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."

Barbara Memorial program

A gathering to share our memories of Barbara Spiegel took place March 19th at the Auditorium of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Mimi, Jean-Luc, Judy, Holly, Sara, and Philip shared their reminiscences of Barbara (you might have suspected that Barbara was a wild teenager, and now we know) and the music was utterly beautiful: 

Natalie Aroyan, Soprano 
Pavlina Dokovska, pianist 

“Pleurez mes yeux” from LE CID By MASSENET [French] 
“Io son l’umile ancella” from ADRIANA LEVOUVREUR By CILEA [Italian] 
“Ay Vart” (Oh Rose) By SKENTYAROV [Armenian] 

“Groong” (The Crane) by KOMIDAS [Armenian] 
“Nye poi krasavitsa” (O sing no more) by RACHMANINOV [Russian] 
“Ebben! N’andro lontana” from LA WALLY By CATALANI [Italian]

[music links point to performances by other artists]

[to view the program, click here] 
[to view Mimi Gross program sketches, click here]
[for more photos, click here] 

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests a donation in Barbara's name to either 

Oratorio Society of New York
1440 Broadway 23rd Floor
New York, NY 10018

or 

Falmouth Public Library
300 Main Street
Falmouth, MA 02540

Requests for additional information can be sent to this email address: barbaraspiegelmemorial@gmail.com.

A Valentine: Evolution Made Us All

You would NEVER guess who told me to see this

           http://vimeo.com/19416924
Watch it - it is lovely. And never forget - evolution made us all. Though every sun-like star has 25% chance of an Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks belt, and there are so very many different paths, the chance that any one of them culminates in Sarah Palin can be rigorously shown to be arbitrarily small.

2012-03-24 footnote: (1) no idea who told me to see this. I'm on statins, so that's OK. (2) The video was removed from YouTube (?!) but I found it on Vimeo. It must have been the complaint from this lovely, deeply religious student.

La Patrona

[A friend from Mexico (an amazing friend, really) writes (for a Google translation, see the bottom of this post):]

Pues el día de hoy regresamos de la visita al municipio de la Patrona en Veracruz cerca de Orizaba, les cuento sobre esto porque es algo muy intenso que cuando se vive se regocija uno con la vida pero también caes en cuenta de lo indiferentes que somos y del mundito en el que a veces nos encerramos. La Patrona es el lugar por donde pasa el tren ( La Bestia ) que viene desde el sur de Mexicio, Arriaga Chiapas y al cual se suben los migrantes que vienen de Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala etc. en este lugar de 3 mil habitantes hay 14 señoras que desde hace 15 años trabajan por su voluntad en darles de comer a los migrantes cuando pasa el tren, todos los días dos o tres veces al día tienen comida preparada , arroz, frijoles, pan y agua que empacan en bolsas de plástico y que se las dan cuando el tren a su velocidad normal, a veces el maquinista baja la velocidad cuando pasa por ahí porque ya lo saben, les dan también ropa, o zapatos todos los días desde las 7 de la mañana en una cocina de leña preparan la comida. Es solo desde hace como 3 años que esta acción humanitaria comienza a ser visible para la sociedad y el gobierno mexicano, fuimos invitados por una asociación de jóvenes que las ayuda, hicimos acopio de ropa, llevamos dos costales de arroz, uno de frijol, bolsas de plastico y cacahuates para ayudarlas, estuvimos el sabado y el d omingo, les ayudamos a preparar y cuando pasó el tren corrimos junto con ellas a las vías para dar la comida, claro que nos vimos medio novatos la primera vez porque tiene su chiste darles las bolsas o las botellitas de agua amarradas para que no te reboten a ti y te lastimes o a ellos, es algo indescriptible cuando pasa el tren con los migrantes agarrados y que extienden su mano y uno se lo logra dar, es verdaremente algo que resientes en el cuerpo, adrenalida, emoción pura, estas mujeres son felices cuando lo logran, uno es feliz cuando lo logra ¡¡¡ luego nos fuimos a Orizaba a las vías y les llevamos zapatos y ropa porque el tren se para y ellos se tienen que bajar a esperar que otro tren parta, ahi estuvimos platicando como con 25 migrantes casi todos de honduras y el salvador, llevaban 8 días en el tren bajando y subiendo, con frío y hambre los habían correteado los zetas en Tierra Blanca y se habían llevado a 20 ellos eran realmente sobrevivientes, dos de ellos hondureños se fueron con nosotros a la Patrona y durmieron y comieron allá, hoy los pasmos a dejar a Puebla porque iban con una cuñada que los ayudaría a esperar la llamada de aviso para irse a Celaya a contactar un pollero que los pasaría, unos de ellos iba hasta virginia , en las vías había un muchachito de 16 años que iba a Huston... fue un fin de semana maravilloso, pensamos en seguir colaborando y tratar de ir con la Patronas una vez cada dos meses o mes y medio, tienen muchas carencias, cocinan con leña les hacen falta muchas cosas para seguir con la labor y sobre todo animarlas y alentarlas porque lo que estan haciendo es un acto de humanidad invaluable ayudar a los migrantes a que ese viaje de tortura en el tren sea más llevadero o por lo menos ellos saben que ahí en ese pequeño poblado de Veracruz hay 14 mujeres que les dan una caricia con un poco de pan y arroz....

