smoked.

Classes at the math department, I am told, traditionally start a little later than usual. At today's class the instructor told us that he would be away at a conference next week, so there wouldn't be any lectures, but this was just as well, since we started early.

Yesterday I attended one class, so-called "Introduction to Analysis." They call it "introduction" but keep in mind that it is no such thing. Evidence of this arises from a member of the faculty mentioning that they would not be covering Lebesgue integration and other "boring stuff" like that. Anyway, this class meets once a week for a 2.5 hour lecture (?!) plus potentially a seminar for the students. The instructor began by telling us that he would not be writing anything on the board today, "for a superficial reason," he explained, "namely that I cannot raise my right arm." Consequently after fifteen minutes or so he left. Commence students agog wondering mock agawk: "So, what is wrong with your left arm?" and "Can't you dictate it to one of the students to write?"

The real shame was that this meant there was really no reason not to have gone to the other lecture I was interested in, on finite simple groups, which would have overlapped in the last half hour. "I wonder what it's about? Presumably he's not going to prove the classification." -- every single person I've discussed this with has made this joke. Yes, it was the first thing I thought of, too. For the normal people among readers, the classification of finite simple groups is touted as one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of man by Those In The Know and is currently spread out across some fifteen thousand pages of articles in mathematical journals, written by about four hundred authors. (Highlights include the Feit-Thompson theorem, "every odd-order group is solvable" (255 pages), and the Thompson theorem, "if every subgroup of G generated by two elements is solvable then G is solvable" (475 pages), not to mention the discovery of the Monster "sporadic" simple group, with about 8 * 10⁵⁴ [if I counted right] elements in it.)

This morning, as I mentioned, there was another class, an introduction to algebraic geometry. (It is actually just called "Introduction to Algebra," keeping in line with their spectacularly mistaken nomenclature.) I don't know if I will be continuing to attend these lectures since there are one or two other classes at overlapping time slots which look very interesting. One of these is the one recommended to me (described in the previous post, below) and another is a class on representation theory being taught by my first-year advisor. I haven't actually seen him (he's on vacation at the moment) but conceivably this might be a prudent thing to look into. Anyway, this algebra class went fine, until the very end, when he tried to squeeze in a proof of the Nullstellensatz (a fundamental theorem of algebraic geometry) and stated and proved a lemma which is obviously false. That was somewhat confusing.

Afterward I was wondering what to do. Since I hadn't slept very well (a partial consequence of some racket outside at six o'clock and then continuing interruptions as people wake up and open their doors which then close by themselves with an apocalyptic thud) I was hardly in a mood to sit down and read my textbook (still Šafarevic). I was pacing aimlessly outside when I ran into a colleague and his wife, who very kindly suggested that if I was going for a walk then I should borrow their umbrella since it seemed about to rain. For my part I didn't think it would rain (it was cloudly overhead, but that means nothing in a land without mountains, and it was moist in the air, but it's been stultifyingly humid ever since I got here) so I thanked them and begged off.

But I still thought I should take a walk, and thought maybe they were right and it would rain, so I returned home to pick up my umbrella. (It's about 15 minutes or less between Fine Hall and the Graduate College, depending on the vigor of your pace and the efficiency of your path.) I arrived without incident and was making my way back when I thought that while I was here I should refresh myself and bring to mind an actual proof of the Nullstellensatz. So I returned and did so. Having satisfied my curiosity, I stood, collected my umbrella again, and left.

An instant before that apocalyptic thud I realised I, my thoughts still among the corners of affine spaces, had left my keys on my desk when I was looking through my algebra text.

After some fierce self-flagellation, I took my amateur medieval monk self over to beg the appropriate authorities resolve my predicament. This they promptly did, according to their schedule, anyway, which scaled to about two hours of Me Time, which I spent pacing up and down the halls. This created a burning in my legs which took my mind off my burning shame. I think it may have had a different effect on the few neighbours still in their rooms at the time.

Having cursed life, death, creation, and locksmiths everywhere, I once again set off to Fine Hall. For one thing, I had left my bag there. For another, there was afternoon tea which I hadn't quite missed yet. This tea (and cookie, Oreo brand) was adequate and took my mind off my troubles a little.

By this time, of course -- "Look, Sulu, it's a miracle." The sun came out.

I hope they have more salmon this week.

Cherubim: "a mountain range out of ever more sacred mountains"

2005-09-15T21:36:00.000-04:00

Somehow I've gotten out of the habit of writing my chronicles. I think the angst went out of my existence when my boxes arrived, safely.

I should have taken a picture of them to go with a little elaboration on this last. The contents arrived safely, seemingly without any wear or tear. A few shirts had a few more wrinkles, and one or two books the same, but otherwise everything was intact. My ceramic and grass knicknacks might as well have been riding on cushions of state. The very boxes themselves, however, were in quite rough shape. I had hoped to reuse them in the coming summer (whether I have to store things or just move them to a new domicile on campus) but a substantial fraction of them will not see service again without liberal applications of duct tape; in fact would not have made it with their contents whole without liberal applications of duct tape. For all the bitterly bilious thoughts I've thought at them over the past two weeks, in the end the courier concern came through.

The delivery itself went smoother than planned. They were just plunked without ceremony outside the mail room. I got them from there. Since the mail room was closed that hour, I in fact have not yet signed for my boxes. This would trouble me if not for the "all's well" observation that cools the worry wort living in my heart. It was a bit of a walk. I tried to carry them two at a time, on the hypothesis that it would take forever otherwise and after all when packing them I tried to dilute the book boxes with lighter (less dense) articles. Thus I was never actually carrying three cubic feet of books. (I think my brother just shuddered. My cheeks are forming a grimace just thinking of it.) This was Monday night. I was feeling a little beat up.

Fortunately, another hobgoblin of these pages, Dining Services, finally did something in effort to make themselves merely goblins, namely, open the dining hall for dinner. One or two people have referred to said hall as a cafeteria. I made what must have seemed a pretentious correction. One day soon I will take a camera down with me and show you why 'cafeteria' is too unbecoming for, say, the huge stained glass window dominating the room. It depicts the Seven Liberal Arts (no correspondence to deadly sins to my knowledge) and has a Latin motto inscribed underneath. While we're on the subject, the food is fine. I sense a certain limit to the variety, and they have some rather uninspired dishes floating around. However so far they have had at least one stand-out each day; for example, yesterday's flounder Florentine. I know some of you were worrying about this, or maybe maligning the name of Princeton. (Tiger!-siss-boom-ahh! -- skyrocket cheer -- yes it does; sound it out.) Some more of you possibly feel chagrin that you weren't worrying. This is all right. I worry about myself and you so that you don't have to worry about me, although since I am unreliable you should continue to worry over yourselves as you see fit.

But, we have to go back in time a little bit to pick our story. When we last left our protagonist he was about to embark to a rite of becoming, the Math Department orientation lunch. This trial turned out to be somewhat less a firey Polynesian odyssey than a repetition of many things I already knew. (This seems to characterise every "orientation" I've been to this week, which constitutes, if you haven't been counting, a substantial sample size.) I did see Andrew Wiles. I didn't embarrass myself too badly, else he would have remembered me, and he didn't. Not surprising: I was at the very opposite end of a very long table, with multiple other students leaning forward to look down at his end, thereby obliterating my view.

