Whuz y'r name?

 (see also ChaosBook.blogspot.com/2024/12/how-i-got-my-unpronouncable-name.html)

Margy requests: "I am publishing the audio edition of The Cosmic Blueprint by Paul Davies. You are mentioned in the book

"The new paradigm amounts to turning 300 years of entrenched philosophy on its head. To use the words of physicist Predag Cvitanovic [relative of Predrag Cvitanović?] 'Junk your old equations and look for guidance in the repeating patterns of clouds'. It is in short nothing less than a brand new start in the description of nature"

and I would greatly appreciate it if you could please email me the correct pronunciation of your full name."

Here is how I pronounce it: 



and here is how Google transcribes this:

Tony, My mother just don't know. Hope to pronounce my name. Hey, what's up. Bye, but she's down, so I will try my best. The problem is that my first name has to wall and ceiling and I can't pronounce it myself. Yes, I guess. Talk to the claim deed from my biological clock. I'd like to give me a call. Yes, glad, that sweet. Tom credit check, see passage.

I love Google voice, it's better than having a cell phone - it emails me voice messages. The best thing is the transcription. For my future merry widow it transcribes things like (excuse the formatting errors)

Sara:      "I'll have a busy day"   gvoice: "I wish you would die" Predrag: "Hi Predrag"               "Hi pathetic" Predrag: "Will you?"               "Love you" Gene:     "Hey Predrag, it's Gene"               "hey Babe, it's Jean" Katrin:    "Hi Predrag, it's Katrin"               "Hi gets cobson" Ed:         "Predrag!"               "Hey brother" Sara:      "Hi, Predrag Cvitanovic"               "Hi, but in the back see if you haven't reached" Sara:      "Hi, Predrag Cvitanovic, this is your wife"               "Hi today that state that it's DC's, Joe Weiss" Gunilla:   "Hi Predrag, it's your long lost friend Gunilla"               "Hi, padzo H, this issue as long as I said, I'm going to know" A nurse: "Hello Mr. Cvitanovic, this is Rosalyn"               "Hello Missus. It's on a. This is Robert"  A sales person: "Good morning Mr. Cvitanovic"               "Good morning Mrs. Print out of reach" Diego:    "Hi Predrag"               "Hey Derek" Ed:         "the ophthalmologist"               "the office for malicious" Sara:       "transferred to oncology"               "it doesn't hurt to apologies" Sara:      "driving me crazy"               "hey Casey"

Sara:      "because I miss you"               "because Denise you" Sara:      "sleepiness"               "sweet business" Sara:      "kisses"               "He's Just" Sara:      "it's a mess"               "eat a massage" Sara:      "it's Ellen's birthday"               "A status birds" Sara:      "recovering from the dinner"               "recovering from the died" Sara:      "I'm back home"              "I have dot com" Sara:      "as soon as you can"               "that's nasty and" Sara:      "welcome back, kiss kiss"              "comes back. Thank you. Steve" Mitchell: "if I exist"               "the fight process" Barbara: "Itamar's coming"               "Hey. Mars coming" Gene: "would be just Clara"               "could be a stickler"  Katrin:   "how grown up Clara and Alexander have become"               "how the drawn up by mix up, but if not I have to come" Katrin:    "got back on Monday evening from our travels"               "got back on Monday evening from Allah. Travet..." Gunilla:   "Hi Predrag, it's your long lost friend Gunilla"               "Hi, padzo H, this issue as long as I said, I'm going to know" Siri:        "Happy birthday to you"              "Hi he has been you know" Sara:      "took the candidate out for dinner"               "took the copy that that 50" Sara:      "I'm on my way downtown. Hugs and kisses"               "I would be dot doctor Kai. Thank you sir bye bye" Dusko:    "it's 9 o'clock in Chicago"               "Center call think" Predrag:  "Hi Evans nothing of any urgency It's Predrag  I'm just calling to find out how                 Charity's doing.  Whenever. "                 "HI. I'm on the nothing. Overmilitarization brother I'm just calling to find out what                  services and Linda"

         Predrag: "Google Voice"                        "global lawyers"

Predrag: "working like it should?"               "black and black shirt"

Pretty sharp, nein? I do miss Denise very much. While I am at it, on a totally unrelated topic, my prayers are answered. I just have to fall on my head, and when and if I come back, I'll be speaking fluent German: Croatian teen wakes from coma speaking fluent German. You can write anything you want about me, just spell my name right.

Wikipedia criticism, and why it fails to matter - What Is Research?

Wikipedia criticism, and why it fails to matter - What Is Research?

Extreme Ice Survey - time lapse photography of glaciers melting

Extreme Ice Survey :: Home Page

This surfer is no Einstein

Hasten Jason, El Naschie Watch

[8 Mar 2010]
"The magic square did it! His colleague Prof. P. Cvitanović, a student of another extragalactic like El Naschie is saying the same."

Shirin Neshrat "Passage."

Lolo writes: Blott spent a couple of days up here in the city with me. We went to the SFMOMA and saw the "Fisher Exhibit." There was a film piece by an Iranian woman, Shirin Neshrat. It was called "Passage."  Blott couldn't take it. She left and I stayed to see the entire piece. It was incredibly moving. It had a Philip Glass score and was approximately 15 minutes long. If there is any way that you can view it online, I suggest you do it. It was so powerful that I started to cry uncontrollably. The film was of a funereal procession in a very stark and foreboding environment, where the desert meets the sea. There were 150 men dressed in black carrying a shrouded body on a stretcher in a highly choreographed manner all around the dessert. In the distance, a circle of women in chadors dig through the rough sand and rock with their bare hands creating a burial mound in which to put the corpse. A young girl sits  in the foreground mimicking the circle of women building a miniature rock mound with small stones, then a wall of fire is ignited and unites the entire piece.

It sure is hard. Death is always hard. The inevitable. No escape. 

Greetings from atop Mount Davidson/self portrait with skull head /HALLOWEEN my favorite time of year/.

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

These are not good times for some of our dearest friends. The title of Blot's email "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury" says it all:

SEYTON

The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

A bit of Atlanta economics in numbers

In "NY hedge fund partner trying to convert Atlanta ‘red' land into green space | ajc.com" Michael Messner, a 1976 Georgia Tech civil engineering graduate, says:

Over the past 10 years, government policies pushed vast over-investment in useless, unproductive commercial and residential development. Total real estate values reached $45 trillion, then fell by $15 trillion; the whole U.S. stock market is worth $14 trillion.

Atlanta’s retail vacancy rate is 13 percent, one of the highest in the nation. The Atlanta region has vacant office space equivalent to 24 empty Bank of America towers, the largest office building in the Southeast. Over 30 percent of homes with mortgages were in negative equity at the end of 2009, leading to one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country.