les mando este link

Youtube.com/watch?v=Q7mtupd9j3I

Youtube.com/watch?v=FlxKcBklJ4c

para que vean un documental de las Patronas mujeres maravillosas mexicanas.... ojalá tengan tiempo de verlo, Norma es la lider de ellas es una mujer maravillosa... todas los son, la mayor de ellas doña Leo...

Angry white people in Arizona - what are they thinking? Is it really so long since their ancestors came there, poor and hungry? The story brought back my grandmother, a Czech peasant from Slavonia and the stories I heard from her about the life through the Second World War and the aftermath, stories that shaped my lifelong conviction that men are a useless gender on the way out.

The men, mostly, were forced by random circumstances into joining random factions, they fought and they terrorized the populace. Women tended gardens, raised chickens, fed everybody - from German officers quartered in grandmother's house to every scared and hungry orphan that came up to the doorstep. Grandmother would slaughter one of her pigs, and then she would use every gram of it - smoke hams, make sausages, fry the skin and then throw the bones and  what else was left over into a lime pit and make soap. Towards the end of the war her older son was taken by Serbian royalists, now turned communist partisans, and buried alive. Her younger sun was in the woods with the partisans, and roads were full of dispossessed and fleeing.

The worst was the aftermath. The British turned over to the communists several hundred thousands who had fled across Slovenian border into Austria. Thousands were executed right there - in 1991 I met a woman in Denmark (with whom I share the last name) who was lined up with other children in front of a trench but survived the execution. The rest were force-marched across Croatia and into Serbia on "Krizni Put" (El Camino de la Cruz), along river Sava, and through Slavonski Brod where grandmother lived. And here La Patronas images come in: the women would brave the Serbian guards, come up to the side of the road and throw food to the endless procession of thousands and thousands miserable, starving and barely alive war prisoners.

[a Google translation of Mexican friend's letter]

Well, today returned from a visit to the city of the patron in Veracruz near Orizaba, tell them about this because it's so intense that when one rejoices to live life, but also fall into account what we are and indifferent the little world in which we sometimes locked. The Patron is the place where the train passes (The Beast) coming from southern Mexicio, Arriaga Chiapas and which are raised migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala etc. In 3 thousand inhabitants there are 14 women who work for 15 years for his willingness to give food to the migrants when the train passes, every day two or three times a day have prepared food, rice, beans, bread and water packaged in plastic bags and they are given when the train at its normal speed, sometimes the driver slow down when going through there because you know, they also give clothes or shoes every day from 7 morning in a wood stove preparing food. It's just like 3 years that this humanitarian action begins to be visible to society and the Mexican government, were invited by a youth association that helps, we gather clothes, carry two sacks of rice, a bean-bags Plastic and peanuts to help, we were on Saturday and UNDAY, we help them prepare and ran when the train went along with them the ways of providing food, of course we saw the first half rookies because it has a joke to give bags or bottles of water tied up so you do not bounce off you and hurt you or them, is indescribable when the train passes migrants caught and extending his hand and one he does give is something that he feels verdaremente the body, adrenal, raw emotion, these women are happy when they do, one is happy when he does then we went to Orizaba to the tracks and I wear shoes and clothes because the train stops and they have to come down to wait for another train leaves, there were talking as 25 migrants almost all of Honduras and El Salvador, took 8 days on the train going down and up, with cold and hunger they had chased the Zetas in Tierra Blanca and had led to 20 they were really survivors, two Hondurans were with us to the patron and slept and ate there today Puebla spasms to leave because they were a sister to help them await the wake-up call to go to Celaya to contact a pollero that happen, some of them going to virginia on the tracks was a boy of 16 who went to Houston ... was a wonderful weekend, think about continuing to work and try to go with the pattern once every two months or six weeks, have many shortcomings, they cook with firewood they lack many things to continue the work and especially encourage and encouraging because what we are doing is an act of humanity invaluable help migrants that travel on the train torture more bearable, or at least they know that here in this small town of Veracruz there are 14 women who give them a pat with a bit of bread and rice ....
I send you this link

Youtube.com/watch?v=Q7mtupd9j3I

Youtube.com/watch?v=FlxKcBklJ4c

to see a documentary about the Mexican Patronas wonderful women .... hopefully have time to see, Norma is the leader of them is a wonderful woman ... all those are, most of them Mrs. Leo ...