You may rightly wonder how I know he didn't recall. You can ponder this mystery of the universe while I segue to -- pictures! ... of some buildings. From the top of Fine Hall, the forbidden Professors' Lounge. You need a key to make the elevator go to this floor.

	We begin our tour with the view south-south-east. I know this because I know in which direction the sun moves during the day. Guildenstern would be proud. (Or maybe Rosencrantz.) The large colloseum-like thing on the left is an actual stadium. Otherwise unremarkable. As always, click through for a bigger view.
	Here is an actual sporting field. (It is a jock school, or so I've heard. uhh, tiger-siss-boom-ahh?) The trees are entirely characteristic: you can see them in every direction. It seems that we are in the midst of a clearing in the forest. The railing here runs along the outside of the suite, but these pictures were taken from behind glass -- it was not possible to get outside. It seems there is some concern about depressed mathematicians. I appreciate their consideration. Or perhaps it's just very windy on the twelfth floor.
	The view west. The buildings directly in front are labs (not sure what kind). The double row of trees overlooks a very efficient Graduate College-Fine Hall walk path which I found using the aid of a backward searching algorithm. In the distance you can see Cleveland Tower, where the Graduate College is. (By the way, it turns out it's named after Grover Cleveland, former American President, and was paid for by donations. You can go up to the top of it, too, if you borrow a key to get in.) The thing to notice here is how much smaller this mighty vallation is than the math building.
	The building on the left is Frist Campus Center. It's a nice building in its own right. If it looks "not too small" by comparison, keep in mind it's sitting on a sizeable hill. I know the size of the department's endowment isn't everything, but it's especially delicious when you remember that --
	-- Princeton is a jock school. This behemoth is Princeton Stadium. Yes, directly east of Fine Hall. All it's missing are some pendants, eagles, and an Imperial box.
	This has nothing to do with the previous series. It's the exterior of Alexander Hall, where Tuesday morning's orientation was held. The inside, Richardson Auditorium, is quite striking, but unfortunately my batteries died. That's why this doesn't constitute a separate series. However, since I will doubtless be back here (they have myriad performances throughout the year) we will just have to be patient.

This brings us to Tuesday night in our story and the resolution of a cliffhanger. This was the Math Department reception, a key opportunity to schmooze and eat more cheese than I'll see for the next three months. Since my boxes had arrived I even had something to wear. Things were looking up.

Unfortunately, the flaw so difficult to avoid I feel with respect to it almost fatalistic emerged. This party was far too crowded, being confined to two and a half rooms, not small rooms, but not with few guests, either -- all the faculty, graduate students, some graduate school officials, and associated hangers-on were invited. Consequently it was hot, noisy, and without room to maneuver: my bête noire. I made a valiant try to keep up but somewhere in the second hour my strength started to sap, revitalised only by such nuances as the John F. Nash, Jr. being less than a metre away from time to time.

There was a quite accidental happy ending, whereby a lady who I presume is Andrew Wiles' wife notices me sitting on a couch in the hall as they're leaving and asks if I'm all right. I can think of better ways to get introduced, but considering I fobbed the ball all evening long, I'll take what I can get. Anyway, I spoke with them for a few seconds. Very pleasant people. He is quite soft-spoken but confident. When asked after my interests (the fourth question everyone asks, behind (1) what program; (2) what year; (3) where from) he even suggested a course I should look into this term. If I understood him correctly, he meant something entitled The Langlands Correspondence in the Bad Characteristic. I have no reason to believe that I misheard him other than the obvious -- that title is all the more intimidating to me than to you because I "know of" the Langlands correspondence.

That, by the way, is due to Robert Langlands, member of the Institute for Advanced Study, proponent of the system of conjectures called the Langlands program, and, incidently, formerly of Vancouver.

Suddenly I'm thinking of going to bed. Certainly I've left out some things which I will get to anon. (Somehow this story ended two days ago?!) But I should explain that skyrocket thing before you think I'm just batty. (Batty-plus-something-else, now --) Here's the exegesis, lifted shamelessly from this page on Princeton iconography.

This Princeton cherub is calling out the Princeton skyrocket cheer, which was adapted from the cheer of the New York City’s Seventh Regiment in the Civil War. As those troops traveled through Princeton on their way to Washington in 1861, they captivated the College’s students with their cheer, which was supposed to imitate the sound of fireworks: “sis,” the rocket zoomed into the sky; “boom,” the explosion; and “ah,” the crowd expressed its pleasure for the resulting light show. “Tiger” was a frequently used word in cheers of that era and soon caught hold at Princeton College, where athletic teams often wore orange and black. By the 1890s, the skyrocket cheer was transformed into the “locomotive,” a chant whose word repetition and increasing speed emulated the sound of a train pulling out from a station: “Rah, rah, rah; tiger, tiger, tiger; sis, sis, sis; boom, boom, boom; ah!” [followed by three shouts of “Princeton!” or class numerals]. The unknown artist of this 1909 postcard incorporated Princeton iconography with more generic, spirit-evoking images of the day—cherubim and football.

It almost makes me want to go to one of these sporting occasions, just to see if it's real. And then leave promptly, of course. Especially if it's basketball. I don't know if they play baseball here.

Transition: "to flicker like small flames on high masts"

2005-09-10T19:53:00.000-04:00

If I keep making updates in the comments below, we'll always have a megabyte plus of pictures sitting on the front page. So I'll start up here, even though like every day this week it's a story of gradual evolution of circumstance.

When last I left you there was one more day of the "international student orientation." This time around I learned fascinating things like how America uses "Western medicine," that Americans are individualistic and friendly but that this should not be taken to mean they are superficial, and that there is no socialism here. I feel nervous. In Canada, when I have to comply with the perverse and draconian dictates of a foreign dictat and submit myself to an immunity titer I just show up with my CareCard and am out of pocket absolutely nothing. Here I tremble thinking what it might cost just to talk to someone who can tell me what the same might cost. I think I join all my expatriot fellows and European brethren in asking America to, as quickly as possible, get itself a real health care system. If you are uncertain how to pay for it, perhaps consider not building as many aircraft carriers. I doubt that will quite do it but then you'll also build slightly fewer aircraft.

Anyway, I'm glad that part is done. It left me feeling somewhat uncomfortable. Perhaps as Richard remarks in time I might come to feel more "international." On the other hand, just today I was speaking to a new colleague (first-year math grad), bemoaning and bewailing as usual the state of my boxes, when he remarked this was strange, since Canada is such a close neighbour (or something to this effect). I think that I do not actually want to feel "international." I want to feel "North American," or barring that "European" (if they'll have me). Somehow I feel strongly, as an old Italian restauranteur remarked, that "peoples is peoples."

As you may recall, by virtue of living in this place, the Graduate College, I am compelled to buy into their meal plan. Considering this, and the extortionist nature of their racket being reflected in their fees, I would have expected a little more courtesy on their part; for example, that they would actually supply meals during certain holidays, or, say, from the time that I actually arrive here. Beginning yesterday they have started to do something about this: Friday and today they held barbeques on the south lawn. This was pleasant -- where I met the aforementioned new colleague (more than one, actually). (So for the first time in a week or so I've spent a few hours chatting, a pleasant change.) Tomorrow they offer a "soup and bagel" brunch. I hope I'm not inconveniencing them too much. There's nothing we Canadians hate more than to feel like an inconvenience.

