Dusko - a film can alter how you see something that lies well outside movies

[ www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/conversations-with-christian-petzolds-phoenix]

 

And here is where I come to my last conversation with "Phoenix," because sometimes, a film can alter how you see something that lies well outside movies. As soon as I got home from seeing the film, I opened my copy of Salka Viertel's memoir, "The Kindness of Strangers." She grew up in a well-to-do and cultivated Jewish family in Sambor, Galicia, which is now part of Ukraine, moved to California with her family in 1928, wrote screenplays (including "Queen Christina" and "Deep Valley") and turned her home into a magnet for people fleeing Hitler's Europe.
When I read the book, I couldn't understand Viertel's decision at the end of this passage, and I am not sure I do now. But in my mind, the trajectory of Petzold's heroine is now caught up with the following story, permanently.
Viertel's brother Siegmund, known as Dusko to the family, didn't make it out of Sambor in time. By 1946 Viertel was convinced that Dusko hadn't survived; she got one unconfirmed report that her brother had jumped off a train to the camps and been killed by the SS. Frantic to keep any details of Dusko's fate from their elderly mother, who had managed to reach the U.S. in 1941 and was living in her daughter's home in Los Angeles, Salka made a point of intercepting the mail every day.
One morning, Viertel opened a letter from a woman named Viktoria, an orphaned Galician who had been raised alongside Salka and Dusko in Sambor, as part of the family. Viktoria wrote, "In 1943 [Dusko] came to my house begging me to hide him, but as we are living in a rented place I could not do it, and since the last German Aktion I have not heard from him again." Aktion, Viertel knew, was the word used to mean rounding up Jews.
Viktoria closed the letter by saying she now had four children, and asking, "would Salka, who has always been like a sister to me, send us a food parcel?"
Viertel started to reply.

I wrote her that she had forfeited the right to appeal to my sisterly feelings. She had cruelly denied shelter to a hunted Jew, whose father and mother had given her love and devoted care since she was born, and she had allied herself with monsters and torturers. My tears stained the paper and I had to stop. Could I reproach this cowardly woman for not risking her life? Hadn't others, more powerful than she, stood by indifferently when these unspeakable horrors took place? She was only one among millions ….
I tore up the letter, mailed a CARE package to Sambor, and never told Mama what happened.

Phoenix - notes (and I was always in love with Thulin)

...the warped narrative functions as an allegory for the stories that people and nations recount to themselves in order to go on surviving....

... Phoenix boldly offers us a war without heroes, only ghosts of broken people moving through a broken world, searching in vain for their former selves.

...opening line is an altered quote from Much Ado About Nothing — "Speak low when you speak, love"...

... In an early scene Nelly catches sight of her new face in a shard of mirror — not just any mirror, but a broken relic from the site of her former home, now reduced to rubble.

... Until then, "Speak Low" has figured nominally in the story: At one point Nelly listens to a recording of it with Lene, also a singer, who praises it almost in the same breath as she speaks of her eagerness to leave Germany — with Nelly in tow — for Palestine. "I can't stand German songs anymore," she says, making a wry, unwitting joke. She seems to have forgotten that Weill is as German as they come.

... "Speak Low" is from the 1943 Broadway musical "One Touch of Venus."[In] the 1948 movie [...] Robert Walker has brought to life this statue of the ideal woman (Ava Gardner, that is to say, a goddess), and still can't control her; "Speak Low" is she sings as she leaves her mortal lover.

[Predrag: One Touch of Venus is a sweet light musical, with a very beautiful Ava Gardner, enchanting Kurt Weil's "Speak Low" and nothing to strain your neurons. Curiously, the really wonderful Roman Holiday (1954) (a remake of Oscar-winning Princess O'Rourke (1943), which itself loosely follows Thirty Day Princess (1932)) follows the same plot: a princess instead of a goddess, but the escape from Olympus/court is only 24 hours, there is dancing by the water, and the plain clothes in similar very obtrusive suits and hats.]

...as Nelly sings and Johnny plays, the audience of blandly indifferent post-war Germans regard Nelly with no trace of guilt. They have already convinced themselves that they did nothing that needed forgiving.

...Ah yes, those old friends of Nelly and Johnny, who show up towards the end of the film. That brings me to one movie Petzold, surprisingly, says he hasn't seen: "Return from the Ashes," directed by J. Lee Thompson in 1965, based on the same Hubert Monteilhet novel as "Phoenix." Ingrid Thulin plays a Jewish anesthesiologist who falls in love with Maximilian Schell's scheming, social-climbing chess pro. They marry just as Paris falls to the Nazis, and she is arrested and sent to Auschwitz. [...] The one scene that can stand up to logical comparison with "Phoenix" is the first. "Return From the Ashes" begins on a train to Paris late in 1945. The carriage is full of tired middle-class people, an elderly man, a matronly woman traveling with a little boy of about 10 years of age, and Ingrid Thulin. (Thulin here looks remarkably like post-surgery Nelly: hollowed-out cheeks, bruised eyes, straw-like hair, even a similar shabby raincoat.) The train is traveling very fast. The boy entertains himself by kicking the door to the outside of the rail carriage—bump, bump, bump, as steady and as maddening as a dripping faucet. Then we see his bored, curious hand reach for the door latch. The old man sees it too, shouts "be careful," but it's too late. The little boy opens the door and falls through a blast of smoke and air, presumably to his death. The mother wails, someone pulls the cord, the train halts and the carriage fills with people, as the conductor comes to lead the distraught mother away. And of all these passengers, the only one who doesn't so much as shift in her seat is Thulin. She is utterly still, staring. "Really, such lack of feeling," says one woman, and the old man starts to agree. Then he breaks off mid-word, as the camera moves to show us the number on Thulin's arm.

[Predrag: For the first 1/2 Return from the Ashes  follows the same plot, but then the
wealthy Jewish widow, Dr. Michele Wolf and former Dachau SS whorehouse inmate turns into blond Ingrid Thulin, and from then on this is a thriller with Holocaus forgotten. Filmed in black & white, and staged like a theater play, it cannot even begin to be compared to Phoenix. Maximilian Schell is over-acting, and Ingrid Thulin is not the Bergman Thulin I love so much.]

...When Nelly is dolled up in a black suit with a veiled hat, it evokes Hanna Schygulla, maneuvering through a new but still-ruthless Germany in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun."

[Predrag: Les yeux sans visage is a straight horror movie - especially the long sequence of removing a girl's face is sickening, but Phoenix owes much of the border-crossing and hospital sequences to it. The debt to the plastic surgeon sequence in Dark Passage is greater, even though that is a relatively light-hearted version. The debt to Vertigo is deep. At 1hour 40 min it starts making sense. At 1:50  he says: "Color your hair".

Petzold started with his actors by watching Les demoiselles de Rochefort together, with Gene Kelly and Catherine Deneuve? It's like getting in the mood for Aguirre, Wrath of God by watching Mama Mia.

I have not seen either  Yella (2007) or Barbara (2012).]