Because of this, Georgia leads the nation in bank failures. The city has lost over 30,000 construction jobs in the last three years. Atlanta has vacant lots selling for 25 cents on the dollar. Commercial real estate transactions are down 90 percent from 2006, so there is no liquidity in the market.

And Atlanta is park-poor. Less than 5 percent of its area is parkland; it is among the lowest metros in green space per resident.

Hearding CATS?

Hearding CATS? Sure , I know all about it.

Brainless Fish in Topless Bar

One of persistent urban legends eating brains of MBAs is the story of critters that allegedly eat their own brains out, in a manner of high academic administrators. Debunked here:
Brainless Fish in Topless Bar | Fast Company

This blog is above average

Estimated percentage of all existing blogs that have not been updated in four months: 94%

Asperger's out

To my personal playwright, of K. und K. fame:

Got a gifted undergraduate - mathematically inclined (ie, what they diagnose as autistic spectral disorder nowadays). We look at each other in silence, mostly. Man to man kinda thing, no wonder no woman wants to do theoretical physics.

K:

Is the more fashionable label Asperger's Syndrome? I've heard it has a certain cache among autistics. I wish there were a way to tell if someone actually had autism or simply doesn't know how to talk to live people. Maybe he was raised on a lonely, isolated farm in Kansas with emotionally remote, deaf-mute parents, and the only one who truly loved him was a cow. Just a theory.

sorry K, Asperger's out - it had a cachet, and we were all trying to get it as a diagnosis, but the threshold is high - gotta be Dirac or Grothendick. Now it exists no more as a diagnosis, it's subsumed in the autistic spectrum. The magic is gone, bit like the magic is gone out of what used to be PanAm, but is now the Delta business class.

In March or so blah-blah K had an idea he was going to tell me about. I've taken a number in the queue with K so he can talk at me in a long uninterrupted stream. I'm married so I am trained, just gotta say yes o yes at regular intervals to indicate I'm still awake.

K:

Jokes don't travel well on email (or Facebook, as I've learned to my chagrin more than once). Besides, you can never expect a man to joke about his cow.

all of the contents of all my blogs are strictly confidential, and can be only used as a fodder for scientist characters in plays, mercilessly dissected.

Anyway, report form the trenches: HE is just sitting there bent over His desk, not torturing any Japanese. Depressed? Hard to know, we men do not get into emotions.

But today is an exceptional day, as I have - for reasons that fill my chest with pride - 4-wheels unpacked and ready to roll. Do you want me to pick up some pizzas to feed the brood, or they all have prior violin / soccer/ kung-fu / German literature club / Eminem support group/ ... appointments tonight?

K:

Doublet inspection day? Pizza would be a good thing, and well appreciated, especially by the Sophia doublet. This weekend?

Looking at my weekend schedule I only see vasty deep of existential angst - yet another weekend where instead of catching up I have sunk even deeper into impossibility of dealing with but an ever shrinking fraction of things that must be taken care off. Issue orders. Doublets have very firm opinions about such things, so to be specific:

You call the pizzeria of Ἁγία Σοφία's desire and order those and only ingredients that Doublet will consume, and I will unpack the four-wheeler (two wheels good, four wheels bad) and pick up the consumables on the way. The usual rules apply: adults converse about any fascinating thing in the universe, except for the small mammals at hand. They are hard not to notice even in the best of families. No dipping to 10 year olds IQs, OK?

K:

I would love to increase eternal interaction with my mother. Unfortunately I don't know how to contact her. But, speaking of the living nonAsperger's folk, I'll order from Athens pizza, if you want, though we're closer to a Mellow Mushroom.

Hey, speaking of plays, I'm tentatively starting a play about a humanoid-appearing robot head. Yeah, I know, sounds like fun, but it will be I think a play about how we form attachments, how we anthropomorphize, and how we grieve. And a comedy, of course.

Isn't this what we mean by "Talking Head?" Whatever. I'll drive from Virginia Highlands and pick up the pizza, say when and where. Should we take the Doublets to National Coming Out Day on Saturday October 10?

Next stop, Croatia

Happy 2^2*3*5

The end of the world as we know it

The end of the world is neigh.

Correct attribution is hard, especially for the past

As mathematician and golfing visionary Doug Arnold wrote 3:33AM on Jun 10, 2010 (and I have archived the exact email, for the future historians of Google urban myths)

"Correct attribution is hard, especially for the past."

Doug does not do pro sports, I threw in the golfing reference as in US you have to be a sports celeb to gain street cred as a source of quotes. But he is a pro, and we are grateful for him for much other than golfing, see for example this.

Often one reads that Niels Bohr (or even Yogi Berra AKA "I never said the most of the things I said") said that

"It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future."

Anglo-centered webpages (see, for example, letterfromhere.blogspot.com and larry.denenberg.com) ascribe the quote to everyone and her Anglo-Saxon mother.

W. J. Moore, in Schrödinger, Life and Thought (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1989), p. 320 refers to this as an “old Danish proverb” that Bohr was fond of quoting. All Danes, however, know that it was the cartoonist Storm P. who said it first:

»Det er svært at spå, især om fremtiden«.

Well, not so. The gist of what follow (to you ignorant of Danish - much is lost here in translation) is that it goes back to 1930's and 1918, and presumably earlier than that. In old fashioned way, a source for the claim is provided: MP in the Danish Parliament during late 1930's. Steincke, K.K., "Farvel og Tak", p. 227. 1948 / Vogel-Jørgensen, T., "Bevingede ord" p. 124 (Gad 1990).

So it was not Storm P. Then it is attributed to Markus M. Ronner (though Anonymous in the comments below says "The quote can't be attributed to Markus Ronner -- he was only born in 1938."), where the track -for the moment- is lost in the fog of Germanic citations.

Which brings us to the general problem of correct attribution. Sir Michael Berry puts it this way:

But one ought to get things in perspective, and so I offer (not entirely seriously) three laws. First, there is the fact that it is hard to achieve justice in the attribution of scientific ideas, and this leads to

Arnold's Law (after the famous Russian mathematician): No discovery is credited to the right person. (Of course this applies to Arnold's Law too.)

The second law says that it is not only hard but impossible to achieve justice, because it seems that one can always find a precursor to any thought. So we have

Berry's Law: Nothing is ever discovered for the first time. (This too is self-referential.)

Here now is the third law, which I offer not because it applies to us (nor do the others, really) but because it is deep. It is a quotation from a philosopher:

Whitehead's Law: To come close to a true theory and to realise its precise application are two very different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.