Speaking of which, there was a suggestion that the space crunch I referred to (too many students, not enough desks) may not actually amount to anything because some students wouldn't want to use that space. This was not something that came to my mind. I learned the trade from Richard Anstee, who would make certain to stop by and chat a while with some frequency. (How are you today? What's this you're working on? -- no, no, don't read that; it's all wrong; I just didn't get around to erasing it from the blackboard--) So maybe some will be recluses. Math department orientation is Monday. We'll know more about lots of things then.

I'm sure I'll have a lot then. In the meantime I don't even have any new pictures. I haven't visited any new exotic locations. I was going to snap a few of the desk I claimed and its environs but frankly the place looks a little Dickensian and I wanted to put some space between it and the pre-Victorian pictures below. (Got to watch out for the anachronisms.)

We'll call it full there for now. It seems that irrespective of what's happening outside and about I can manage to talk it up. I was feeling a little sluggish this week but better now, a little isolated but now relaxing, feeling more menschlich, less allzumenschlich. Thanks to everyone who wrote. See you anon.

Arrival: "as much like Oxford as monkeys could make it"

2005-09-05T00:30:00.000-04:00

Pictures, pictures! He held the camera in his hand and felt a giddy rush. Let me chronicle the world, he said. Later he sorted through them.

Here's my journey, up to now. Click images for a slightly larger view. (I took them all at 22xx by 17xx but obviously I'm not hosting something like that.)

I wonder if they cap my bandwidth each month, or just get angry if I use too much. Judging from the sustained 1 megabyte per second transfer I got downloading a patch earlier today, though, they're not in much of a position to carp.

There seems to be a high gap of white-space between here and the start of the table. Someone give me a clue? HTML and me, huh --

[Postscript. Some small edits Monday morning. I feel particular shame over my inability to reason spatially in a certain skew shot near the top.]

patience on the runway
	On the second flight of the day, Toronto to Newark, I had a window seat. In fact, an emergency window seat. The flight attendent quite earnestly asked me if this was all right. "As long as it's not used," I quipped. Here we're waiting on the tarmac. Later he explained how to remove the window. As it turns out, it was not used.
ascending to the heavens
	Take-off is pretty exciting when you're there, somewhat less so when you're not. Obviously, the anticipation and the power of the engine and the floor not being down anymore are integral to the experience. I guess this captures that last a little bit. Anyway, Toronto looks like a nice place from the air. If only its citizens didn't have that infernal gall of theirs. Vancouverites know better: their city is best, or maybe would be if Zurich vanished.
suspended o'ertop
	And here's proof. Take a look at that. No mountains in sight! They've got some water, sure, (it's not really near an ocean,) but where are the mountains? Without them, those dangling clouds are cute, not an antediluvian menace.
modern world at a glance
	My worldly American neighbours might find this charmingly rustic, provincial, even parochial. Just like the lady at the shuttle bus company who asked for my phone number (to look for it in the database: still trying to find my reservation at this stage) and, upon receipt, said with fatigue bordering on contempt: "Area code..."
not upside down
	I took a lot of clouds pics, more or less under the hope that one or two might turn out all right, interesting, etc. A few did the former but the clouds that day just weren't so exotic or photogenic. This is the fluffiest of the bunch. As you can see, its chief redeeming feature is the novelty that it looks like it's upside-down, taken at sea, but it's not. The clouds are below us, ho-ho.
clouds swim among clouds
	I'm on top of the world, looking down on Creation, bum bum, bum,...
not actually inside Miniluv
	Just after putting my bags inside, I snapped this shot of the sterile-looking hallway. There is one more pair of doors behind me, making ten in all. (Those keeping track will realise I mistakenly put myself "third from the back" previously. Shucks.) Fortunately, at this stage my large suitcase was propping the door open, preventing me from, say, accidentally locking myself out.
evidence those stains are not my fault
	It's slightly fuzzy, and the colours aren't totally right, but we work with the single shot we snapped before moving in. (I'm not taking another one and revealing to the world that even without any of my boxes I can still suffer the shame of an untidy room.) Still, the calm, cozy feel is apt. Careful examination will reveal that there are two chairs, not one, and pretty comfortable ones, at that. The closet and drawers are on the right, blocked by what looks like the door, still propped open by my luggage. All in all, much better than I had feared. Shortly afterward I tried to relax. Rather thirsty from the long trips through a sun-drenched world, I stepped out to fill my mug from the washroom sink. My luggage was no longer adjacent to the door.
idyllic Elysium
	Go down the humourless hallway, through the menacing firedoor, into the atrium, and look left. This is the pleasant slice of pastoral New Jersey that you will see. I went on a walkabout today [Sunday -- this entry posted early Monday morning], snapping photos as I went. It was very bright out, very summer-like.
brick and mortar, arch and lamp-post
	Not quite like the buildings back home. This is still on the grounds of the Graduate College. The architecture is entirely typical of more-than-every-other building on campus. I'm sure in a few months I will be quite oblivious to it, so a few shots to send Back Home are in order.
Tower of ~~Babel~~ Cleveland
	Jutting up to heaven, Cleveland Tower looks o'er the Graduate College. I assume there was a person named Cleveland, who possibly donated some money. Most of the buildings around here have plaques ready to inform us of the buildings' history. No doubt a cursory examination would have revealed the sordid story of this bright tower, but I had an agenda. Today I wanted to find a first-approximation of an efficient route to the math building, Fine Hall.
archaic meets modern among architects
	More or less, I planned to just "walk over there," taking what few turns I might need to. Alas, it did not turn out that way. Here I get distracted by an anachronistic juxtaposition.
just pleasantly archaic
	After just a couple of left/right decisions, I was getting onto the wrong track. My path-finding algorithm didn't seem to be so good. This makes concrete some of the jokes I was telling just yesterday: "Ah-ha! A solution does exist!" ("but it runs in n² factorial time!" -- true story from commutative algebra. -- or something like that; I just remember hearing it from Zinovy Reichstein.) Anyway, I amused myself by taking some pictures along the way. This made me feel slightly more productive. However, given the sun I would have traded it for actual productivity.
more detour
	A slightly more-grand-than-typical building. I like the turrets. If I had turned right 'round about here, I would have been peachy. But I decided to circle back and try a different path after consulting with my map.
same detour
	But why would you do that, I hear you asking. After all, it's counter to the algorithm. The first reason is that there is a solid black line of a building where I thought I was on the map. The second reason is carefully hidden in this shot of yet another building I thought looked nice, the rube I am.
malformed, wicked lion-beaver-things, defend us!
	Here's detail on the guardian figures by the road of the shot above. I have no idea what those things are, but I'll just call them lions, because they don't look much like tigers. They don't look so much like lions from this angle, either. I think I just called them lions because I'm accustomed to seeing statues of lions. They're certainly not hoary marmots. Note, while we're here, the forbidding DO NOT ENTER (on pain of horrific things, they evidently didn't have enough space to elaborate) sign.
flying beasts, defend us!
	By this time I was keeping an eye out for that old standby, the gargoyle. It didn't take twenty seconds to find this example. I think it's some sort of lizard-snake-dragon-thing.
more ostentation
	This is one entrance to the Frist Campus Center (yes, that Frist), where apparently all the happening things happen, like the chess club. At this stage I knew again where I was -- this building is quite close to Fine Hall.
a fine hall
	At last, that veritable holy place. It's a huge building. I didn't take any shots from high-atop, on the theory that I had to save something for later. I was also rather hungry and wanted to get home. Consequently after collecting my snippets of mail from the box here I made my way to a small Greek diner I had noted from the Guide to Everything I received when I checked in. (It is aptly named.) I also found a helpful list of incoming graduate students. Apparently there are fifteen of us. Long-time readers will realise that this ameliorated a potentially awkward situation that had been on my mind.
en avante, lion-things
	On the way back, I found a quite acceptable route, very direct, west across campus, although not quite at the north/south level I'd want. It was not until I passed through these curious-looking statues that I realised I had very nearly been here before. The fools! Their sign was wrong!
sweet home again
	Finally, I returned home. All told I was out for a little more than 1.5 hours. It felt like a little longer than that. I'm still not quite on their time. Today otherwise I've been reading and resting. I took a brief nap, more or less by accident, which was probably not a good idea; but it did leave me alert enough to hammer out this update. It is now past midnight, Eastern. I'll have to change Sun-Drunken time to that of the East coast. I confess I'm still mentally subtracting three every time I look at a clock, even though they're all Eastern, but there was a time this afternoon when I took my watch at face value. The assimilation proceeds.