=========================================================================================

cinema-scope.com/features/face-another-christian-petzolds-phoenix/

The early sequences of Nelly stalking the halls of the Berlin hospital where she's gone to have surgery on her ruined face conjure up Georges Franju's Les yeux sans visage ("Eyes Without a Face", 1953), and not only visually; just as Franju's film mobilized mad-doctor tropes to evoke the medical atrocities of the Holocaust and the spectre of Aryan racial purity, Phoenix frames Nelly's operation in metaphorical terms: "a new face," the surgeon assures her, "is an advantage."

Nelly doesn't need her new visage to evade the authorities à la Humphrey Bogart's wrong-man character in Dark Passage (1957). But as in Delmer Daves' film, it proves useful in exposing the guilt of another.

It's here that Phoenix comes down with a distinct case of Vertigo (1958) and also becomes brutally moving, as Nelly is instructed by a man she has reason to suspect may have been behind her incarceration how to act more like "herself"—already wearing the face of another, she begins to see herself through a different pair of eyes as well.

What's remarkable about Phoenix is how its Farockian didacticism—the fact that Nelly would rather try to reclaim her place and her identity in a German society that tried to exterminate her rather than go with Lene to settle in Palestine—is blended into its drama so that it becomes a film of ideas that is also a film of emotions. For this critic, at least, the feelings in Jerichow, with its cuckolded Turkish version of Cecil Kellaway, and even the markedly superior Barbara, which trapped Hoss' eponymous heroine in an East German hospital while she harboured fantasies of the West, were mostly theoretical: the films, and their social critiques, were so neatly turned out that they didn't leave any residue. Phoenix is neat, too, and perhaps even more chokingly claustrophobic than its predecessors—not least of all when Nelly revisits the spider-hole where she hid from the Nazis—but it also has a plangency that's distinct from being simply and expertly spartan.

Les yeux sans visage is a good starting point to talk about Phoenix, since they are both movies about women's faces that are also images of nations in wartime—the idea of trying to graft a more beautiful face onto a ruined one.

Nina Hoss:
I always have the feeling with Christian that his movies are really about German identity, or about individuals in search of their own identity.

I thought very much about how I could express her journey in her body. When you see the pictures of the people who were at Auschwitz or the other concentration camps, they are so thin and in a way not really there. They look like they don't want to be seen, so they don't get into trouble. That's what I was working on, the fear. I also wanted to show how [Nelly] grows slowly over time, like a flower. Her head goes up and she can remember what it is like to be in the body again.

Christian Petzold:
I didn't show the Franju movie to the actors. I don't want to show them movies like Les yeux sans visage or Dark Passage, because they're too near to their characters, and too faraway in the same moment. The first movie we watched during the rehearsals was Jacques Demy's Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967).

While we were doing The State I'm In (2002), we were talking about Nuit et brouillard (1956) by Alain Resnais. I'd seen the film as a pupil in school. When it screened at Cannes in 1956, all the Germans at the festival left, because of the movie. Harun told me that for people of his generation, the left-wing students, it was the movie that showed them what had happened in the concentration camps, and so it was the movie that divided them from their parents.

[Ronald]  worked so hard. He looked at 25 movies from the time. He always had cigarettes and dollars in his pockets, because he wanted Johnny to be a real person. But Johnny is dead. From the first moment on the set, I said to him that the tragedy for him as an actor is the same as the tragedy for Johnny as a person—that he's dead. The end of the movie is not him coming back to life; it's that he knows that he's dead.

We shot for three or four months, and then Nina and I have had no connection to each other. It's not because we don't like each other any more. It's because the directing of a movie starring a blonde actress and what goes on in Johnny's basement…the two things are not so far away from each other. At the end of the movie, it wasn't just Nelly who was going away, it was also Nina saying goodbye to my fantasies as well. When the shooting ends on my films, there is always a party, and the Barbara party lasted for days. With this party, everyone went home after 12 minutes. Nobody talked to each other.

There are two questions that people can ask about the movie. One is, "Where is her face?" The other is, "Why didn't Johnny recognize Nelly?" My answer to both is that people who ask these questions don't like movies. It's what Hitchcock called "the plausibles." There's a German word for it too, and it's a bad word. But it's also a question of morality that he doesn't see her face.

Harun Farocki [...] died five weeks ago. I don't reflect about it. In the future when I'm writing, I'm going to go to his grave like in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). There is no other collaboration that I can think about. I'm going to take a break next year.

In our work together, everybody thought that Harun was the cold-blooded intellectual and I was the warm-blooded, emotional guy. It was totally the other way around. I'm the constructor in the stories, and Harun was always on the side of emotion.

We read three or four books by [Austrian essayist] Jean Amery. After he survived Auschwitz, he wrote in one essay, about being in a camp for displaced persons, and how after he came back to Germany, he thought the people there would embrace him and show their interest in forming a new society. He came back and nobody looked at him. Friends didn't recognize him. His friends had cut him not only of their memories but also out of their senses. He said, "I'm like a ghost."

At first I didn't want to make "Phoenix" because "Vertigo" exists. Harun said the same thing. It's a fantastic movie but we hate it a little bit, too. We changed perspective to a female perspective. At the beginning she is bandaged and you think she is a victim, like all of the survivors' victims. But at this moment, when she is in the basement, she starts to be the director of the movie and the director of the love affair. She was bringing back his memories. This is the turning point I like so much.

In the early '30s the Germans had made all of these great films, like "People on Sunday," the Billy Wilder, [Edgar G.] Ulmer and [Robert] Siodmak film. These movies were full of life. All of these great Jewish directors had to leave Germany and they made film noir: "Lost Weekend," "Detour," "The Killers." They changed their positive light into the dark light of the night. I said to the cinematographer [Hans Fromm] that we need color, because we have to have the natural and beautiful qualities of the world, but also the noir and the realistic. We have to use 35-millimeter. I like to shoot on 35-mm because I don't have the [playback] monitor. There's one camera and you can't see the rushes until two days later. You have to trust the things of what you saw. What's fantastic about 35-mm is that two days later, as the rushes are coming, you see them projected at a screening and it's not your movie. It feels a little bit strange. It's done. I like that very much.

And here is Nina Hoss on herself. It makes you think, God, how worthy every life is, even if it’s not exciting.  It’s such a great experience when all you need is on your back. It makes you realize how you are surrounded by things you don’t really need.

and where all children are above average

About this year's incoming Georgia Tech Students:

"looking at the makeup of the 2014 freshman class, it’s still no easy task to become a Yellow Jacket. The average SAT score (including the written test) of this year’s enrollees was 1450, the ACT 30, and the GPA a solid “A” average"

I especially like that the average is solid “A”.

The Suits take our coursera SOOC off Coursera, final episode 2

[for the previous installment, click here]
[for the current course website, click here; to read about the motivation for this course click here].

The Coursera.org course announcement went online August 21 2015.