Danish sources:
LUNDSKOV.DK :: Citater

Ifølge Politiken, Storm P. sagde ikke: »Det er svært at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden«, det er et af de citater, man ikke kender ophavsmanden til.
• Ifølge K.K.Steinckes erindringsbog ”Farvel og Tak”,(s.227, 1948) var det en sprogblomst som faldt i Folketinget 1935-39.
• I T.Vogel-Jørgensens ”Bevingede ord” (Gad, 1990, side 124) oplyses bl.a., at Steincke på forespørgsel har oplyst, at han ikke huskede hvem der havde sagt det.
• Ordsproget omtales også i en den norske ”Bevingede ord”. Her skriver man: ” Det er vanskelig å spå - især om fremtiden, setning som har vært tillagt den da. forf. R. Storm Petersen. Dette er ikke riktig, og opphavet er usikkert. Ifølge den da. politiker K. K. Steincke (1880-1963) i Farvel og Tak, 227 (1948) er den falt i det da. Folketinget i tiden 1935-39, men verken Steincke eller andre har kunnet angi opphavsmannen. ”
• I art. ”9250”, i det norske tidsskrift Samtiden 1918, siger prof. Fredrik Paasche: ”Det er en vanskelig sak å spå om fremtiden.” At Paasche ikke bruker den vanligste formen, eller føyer til ”som bekjent” el.l., tyder på at sentensen er yngre enn 1918.”
• I ”Den store citatbog” af J.B. Holmgård (Reitzels forlag, 2.oplag 1993, s.118), er citatet ”Det er svært at spå, især om fremtiden” tilegnet Markus M.Ronner m.fl.

Fight jetlag by not sleeping

SmarterTravel.com says:

Fight jetlag by not sleeping. The secret to fighting jetlag has been discussed by lots of travel experts, but we found the common advice—to stay awake until night falls in your new destination—to be unhelpful. “We have found that a shower and a short nap (no more than 2 hours) after landing is just the trick. Then we head out, enjoy the afternoon and evening, have a good night's sleep and are good-to-go! Check when booking hotels about early check-in, or even pay for the night before, so the room is available as soon as you land. Money well spent!” I’ve tried both methods, and for me, the mythbusters are absolutely right: A short nap and a shower is the perfect remedy to a long, sleepless flight.

The best years of our lives

                                                     Waltham, MA - May 2010

For my niece Maia's Brandeis commencement

we had a family lunch in a nice, spacious Elephant Walk restaurant, wide enough that the whole family sat along one long table. Maia in the middle, and at the far right the grandpa Jerome, his wife and their girlfriend. They were laughing, giggling and having a great time, so I went over to sit with the three of them: 94, 95 and 96.

I was in my 60's so I wanted to know what to expect in the years ahead.

They were emphatic, all three: The absolutely best years of life are the 70's. When you are 70 you are relieved of the hum-drum obligations of adulthood, free to do what you want to do, still full of energy and at the top of your game. The 80's are a bit creaky - many small malfunctions. 

The 90's? Nothing to recommend.

2^6

The Facebook, my Gawd? I've never had so many people remember my birthday. Three screenfulls of gmail inbox scrolling continuously like a screen saver.

Windbag Senior says: "Wait till the senior moments start. (I've been having them for years:2^5.)"

I agree - 32 is such wonderful age. Talkin' bout my generation? As to the symptoms... Constantly running to pee, having bowel movements at oddest times, beautiful girls looking through you as one would look through a train window - you have to admire my courage, [this to Rock'n'roll Dreams, who could not understand why I bother to carry on, already in 1978] to survive all that for so long.

2^6 is a good number, in base 64 it is 10, so I got to blow out one lit candle, and blow out one imagined candle standing for zero. Half of the Indians at the dinner were Jewish, so the cake was Passover cake, made of matzo flour. Really good.

Next day I windbagged my way through two lectures at Tufts. Under the portrait of Norbert Wiener as a 13 year old graduate.

We count our blessings.

Grothendieck has spoken: what now?

This declaration by Alexandre Grothendieck, has been placed on the homepages of the Grothendieck Circle (in French), and Ferment Magazine (in English):

Declaration of my intention to refuse permission to allow my works to be published

I have no intention of publishing, or republishing, any work or text of which I am the author, in any form whatsoever, in electronic or print media, whether it be in the form of entire works or extracts, whether or not they be texts of a scientific or personal character, or any other kind, or in the form of personal letters addressed to others - as well as all translations of texts of which I am the author.

All editions or transmission of such texts which have been produced in the past without my express permission, or shall be made in the future as long as I am alive, which will or has been done in opposition to my will, as it is precisely expressed herein, will be deemed illegitimate in my eyes.

To the degree that I become aware of them, I will insist to the makers of these pirate editions, or any other publications including, without my express permission, texts from my own hand (apart from possible citations of a few lines at most), that they immediately withdraw these works from the marketplace; that the directors of libraries holding copies of my works, that these works be removed at once.

If my intentions as an author, as clearly expressed here, are treated as dead-letter, then let the shame of their contempt for me fall upon the heads of those responsible for those illegitimate editions, and on the directors of the libraries that harbor them. (From the moment that one or the other be informed of my intentions)

Made at my residence January 3, 2010 AG

Google.com/voice: 404 IT STINX

OK, I admit it: I never liked phones. I tried to live without one but having a wife and no phone is not possible. Actually, even before that - I moved into Livjaegergade without phone, but one day Carsten got so annoyed that he ordered one for me. As one fifth of Danes share the same name, and rest the remaining dozen names, they use their profession to distinguish themselves in the phone book. I got "fa." as a suffix, and an irate call from a ladyfrom the phone company to complain that I was misrepresenting myself, as I was no "fabrikant" (factory owner). Took me a while to get her to accept that I was a "fremmed arbejder" (foreigner worker), but she eventually gave up, and "fa." I stayed for next twenty years, with phone numbers everywhere: Copenhagen, New York, Chicago, Atlanta. Urrrgh. But at least I have no cell phone. Yet.

If one calls my google.com/voice number 404 487 8469, any number of phones in US that I set as active ring: home, office, Chicago home, a cell phone, or wherever I happen to be. If none of them answer, google.com/voice records callers message, and sends it to me by email. For example, one can try to pronounce my name, and it shows up in my email:

Whuz-yr-name?

It also transcripts it - and that is hilarious, it does not like any immigrant accents, so far only a lady from GaTech Human Resources got transcripted sensibly. Typical result is more like this:

You-better-brush-up-on-your-Shakespeare

If any phone picks up before google voicemail kicks in, then I do not get
a message - that's why I am trying to disable voicemail on all phones.

Inhuman Resources

I did my best to fill in my p-card (work purchasing credit card) and sign 7000 places, but not once since 2001 has this thing just gone in - always comes back to me multiple times. For example, there is some person in Inhuman Resources who does not like the way I sign these things. So I feel it less traumatic I put these forms in a cubbyhole of one of our administrators who actually does not do these things, but has gentle hands. It will be passed on, and come back to me in a few days.

It's also an occasion for celebration, because I refused to authorize Inhuman Resources to do a criminal check on me, so this is my last p-card, and from now on my attempts to get purchases refunded will take on a still more voluminous paperwork form. I was hoping for something more in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence (Magna Carta, presumption of innocence, stuff like that) when I immigrated to these shores from "them" (the comrades of former communist Yugoslavia).