Toward the Rising Sun: "adieu, adieu, remember me"

2005-09-03T00:35:00.000-04:00

Dear friends,

It is about that time. Shortly the music will stop playing and the light will surrender as night descends on Vancouver for the last time. (For me.) The next time you hear from me I'll have been eastward-bound.

Early tomorrow, about 6 o'clock, we'll be leaving here for the airport. Putter around for a while until the 8 o'clock flight. If the headwinds are all right and the organisation proficient I'll be in Toronto in under 4.5 hours. There's a too-brief stop here, a little more than an hour and a half, to get my way to the next terminal and through customs (and get myself that F visa). Then another flight, under 1.5 hours, to Newark airport. I have a ticket for a bus to Princeton which will be leaving at 8:15 (Eastern), somewhat after I arrive, so there's a bit of room here.

Then a little over an hour to Princeton, call it a twenty-five minute walk to the Graduate College complex where I'll be living -- it is not actually that long but I will have two rather heavy bags with me -- and a few minutes longer -- navigate the complex, trudge up the stairs -- those first timid steps into the hallway I'll come to know very well -- and there, on the left, third from the back: Room 2716, my 11 by 10 dwelling. Key in door. Opens. Musty air escapes. There's no light streaming through the window. I scan for a light switch -- there. The incandescent bulb lights again, but it's still dark-like, it's not the soft and familiar glow of the bulb behind and above my head right now, halo-like. Still, there's a bed; and I'll hobble to it, leaving my bags on the ground, and sit down. Take stock. The mattress is slightly too hard. I'm slightly hungry. It's not quite home. But that's all right: it will be. So I open the larger suitcase -- where are my pillows? -- that chair looks uncomfortable, and I have some work to do. The music starts playing again, an ancient baroque canon I sometimes listened to in the dark.

I bet it won't take half an hour to get the internet connection up.

I'll see you on the other side. Good night, everyone. Triumphant dreams.

Impatience: "nothing is beautiful but man alone"

2005-09-02T02:22:00.000-04:00

Listening, as I sometimes do, to my favourite thing in the world, my disc of excerpts from Bach's Art of Fugue performed by Glenn Gould (piano and organ), I was struck by the desire to stop waiting. There's a thing whose time has come. I want to be in Princeton and I want to have my speakers back. If there's anything as silly as an extended farewell, it's listening to the unfinished contrapunctus through laptop speakers.

Funny how the oddest things can make conflicts pass to the conscious mind. Every now and then I need someone to tell me: "You've lost perspective!" These things happen. It's not hard to enumerate some reasons why: Bacchanalia, denial, tree/forest distinction, absurd justice, allzumenschlich syndrome, clawlessness, whatever. Make your own list. Don't feel compelled to share it, except with yourself.

It's very late to me now, since I didn't sleep very well at all last night. I don't expect to sleep so well tonight, either, or tomorrow. I think I will try to eat as little as possible, too. That might make it easier on me.

Judging, by the by, by the stunned silence, I believe there was remarkably little interest in the byline on 37. This is OK with me. I think it is healthy to write, every now and then, on something no one cares about, so long as it is not a pathetic indulgence (see above list). It shows some independence, fortitude. Gut. So, in which category does the rest fall?

On 37

2005-08-31T17:12:00.000-04:00

Today's a big day. Later this evening, in just a few hours, Papa and I will hop down to the local courier concern and send my boxes off their way. Today's the day where we must be absolutely certain: if it doesn't go today and it can't fit into the luggage than it's not going. I think it's all in order. Thanks to the kind Party the Third the luggage recently got bigger. I think that's set my mind easier, but I'm still highly anxious about things I know not what.

I'm packing my speakers off, too, so I thought I'd take today to transfer all the data I need to the shiny new laptop. While this transfer proceeds, I thought I'd take a moment out to tell you about 37.

37 is a remarkable integer, and my favourite one. It's prime, of course. Other than that it doesn't seem on the face any more or less remarkable than, say, 47. Another principal candidate for Favourite Integer is 26, which besides figuring in my birth date is the only number between a square (25) and a cube (27), (a proposition dating to Fermat).

You may think that there are so many integers it would be impossible to have a favourite one. This is not so. First, the Law of Small Numbers suggests that small numbers are the really staggeringly remarkable ones; they just get more boring as they get bigger. Paradoxically, of course, this makes it all the more interesting when the smallest example of something turns out to be 37; but 78,557 being the smallest Sierpinski number doesn't really make it more endearing. It's a delicate balance. Someone who thinks Graham's number or Skewe's number or something like that is the best integer is, I'm sorry to say, lacking in taste.

Yesterday I happened to mention over dinner somewhat provocatively that 37 is my favourite integer, which I shouldn't have done, because it was not a good time to explain why, since it's a rather long story that will require a detour through a lot of elementary algebraic number theory. But having stepped in it, I had to say why; and it's an interesting story, to me, anyway; so here we are. Don't let the words distract you from the music. If it gets too bad, just imagine Kosh is saying it. (This works especially well if you have questions. Query: What does this mean? Answer: Yes.) For the mathematicians in the audience, I will beg your forbearance with the simplifications, beginning with my second definition.

A (rational) integer is a counting number, 0, 1, 2, ..., or the negative of one. The set of such is labelled Z (for zahlen, German "number"). Prime integers, as we learn in grade school, are those which are divided only by themselves and 1. Otherwise a number is called composite. Every composite number can be expressed as a product of prime numbers. In fact this prime factorisation is unique.

There are other kinds of numbers, which are not integers, like the square root of two, say. We can do a kind of generalised arithmetic with these numbers, too. The set ("ring") Z[α] consists of all the things that look like a + bα + ... + cαⁿ, where a, b, ..., c, n are some integers. We can ask about what sorts of properties of integer arithmetic carry over to these new kinds of arithmetic. One question is: is there also unique factorisation into primes in a ring Z[α]?

It turns out that the answer is usually no. An easy example is to take α equal to the square root of -5. Now we can write 6 = 2*3 = (1 + α)*(1 - α), and it turns out that all of 2, 3, 1 + α, and 1 - α are irreducible in this ring, so that these factorisations are "essentially different." (Irreducible is related to but not quite the same as prime in a way which I will not say.)

