Tag Archives: humor

another amusing footnote

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I seem to have a penchant for picking books with amusing footnotes. Or maybe most math books have them and I’ve been remarkably unlucky. Here’s one from Random Fields and Geometry, by R.J. Adler and J.E. Taylor:

The use of T comes from the prehistory of Gaussian processes, and probably stands for “time.” While the whole point of this book is to get away from the totally ordered structure of \mathbb{R}, the notation is too deeply entombed into the collective psyche of probabilists to change it now. Later on, however, when we move to manifolds as parameter spaces, we shall emphasize this by replacing T by M. Nevertheless, points in M will still be denoted by t. We hereby make the appropriate apologies to geometers.

It’s a good book so far, and may help me solve some pesky technical point in a new problem I’ve been working on. Hooray for new problems!

Krugman on Interstellar Trade

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While reading the comments over at Crooked Timber, I saw a link to one of our new Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s more insightful papers: The Theory of Interstellar Trade. The abstract reads:

This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

amusing footnote in Symmetric Functions and Hall Polynomials

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In I.G. Macdonald’s Symmetric Functions and Hall Polynomials, on page 2 there is the following comment on the standard way to write down diagrams of partitions and tableaux:

Some authors (especially Francophones) prefer the convention of coordinate geometry (in which the first coordinate increases from left to right and the second coordinate from bottom to top) and define the diagram of \lambda to be the set of (i,j) \in \mathbf{Z}^2 such that 1 \le i \le \lambda_j. Readers who prefer this convention should read this book upside down in a mirror.

Oh, snap!

Enginnernig Quiz

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Apparently I am going to attend the Electrical Enginnernig & Computer Science Commencement on Saturday. Riddle me this: enginnernig is:

A. The sound an engine makes
B. The learnin’ you do in engineering
C. Fake “academic” engineering
D. All of the above

Also, the department’s official name is Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Because, you know, there’s more than one computer science.

Links in lieu of posting

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Amardeep Singh on interviewing survivors of Partition. See also the Sepia Mutiny version.

Fry and Laurie on Language (HT: Crooked Timber).

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner (yes the same Wigner from random matrix theory) (HT Adam).

An important test about bicycling (HT Morgan).

An interesting read, given that I acted in Harvest, an article on surrogate mothers in India (HT Mimosa). Strangely, it mentions “Anand, a city in the eastern state of Gujarat.” Who knew?

An excerpt from Man of the Heart, a play about Lalon Phokir by Sudipto Chatterjee and directed by Suman Mukherjee. I did lights for the original workshop and a performance in Irvine. This video is from a production in Kolkata, for which they made several changes in the production and design.

A MetaFilter post on Çatalhöyük, which sounds like a fascinating place to visit if I ever get to go to Turkey again.

In other news, my thesis draft is now 200 pages. Hopefully it will become more readable soon.

UPDATE : This class looks totally awesome, except that I would probably want to have more plays on the syllabus and maybe expand it to include science and engineering. The Alchemist and Galileo are recognizable choices, but there’s also more contemporary stuff, like The Water Engine. In some sense this would make an ideal graduate seminar…

The FCC and buttocks

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I get the FCC’s daily email updates, which mostly contain links to boring procedural documents, but occasionally are a source of amusement. They decided to fine [pdf] ABC for the Feb. 25, 2003 episode of NYPD Blue in which a woman’s buttocks are shown. On pages 4-5, they state:

As an initial matter, we find that the programming at issue is within the scope of our indecency definition because it depicts sexual organs and excretory organs – specifically an adult woman’s buttocks. Although ABC argues, without citing any
authority, that the buttocks are not a sexual organ, we reject this argument, which runs counter to both case law and common sense.

I remember that episode causing a bit of an uproar at the time, but it took almost 5 years for this decision to come out, so I suppose they have been thinking really hard about butts over at the FCC. Perhaps they are getting a bit obsessed.

UPDATE : Language Log has more.