Gowd, I must be turning Libertarian? It's something they are adding to Virginia-Highlands water.

But having all administration (financial offices, grant office, computer people) turn from supporting us in our work to running interference and policing us is getting increasingly tedious, so I'm getting edgy. This is what happened. First a secretary somewhere embezzled tens of thousands of dollars (our annual budget is 1.2 billion dollars). Then another secretary posted naked pictures of herself using work computer. The level of wrongdoing remains the same. To cite Patrick Jenkins, senior Information Systems Auditor (Whistle, April 2010):

It's important to remember that it's a very small minority involved in questionable activity. [...] The problems we run across are easily 0.01 percent or less of what we look at, overall.

Total 2010 GaTech budget is $1.2B, so we are talking about $120K in questionable spending. School of physics alone has about 4 people using most of their time generating paperwork related to faculty purchases. My wild guess is that we are spending between $1M and $10M to prevent faculty from initiating potentially questionable spending in $100K range. Would it not be much cheaper to assume that the faculty and staff consists of upright citizens, and criminally prosecute the few that stray from the straight path?

Nevertheless - transition took only couple of years - we have been kidnapped by a locust cloud of liability lawyers, who construe the purpose of the Flagship of Technology and Science of Southeast to be preventing people who work here from doing anything that could become a criminal liability for the institution.

In the old time my computer would greet me like this:

--- welcome to "zero", the CNS linux network server ---
--- ubuntu/dapper linux 2.6 2 amd86x64 ---
Now that KBG has taken over, it greets us like this:

This system is for the use of authorized users only. Individuals using this computer system without authority, or in excess of their authority, are subject to having their activities on this system monitored and recorded. Be advised that if such monitoring reveals possible evidence of criminal activity, system personnel may provide the evidence to law enforcement officials.

Well thank you so much. In my innate state of moral turpitude the thought that criminal activity might lead me to law enforcement officials never crossed my mind. Now I'll be doubly vigilant while engaging in it. And while we are at it, can you please hang a sign around the neck of every child entering the campus saying:

Georgia Civil Code Secs. 19-7-5/19-15- 1/49-5-180 and Georgia Criminal Code Secs. § 16-3-20. Parent or person in loco parentis reasonably disciplining of a minor has a justification for a criminal prosecution based on that conduct.

plus rest of the penal code, lest we forget. So now we are recruiting top talent by whispering sweet nothings in their ears while a job offer that reads like incarceration papers is in the mail.

As an added security measure, an unattended computer on my desk locks up every 15 (fifteen) minutes and pops up the above winged greeting. Then you press [ctrl][alt][del] and type in your user ID and your password, and voila! you can continue your criminal activities. Really improves your productivity while keeping you out of the jail. So everybody is lugging their laptops to work, and waiting for the day when a G4 wireless connection will liberate us. Part of our research is already running on John's off-campus server, and I'll have to move the rest as well.

The stupidities our IT Security Organs impose in their very effective work on preventing us from working... For example, CNS network Tzar and I could not [shut down] the Center communal W7 PC, so we had to request the KGB administrator to come, log in as administrator. What goes through IT people's heads I cannot fathom. My instinct is that if you give people a chance, they'll do the right thing. Why would they be doing science otherwise?

I'm writing pointless letters of protest, like to our telephone police. "They" just informed us that from now on they will erase any voice mail older than 30 days. So I'm trying to figure how to move all my voice mail to google.com/voice. They are not technology powerhouse, like us, but they seem to be able to keep voicemail for more than 30 days. If the locust cloud of liability lawyers does this to our emails - and - for added computer security - to all our computer files, the life will become so much simpler again. As secure as the death itself.

Followup: What I wrote above was in the morning. Since then I got this email: "You have turned in your January p-card statement. However, you have not signed it on the cardholder signature line. Please come by the Finance Office as soon as possible to sign your statement."

I'm fairly sure I signed that piece of paper, but not on the right dotted line. The world will collapse and both our departmental Financial Officers and I will be taken away in ball and chains if I do not "come by the Finance Office as soon as possible to sign". But I feel too fragile to attempt such a thing in my present condition.

Nobody said that life here would be a bed of roses.

In the real world such defects could have consequences

My personal playwright, of K. und K. fame:

"The liberation of the laptop. We can work anywhere, any time, so we drift away from our offices, retreating into our own little cyberworlds, while the floors grow quiet as the prairie and the nexus of activity spins apart... Know what I have? A writing board, coffee shops, and a consortium of bastards. Go cry on someone else's shoulder."

"While a physicist's gotta hide, dramatista needs to feel the pulse of humanity and lots of bastards to get adrenaline flowing. Go get them!"

"Oh, I don't have to go get them, it's the theater community, I can't avoid them. On the other hand, knowing so many actors, directors, and, yes, playwrights, has given me an invaluable understanding of narcissism, callowness, superficiality, cravenness, hypocrisy, selfishness, and self-delusion. Fortunately, most of these people don't live in the real world, where such defects could have serious consequences. We are so much more comfortable in the black box than Out There, where the others don't realize how special we are."

"I've had some interest in [my own story] over the years, but that's never led to production. 2010 might be the year, though; I've submitted it to Essential Theater and to Stage Door. However, I've given up trying to figure out how ADs make their decisions. I've moved on."

Do no count citations, impact numbers

This from D. N. Arnold, SIAM NEWS, December 4, 2009 (via my friend Gregor)
Integrity Under Attack: The State of Scholarly Publishing

Pay no heed to silly numbers - just check what journal the good publications that you have read are, publish there. Even that can be gamed and is, in good journals like Physical Review Letters; once you establish a little subfield, with a group of friends citing and refereeing each other, it can have a good run with not very good articles. There is no defense other than common sense.

Incurrable schmaltz

I cannot help it. Instead of doing anything sensible, I fell for this. And this. OK, here are a few movies that I love. They might be pure schmaltz, but I cannot help it - I'm an incurable romantic:

Off the Map
Genghis Blues (a wonderful documentary by my two nephews)
Everything is Illuminated (with lead singer of Punk Bordello as interpreter)
Across the Universe (the baby boomer relapse)
Run Lola, Run (a movie about sensitivity to initial conditions)

For adult couple viewing I recommend any of Sid Nagel's 10 best movies.

You better brush up on your Shakespeare, Google Voice

I cheated - had Nick do the work for me and take picture of Blot. But get a load of this:

William Shakespeare - Sonnet #29,


When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.


as read by Blot

and transcribed by Google Voice:

When in disgrace with Fortune. I'm inside.
I will alluring be, we, my outcast state
and so I will definitely been with my blue skies
and look upon myself in curse my fate
wishing me like 21 more rich in hope.
Featured like a m like, and with friends possessed
design this Mansard and that meant scope
with what I most enjoy content at least
yet in these thoughts myself. Almost. This biting.
Hopefully, I think, on, the, and then my state
like to the market breakup day arising
from selling her things him at heaven's gate

for the i, sweet love. Remember such well Springs
at de nice want to change my state with king.

