Pictures from the past week’s trip. Ended my intact bones streak :(
Monday May 28, 2012
kairosclerosis
Wednesday May 23, 2012
n. the moment you realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.
(via calamist)
O quid solutis est beatius curis
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum,
desideratoque adquiescimus lecto?
Oh what is more blest than when the mind,
Cares dispelled, puts down its burden
And we return, tired from our travelling, to our home
To rest on the bed we have longed for?
— Catullus (via illuminatesthefollyofthedancers)
Thursday May 10, 2012
We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
— Carlos Castaneda (via illuminatesthefollyofthedancers)
Wednesday May 9, 2012
Tuesday May 8, 2012
my sister called me a homosapien!!! :D
Parastou Forouhar, from the series Schriftraum (Written Room), 2011 *
“The Persian script is turned into an ornament. Covering the white walls of the museums, the characters serve Forouhar as ‘paper’ for her own text. The room becomes a ‘writing room’. Whereas the white walls of the gallery room are raised to a universal norm and an unmarked instance, the Oriental ornament stands for difference or the deviating. The writing is also strange, if not alien, because it is illegible for Western visitors – as an “incomprehensible” text it becomes a pure ornament. In defying attempts by Western visitors to assign it meaning, the script remains locked into its irreducible pictorial graphicness and indissoluble representation… Even if one has a command of Persian, the characters prove to be nothing more than word fragments and syllables, which are not subject to a linear order. The script ornamentation covers the whole room – the ceiling, the floor, and the walls. Viewers entering the rooms are surrounded by patterns, forcing them to give up their sovereign, distanced standpoint.”— Alexandra Karentzos, from “The Location of Art”
Thursday May 3, 2012
…I think it would be an intellectual feast just to be there and to read the briefs and discuss things with counsel and discuss things with my colleagues.
—
Robert Bork, in hearing, answering “Why do you want to be an Associate Justice…?”
INTELLECTUAL FEAST
The salient point here for me is that this is, to me at least (perhaps wrongly so) an example of someone having their priorities in the wrong order.
Also, if I remember correctly, this is not at all how Toobin made it sound in The Nine. But I dunno, maybe Bork enjoys (or thought he’d enjoy) not actually discussing things with his prospective fellow justices, people who have been generally uninterested in reconsidering their own views.
Wednesday May 2, 2012
Real Life Mathematics (pdf)
Tuesday April 24, 2012
As mentioned by http://www.siam.org/careers/thinking/profiles.php#li
Cosmic Gall
Sunday April 22, 2012
Neutrinos they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed – you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.
-John Updike
cute.
Molecular Evolution
Wednesday April 18, 2012
At quite uncertain times and places,
The atoms left their heavenly path,
And by fortuitous embraces,
Engendered all that being hath.
And though they seem to cling together,
And form “associations” here,
Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether,
And through the depths of space career.
So we who sat, oppressed with science,
As British asses, wise and grave,
Are now transformed to wild Red Lions,
As round our prey we ramp and rave.
Thus, by a swift metamorphosis,
Wisdom turns wit, and science joke,
Nonsense is incense to our noses,
For when Red Lions speak, they smoke.
Hail, Nonsense! dry nurse of Red Lions,
From thee the wise their wisdom learn,
From thee they cull those truths of science,
Which into thee again they turn.
What combinations of ideas,
Nonsense alone can wisely form!
What sage has half the power that she has,
To take the towers of Truth by storm?
Yield, then, ye rules of rigid reason!
Dissolve, thou too, too solid sense!
Melt into nonsense for a season,
Then in some nobler form condense.
Soon, all too soon, the chilly morning,
This flow of soul will crystallize,
Then those who Nonsense now are scorning,
May learn, too late, where wisdom lies.
~ James Clerk Maxwell
This series of lecture… is doomed to failure… This being said, plain success is not the only possible goal; mine might simply be the exposition of a disorder in this apparently well-organised universe, in which logic eventually takes its place between two beer mugs and the Reader’s Digest and no longer disturbs anybody—like a fat cat purring on the carpet.
— Jean-Yves Girard, The Blind Spot
Tuesday April 17, 2012
In the academic world, on the other hand, mathematicians often enjoy rewards that they do not merit. They are engulfed by admirers from the departments of philosophy and the social sciences, disciplines that suffer from a dangerous confusion of thought; namely, that the presence and the causal contributions of scientists certify them as sciences. Mathematicians are too vain to assess such admiration at its true worth.
— Alfred Adler, Mathematics and Creativity
Friday April 13, 2012
