Nachtblogging: "deeper than day had been aware"

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.

Domicile Tour Extravaganza 2006 continues

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.

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

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?

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

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.

1. 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!
   
2. 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....
   
3. 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.

What we want, or, Election Day

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

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

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."

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

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.

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

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.