Yeah, I don't gain own.
We were 42 20 80, savvy it up and walk to do to reach Jandy are not Oktoberfest for feel it'd be air. If you do then.


To be fair, the last four sentences are in Danish, Croatian, French and German, respectively:

Jeg vil gerne ha' en ol.

Large aspect plane Couette turbulence

For an introduction into plane Couette turbulence, see
ChaosBook.org/tutorials

Alexander the Huge

what do you know? At the opening of Gunilla's exhibition (scroll on the right until a picture of two girls appears - then click on next until the big painting of little Alexander shows up) Alexander the Huge was the first paining that got sold.
So much for the theory that nobody buys baby portraits (other than one's own baby's).

Toni faces mortality

I talked to my father. He is a very sprightly 72 year, still running the Central Europe sales of the Danish company he works for, and flying all over the place almost every week. 

He and his wife had moved to Villach on former Austrian/Yugoslav border some eight years ago, both to avoid taxes and to be close to Croatia. So what has he been up to last few weeks? 

He knows an architect that was remodeling some tombs in the pretty 18th century Zagreb cemetery, and the architect found for him a good empty tomb just in the front row by the entrance arcade (with all known Croatian poets, writers, politicians, sculptors etc.). He has space for six, so he is now moving in my grandfather and grandmother's coffins from Rijeka, and grandgrandmother from Slavonski Brod (rest is in Derventa across in Bosnia, town which Serbs leveled with the earth in 1992). He will also put up his brother's name (he was buried up to his neck alive by the Serbian partisans in 1945, even though he was part of the Croatian partisan underground), and so he has three free slots. He says it is more convenient for him to have them all in Zagreb, as he has an apartment there and they are there often. 

I think he 1) has too much money and nothing reasonable to use it on 2) he is being his usual manic obsessive. In other words, he is thinking of mortality, and the response is a catholic one - it is important there there be a grave, and as many generations of family names on it as possible. 

I ate with a group of Indian colleagues/wives last night and asked them - what do they do with the deceased? A family and friends getting together and remembering - cremation - then a remembrance on the date a year later, each successive year less elaborate. They believe in reincarnation, so the sooner all material aspects are gone, the better for the cosmic cycle - only the saints are buried, ase they have reached nirvana. At the same time, each Hindu is supposed to know his patriarchal descent through 14 generations - this has to do with 1) property 2) arranging marriages. Each Hindu knows the name of the first in the family tree - primordial first, not the 14th generation back, and one avoids marriages between the descendants from the same tree. Only the men count in the tree.

Toichiro Kinoshita makes a transatlantic phone call

 

to Kay, June & Ray Kinoshita, June 2023

 

I should have gone through my diaries and correspondence from 1963-1973 but many deaths and general decay of my generation seems to be getting me down, and I can see I will not get through this any time soon, so here is a tidbit I would have written about. You, being all amazing students, and me almost as good of a student, we have all had decades of recurrent nightmares that go something like this: You have suddenly received a letter from your high school, and they have found out that you had missed the exam in -let's say- biology -and your high school diploma (and the college diploma that followed) is null and void until you complete your biology requirement. This nightmare comes back and back again for years and decades, until the work takes over and you have no time for nightmares any longer.

So, you paid Velma to type it up and you have delivered your PhD thesis in July 1973, you have not as much as touched a computer keyboard for the next 4 years, so traumatic all the computer nonsense had been, once Tom lured you into this madness by giving you first a few easy Feynman integrals that you aced, there was no turning back. Way too much had been invested into the calculation. It was like 2 years in the trenches of Vietnam and that was not what you had gotten into grad school for.

You have totally changed what you work on, you have thrown away anything that might even vaguely smell of your PhD thesis, except for a tiny ring-book that contains the lists of the numerical values of some 1000 (?) Feynman integrals you had computed . It's 1995 (?) and your Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen office phone rings. It's Tom. It cannot be good - he had never called you, and a transatlantic call costs an arm and a leg. Tom wants to know whether I had computed the integral 63-B (let's say). I have no idea, I do not even have my PhD thesis (it's in my American brother's basement someplace in Michigan) but I have this little ring-binder on the bookshelf. I run for it, I find 63-B and wow! 

 

I tell Tom: "Sapirstein did 63-B."
Saved.

The thing is, Tom was not into making mistakes, and I caught all of mine by finding independent calculational methods to cross-check everything - in our 2 years of calculation we found only one, numerically small error in one of our counter-terms, due to a typing error in a Jacobian. We found it by recalculating everything in a new formulation, one which I believe I had invented (my memory is of the idea coming to me while babysitting for a graduate student friend's baby), and Tom believed he had invented (he must have had a different memory, you were too big and too wild for any babysitting).

 

I never found out what happened to Sapirstein.

I have this somewhere in the diaries and letters. But I did find a letter from Tom in the sole ring-binder leftover from my PhD calculations.

 

Toichiro Kinoshita: the theorist whose calculations of g-2 shed light on our understanding of nature - 29 May 2023 Robert P Crease 

Toichiro (“Tom”) Kinoshita (1925–2023): Pioneer of precision in tumultuous times - July 11, 2023 Robert P Crease

Masako Kinoshita - Me & Olivia go way back

Memorial for Toichiro & Masako Kinoshita

 

A regular pervert in the kingdom of Bohrdom

I am living as it were in the very kingdom of Bohrdom, but as the fate would have it, something actually happened here. 

Yesterday fru F. was exiting out onto my balcony, when she perceived a stark naked young man of muscular build and Nordic persuasion standing in the balcony doorway across. He's eyes were closed - bright sunny day - in rapt adoration - and he had the cock out, a rather impressive tool says G. Having been married 7 times, G. knows the available range. So she withdrew into the kitchen - what does she know the Danish customs? 5 minutes later UFO himself came into the kitchen to inspect the sight, and the man was still at it - it is apparently a laborious process. 

Ever since we have been busy - something as exciting has never happened in our little petty bourgeois building - seems we got a regular pervert. Catching up with New York, finally. I have installed locks on back-stair doors and so forth. This is it - the big news. 

Rolling back into abyss of time, backwards: I became a director of the CATS Center (Chaos and Turbulence Studies) I got the Danish Physical Society prize and delivered a major oration. My Wo was in tears with pride. There was 100.000 kroner to this, but it will all go to help rebuild a library of a Croatian University bombed silly by Serbs in one of their paroxysms of fraternal luuuuv. 

Been engaged in much scientific procreation, hormones and doctors and whole schlemiel - does not work, and is sure not fun. But the Wo wants to make a miniP of her own, so we are in clutches of miniscience.