However, there is a very deep theorem due to Dedekind on this subject. The first idea is to introduce so-called ideal numbers, not all of which exist in the ring Z[α], but which are related to the numbers in this ring. With these numbers, unique factorisation can be restored. This is an excellent achievement because unique factorisation is a very strong property and a lot of consequences follow from it purely formally. It turns out, to give you an idea that this is not so strange, that the only ideal numbers you need can be denoted (a), which kind we identify with just a, or (a, b), which we can think of as the greatest common divisor of a and b, for a, b elements of Z[α]. (All of this is true only for certain α. I won't say which, but all the α I mention in this post are of this kind. An example of something that doesn't work is π. Another example is the square root of 5. It's tricky.) There is an object called the class group which one can define from these ideal numbers. Very roughly speaking, it tells us how many essentially different kinds of factorisations (into non-ideal numbers) there are in the given ring. The very deep theorem of Dedekind which I mentioned is the statement that the class group is a finite set. Its size is usually denoted h (and depends on α, of course). We have unique factorisation if and only if h = 1.

With this behind us, we are going to specialise to the case where α = ζ_p is a (primitive, complex) p^th root of unity. This means that α^p = 1, but α is not equal to one. For example, the number i which solves the equation x² = -1 is a fourth root of unity. Now let h be the class number of the ring Z[ζ_p]. We say that the prime p is regular if p does not divide h, and irregular otherwise.

37 is the smallest irregular prime.

You may wonder why anyone would be so daft as to make this definition in the first place: why is this property of any interest at all? The answer, as it is with so many things in elementary algebraic number theory, is Fermat's Last Theorem. It is possible to give an "elementary" proof of FLT for the case where the exponent is a regular prime.

(For the math guys who haven't read it. The idea is to start with x^p + y^p = z^p and factor the LHS into a product of terms looking like x + ζ^ky where ζ = ζ_p is as before. Now if we had unique factorisation in Z[ζ], a product of relatively prime factors being a p^th power means that each factor is itself a p^th power, a very strong condition, which we can get our hands on by passing to ideals. For the other case we note that the gcd of two of those factors divides also their sum and difference. In any case, there is a long and difficult calculation ahead, which takes a few pages after the preparatory lemmas are stated. At a critical juncture we have some ideal I whose p^th power is principal. If p is regular, then it is coprime to h, and this implies from the definition of the class group as fractional ideals modulo principal ideals that I itself is principal. That's the only place where it matters that p is regular. I think there is also some assumption that p doesn't divide xyz in the argument I remember.)

Frankly, I find it remarkable enough that there are any irregular primes at all. There are three less than 100. It turns out that there are even infinitely many irregular primes. I guess when I understand this fact I won't find it so astonishing that there are any at all. But the other surprising thing is that we don't even know if there are infinitely many regular primes, although it's conjectured (and there seem to be more regular than irregular in the ranges where we know). You can take a look around some of the links on the right column to read some strange facts and more technical descriptions if you like.

Postscript, immediately after. That ζ looks really ugly in this font. Shame, it was a favourite Greek letter of mine. Also, tthere's a post from "last night" [early this morning] just below here, too.

Stellar core: "my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth"

2005-08-31T03:38:00.000-04:00

Saw a play this night, Hamlet at Bard on the Beach, with Party the First and guest. This is my second-favourite of Shakespeare's plays, behind (in particular Kenneth Branagh's definitive edition of) Henry V. There was a lot to enjoy; our man Hamlet got to exercise much of his histrionic range and the rest of the cast generally turned in adequate performances with a few glimmers of more. They cut the text so that it finished by 11 after starting at 8. This is pretty short for Hamlet (Branagh's film is five hours), but it seems pretty long, since after Polonius dies (the gentleman playing Polonius seemed to have much fun with the role) with the cuts to the text it's more or less a very long funereal dive to the end of the story. They had a lot of energy in the first half, but some of this seemed to wane (or maybe I did) in the second.

After the play finished there was a talkback session (Bard's regular Tuesday feature) with some of the actors (but not production people). You can imagine that the questions varied from the dull to the plodding ("I noticed that the costumes dated to the 1960s, specifically to 1964" -- here I am paraphrasing, not inventing).The answers to such unprovocative questions were slightly more illuminating than the source material. One answer in particular interested me very much. The actor who played Hamlet said that when he spoke with other actors who had played the character in previous engagements they were reluctant or unable to speak about this, to vocalise their feelings about Hamlet and what he does.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Hamlet is a tremendous canvas awaiting projection by audience, cast, and commentator; it is Hamlet's personal power that makes us want to identify with him, and that makes it a personal identification, indeed.

For my part, I think of Hamlet as largely a fine specimen of humanity who suffers yet from allzumenschlich syndrome. (Lit.: "all too human.") He spends an eternity in desperation, oscillating between the existential ("what dreams may come") and the more raw ontological ("what is Hecuba to he") with raw wounds ("get thee to a nunnery!") displayed between. The madness that he pretends to is pretended only insofar as it is exaggerated: the core of it is real. His clever by-play ("you are a fishmonger"; "if like a crab I could go backwards") is an attempt to escape from this by confusing his interlocuters with equivocation and thus preventing the dangerous questions he has already realised he cannot answer, even attempting to deny that they are valid questions by denying them voice. But, he is still too clever by far to escape self-conscious reflection ("nothing I would more willingly part with, except my life") and he is unwilling to just surrender to nihilistic impulses (evidenced in the haunting repetition: "except my life, except my life, except my life"). Hence the extended conflict. Since all this is obviously an intensely private matter, in what sense can it be brought out? For this Shakespeare gives us some artillery in the play's set-up: a father murdered, supernatural circumstances, a mother's betrayal (Hamlet has obvious Oedipal feelings), estrangement from all his friends (save Horatio). To bring it all together, we rely on Hamlet's interactions with his numerous foils: Horatio, Ophelia, Gertrude, and most importantly Claudius. I save Claudius a special place because he is the only one who Hamlet cannot and should not forgive; moreover he is the only one who really is in opposition to Hamlet in spirit, besides happening to be the cause of the circumstantial ills Hamlet experiences. Therefore Claudius' strength underlies Hamlet's powerlessness and inability to resolve his internal turmoil and exacerbates the cracks along these fault lines.

That, in a paragraph, is why I still think Derek Jacobi has given us the "best Hamlet yet performed" (to borrow a catchphrase from Amadeus) in his 1970's BBC tape -- owing no small debt to Patrick Stewart's Claudius, because Patrick Stewart is the only man who could play Claudius as the titan he needs to be to make the fragmenting of Sir Derek's Hamlet credible, and tragic.

On a completely different note, I wish to register my extreme distaste for the frequency with which I am accosted while waiting for the bus late at night. I have had it with pathetically manufactured sob stories, Tourettes-induced blather, jocular threats, direct requests, star-crossed lovers, and invitations to join the Watchtower Society ("thousand years of peace!"). I don't want to have anything to do with you people. I just want to spend a little time with my friends on the town without remembering why I worry about stepping outside of my house in the first place. I forgive you everything but this. Beggars! It is annoying to give to them and it is annoying not to give to them. That is all.

"Tomorrow" I have to fulfill a promise to tell you about my favourite integer, 37, which is a truly remarkable integer, but I definitely need to sleep between now and then. With the planned cutbacks to the existential meanderings we jumped at the opportunity to just throw in mathematical content. In the meantime you can enjoy the radiant glow of the stellar puns that just burst from me at 0130. (Obviously that doesn't excuse the last post that had a pun on 'stellar'.)