Georgia Tech Professional Education Dean XXX has stopped the course twice. First time -without informing me about it- it was taken down for three weeks in October. Then it was reopened on Coursera.org, and was kept there until December 11, when it was taken down for good, again without a warning, this time with a 10 line email signed by XXX, and 3 points explanation:

"[the course] diverges in significant ways from other Georgia Tech MOOCs both in terms of production quality and pedagogical style and it is unlikely to meet the requirements that have been set for Coursera MOOCs.  There is also an overt marketing appeal for your Chaos Book that is inconsistent with our approach to MOOCs."

Georgia Tech "Professional Education" ways are mysterious. I have, in the entire year of working on the course, had only one 15 minute conversation, subsequent to shutting down the course. And why should Georgia Tech advanced graduate curriculum be approved by GT Professional Education?

We have split up the semester-long course into two consecutive 8-weeek courses. I was counting on about 50-100 off-campus students. 8,000 signed up. Assuming linear growth over the October lock-down period, and ignoring the acceleration towards the end, some 10,000 would have signed up:

The Suits take our coursera SOOC off-line, episode 1

[for the previous installment, click here] 

The GaTech Suits ban our advert for the Jan 2015 Coursera.org course, after 3 months on the Coursera website, and take our www.coursera.org/chaosbook off-line without informing me. Making it took a week of shooting, reshooting, and editing. I like the final Chesire Cat version for a reason, as a parable for a strange attractor. You can watch the banned video here: Youtu.be/JqaM-y2cBkI, with the caption:

This is an invitation to join our course. Click on [CC] for subtitles. The gadget on the glasses is the home-cooked Google Glass (ie, the mic for the camera). 

I asked by email what the deal is. The Suits took the advertisement down because: "The ghost movements are unacceptable and those videos will need to be reshot. All of these restrictions are made with the experience of the 20 previous Coursera courses that we've produced. The course would be removed from external access until the course is approved for release by the Executive MOOC team and made public after Dr. Baker and his team give their approval."

So, when you have a look on Internet, it's amazing how much stuff there is that does not meet  the Professional Education treshold. Here is this unprofessional Robert Reich's shaky video.


Whoever Dr. Baker of the Supreme MOOC Presidium might be - he's never talked to me or contacted me. So I wrote down the text of the add for the Professional Education, put on The Suit (I dress this way only for funerals, but nobody got the joke), went into their black room, and read the text off the teleprompter. With this version the Suits put the course back on line (after 6 weeks!).

[for the next installment, click here]

Wenches in Chainmail

America and its infinity of subcultures is amazing.

Someone on flickr.com faves a nice portrait by Jim of his ex (245 people have looked at it?), so I check that person's photography. Not public, but the person is into girls with plaster casts; Wenches in Chainmail (a flickr group with 279 members); Adult Baby Girl ("There is something about a beautiful, adult woman securely diapered with her pacifier neatly tucked in her mouth"); ladies wearing casts; and so on.

Why would anyone ... oh, never mind.

Life is beautiful

March 13 it happened, and it happened so quickly: we derived the classical trace formula. Half of the class was not even here, they had no time to blink, and it happened. The course is OVER. Trace formula is beautiful, and there is nothing more to say. Just some moping up to do. Today's sequel, "The meaning of it all: From trace formula to spectral determinant" was not half bad either, except for some wind-baggery about Gutzwiller, Zagier, etc, etc.

Outside the skies were beautiful, clear and blue. Cherry and Bradford pear trees are in glorious bloom, and the temperature is quickly dropping to below zero. I jumped on the bike and biked from Georgia Tech to the dead center of downtown. There were 5000 cars going nowhere, all roads plugged up, and there I was zooming by on the sidewalks - illegal in Georgia, but there are no pedestrians, and I live only once. I smuggled the bike into dentist's office, and submitted myself to scrutiny of a dental hygienist from Pasadena. I had recommended the dentist to Kimberly Short, and guess the name of hygienist: Kimberly Long.  Kimberly stuck my head in some contraption from Trekk, and made me bite and suck on a steel rod with lips closed while pushing the tip of the tongue against the palate and kind of standing tiptoe. In this ridiculous pose the machine whirled 360 degrees around my head, ostensibly generating a 3D Xray of my teeth. But I am sure it sucked my mind out, because I immediately became deliriously happy. The tooth that was sensitive to pressure before I got to office decided not to be sensitive to anything, so I left the office (with the bike, 5 floors above Peachtree) undrilled and irrationally content.

The sun is setting, the temperature is quickly dropping, and from overpass to Freedom Parkway downtown skyscrapers are silhouetted against a dramatic sky, with large dark purple cloud blotches. Bike chain locks up - I reset it and think - maybe I should get a new bike...

I decide to explore Highland south of Ponce de Leon, and discover a bike store that I did not know existed. It's a small store, and there is a single young man standing in it. There I things in life I find irresistible: dancer's body, a woman with a voice and acoustic guitar, an intelligent, serious 12-year old, a man or woman alone in his/her bike shop. The young man's name is Seth, and he is a dropout. Why go to school when you can build your own frames?

He takes the bike, disassembles it: the chain is stretched, the bracket is loose and it misses the bolt, the right brake cable is locked up, I must get the only backlight he sells (40 bucks for a blinding red rechargeable only via USB cable), and then reassembles it again, pumps the tires to 90 psi ("You have to pump up your tires every two days"), while his Asian-American girlfriend floats in, the bicycle beautiful and with bamboo fenders, then a tall young man who sets to lovingly dusting a dirt roadbike by the light of his smartphone, and yet another gentle young Asian-American man whose business has been taken over by Starbucks floats in - it's a bike store where you hang out in the evenings. I get on the bike, and its 20 years younger - the gears just purr between my legs. I stop the next door: Sweet Auburn Barbecue. Waitress Katherine is Asian-American. The owners are not southern rednecks - they are Hmong? Malaysians? Filipinos? It's getting impossible to guess. The stone is off my chest and I do something I've been unable to do in months. I open the postdoc application folders I've been carrying with me everywhere. What an idiot I've been - I have to call Cédric, make him an offer. Now.

It's night, the temperature has dropped bellow freezing, I'm freezing and I'm biking home, idiotically happy.

Sanity check

remember to click on Chris' blog whenever I do something especially boring in the chaos class :)

But to go beyond perturbation, determinants lead to salvation

SAS's limerick:

There once was a lad from the Adriatic
who grew up among things Croatic
but he then crossed the pond
and became quite well known
for perturbing potentials quadratic.

But to go beyond perturbation
determinants lead to salvation:
just expand in a set
whose completeness is met
and get the result through summation.

This approach will lead us through the maze
well applied, it will solve every case -
from chaotic the flow
to the mystery of thought -
all is done by computing the trace.