They made me official Windbag, member of the (Danish) Royal Society. Delivered oration explaining Quantum Chaos to archeologists and such. The nodded in awe, said that while usually they only understand the prepositions in physicist's popular talks, this time they understood some nouns and verbs as well. 

Been profoundly disgusted at this planet - fat assed Euro diplomats and such, watching on tely an ongoing genocide, hoping that Serbs just get this over with so all is quiet again. De-pressing. 

On the bright side, variety of local friends kids are also growing into very delightful people - so charming that one could even consider procreation as rational act, and not only the selfish gene in action. 

This grownup life has not much to recommended - everybody exerting civilizing pleasure until there is nothing left that makes life worth living. My strategy has been internalization: I just think Predrag thoughts internally, and I externally nod politely and eat correctly out of color coordinated plates. 

One of the things I miss is freedom to just take off for a week or a month, and wonder in Greenland or somewhere. But we suffer from the dreaded academic 2-body problem - getting 2 jobs in a same place. So I might have to leave all this behind, and head for god knows where. Might be fun...

A not so short history of Universal Function

Acceptance speech - 1993 NKT Research Prize in Physics
Dansk Fysisk Selskab Årsmøde, Lalandia, Rødby, Maj 18, 1993

                                                                           Excerpted and edited July 5, 2019

[For A very brief history of universality in period doubling click here]
[For hyperlinks to some of the literature,  click here]

Among my friends at Cornell were two called Feigenbaum.  The first one moved to a factory town to do union organizing, and reached brief national fame when the Mafia bombed his house.  The other one was amazingly fast in solving New York Times crossword puzzles, but he published nothing. Hans Bethe dispatched him to Blackhole, Virginia, where he languished publishing nothing until Peter Carruthers rescued him and took him to Los Alamos on the risky presumption that the man seemed very smart.  In contrast to these good-for-nothings, I was advertised as the best thing since Roman Jackiw and sent off to Stanford, Princeton and Oxford with a mission to solve the QCD quark confinement problem.

[...]

Mitchell told me about existence of period doubling universality at 10pm on December 19 1975, in a bar in New York City, over a glass of good red wine and in presence of my Black Irish Poetess.

In spring 1976 he came  from Los Alamos to visit Princeton, having published even less than before.  He gave a seminar, but nobody understood a word. Starting point was a parabola, then things got incredibly complicated, and at the end it turned out that the theory might be applicable to fluctuations in forest moth populations.

During his graduate school years at MIT, the strongest intellectual influence on Mitchell was not his adviser Francis Low (of Gell-Mann--Low beta function), who by that time had lost faith in quantum field theory, but charismatic cognitive scientist Jerry Lettvin. So Mitchell and I were driven by a secret agenda - the thing was robust, you could make it very imperfect, and a universal superstructure would survive the imperfections. In other words, just what you need to build a brain - all parts imperfect, and the thing functions anyway.

But my first task was to help my friend, make his lecture comprehensible. My friend Betty Boop worked on a Hewlett-Packard assembly line, so I was able to acquire a discounted programmable pocket calculator (with [multiply] and  [divide] buttons interchanged) for a mere one-fourth of my monthly salary.  Mitchell needed no such display of dedication, Los Alamos was floating in money.

I started thinking about functional equations on May 1, 1976. I calculated away with such gusto that I was calculating even laying on my belly on an operating table, with a surgeon lancing a large bicycle-caused sore. Eventually I reduced the whole complicated mess to one equation, wrote down the period doubling fixed point function equation on May 3, 1976,

and went off to the math library to look it up.  The Institute has an excellent math library, but I did not find it.  As a matter of fact, we never found it to this very day - it had never been written down before.
             For the record: universality in period doubling and the functional renormalization theory that explains it were         Mitchell's discovery, my contribution was to recast what was an infinite tower of renormalization equations into a more concise form.

As one would expect, nobody wanted to hear about it.  To be fair, I remember that a total of four people did:  Freeman Dyson, John Milnor, Bill Thurston, and Donna Lee.  Donna Lee is a wonderful San Franciscan whom I love even more dearly than Dyson; the rest you should know.

Blott, AKA Donna Lee above us to the right. In front: following our friend Stephen Wolfram, Nordita purchased the first Sun-1 in Scandinavia (though this desktop is not it). On the keyboard is one of Mitchell's calculators, on which he did most of his early period-doubling computations.

Six years passed and I was laboring away at Nordita, Copenhagen, when the word arrived from USA; there is chaos, and in August 1981 I could muster an audience for my first talk about the period doubling universality. It was an after-dinner talk in the Perturbative QCD Nordita summer school, Yngsjö, Sweden. In long run, quantum field theorists became dismayed by this theory. Being as intelligent as they were, they should have understood it with no effort, but they did not. But this first evening talk, to innocent, budding theory graduate student was a resounding success.

I went around spreading the news. In those days it was impossible for most to access the literature in a field so new, with foundational publications spread across so many specialties, so a put together a book of source materials:

This was the 3rd of my heavily illustrated home-production books, with hand drawn covers that I called 'Classics Illustrated'. Here we have Graf von Chaos himself as Faust (he loved Goethe) in der Periodenverdoppelnde Wald, cigarette aflame, desirous of Black Irish Poetess, soul aflame with turbulent longings, Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan, eying Die Gleichung. I had just returned from California where it was not unusual that a woman would ask you about your Sign. Plus? Minus? I resent all those violent and horned animals, so I would have to explain that mine was Helix Vulgaris, or the Gentle Garden Snail, the not well known 13th Sign of The Zodiac.

Passover seder with Bram

Professor Pro is convinced that I am Jewish, because I have that gleam in my eye (well, maybe, but that must have been before 1658).

One would find overdose of the alleged gleam in my eyes last Monday - fresh gefelte fish and matzo meal arrived from New York, and there I was, kneading the balls. We had the haggadah, Sigrun's David acted as the youngest child asking the appropriate question, and we had the bitter herbs and matzo and the charoset mortar with which "we" built the pyramids, and the menu that would warm up my Czech grandma's heart - the whole schlmeal.

        There were some irregularities; specially that injunction about circumcised males was not strictly observed - but the rest - the genuine thing. It was beautiful, in a totally unexpected way. I had invited Bram and Ida, which turned out to be something much more important than I had realized. Abraham Pais was musing those days about his survival during the war and about layers of his identity; Jew, Dutch, American, now even a little bit Danish. So for him this was an occasion to remember his orthodox father, and for the first time to sing songs in Hebrew in front of his Nordic beloved; he sang beautifully, with Ashkenazi pronunciation the songs his father liked, and with Sephardic the ones his mother liked. It was very touching, and moving.

        Then Bram told us how he lost his faith. One Shabbat his parents had left him alone in the kitchen, and he stood there with a match in his hand - what would happen if he did the did the forbidden? and - and - he lit the match. He stood there petrified, awaiting the heavens to open and lighting to strike him. Nothing. So there was no God after all.