Servicing undergraduates

[Cannot keep up with the stream of email ordered tasks. One hypothesis is that there is more crap floating in, the other is that I'm slower. But my email is nothing compared to what my younger friends get from their undergraduates. Especially if you are a young considerate woman. Here is one of the reports from the front trenches:]

[...] there is definitely more crap floating in. My students send messages of the type 

"I cannot come at ... for ... But I can come between 13:17 and 13:21 on Wednesday or between 15:07 and 15:09 on Thursday."

(only slightly exaggerated).

 

"We have not succeeded in the homeworks and we didn't attend the first exam. Can we participate in the second exam?" 

(Yes, you can, according to university regulations but in any case you won't get any credits, also according to university regulations ... You should know that yourselves.) 

"I want to go to Spain as an ERASMUS exchange student. Do they have the courses "Introduction to bullshit 1" and "Specialization in dirty Maths 2" at University XY? These are the courses I still need to take for my degree."

followed by the threat

"If you cannot answer that on the spot I'd like to take an appointment."

Where are we?!? Kindergarden?

Virginia-Highlands past

Pat Conroy, the author of "The Prince of Tides," grew up in the house next to mine, or perhaps second one over going south. It is a setting for an important part of "The Prince of Tides." In this wonderful podcast where he talks about the books that shaped him, Rosedale Road comes back: he talks about his mother reading to him and his sister, also a poet.

While I am on former neighbors: Daniel Pearl lived in this neighborhood in 1990's. As lead violinist in an Atlanta band called The Ottoman Empire, Mr. Pearl received the thrill of his musical life in 1993 when his band opened for The Kinks at an Atlanta club. His murder at age 39 hurts more when you read about him.

Our strict constitutionalists

American history according to Bachmann

NYTimes.com: Obama's 2011 Budget Proposal: How It's Spent

February 01, 2010 Obama's 2011 Budget Proposal: How It's Spent President Obama's proposal for the 2011 budget.

Instead of working on Slice & Dice draft with Stefan

anti-dote, to help you recover from the Xmass drivel:

Pretty Girls Make Graves
Soophie Nun Squad
Gaju
Waxahatchee - Sister Saint
Sara Cilantro (has vanished since 2010)
I Monster

Why this despair? Let us summarize where we are on the Dreams of Grand Scheme timeline:

My student's thesis topic was to use periodic orbits to describe turbulence. Instead, he styled himself a child of two famous theorists, is baffled that his paper with us is so much cited, made no progress on turbulence. Freddy, Vaktang, Yuheng and Evangelos finally did the essential preliminary steps, on a 1-dimensional model of a turbulent flame front. Jonathan was the first, with fellow Zappatista John, to really work on fluid turbulence. I still have to find someone willing to understand ChaosBook.org, so that we can quotient symmetries, slice translations, cut Poincare sections and finally recycle fluid turbulence.

A warm up to applying the Grand Scheme to Yang-Mills and general relativity.

Brian Dykstra - Break The Bank S.W.A.P 08

Bail THEM out

The decline and fall of baby boomers

Prairie Home Companion: "Today I broke my previous record for number of consecutive days being alive"

If you are thinking of retirement near an ivory tower...

Baby boomers cannot not be the center of attention, even when they cannot remember why.

Now, if you think you have had a senior moment too many, take comfort in the anecdotes about Norbert Wiener’s absentmindedness: the time he reported the theft of his car to the police, only to discover that he had driven it to Providence for a talk and taken the train back to Boston; the conversation in an MIT hallway he concluded by asking his interlocutor which way he had been heading when he stopped to chat, greeting the answer by saying, “Good! That means I’ve already had lunch.”

And here, a bleaker view, lucidly laid out.. And why doing a PhD is often a waste of time.

Do doctors improve with age, while physicists and mathematicians are dead meat past 30?

On the cheerful side, Mimi (no spring chicken herself) notes: You know what Oliver Wendell Holmes said when he was 96 and saw a pretty girl walking down the street. He said,"Oh to be 90 again".

Jim Morrison: "No one here gets out alive"

Nevertheless, I do solemnly promise to stretch out mu dotage at least until my quasi-godchild Oscar's luminous being materializes by my side. This is contingent upon a black lady with a tinted-glass SUV blabbing into her cell phone while checking her Gucci bag on the back seat not running me over before then. (February 1 2011 such lady from Turner Broadcasting ran me over while I was crossing a pedestrian crossing, and she was stationary. When I got over 2/3 of the crossing, she started the car and run me into the ground - there was no way of jumping of the bike, her front-left end of the bumper got my legs entangled. I was bleeding, the left leg turned purple, I hurt all over for weeks, the front wheel got bent out of shape, but she did not get me. She's lurking out there for the next chance.)

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.