Redemption: "I want to climb a high mountain today"

2005-08-27T19:29:00.000-04:00

It's a happy, reflective melancholy.

I've had a lot of time to think thoughts this summer. Some thoughts I meant to think were thought; others not meant to think, too; some got lost, some couldn't keep up, some became nauseous, some just called for the sherpas and kept climbing. Some we didn't get to -- surprise; summertime is bountiful and sparkling but finite. I don't lack imagination, I wonder if one will ever run out of thoughts to think, or if they keep getting generated, saplings planted in the cracks of fertile minds, faster than one can think them.

Sometimes I just want to take a rest. "Why are my hobbies so demanding?" I ask myself, but I don't bother answering. I could look over and read the titles on the stack of books by my bed, but they've been packed. Asceticism is demanding, asceticism is commanding, but I wouldn't change it. And if a giddy madness falls sharply, at least it passes just as quickly: it is too superfluous to survive an ascetic. I'm not talking about monks' half-starvation diets, I still eat cookies.

I suppose I've been thinking a little about Vancouver recently, the places, the peoples. Last time I left Vancouver, in March, it was only for a few days -- a few hectic and harrowing days -- but, how happy I was to see from the plane the glittering lights in familiar shapes on the ground. Sitting in my fortress, which others might mistake for my bedroom, sometimes it might seem a little distant, but it's about to get more distant, and more thoughts will get more demanding. "Vital energy," my maternal grandfather once told me, "is the sine qua non of a successful career." -- well then! If I understood what he meant, how can things go badly? (Variation on the Socratic paradox: ultimate Platonic prejudice.) And if the name Princeton has cachet born of past success, then it creates its own future success when the next generation wants to earn and be worthy of that cachet, too: so how can one fail with so many good people around? Perhaps I am like Goethe, too conciliatory for real tragedy -- during the day, at least, when the sun shines; but when I'm on the East Coast, the sun keeps shining for three hours more after it sets.

So! "Was Das - das Lieben?" will ich zum Tode sprechen. "Wohlan! Noch Ein Mal!" ("Was that life?" I want to say to death. "Well then! Once more!") Take stock and then -- En avante! Up the Republic! That's my war cry.

So I sit here telling myself my past. And I bake cookies. Let me tell you how: some secrets shouldn't vanish altogether with the comings and goings of aircraft. I thought I might conjure a fanciful name for these, something like "Aztec Ambrosia," or maybe "It Didn't Make Me Stronger," but that's maybe a bit much, fusing mythologies willy-nilly, so let's stick with:

Double Chocolate Chip Cookies
1 1/4 c. margarine
2 c. sugar, or a little less
2 eggs ("large")
3 tsp. vanilla (15 ml)
2 c. flour
1 tsp. baking soda (5 ml)
3/4 c. cocoa
semi-sweet chocolate chips (200-250 grams)
Add ingredients in this order in a bowl. Mix at each stage. I do it manually with a fork (which demands some rigour with the wrist), in which case it is helpful to add the dry ingredients piecemeal and mix in between, but you can find your prefered method. Drop by teaspoons onto ungreased cookie sheets. (One teaspoon in each hand is very convenient.) Bake at 350 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course) for about 12 minutes. Good the first day, excellent the second and beyond. Makes 32 cookies. Store in glazed ceramic Austrian snowman.

I'm kidding about the 32 cookies thing. I just can't remember the last time it didn't come out to 32 cookies. (About the snowman thing, too.) Probably I'm unconsciously acting to keep it that way, by now. Put on a CD you wanted to listen to while baking; from start to last-tray-out is about an hour. My father's first piece of cooking advice to his children was: Pay attention! But this is pretty fool-proof, unless you put the cookies in the oven and then go to write something for a while and lose track of time.

I think I have to go now.

Postscript, that night.

Here you can see the Austrian snowmen: the jolly, fat one on the right holds cookies and the equally jolly, slightly less fat one on the left just dangles his legs and enjoys his hot cocoa. Before you make fun of them, as so many cads have been wont to do, you should know that my mother brought these back from a Christmas village in Austria.

You might justly wonder how it is that suddenly I have so little to do that I'm posting pictures of my cookie jar on the Internet. If someone said this to me, I might quibble that it is only one picture. What can I say? The walls are getting bare here. The last books are packed; I kept only three to take with me for the crossing: an anthology of science fiction, Kaufmann's Portable Nietzsche, and Šafarevic's Basic Algebraic Geometry. The problem is that I can't do math late at night. I'll never be able to get to sleep with ghosts of quasiprojective varieties floating and flickering in twisted knots through my brain. (No, knot theory doesn't come in here, that was just descriptive prose.) Fortunately, I seem to have the next week just about booked up.

Inaugural Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award

2005-08-24T23:55:00.000-04:00

We should be able to do sums, Donald Knuth writes in his parvum opus Concrete Mathematics, even on our less creative days. (That book has two co-authors, too, Graham and Patashnik. Somehow I keep calling it Knuth's book.) What he's extolling his students to is a level of technique that obviates the need for divination in finding a path to the problem's solution. This is a fundamental step to mastering anything, because creative expression always hinges on an excellent grasp of the technique of the medium.

To this end, I shall indulge in a Regular Feature, Sun-Drunken's first, (although I threatened one earlier, if you're keeping score, which I've not yet had occasion to revisit). Shame, by the way, to you if you thought I was going to say I was going to learn how to write properly. The famous physicist Lord Kelvin (yes, that Kelvin) wrote:

Quaternions came from Hamilton... and have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way. Vector is a useless survival... and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.

In honour of his getting one out of two, and being hilariously mistaken on count of the one he missed, I'd like to establish the Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award, given to "those entities that in the estimation of the award committee have never been of the slightest use to any creature."

Today's recipient gets my mountain goat, and they'd take my other goats, too, if they knew how. No doubt this problem will continue to hold their attention for years yet to come. But don't think they're getting this prestigious inaugural award just for future anxiety, they've already caused much. In recognition of their undying capacity to create labyrinthine obfuscation, I'd like to award the first KUCA to the united bureaucrats of New Jersey. The award citation makes note of, inter alia, their request that international students fill out tax documents with deadlines set before said students can acquire an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number), their refusal to acknowledge the utility of MMR immunization that occurs before the age of one year (contrary to, for example, medical practice in British Columbia), and their inability to promptly send letters threatening fines and other action against people who fail to comply with their artificial deadlines. That, of course, is just the stuff that happened today.

Congratulations, guys.

On a lighter, fluffier, even, note, I note that no one's even noted the fluffiness of the light atop the page. (Before you ask, I'm not eligible for a KUCA.) The background is from the galleries of the Cloud Appreciation Society, the existence of which I think you'll agree is just reasonable enough that I don't have to remind you that I'm not making this stuff up. It's a striking shot of the rooftops of the world. Their manifesto, (nevermind the cloud-inspired poetry), is even more striking.

Redemption: "for that I must descend to the depths"

2005-08-24T02:08:00.000-04:00

I think I have made an error.

What kind of fool tells his audience that they should go away and return in two weeks or so because in the meantime things are going to be very, very boring? Zarathustra tells his disciples to leave and denounce him, but he's a mighty philosopher-poet. I'm just a hack job going out with an accidental whimper.