        Next day I made the error of reading the Exodus and loudly commenting how I feel about that petty and vengeful God of the Jews - that was not wise, as it lead to a scene, with me accused of belittling God.

The Man who made Matzo Balls

PS June 7, 1996

Message from Bram: " I plan to be in Copenhagen for s stretch starting end of June. You are supposed to save a seat by your side for me in the frokoststue."

PS December 4, 1999

Bram Pais saw me in the cafeteria and immediately said:
"You look terrible - What are you doing with this Jewish beard?''
 I said: "How do you know it is a Jewish beard?''
"I know'' he said.

PS October 25, 2000 Apropos Bram

Tina, friskier at 80 than many are at 60, is the woman who hid Abraham Pais in Amsterdam during the war. She told me few months ago I look like Marcelo Mastroiani as we danced to kletzmer at Bram's memorial. It's not true, but it is a sensitive thing to say to a guy of uncertain countenance.

Harry J. Lipkin: "Bram had spent the war in Amsterdam, hidden from the Germans. When he was finally caught and arrested and would have been shot, his teacher Kramers wrote a letter to Heisenberg asking him to help Bram. Heisenberg did nothing. But the heroic Dutch woman who had hidden Bram  during all these years risked her life to go to the Gestapo commander to plea for Bram's release and she took a copy of Kramers' letter to Heisenberg. This was enough to convince the commander to release Bram. His cell mate who had been arrested with him was shot."

Feigenbaum contemplating a cauliflower

It is true: Mitchell has gone live on the 7PM German TV news  contemplating a cauliflower (?)

Zeta function for diffusion on Lorenz lattice

It started by having some great time with Mitchell, theologians and semi-idiots.

Then I ran into a problem, a problem that turned out to be very pleasant, the problem of Eckmannia. That is to say, we actually solved a problem - Eckmann is still convinced that if we could solve it, it must be trivial; "everybody must know that???" - but we finally wrote down the zeta function for diffusion on Lorenz lattice.

I have been thinking about it for at least 3 years - and it finally came out, with a very pretty and sensible answer. So now we have done what I never have done; written a paper in 2 days flat, from first conversation about existence of the problem, to the first complete draft of the paper.

I was also screamed at by some Chinese physicist about importance of his solution of the percolation problem, but I am so happy it made no dent.

The worst meal of my life

Apropos nothing: 

Universität Greifswald has a special place in my heart, as the place where I had the absolutely worst meal of my life, in the University Mensa. I was given what smelled like a barely rinsed plastic plate with multiple indentations, and the mensa cook ladled in some orange-yellow fluid substance that I still do not know what it was.

I also remember fondly watching prisoners in white-black horizontal stripes suits walking in a circle, while talking to the Chair of the Physics Department (his window overlooked the prison yard). Greifswald was brown gray, everything about it and its air was colored by the coal soot.

Greifswald Nonlinear Dynamics Workshop, Trassenheide, GDR, 25 april 1990.

Hallur wins the 3rd world war, European theatre

Hallur wouldn't get of the phone a few minutes ago - had to tell me that he won the 3rd world war, European theatre. He was Warsaw pact - that is better, because Warsaw pact has so much more of everything. He dropped a gas bomb on Bruxelles; NATO retaliated by sending a huge atom bomb - he lost something, he thinks it was called Moscow - blew away most of the screen - but then he got West Germans surrounded, 5 armies encircling their 2; couldn't kill them all, but he won anyway.

Mitchell does prime time TV in Copenhagen

Mitchell has appeared in the leading Danish left-intellectual rag, (Mis)Information, holding a Wonder-bread-like blackboard sponge, pensively, to great merriment of our students who have the picture on our bulletin board, with a variety of captions emanating from his mouth, comic-strip style. It is a reasonable article, from Mitchell's angle the best thing about it is that it is in danish, so he is safe from understanding it, and I ask you only 3 brief stupid questions, so I'm also clean.

Mitchell is now a heartthrob of many a wo in this ducky kingdom. They aired him and Polyakov in prime time, and they re-aired him alone today. It is actually almost sensitively done, considering the foreign worker treatment I got on Danish DR televison.

Well, Mitchell does have his detractors. MargArethe says that he has a strange way of blinking into camera, and that neither he nor Polyakov are her man types. But many a less critical Valkyrie is wet to her knees just at one of those blinks.

Other than that, there is much ballooning around. The Eye's woman is supposed to burst any day or hour now, and Ulla and Natural Radiance bounce around like Venus of Milendorf fertility amulets.

How long is this seriousness going to continue (and this includes Mitchell)? It's deadening, the joy is gone if every act is supposed to be laden with meaning. I'll go home and bounce few balls on the HP - it's trivial childlike game, but it is making me euphoric. All the patriarchal and fessorial responsibility
is dry and dusty as old wood.

Dyson, Tomonaga, Feynman, Schwinger

Sam Taylor, a nuclear engineering undergraduate in my intro nonlinear dynamics class alerted me to a wonderful (Web of Stories) video series of Sam Schweber interviewing Freeman Dyson. 

While I was at the Institute in 1975-1978, I was Freeman's very young friend. What brought us together was that at that time I had been a rather bad dancer in a very charming performance of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience".

Here Freeman is recorded in 1998, looking even more youthful then when I knew him. He was the only physicist who would hear about my 1976 work on universality in chaos. It was the most important thing I accomplished as IAS Fellow, but -fore example- Tullio Regge would not hear of it. Dyson was and remained the only physicist I knew who wanted to learn things regardless of whatever he had done them himself. So he became and remained my only hero and role model in this profession.

Shin'ichirō Tomonaga (and, for me, Tom Kinoshita's war years) enters, unexpected, out of the ashes:

And meanwhile, of course, we'd heard about Tomonaga's work which was, I think, also in the spring of '48, when Tomonaga sent his first two papers from Japan, and these came as an absolute total surprise, that somebody in the rubble of Tokyo was actually able to do physics. I hadn't heard of Tomonaga previously and he wrote to Oppenheimer from Tokyo and Oppenheimer sent a copy of the papers to Hans Bethe in Cornell, and so we saw them there. And these two papers of Tomonaga, it was called, I don't remember... on the many... This was the new Japanese journal "The Progress of Theoretical Physics" which was published in English. It was published on brown paper which was all they had in Tokyo at the time, and it was just like a voice from the deep.

I mean we thought of Japan as being a total ruin and there was this man who had somehow or other kept physics alive all through the war, and there it was. And he'd in fact done all this long before Schwinger and essentially arrived at the same results as Schwinger three or four years earlier, with more or less the same techniques.

About Cornell:

[Schweber] You stay in Cornell for two years and then you go to the Institute. Do you want to say a few words [...] about life at the university there, and what made you decide to [...] accept an invitation to the Institute in '53?