Sins of philosophers

In July 22, 2013 New Yorker, James Wood writes:

Almost twenty years ago, George Steiner suggested in these pages that doing philosophy was incompatible with domestic life. Speaking of the troubled French thinker Louis Althusser, Steiner proposed that sometimes it might be necessary for a philosopher to strangle his wife. (As, alas, Althusser did.) There is something vulgar and absurd, he continued, in the notion of a Mrs. Plato, a Madame Descartes. You cannot commit to taking out the garbage or doing the dishes while also solving the problem of the cogito or announcing the death of God. Being George Steiner, he charged his argument with bolts of existential electricity. In his reading, Zarathustra is at best a rough, undomesticated beast and at worst a murderous lunatic. Up on Olympus you feel free, not in the kitchen or the faculty lounge.

I have always liked Tolstoy’s diary entry from 1863: “Family happiness completely absorbs me, and it’s impossible to do anything.” Tolstoy is indeed the great novelist of family happiness, but delight is tempered by the vision of the father and husband he became—selfish, tyrannical, more faithful to his literary and religious followers than to his biological successors. Even gentle Chekhov joked that he would prefer a wife “who, like the moon, won’t appear in my sky every day.” He contrived to marry late in his short life, and spent much of his marriage in Yalta, while Olga Knipper worked a thousand miles away, in Moscow....

Dreams of theorists

S writes: "Last night I dreamt of traffic cops that would stop and fine chaotic drivers. I saw them stopping someone and I intervened - how did they establish that the driver was chaotic? Had they computed Lyapunov exponents? Did they know whether it was real chaos or non-normal chaos?"

This time, they say, Einstein might really be wrong

Today's  Dennis Overbye is priceless:

.... this violated a basic tenet of modern science and of quantum theory, that information is always preserved...

I'm sitting here with two other scientists, here we are, ages 90, 82 and 67, spent our whole lives as card carrying physicists, and until this minute, we had no idea that this is the basic tenet. See, we never got the memo.

... in a sense physicists had already thrown Einstein under the bus. In Dr. Maldacena’s holographic universe, considered to be the last word on quantum gravity, the dimensions of space-time do not seem to matter. “We’ve known for years that space-time is not fundamental,” Dr. Polchinski said. “General relativity is not fundamental.” He went on, “space-time is emergent. Gravity is emergent. Maybe sometimes it doesn’t always emerge.”...

And guess what - not only there is no experiment, there cannot be an experiment:

... Daniel Harlow of Princeton and Patrick Hayden of McGill University suggested that the issue might be moot; the computation necessary to verify that Alice and Bob are entangled could take longer than the age of the universe and the black hole would evaporate in the meantime, making it impossible ever to go inside and experience the contradiction...

Brilliant, no?

There are already more than 300 comments, one more helpful than the other:

Bondosan: I am reminded of the Buddhist concept of the Four Sufferings: Birth, Aging, Sickness, and Death, which apply not only to individuals but to entire world systems as well...

The modern thing is to make virtue of predictions being untestable. Here are news from CERN:

The LHCb and CMS experiments at CERN have announced the first definitive observation B⁰_s→μ μ− decay. This is one of the rarest processes in fundamental physics, predicted by the Standard Model to occur only about 3 times in every billion. Where the result is a remarkable success for the Standard Model, around the web it has also been called a serious blow to supersymmetric symmetry (SUSY) models.

But  Gordon Kane points out that some supersymmetric theories actually predict that some superpartners lead to experimental results very close to the Standard Model ones, particularly those that affect these newly observed rare decays. He and his colleagues made quantitative predictions of B_s meson decay to muons based on the compactification of M-theory that deviate from the Standard Model prediction by a percent or so. Jim Gates also bemoans talk of the death of SUSY. "SUSY has a huge parameter space and it will take years, if not decades, to experimentally explore it all. So declaring SUSY dead is most certainly premature."

While I'm on the roll with matters delirious:

Is it possible that time is real, and that the laws of physics are not fixed? Lee Smolin, A C Grayling, Gillian Tett, and Bronwen Maddox explore the implications of such a profound re-think of the natural and social sciences, and consider how it might impact the way we think about surviving the future.

Einstein is invoked only in min. 4. Gotta hand it to Lee for professorial grooming, though.

Lyapunov exponents - good for what?

David M writes:

Q: I am working in nonlinear dynamics in the area of Sports Science and was intrigued by your comments in ChaosBook.org (version14.4.1), Chapter 6 Lyapunov exponents:

In short: Lyapunov exponents are an abomination. We are doubtful of their utility as means of predicting any observables of physical significance, but that is the minority position - in the literature one encounters many provocative speculations, especially in the context of foundations of statistical mechanics (`hydrodynamic' modes) and the existence of a Lyapunov spectrum in the thermodynamic limit of spatiotemporal chaotic systems.

Lyapunov exponents are used extensively in the literature of nonlinear systems as an indicator of chaos.  Do you have any suggestions as what should be used as an indicator in place of Lyapunov exponents - is it a number of multiple factors that indicate Chaos?

A: thanks for pointing this out, I thought I had censored the 'abomination' already - it was stated so emphatically because I cannot get my students deprogrammed from 'Lyapunov exponents' no matter how I rewrite the stability chapters, but it gets colleagues' hair up. How about this revision:

In short: we do not recommend that you evaluate Lyapunov exponents; compute stability exponents and the associated covariant vectors instead. Cost less and gets you more insight. Whatever you call your exponents, please state clearly how are they being computed. While the Lyapunov exponents are a diagnostic for chaos, we are doubtful of their utility as  means of predicting any observables of physical significance. This is the minority position - in the literature one encounters many provocative speculations, especially in the context of foundations of statistical mechanics (`hydrodynamic' modes) and the existence of a Lyapunov spectrum in the thermodynamic limit of spatiotemporal chaotic systems.

'Stability exponents' and the associated 'covariant vectors' are defined in the preceding "Local stability" and "Cycle stability" chapters. The "Lyapunov exponents" chapter I had to write because it is only very recently that people (see  Ginelli et al. Covariant Lyapunov vectors, J. Phys. A 46, 254005 (2013),  arXiv.org/abs/1212.3961) do the right thing.

Theresa is no Catherine: I got my Catholic saints mixed up :)

[this post has lots of clickable links; "mudders" hick hop link is highly recommended]

I love 'Lives of Saints', as much as I hate annual reports, and here is what I learned while avoiding to work on the recent deadline:
 
Bernini's ecstasy depicts not Catherine, but the other woman saint. 

The original Catherine (the Lady of The Wheel) was not so lucky to be sainted for an orgasm, but sure was a major pain: "Consternated by her learned denunciation of paganism, Maxentius summoned fifty philosophers to trounce her in a public debate, but Katherine instead converted them all to Christianity.".

Feast Day: November 25th; Date of Death: A.D. 307; Cause of Death: broken on the wheel and then, just to make sure, beheaded. (Santa Cecilia sung for three days after beheading. She however, did not merit a Bernini - though you might like the modern version better).

She was a chick saint, transported to heaven to marry Jesus in a mystical wedding ceremony:"Attuned to the interests of women, who were avid readers and patrons in 1440s East Anglia, Capgrave develops those aspects of the virgin martyr's relationship with her heavenly spouse that provincial wives could understand: her longing for her absent husband, for example". You Catherine are the patron of philosophers, theologians and royal women. Were you less fortunate, you could have been the patron saint of mudders.