Clearly I need to rectify this blunder. Rectifying blunders is a slippery proposition, mostly because "rectify" is a worse idea than "ameliorate." In chess it is well-known that the most dangerous time, psychologically speaking, is just after you realise you've made the mistake. The impulse is to correct it by lashing out, with brutal violence hatched from desperation and chagrin, but the patient man knows that a minor misstep is not enough to ruin the position and that this is the moment to pull it together, man! and settle in for the long haul, play it stingy, rather than risk everything on a shoddy throw of the dice -- a dice-throw likely to fail, since the blunder has already put the gambler at a disadvantage.

I always say: "I'm a patient man." In as Croat-like an accent as I can muster, "I'mma pay-shyunt mann," I tell them.

Still, I have just the thing -- So: "as close to the gutter as I'm likely to get." Avert the eyes of the little ones, the sun is about to go under.

On a lark I did a Google search on Sun-Drunken's titular quotation. Pause a moment, selah, as I did not, and wonder what might come up. What I found -- if you guessed occultist textbooks and gay erotica, you were bang on. Apparently everyone else had the sense to keep their prose blue or red but not both at once.

The Google search summary left a tantalising dangling simile: "...set his locks on fire; his skin was sun drunken like a..." -- like a what, now? What's the end of that sentence? Ancient Bacchanallian reveller? Avatar of Eros? I have it -- icon of Icarus, apt and alliterative. But no: then it would not be "a" but "an." Instead they had a Mesopotamian theme going on:

"Enkidu!" My soul mate.... The light, now a pleasant, soft crimson, set his locks on fire; his skin was sun drunken like a peach.

Oh. So, anyway, that's "sun-drunken." What about "quivering" and "delight"? Well, naturally someone was saying something with "quivering" voice, dicit Google, and if you want to know what went with "delight," you can look it up yourself. I didn't bother. I couldn't quote it to anyone, anyway, for obvious reasons.

So that's where I am now: somewhere south of zealots and smut-mongers. Huzzah.

Back to high-minded parables next time, lads. That's how we're going to climb this valley.

Stellar matters: "light seeking light doth light of light beguile"

2005-08-22T16:12:00.000-04:00

There's much afoot these days, but little interesting; therefore this space will be commensurately uninteresting for the duration. I just thought I'd like to get a head-start: one less thing to worry about working/not-working on the other end. So not so much time for the stuff we like: καιρος πολεμου και καιρος ειρηνης, but I promise καιρος πολεμου will be back.

("A time for war and a time for peace," by the way. Eventually I'll figure out how to make the putative erudition less obtrusive. πολεμου, polemou, cognate with polemic.)

Saw a play the other day: Love's Labour's Lost at the local Shakespeare festival, Bard on the Beach. They've got an idyllic setting with professional production and a few actors who can be relied upon to turn in a good performance. Even when I can't manage to get to the opera I still see more than one play there each summer: a very agreeable custom.

I had planned actually to see all four offered this year but it seems, alas, that I won't be seeing As You Like It after all, since it's sold out for the balance of the season and I don't have tickets. It was to be the first I was to see this year; that got postponed unavoidably at the last moment; then I was to see it with a different party and hence cancelled with the first; then organisation broke down with the Party the Second; meanwhile I arranged to see the remaining play on the schedule with Party the Third, having determined to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with Party the First; now I even have tickets for Hamlet with Party the First but no tickets with Party the Second because it's sold out. In other words, if I weren't telling this story chronologically, Party the Second would not be Party the Second.

Since Party the First is so proactive you might wonder how Party the Third even got their foot in the door. The answer is that Party the First was not interested in seeing this particular play. Apparently it's a somewhat vulgar comedy, inferior in this regard even say to Merry Wives of Windsor. On the other hand, this one doesn't have a clown prancing around masquerading as John Falstaff, as Harold Bloom suggests happened in that one. Speaking of Harold Bloom, he has many fine things to say about Love's Labour's Lost, specifically about the splendour of the language, which is why I wanted to see it anyway. For myself I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, modulo one gag I could have done without. Berowne-in-the-tree is a fantastic scene, a mechanism emulated well by writers of the present age's better farces. I had to clear that up, by the way, so that Party the Third realises they're not the third-string guests.

Speaking of Party the Third, I should stop speaking of them in circumlocution, but I don't know if they want to get introduced to the public on this page. I have one or two pictures but I know they strongly value their privacy. This, Party the Third, is the reason why one member of our party of four doesn't appear here even by implication except now; you two can file a complaint. That's my brother, right, and "Mom and a Bonsai" up there. If part of the background looks very strange, that's because the photos got touched up a little. They were too dark originally, for shame of me. I'll know better next time.

(I've gone batty, by the way, trying to get those pictures and captions to look one-quarter-decent on the page. Someone give me a hint. The "preview" function here apparently doesn't support some things it should.)

Things to do today. Devise an optimal internal structure for packed boxes and pack them according to this scheme. Construct an appropriate header for the page. Find something to eat. Compute the co-ordinate ring of the affine plane minus a point. (Find out how to write in blackboard-bold font.)

Incipit Metablogging

2005-08-20T16:40:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to learn all the various things which a man must learn to make his web page presentable. I'm not hugely keen on this font so probably it will change as soon as I (a) find a better one; and (b) determine exactly what the list of fonts in the blog template is there for. I suppose I figure out what font is being used here and then that's the one to replace? There's a down-side to this program -- my already chatty posts will start to look downright water-fat. Still, if it improves readability -- on which subject these margins are way too big. Lots of work yet.

I'm also trying to find a nice way to upload pictures. I did get myself a nice camera recently with the intent that I could share pictures. There's a B-grade solution in place at the moment, whereby I use Blogger's sponsored "Hello" utility to simultaneously publish and upload to a storage space, then delete the unwanted post but keep access to the uploaded picture. Obviously this is unsatisfactory. I think the A-grade solution is to find out what kind of webspace I get from my future employer. (For some reason it has become customary to give webspace to students. For, I don't know, their huge curricula vitae or something like that.) In the meantime, we cope.

There's now a picture of yours truly, right, in case you forgot what I look like. It's supposed to brighten up the page. It's one of a couple of portraits I took, a first stab at the Sun-Drunken theme. Apparently huge contrast in brightness is fundamental to this theme. The problem with this pic is that if you look at it the wrong way it looks like I'm in pain -- which I am, since that sun was awfully bright; but if you look at it the right way it's vaguely beatific, and that meshes with the theme. Or maybe both do, and I'm just worried about having a picture of someone in pain sitting around here. In the small size it seems to be less that way.

Anyway, let me know what you think. And post 'hello' in the comments here, even if you have no opinion on the pic, just to sign in, as it were. (Postscript. Somehow the comments got set to registered-user-only. Thought I fixed that. Anyway, it should allow "anonymous" remarks now.)

(Further postscript. The A-grade solution has been implemented, thanks to the IT department at Princeton and the miracle of the VPN.)

(Post-further-postscript. This post is fast getting out of date. The margins got moved, a more slippery operation than you might think. Never mind the bragging, I'm still flush from victory. The new font is Garamond, which I chose more or less because I didn't want one of the n fonts that all look like Arial except for slight variations on spacing between letters. Still, it's pretty readable and the italicised text looks pretty good. It's supposed to have character, but not too much, unlike those n² silly novelty fonts that look flashy but have actually no conceivable use. We'll see how it goes. I no longer like how the banner up top looks. Maybe I can replace it with a tastefully snazzy .jpg. -- Saints preserve us, it's turned into a webdesignpublishing and neologising machine!)