This was a hard choice, because I was spiritually much more at home at Cornell. Cornell is a much warmer place. It's a real community, partly because of Hans. I mean Hans made it like that, but even without Hans - it's a place which commands enormous loyalty. I mean the friends that we made at Cornell 40 years ago, a lot of them are still there. These people just never leave, including Hans himself, who's now been there for 60 years. And so I felt very much at home there and sort of spiritually I still feel more at home in Ithaca than I do in Princeton. So there were these strong forces keeping me at Cornell. Cornell had always been my vision of America, whereas Princeton is not. Princeton is definitely an alien growth in America. Ithaca is the real thing. So from that point of view I would have preferred to stay in Ithaca, and also I love the people there.

About PhDs:

But I hated the PhD system, and that was what - I felt basically out of tune with the main job I had at Cornell, which was to train PhD students. The whole PhD system to me is an abomination. I don't have a PhD myself, I feel myself very lucky I didn't have to go through it. I think it's a gross distortion of the educational process. What happens when I'm responsible for a PhD student, the student is condemned to work on a single problem in order to write a thesis, for maybe two or three years. But my attention span is much shorter than that. I like to work on something intensively for maybe one year or less, get it done with and then go on to something else. So my style just doesn't fit this PhD cycle. What would happen, a PhD student would want to go on working on a problem for two or three years, but I would lose interest before he was finished. And so there was a basic mismatch between the way I like to do physics and this straitjacket which was imposed on the students. And so I found it was very frustrating [...]; all the PhD students had these same constraints imposed on them, which I basically disapprove of. I just don't like the system. I think it is an evil system and it has ruined many lives.

About understanding Schwinger:

That was another of the Columbian experiments done by Kusch and Foley, where they measured the magnetic moment of the electron very precisely, and they found that it was not the Dirac value, but differed from the Dirac value by a certain finite amount, which then Schwinger was able to calculate. [...] It involved things that Schwinger called Green's Functions, which again I found rather incomprehensible, but Schwinger was very obscure when he described the things he was doing. He loved to make the - as Oppenheimer said, most people when they explain something, they're telling you how to do it; but when Schwinger explains something he's telling you that only he can do it! That was roughly the way it was, I mean, so from Schwinger one only had the impression that this was so difficult and so elaborate a way of calculating, only Schwinger could possibly do it. [...] in Ann Arbor in June of '48 I learned the stuff from Schwinger himself. I listened to his lectures in the morning and I spent the afternoons working very hard, just simply going through the Schwinger lectures step by step and really understanding what he'd been saying, which was very hard work because he just had this wonderfully baroque style of lecturing in which everything was dressed up to be as complicated as possible, and the answer somehow came out miraculously at the end.

About Feynman, understanding:

There were two problems which Cécile and I took along for Feynman to deal with... [...], and the scattering of light by light; especially the scattering of light by light had been a sort of a notoriously difficult problem.[...] It was a formidable calculation and it wasn't at all clear that we could do it by the new methods of Feynman. And it was something we had to get straightened out before this whole theory was really complete. So we asked Feynman about this, and he said, 'Let's see about that.' And he sat down and he just worked through it; in about three quarters of an hour he'd done the whole thing and it was the most amazing performance. He just - with his lightning calculations, it all came out very beautifully. It turned out that the third order effect was zero and the fourth order effect was finite and everything worked exactly the way we wanted.

When I entered graduate school, theoretical particle physics was the 1965 Bjorken-Drell "Relativistic Quantum Fields", i.e. Feynman diagrams. Feynman diagrams and Feynman diagrams only. But my academic grandfathers were Feynman and Tomonaga (via Tom Kinoshita), Schwinger (via Tung-Mow Yan), with Freeman my academic godfather. I wrote a book about it. Feynman reviewed it. Were it not for Tung-Mow, I would have never understood the Schwinger tale.

 

Ballur the Dog in love

19 July 1988

We live alone on the farm. Ballur the Dog has developed a strong master craving and follows me everywhere.

Predrag is a bore
Predrag is a boring bore
Predrag is the boringest boring bore

But Ballur the Dog is charming and very doggy in temperament - he is an Icelandic sheepdog, and he a very happy dog who seeks my company irrespective of how boring I might be. We are a very active couple, sharing passion for swimming, running, and avoidance of other human company.

Paris! Par rires, as Rablais claims the etymology is. It is very enchanting, and still, I feel like a mouse there. New York, one feels like a rat. Here, on the farm, I feel content. The truth is, I am very happy to spend weeks and months without human contacts, but it is almost impossible - they stream in, the humans, even on the farm.

Here life is as always - it seems impossible to do 1/10 of the things one expects oneself to be able to do. Even with Ballur there is psychology - he objects to sleeping outside, so he woke me up at 3 am, rotating in a strangest of dog hysteria ways. We had a talk and a little walk, and I was allowed to sleep again.

29 July 1988

I still do not what he wanted. I got up this morning - Ballur says woof! and then sits in front of me, looking me right into the eyes, expectantly, as though I have a large cut of beef between my eyeballs. Usually he wants to run out into the court, but not today - I open the door, but he just follows me again. Watches me brush my teeth.

What is it? Did I forget to feed him yesterday? I rattle his dog food bucket, but he just keeps looking intently into my eyes.

Piss? Shit? Brushing my teeth, we walk into the seeping rain and out of the farmhouse onto the track across the wheat fields. He just dogs me - no crap, nothing. We go back again, an he will not let up; just sits in front of me, expectantly, totally focused on me, with that swooning look of the woman from Midsummer Night Dream who got love potion rubbed over her eyelids.

Could it be? Could it be? oh, no! the dog is in looove. Ballur, you know we cannot go steady - I will have to move back to the city....

Prussian determination

Max-Planck Institute fur Mathematik, Bonn

I have been swimming with Prussian determination every morning for last 5 days. It is like swimming among sharks - there are all these young women out of Leni Riffenstahl's Olympiad zooming by in white spray on their way to Seoul Olympics. I do not know yet whether it helps, but it does give me certain chlorinated radiance.

Night Fishing in Blackhole

January  25, 1988

 Once UFO and I considered moving to his Blackhole to run a megainstitute of Nonscience
- to be filled in from my diary

A letter to Il Coruptore AKA Peter Carruthers

Carissimo Il Coruptore,

I write with moody forebodings of impossibility of attaining anything, the mood reinforced by the cheerfulness of danish December: I do not see how I am going to visit you in the foreseeable future, to the extent that there is future. Maybe next winter? Where did the time go? I thought I would be basking in Arizonian sun right now... But in a few days I am escaping to New York - UF will cheer me up with Wagner and Kindertotten Lieder.

Then I am supposed to be back and do what? Repair rotten doors on my edifice, harangue students? Is that it? All those years of crazy self-reliance? and looove, where did loooove go?

Pagarlo delle Lire, pagarlo delle dollare... Why did I ever turn bourgeois?

di notte nordice
Amleto il Danesco