There are two kinds of saints: either martyrs, quartered and sliced in imaginative ways, or the agile fund raisers. You got the both genes in you:)

The fund raiser was pretty scary too, caused lots of trouble in her 33 terrestrial years: "Catherine threw herself into Pope Gregory's campaign for another crusade to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the Turks". And so our troubles started.

The runaway St. Flora likewise had issues with Muslims and, on the helpful advice of St. Eulogius, was decapitated only after a tour in brothel.  She wavered and trembled on her way to glory. She is patroness of the abandoned, converts, single laywomen and victims of betrayal. Feast day: October 5.

Then there is St. Flora of Beaulieu who did nothing of note, other than being mobbed by the sisters: "Like many saints, Saint Fleur was subject to the suspicions of her mother superior who could not admit or imagine the eminent virtue of her inferior". But she was a good girl and so went to heaven. Somehow she too, through the infinite wisdom of internet (conflated here), became patroness of the abandoned, converts, single laywomen and victims of betrayal. Feast day: November 24.

Portraitlandia

Portland, you gotta love it:
Wired.com/rawfile/2013/07/portraitlandia - www.kirkcrippens.com

Codefellas are not bad, either

Kapuściński; von Rezzori

“Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing. Herodotus, The Histories.”

Read straight through Ryszard Kapuściński Travels with Herodotus; started rereading Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. I had almost forgotten how much I love them, and why... I'm a grandchild of Mittel Europa destroyed in 1914.

Ivan on Croatia joining EU; on Croatian bureaucracy

Ovo iz Ivan Belić fjesbuka - predrago da se tamo izgubi: 

Dali nekom nešto danas fali?

Kada god smo se udruživali ili razdruživali u zadnjih 1300 godina, uvijek je bio veći cirkus ... Poraženi bježe, pobjednici defiliraju, razdragano građanstvo baca cviječe, voljeni vođa maskiran bježi iz zemlje, u dvorište se zakapaju se krive uniforme, ističu se nove zastave ...

Možda sam nostalgičan, ali da bar jedna vojarna odbije istaknuti nove zastave ... ili da se koja skupina Ličana odmetne u šumu do strane intervencije ... ili da skupina studenta pred HNK zapali zastavu EU ... ili da Josipović obuće haljinu i pobjegne u Italiju ... ma bio koja naša stara tradicija bi valjala, jer ovako izgleda kao da normalna zemlja ulazi u normalnu zajednicu. (30.6.2013)

Rekordni urod!

Usprkos lošoj godini, lošim uvjetima, padu proizvodnje, recesiji, deficitu, i ove godine birokrati su rodili u rekordnom broju! Nema ureda koji nije do vrha pun. 

Polja prazna, narasla makija, drač, posljednjeg pastira su već odavno pojeli vuci, čak i luk uvozimo iz Kine ... Uostalom, tko je čuo da nešto može roditi na škrtoj zemlji Slavonskoj? Ali agro-birokracija nikad bolje i živahnije. 

Odeš u agenciju za upis imanja. Prvi stakleni neboder, unutra njih 400, skoro svatko ima svoj ured, ali nitko ne prima papire. Oni se više bave ovako zen meditativnim aspektima poljoprivrede, svima nama žele dobar urod, za skromnu naknadu od 12tak tisuća kuna mjesečno. Ali srećom, u istoj ulici je ispostava (imaju ispostavu u istoj ulici, za ozbiljno) sa njih stotinjak, među kojima navodno postoji jedna budala koja radi. Pogodili ste, tu budalu koja radi su premjestili u treću (!!) ispostavu u istom gradu. Tu sam odustao ...  

Kako ono ide? Vjera u boga i seljačka sloga! Da nam živi jedina 'rvacka! (11.7.2013)

Peppermint Frappé

Peppermint Frappé, Carlos Saura 1967 homage to Bunuel dates me. No millennial can sit through it.

The Devil's Eye / Djävulens öga ( Ingmar Bergman, 1960):
Markis Giuseppe Maria de Macopanza: 
       Äktenskapet är helvetets fasta punkt, vår pièce de résistance, skulle jag vilja säga.
Greve Armand de Rochefoucauld: 
       Ni har rätt; vad vore helvetet utan äktenskapet?

3:19, however, perhaps Alejo or Martin can love.

Birthday mail

Just in time for the birthday, unsolicited mail from something called Neptune Society (TM), with following helpful offer printed on the lower left corner of the envelope:

Free Prepaid Cremation!

DETAILS INSIDE

Chucked that one out. 

On the more cheerful note: should we keep Buzz?
 And should Buzz be able to handle our spiders? 

from NPR to rats

I'm getting contradictory messages on this,  but since my plumbing has been on "watchful waiting" I've been told that bicycling is bad, and I'm actually using the evil 4-wheel contraption. Which leads to more NPR. Which leads to often waiting in the stopped car for a program to finish. I was laid back, transfixed, listening to Natalie Batalha describe what it is like to lie on top of a telescope with stars and only stars in all directions when I saw what: a rat, exiting what I thought was an impenetrable grill on one of basement's ventilation holes, and stroll leisurely down the vertical brick wall to the ground. Yes,

Rats can climb brick walls, trees, and telephone poles, and walk across telephone lines.
Rats can fall from a height of 50 feet without getting hurt.
Rats can jump three feet in the air from a flat surface and leap more than four feet horizontally.
Rats can scamper through openings as small as a quarter. General rule: If a rat’s head fits into the hole then the body will follow.
Rats are prolific. Mother rats can have as many as 8-12 offspring about every 30 days as long as there is enough food, shelter, and water. The young rat is sexually mature at 3-4 months of age.
Each year, rats destroy approximately 20% of all the agricultural products in the world.
Rats are nocturnal (active at night), so when you see rats during the day this may signify a rat population out of control, or you may be seeing weaker, less competitive rats that are forced out into the daylight by stronger more dominant rats.

A half of Landau-Lifshitz is wrong

UF calls about 2am - rants and raves against: Newton, Churchill, British lack of interest in fighting the war, the French and that moron Truman. Arnold, Landau and Sinai get mixed reviews. A half of Landau-Lifshitz is wrong. Classical Mechanics is all wrong - Landau does not understand variational principles. Optics (in The Classical Theory of Fields) is all wrong. Galileo, Leibniz, Zeldovich, Stalin were praised, especially Stalin who was very smart and a killer, being a killer meant as a compliment. Brezhnev was a killer too, this time meant only as grudging respect.


The Book is not finished because biologists are not scientists - it is impossible to figure out what their data is -selected to prove whatever they wish it to prove, and with no error brackets- means. Supporting that research is colossal waste of money. Only one in seven gets funded, which means there are seven times too many of those people.


At 3am I declare it is time to sleep and turn over.

