People v. Pitts

My Ithaca roommate Herbet Lee Pitts was convicted for bank robbery which occurred in December, 1968 in Tuskegee, Alabama, when he was a student at Tuskegee Institute. [...] Dr. Price characterized Pitts as a paranoid schizophrenic who had periods of exacerbation and remission. [...] Pitts' paranoic tendencies displayed themselves most clearly in his delusion that he would be the savior of his race.

Here is  www.supremecourt.gov/pdfs/journals/scannedjournals/1970_journal.pdf ,  November 9, 1970 p.99; Certiorari Denied No. 5654. Herbert Lee Pitts, petitioner, v. United States. Petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied.

In 1971 he is listed as imprisoned in Petersburg, Va, apparently as a conscientious objector. He had a number of his poems published in 1970's.

Here is Black View  November 29, 1973 editorial by Herbet Lee Pitt.

In 1973 he returned to his pre-Cornell ways, with a loaded rifle and a bandolier of ammunition: casetext.com/case/people-v-pitts-54 .

Babysitting infrared renormalization for perturbative QED

From the time immemorial rumor has it or better still the notion is abroad there exists a way out.
Samuel Beckett, "The Lost Ones"

Last night I babysat for the first time - and while babysitting I formulated a counter-term prescription for the I.R. problem. The last three weeks have been amazing: I solved a whole series of graph-theoretic problems, formalized the K intermediate counter-term renormalization, and invented the I counter-term renormalization. The last might turn out to be extremely important for QFT, because it is much simpler than the other schemes, and unifies the infrared and ultraviolet treatments.

After one whole week of solid work 73 pages of the paper are written. Many important concepts were formulated this week. Other than writing, I have not been living.

Cvitanović and Kinoshita, New approach to the separation of ultraviolet and infrared divergences of Feynman-parametric integrals, Phys. Rev. D 10, 3991-4006 (1974)

            Rashômon 

The Belgian Pork Chops

What UFO had learned from his fiance Micheline Kahan-Lide, and the often prepared for his friends, to everyone's great delight:

The Belgian Pork Chops

6 pork chops
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon savory
1 teaspoon sage
1 teaspoon rosemary
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon salt

knead all by hand
coat pork chops (thinly)
heat the pan very high, olive oil
2 min on side, golden brown
                       drain off excess oil
reduce the heat, put in a cup of wine (preferably white)
cover, simmer for 5-10 minutes
                       take pork chops out, place on a hot plate, cover with foil
turn heat to maximum
                       constantly stirring, reduce until no fluid left
use these few tablespoons as the sauce

Belgian French Fries

(always a side to excellent steak, but the recipe requires litters of oil in a special pot, so I skip that)

UFO's Asparagus

canned asparagus
hot cayenne sauce
ground pepper
salt
lots of olive oil

Mix, boil the liquid away (ca. 20 minutes), serve.

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ChaosBook.org/~predrag/friends/recipes

Flying to Brookhaven with box-fulls of cards

I had, in 1971 or so, written one of the ur-algebraic symbol manipulation programs, my own, described in my first physics paper, of no interest whatsoever today (not sure I have a copy of the paper anywhere, and certainly not the code)

Our electron magnetic moment calculation was implemented by entering integrands on IBM punch cards, flying on a 4-person plane to Brookhaven with box-fulls of cards, and feeding batch jobs into the CDC computer there. 

We had no computer, but Cornell Synchrotron had several state-of-the-art DEC PDP-10s, so advanced that they had keyboards and screen terminals attached. I was allowed to use them after 1AM, only to edit, but absolutely not compute. So I wrote an symbolic algebra language for evaluation of Dirac gamma-matrix traces entirely as macros in TECO, the DEC text editor. Every time they checked on me, I was in editor mode, so they never caught me. 

Then Kinoshita went to CERN for a summer, and broke their computing budget - it was the first large physics calculation, as expensive as an experiment. I think my TECO code produced some errors, so he switched to SCHOONSCHIP and reentered all our integrands into it, without me, the amazing man that he is. 

I (Tom believes he) invented a wholly independent way of computing sets of integrals corresponding to self-energy insertions, and that enabled us to catch a single faulty Jacobian in a single integral, so our calculation had no errors. I have a ton of things written about that and this in my diaries. If it becomes of any interest to anyone, ever. For many years there was a large metal cabinet in a Newman Hall hallway, containing our entire calculation as punch cards - it might still be there. Only Tom knows. 

I suffer big father-son guilt there, because I used to call him up every few years, but then he exploded a car tire in his home’s garage, and went totally deaf, so I do not call him, and I never write letters (to anyone). But I assume he’s as frisky as always. 

We have a running thing going, because I have a crank theory that perturbation series for g-2 (and all on-shell physical observables) is not an asymptotic series which he doesn’t think much of. So 3 years ago I returned to it  - put maybe 1/2 year into it again, failed again, with nothing to show. But psychologically it must be that I wanted to show my (academic) father that I can do it. Psychology - I do not recognize any form of paternalistic authority - I only listen to women - and still...

The smart graduate student ("hrra-hrra T-uh-u-ft") I had always liked a lot. His adviser -it seems- I found grumpy, so he only features on the back cover of my ChaosBook.org/FieldTheory as "El Noble Cigaro", channeling Pauli, but I do not remember why I did not think all that fondly of him.

MarkCC. The glorious horror of TECO, November 30, 2010.

Me and soccer

 When I was a kid,  the central square (Trg Republike) would every evening be filled with soccer fans, different clubs under different street lights. They were 6 daily newspapers, half filled with communist drivel, and the other half with  sports, and 3 daily sports newspapers. And by  'sports' they meant soccer, there was a paragraph here and there about something else. 

This was religion for morons, I would never have anything to do with it.

Chronic In-and-Outer

Vinogradska Bolnica, Zagreb,  Apr 1, 1946

Just a bit after midnight, 22 year old Đurđica Golmajer gave a birth to a baby of extraordinary head size, the same that he would carry for the rest of his life. 400,000 AFL bituminous coal miners walked out. Not much else happened that Monday - here is the main item from the top of day's front page of Washington Post:

OLD FRIEND RETURNS - Jerry Mullen says hello to Nurse Emma Nicassio in a Los Angeles hospital while a doctor takes 24 pieces of glass from his hip. A bottle of chemicals exploded in Jerry's pocket. The hospital people are his old friends, for he has been there 14 times, 5 times for dog bites, twice for monkey bites, twice for a broken arm, once when a living room mantel fell on his head. They forget what the other three visits were for.