Schemes: "supra petram ponere sedem fundamenti"

2005-08-19T14:42:00.000-04:00

It means: "--to build foundations on stone," ("cum sit enim proprium/viro sapienti," "if it is the way of the wise man," is the couplet prior), but mainly it's just fun to say. (Go ahead, no one's listening.)

(There's a trend here that needs to be broken, quickly, because if every post around here was such a heavy tome of allegories and allusions that one wondered if there was going to be a quiz on it at the end -- that might have gravitas but it wouldn't be Sun-Drunken.)

BKF Boxmaker I call myself; I make boxes, then I fill them. It's the life of the prole for me. "Slumming it." I even sing songs to myself, working songs, drinking sounds. Tam pro papa quam pro rege/Bibunt omnes sine lege, that sort of thing, you know, classics.

They're sturdy boxes, I just follow the directions, mostly, (the first one wasn't quite right), and at the end I feel good that I Built Something. Then I fill them; this is a packing problem, because every cubic centimeter costs money. (Sort of. Since the stuff currently being packed -- books -- probably weighs more than the "box weight," which is used only, I gather, to charge for volume for underweight boxes, potentially there is no cost incurred against slightly inefficiency. However, if there's something that doesn't fit into the boxes, it gets left out; so that encourages me to be dilligent.)

Needless to say this gives some time to reflect on the emptiness of my mind, or the outer world, or whatever. And hatch schemes. Schemes are an important mechanism to cope with the world around me. The notion is that if you can anticipate, plan ahead, make contingencies, then you can overcome through the power of understanding what initially seems very daunting; and to some of us, almost everything seems daunting, or at least potentially troublesome, hence, the schemes. Or else it's just a bad habit, compulsive planning, that I picked up somewhere, maybe playing chess.

If you recall, I did visit Princeton this March. I met lots of people there, other prospective graduate students, some of whom doubtless will be accepting this offer of admission. The problem is that I don't remember all their names. This could lead to social awkwardness. So what do you do? One obvious thing to do is to play the Pronoun Game until you've eavesdropped enough to save yourself. Another is to always introduce yourself first, a kindness to them since they've probably forgotten yours, and hope they reciprocate -- they have to, really. This latter sounds like a well-adjusted plan to me.

Here's a less obvious game-theoretic type possibility. The fundamental problem is that I do remember some names but have forgotten others. So, some people get the Full Point and some people get Zero Points, and it's this asymmetry that's unappealing. It would be better if everyone got something, even if no one got everything. So the plan is: Never volunteer a name. Instead assert that you remember some fraction of names, maybe fifty percent, but that you don't want to slight those in the bottom half. Now perhaps everyone will think: Fifty percent I got a Full Point, fifty percent I got Zero Points. That's the same as everyone getting a Half Point. But, better, it might not be a zero-sum game. Since any person has no trouble remembering their own name, they always feel bad forgetting someone else's just for this reason -- how hard is it to remember a name?! So I think people are more likely to put themselves in the Remembered group, earning us even a Three-Quarter-Point average or something. Score!

Or they might think I've forgotten everything and am just covering, badly. If I give any name unprompted, too, the percentages change. Worse, they might not think it's a funny story. Maybe they'd think the game-theoretic exposition was a blatant and vulgar attempt to gain favour with bad jokes.

So, those schemes, they can go rotten without ever being put into practice, and then where are you? Just with a broken scheme.

-- well, more, a known-broken scheme! -- huh! I guess that means it's time to pack more boxes. Sing along with me: stultus ego comparor, fluvio labenti: "--then I am a fool to them, [building on] a flowing stream."

Genesis: "quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight"

2005-08-18T01:55:00.000-04:00

Someone told me that a beginning is a very delicate time. Someone else told me that a rose by another name might sound more thorny.

So let me briefly tell the story of the quotation that titles this page: "quivering through sun-drunken delight."

For this was the original question; first there was void, then the idea, then the idea got named, stamped, catalogued, and indexed. It could have been anything. From what to choose? It had to be literature of some kind, because it had to be something with which someone else could in principle identify (say if they read the book alluded to), something that could draw in the audience. At the same time it had to be personal, because that's what's interesting.

So what could it be? The first and most obvious course to me was to turn to my old chum Robert Graves. Unfortunately, there is no way to make "I, BKF" sound like it didn't come from an illiterate spambot, and anyway someone I know has already spelunked this cavern, the blogging thief. For those paying extra attention I will say that "BKF the God" although appealing to my vanity would be worse. There ends the infatuation with Robert Graves, barring the possibilty of working "boiled asparagus" in somehow.

Others passed in file for review, consideration, and rejection. I am going to study math, math is huge, math is Platonist voyeurism, but there are hardly any poetic mathematicians and no mathematical poets (more than Euclid have since looked on beauty bare). So it cannot be math -- and anyway math only draws in half the audience, it neglects the key purposes of the title (and does not even describe what I imagine will be a great amount of the content here). Same goes for any number of other niches which maybe I will speak on later, or anyway claim to have considered through my tortured but numinous search for The Idea-in-the-Void's Name -- it will be an easy segue into an extemporaneous disquisition. (Birth of a regular feature.)

Except for one, which hit with the force of divine revelation --

In the original German it is (I think): "da flog ich wohl schaudernd, ein Pfeil, durch sonnentrunkenes Entzuecken" (I say I think because I hardly understand German and Babelfish is truly rotten at making sense of even simple prose) -- in translation (thank you, Walter Kaufmann!): "I flew, quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight."

It is one of my favourite epigram-fragments from Nietzsche's Zarathustra. It summons up all the golden things I wanted in a title. Just reading it I laugh, it is luminous, prankish in its luminosity, something the rejects before couldn't muster at the muster. And -- because of what I just said, what I am saying -- that makes it personal -- hence this post, "und Gott sprach."

Some more context to the fragment:

...My wise longing cried and laughed thus out of me -- born in the mountains, verily, a wild wisdom -- my great broad-winged longing! And often it swept me away and up and far, in the middle of my laughter; and I flew, quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight, away into distant futures which no dream had yet seen, into hotter souths than artists ever dreamed of, where gods in their dances are ashamed of all clothes -- to speak in parables.... ["On Old and New Tablets," Zarathustra III, W. Kaufmann, trans.]

If you didn't think that [this post] was brief, if you thought it was humourless, colourless except in the ultraviolet, in a word, turgid -- forebear; it's been a while since I've done this. But things are getting better: I'm an editor, not just a typer, I can punch it up. Things are getting better all the time. That's our motto at Sun-Drunken.

Ecce homo: "that which does not kill me--"

2005-08-18T01:30:00.000-04:00

Dear friends,

Greetings and salutations!

I am not (I will commence by astonishing) a sociable or gregarious man. I say little of what I live and would rather say less; half of it was dull enough the first time around, and the rest shivered like a lonely puppy in the cold mud. But I will shortly be stranded, still tremulous, in an island fiefdom of Canadiana surrounded by murky waters; and no light should pass from there, not even the most colourfully tortured metaphor, if we did not make special measures to keep it safe. Moreover it would be crass to neglect my friends so! (Family is always implicitly included in that word -- now explicitly.) Perhaps something interesting will happen on the way, too. So I tell myself and you my friends stories of what passes.

And I tell myself -- myself. I cannot tell if I am a taciturn man who wishes to be garrulous or the reverse. Perhaps I will find out.

I remain, even when out of sight, yours,

Balin "BKF" Fleming