Obsessive is good

Looks-like-John Lenon writes:

Now. Obsessive is good. We love you for being obsessive. When all is said and down, the most important thing in science/mathematics is simply being correct. In novel work, simply getting to "correct" not to say "elegant" generally requires busting a gut. And there is often a difference between the truth and the whole truth. 

My personal record to date was an  8-word sentence that expanded and mutated wildly into three paragraphs of prose only to collapse back to it original form after five hours of angst. What a waste (?) of an evening!

But, without obsessives, mankind would still be scavenging for berries in the forests. Certainly the Wright Brothers would have never gotten off the ground. As a female Slovakian poet once passionately impressed upon me (in my last PhD year ...):

"The detail is all."

Bohm rules!

Nobody reads books anymore

Nobody reads books anymore. We only tweet.

Still, there is the Last Book I have read. I stubbornly plowed through all of Zweig’s Beware of Pity. Made me mad as hell - being terrorized by a manipulative Jewish girl? How is that credible? A dumb young officer? But it must have been a good read, because I kept reading it.

And then I read what others wrote about it. He left his super-energetic wife for his sickly secretary, so that must have been what the book was about. In 1943 they committed suicide together someplace in South America. And this neurotic windbag was the most read writer of early 20th century?

So I asked my German Professor of Deutsche Literatur, Professor Erdmann, and he said “Zweig? Do not read him. Not worth it.” By Dec 29 I was done with Zweig. Just in time.

The Shabat Cat and Mayan Catopocalypse

Report from Jerusalem:

The End of the Mayan World we are dodging by having fled to the Land of Israel: here they use some other obsolete calendar, with no uneventful stretch between Hanukah and Tu Bishvat of year 5773.

I'm happy to report that the Rapture did not swallow Jerusalem, and from the balcony of our room at Beit Belgia the next Mayan cycle was ushered in by City on the Hill glowing golden, awash in glorious morning sunshine.

But the night at Beit Belgia was more eventful. It is sparkling shiny freshly renovated, and whoever won the the contract redid it on the cheap, so the lobby was flooded by the nights rain. We fall asleep to plaintive prayers of the Wailing Shabat Cat who got itself into the ventilation duct traversing guest rooms bathrooms. Whether it was she cat or he cat and whether she had the prayer shawl around her head and not across her shoulders (women get arrested for less at the West Wall) we could not tell, she wailed on much of the night. And in the morning I could smell (I have friends who have to eleven cats too many) the unmistakable marks of alpha cats marking off their territory in the carpeted hallway. When the happens, only thing to do is to tear down the plaster boards and rip off the carpets, and rebuild the Beit Belgia from the scratch.

Judging by the surly mug of House Speaker Boehner, the New World is still with us as well.

I'm not alone. Should I start a podcast?

Le Blog de Jean-Paul Sartre

Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures

Tripletitios gave me as a present an Argentinian Tshirt with Andes as a ripoff of the iconic cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Turns out the original is data observed from a pulsar. Cute, no? (Thanks to Mason for digging this one up).

Drones: who's doing the thinking here?

Let's think for a moment. You develop a weapon that in a few years will cost no more than a moped, controlled by electronics already built into smart phones. As you are doing it first, you have an advantage over your opponents and you go kill lots of  'collateral' people in places like Pakistan. The military just does it, there is no civilian oversight. The populace loves it because they have seen techno-killings works so well in the movies. So now lots of people out there really really hate you. They are smart, really smart. And they are committed.

How long will it take for one of these things to fly in a target somewhere in US? 

Agence France-Presse is reporting that the Pentagon wants its drones to be more autonomous, so that they can run with little to no assistance from people.
“Before they were blind, deaf and dumb,” Mark Maybury, chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force, told AFP. “Now we’re beginning to make them to see, hear and sense.”

Ronald Arkin, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that drones will soon be able to kill enemies on their own independently.

“It is not my belief that an unmanned system will be able to be perfectly ethical in the battlefield, but I am convinced that they can perform more ethically than human soldiers are capable of,” Arkin told AFP.

Arkin added that robotic weapons should be designed as “ethical” warriors and that these type of robots could wage war in a more “humane” way.

[...] Earlier this year, Singer wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times about the use of drones. In the piece, entitled “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?” he says the use of drones is “short-circuiting the decision-making process.”

“Without any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorizing it,” Singer wrote. “Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but many future scenarios will be less clear-cut. And each political party will very likely have a different view, depending on who is in the White House.”

There are currently more than 7,000 drones being used in combat.

A gender on the way out

January 2010:
men are a gender on the way out - not very smart, socially autistic, high maintenance, low return. We heard a really cool rap song "Du bist der Weihnacht@mann" at a Gottingen grade school school, sang by a chorus of 8 year old girls. Why were they so good? They had kicked out the boys from the choir, "because they were too lazy." Sounds familiar? This whole gender is on the way out, methinks. It's a disgrace to the species. Women will not have us, even those of us who are female in all ways but the genital, having been raised by single mothers and their girlfriends (alleged fathers only pitching in with an occasional postcard).

If I may be so bold as to quote the introduction to the Pulitzer Prize winning ChaosBook.org, from a letter from Hermann Minkowski to David Hilbert:

"It seems sometimes that through a preoccupation with science, we acquire a firmer hold over the vicissitudes of life and meet them with greater calm, but in reality we have done no more than to find a way to escape from our sorrows."

iPhone owners might seek solace in youtube.com/watch?v=ZBNu6WMfR1k. Requires only one finger. [Warning: those over 48 might experience dizziness and shortness of breath]. The rest of us will have to drown our sorrows in sensitive, chick flicks such as Off the map.

30 September 2012:
Much recent back and forth in New York Times and recent books about the alleged decline of male gender. It's complicated.  Progress of women in US jobs has stalled in the past decade (see statistics here, and a very good county-by-county map here). Today's New York Times:

If the ascent of women has been much exaggerated, so has the descent of men. Men’s irresponsibility and bad behavior is now a stock theme in popular culture. But there has always been a subset of men who engage in crude, coercive and exploitative behavior. What’s different today is that it’s harder for men to get away with such behavior in long-term relationships. Women no longer feel compelled to put up with it and the legal system no longer condones it. The result is that many guys who would have been obnoxious husbands, behaving badly behind closed doors, are now obnoxious singles, trumpeting their bad behavior on YouTube.

Their boorishness may be pathetic, but it’s much less destructive than the masculine misbehavior of yore. Most men are in fact behaving better than ever. Domestic violence rates have been halved since 1993, while rapes and sexual assaults against women have fallen by 70 percent in that time. In recent decades, husbands have doubled their share of housework and tripled their share of child care. And this change is not confined to highly educated men.

On the Run

Lev Davidovich Landau - a biopic

The Movie Set That Ate Itself  -  a few pictures from the set

Beijing Arts District 798, Mr Jones?

I'm reputedly in 'fine shape'; In Whattabore DDs conference Roberto classified me as from Pleistocene. Which is kind, that is as recent as 11,700 years ago, he could have had me in Cambrian, half a billion years ago.

I loved Beijing Arts District 798 - there might be lots of SoHo kind of schlock for people with money, but the art there is more vital and inventive than anything in Europe or US. The painters are only 30! When they were born there was no art in China! My totally uniformed and based on nothing guess is that today 20% of China is middle class. Which is only 300 million. NY Times says there are 400 million bloggers. You have to be literate to some extent to be a blogger. Try to find 75 million bloggers in US? 

All in all, I'm blown away by the vitality of Beijing - Americans and Oy-ro-peens have no conception of what is going on in Asia. The Confucian empire is back, courtiers and mandarins are in charge, the most recent crazy Emperor is only an image on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. It is amazing and it is unstoppable, unless the generals fuck it all up, and they get into wars again... Which is always a possibility, the idiocy of generals of peoples armies should not be underestimated.

Erik says: It is a fascinating place, but impossible to understand without knowing the language. You can just scratch a little bit on the surface. In Sweden and Finland it is rather so that people and the government think too much and too positively about China. There are delegations from my university to/from China all the time, with wide-eyed Swedes knowing even less about China than I do pushing "the great East" for all they are worth. Volvo was sold to the Chinese, and Saab almost was also.

The food is fantastic, and I have never in my life met so many happy and optimistic colleagues (not in the US, not in Europe, not in Russia, not anywhere). America in the 40ies and the 50ies at the height of the brain drain must have been something like that.

Katrin says: Shanghai is probably even more amazing. I've never been to a place like this. It combines Paris, London, Venice, and NYC in one place.

"Something is happening here / But you don't know what it is / Do you, Mr Jones?"

Foundational SOOCs (Specialized Open Online Courses)

I've been wondering when The Thing will happen in higher education for at least two decades, and that's what my ChaosBook.org is about, imperfect as it is. There have been no resources to develop ChaosBook.org - since I moved to US everything has been done by myself, alone, in free time, so it is woefully technologically primitive - but do I keep meeting graduate students who use it.

Now that Sebastian Thrun has happened, we are in the lemmings mode, every University trying to the same thing. But when the dust settles, there will be only one 'iPhone' left standing, the rest will be crushed in competition.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has come out with solicitation for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) grant proposals. Theirs is a laudable goal:

...Must focus on a high-enrollment, low-success introductory level course that is a barrier to success for many students, particularly low-income/first-generation students...

If my institution decides to enter the fry on the level of introductory undergraduate courses, it should pick only very few - like one 2-semester sequence, taught by lecturers universally known to be exceptional, and these few should be given full technical and organizational support, because either you get it perfect the first time around, or do not attempt it at all. This is no arena for amateurs. And very few courses a suited to MOOCsisation - it is no accident that the first success was a computer course.

For research universities most research training will continue as is, by one-on-one apprenticeships. Though I think there is a market for SOOCs (Specialized Open Online Courses).

I think a better strategy would be a specialized advanced education approach: create several high level SOOCs in areas where the institution has particular strengths. They will never be money makers, enrollment will be in hundreds at the best of times, but their advertising value would be high: they would enable us to recruit into our research programs top notch students whose quality we already know through our courses that they have taken.

[for the next installment, click here]

36 år siden jeg indvandrede til Danmark

I dag er det 36 år siden jeg indvandrede til Danmark, med to store kufferter og en cykel. Copenhagen (filmen) viser Andedammen som jeg ser den når jeg lukker øjnene. Du som er 14 eller 28 kan opleve alt det idag. Jeg elsker Danmark og Skytsenglen og Naturlige og Rock'n'roll Dreams og Punk Paraply og Børnene og Englebørn og Tudse og Ballur og fru Hansens mælk og enogtyve nul nul spelt og ... og alle de små tudser, endnu mere end nogensinde - stort knus til mit adoptive land.

The UGLY BEAUTY

KA-nevolim: The UGLY BEAUTY
(from my Karlovac friend Zvonimir - sad and beautiful)

Martin Amis, "Looking in the mirror now"

You have to love Martin Amis. Here is Richard Tull, the protagonist of "The Information":
 
"Looking in the mirror now, on the morning of his fortieth birthday, Richard felt that no one deserved the face he had. No one in the history of the planet. There was nothing on the planet it was that bad to do. What happened? What have you done, man? His hair, scattered over his crown in assorted folds and clumps, looked as though it had just concluded a course of prolonged (and futile) chemotherapy. Then the eyes, each of them perched on its little blood-rimmed beer gut. If the eyes were the window to the soul, then the window was a windscreen, after a transcontinental drive; and his cough sounded like a wiper on the dry glass. These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him-but smoking and drinking had done a lot to him, so he drank and smoked a lot. He experimented, furthermore, with pretty well any other drug he could get his hands on. His teeth were all chipped pottery and prewar jet glue. At each given moment, whatever he was doing, at least two of his limbs were immovably numb. Up and down his body there were whisperedrumors of pain. In fact, physically, at all times, he felt epiphanically tragic. His doctor had died four years ago ("Unfortunately I am terminally ill."); and that, in Richard's mature opinion, was definitely that. He had a large and lucent lump on the back of his neck. This he treated himself, by the following means: he kept his hair long to keep it hidden. If you went up to Richard Tull and told him he was in Denial, he would deny it. But not hotly.

None of this altered the fact that he had to take the vacuum cleaner in. [...]

By the time he had grappled the vacuum cleaner out of its sentry box Richard had long been weeping with self-pity and rage. He was getting good at crying. If women were right, then you needed to cry about three or four times a day. Women cried at the oddest times: when they won beauty contests, for instance (and when they lost them too, probably: later on). If Richard won a beauty contest-would he cry? Can we see him there, on stage, with his bouquet, his swimsuit and his sash, and with all his mother coming into his eyes?

By the time he got the vacuum cleaner out of the apartment and onto the stairs Richard was wondering if he had ever suffered so. This, surely, is how we account for the darkness and the helpless melancholy of twentieth-century literature. These writers, these dreamers and seekers, stood huddled like shivering foundlings on the cliffs of a strange new world: one with no servants in it. On the stairs and landings there were bikes leaning everywhere, and also shackled to the walls-and to the ceiling. He lived in a beehive of bikers.

By the time he got the vacuum cleaner down into the hall Richard was sure that Samuel Beckett, at some vulnerable time in his life, had been obliged to take a vacuum cleaner in. Celine, too, and perhaps Kafka-if they had vacuum cleaners then. Richard gave himself a loud breather while he looked through his mail. His mail he no longer feared. The worst was over. Why should a man fear his mail, when, not long ago, he had received a solicitor's letter from his own solicitor? When, rather less recently, in response to a request for more freelance work, he had been summarily fired, through the post, by his own literary agent? When he was being sued (for advances paid on unwritten books) by both his ex-publishers?"

William Gilbert, De Magnete 1600

to read, books about Venice

Cara writes: "Maybe Norwich for straight history. Jan Morris for wonderful writing. Mary McCarthy for being Mary McCarthy. Joseph Brodsky for a completely singular book on Venice by a completely singular mind."

Matteo Casini writes: "The book by Crouzet-Pavan is a good book in between scholarship and the larger public. Two books I always loved are Ruskin and Pemble, Venice rediscovered. The classical guide for all secrets of Venice is Lorenzetti. (Cara: "smallish type and long, but critical"). I heard good things about the revised edition of Jan Morris and Crowley's account on the Venetian Empire."

Predrag has

Peter Ackroyd’s Venice, Pure City
Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth

J.G. Links, Venice for Pleasure

John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels

but is undisciplined about reading them. So far, finished only Berendt - it is deliriously hilarious, Italy is Italy, but Venice is clearly still another level.

Cara writes: "Dream of Venice by Charles Christopher. J.G. Links is okay. There is an intriguing book (almost a novel) but actually based on family documents that were found. Very pleasurable. I thought the Berendt book was the biggest piece of junk I have ever read about Venice. Sorry. I know you enjoyed it but please do not take one iota of it seriously as a portrait of Venice. The Venetians were furious at him, and not because he was spot on. Quite the opposite. I think he was desperate to get another book out after all the years that had passed Since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and did this miserably forced and false book."

Metronomy - The Bay

I like this:

Metronomy - The Bay,
and much else by David Wilson.

Dougal Wilson - Basement Jaxx - Take Me Back To Your House

Christopher Hitchens: will miss you

As we will remember him:
“In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation.
In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.”

As his friends knew him: the sentence least likely to be uttered by Mr. Hitchens’s was
“I don’t care how rich you are, I’m not coming to your party.”

Squabbling with the BMW GPS lady

I got to UF with surprising difficulty - because of the New York Marathon (50K humans, 100K feet running, 100K's watching) I could not move through the human mass from Lexington to 1st Ave - eventually found a way down 58th St to York Ave, where there were barely any people at all, and leisurely traffic.

UF then proudly took me for a ride to see changing colors in Connecticut in his brand new smelling BMW, the cigarette smoke has not burned itself in yet.

"Seeing changing colors in Connecticut" meant driving through insane traffic for hours (police has basically blocked off all bridges from Manhattan either because of the marathon, or because they felt like it - then we drew through some deliriously rich areas of Connecticut where each mansion is tucked away in acres of forest with fabulous colors of autumn leaves (as promised by NY Times), and then, without ever getting out of the car we turned back. Return trip was marked by squabbling with the GPS lady - UF disobeyed her every order and drove us through some amazing sections of Bronx where no white man has sat foot since the island was bought by the Dutch. By the time we got back to Riverside drive they made up. It turns out that the roads are filled with morons on wheels who do not know how to drive. UF suspects them all immigrating here from Ohio. It's because of them that it is now impossible to eat in restaurants, as eeeeverything now contains fruit. Not to mention how loudly they shout, deafened by their Ipods etc.

UF says The Book is almost finished - he'll finish it as soon as he stops smoking. Currently he smokes like a smokestack.

Then we talked about this and that, and at some point he started saying not nice things about his Woman, so I went to bed. All is all, he is doing MUCH better than any time in past three years, it was more fun seeing him than in a long time.

PS Vecchio objects:

Don't be silly,  I grew up in that part of the Bronx.   It is what inspired Ogden Nash to write "The Bronx? No Thonx."

all things are ephemeral

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

Even for someone who doesn't have a real job, I am always swamped with crap to do. I've come to the philosophical conclusion that nothing is eternal, all things are ephemeral, so one might as well blow off once and a while. After all, as they say in L5P this time of year, "Life's too short, so you might as well stop and smell the zombies along the way."

Siri Answers Questions

Siri Answers Questions From Readers - NYTimes.com:

and now, the insult: Say hello to Iris, Intelligent Rival Imitation of Siri, or Siri backward, who surfaced in the wake of Siri's debut.

That's my (much younger) sister

David Pogue, New York Times Oct 12 2011:

Siri is billed as a virtual assistant: a crisply accurate, astonishingly understanding, uncomplaining, voice-commanded minion.

I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk

Edson is not a professional mathematician.

I went to Professor Weiss and asked him: "I have a blah that can be turn into bi-blah by Schzmolukowzsky's conjugacy. Has somebody generalized this Groethendieck categories of uni-blah with Schartzwitoskwicz points (fuctors for which the critical holonomy is diffeo preperiodic to an unstable climacterium), so the conjugated balh has monotone laps. Remember anyone who has done that?" You would ask the same, no? Somebody must have done it, it is so obvious.

Professor Weiss gives me a happy grin and says: "Of course. Since my childhood I had only worked on Schma, never on Blah, but my dear friend Vargas in Minsk knows everything that is to be known on Blah, ask him."

So I ask, and Vargas writes back: "From the best of my knowlodge, i don't  know any result in this direction"

Wrong! Wrong comrade Vargas. This is how it is done:

1) when anyone asks you a real question (other than "How are you?") you immediately say: "Sorry, I do not work on Blah, I only work on Schma, but I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk, who, .... knows all about Blah". An easy corollary follows:
     Corollary: Weiss is a professional mathematician.
     Subsidiary Lemma: Vargas is not.

2) Theorem: Every sequence of mathematical referrals is a closed loop, ie., no matter who you send me to, eventually the guy in Dnepropetrovsk will refer me back to Weiss,

but now Vargas has spoiled the game that Howie so professionally initiated.

On the other hand, Vargas is honest. Do I even have to cite any theorems on how unprofessional that is?

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

if she says your behavior is heinous
kick her right in the Coriolanus.

Shoot Nations, an annual, global photography project for young people aged 11 to 25.

Shoot Nations, an annual, global photography project for young people aged 11 to 25.

David Hlynsky Communist Store Windows

David Hlynsky Communist Store Windows

Bureaucratics - Images | Jan Banning

Bureaucratics - Images | Jan Banning

Kacper Kowalski: aerial photographs of winter from a paraglider’s lense - Telegraph

Kacper Kowalski: aerial photographs of winter from a paraglider’s lense - Telegraph

Photo Gallery: The 2009 Best of 'Picture This' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Photo Gallery: The 2009 Best of 'Picture This' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Ketzel Cotel 1992-2011

Ketzel the cat is dead.  This sad piece of news was broken by the New York Times's City Room blog on Tuesday.

Accentuate.us

accentuate.us is pretty cool (except that it does not work yet in either of languages that I need it for):

Dataists.com: "Many languages around the world use the familiar Latin alphabet (A-Z), but in order to represent the sounds of the language accurately, their writing systems employ diacritical marks and other special characters. [...] Speakers of these languages have difficulty entering text into a computer because keyboards are often not available, and even when they are, typing special characters can be slow and cumbersome.    [...]
To solve this problem, we have created a free and open source Firefox add-on called Accentuate.us that allows users to type texts in plain ASCII, and then automatically adds all diacritics and special characters in the correct places."