The Tarantula Nebula is also (and astonishingly poetically, I thought) known as the True Lovers' Knot, a 'bow knot as a symbol of love,' or a knot as a symbol of lovers' constancy. This may be derived from a Danish phrase, trolovelses knort, or 'betrothment-bond,' although there is also a reference to French heraldic knots called Lacs d'Amour, also sometimes rendered 'True Lovers' Knots.' The True Lovers' Knot is also the name of at least two English pubs. It is apparently also just a knot.

Amid the flood of Sobig viruses, I got a piece of spam the other day with the subject 'interesting blog'.

Is nothing sacred to these monsters?

How picturesquely apocalyptic! This may be even better than a Big Crunch...

(Am I the first to suggest that an infinite expansion and cooling of the universe leading up to a heat death scenario in which matter falls apart, black holes evaporate, and everything is reduced to isolated particles be called 'the Big Sleep'?)

From the latest AIP Physics News Update (#651):

THE BIG RIP: A NEW COSMIC DOOMSDAY scenario takes the present acceleration of the expansion of the universe to new extremes. Dartmouth physicist Robert Caldwell and his colleagues Marc Kamionkowski and Nevin Weinberg at Caltech have determined that if the supposed dark energy responsible for the acceleration is potent enough not only will the space between galaxies continue to increase but that the galaxies themselves will fly apart as will, at successive times stars, planets, and even atoms and nuclei. Since the acceleration idea became established with astronomers a few years ago in the wake of observations of distant supernovae, it has been conventional to apportion the supposed energy inventory of the universe as follows: 5% in the form of conventional baryon matter (out of which atoms are made), 25% in the form of dark matter, and the biggest part, 70%, in the form of dark energy. Not a lot is known about dark matter, and even less about dark energy. Cosmologists have taken to discussing the enigmatic properties of the dark energy with the use of a new parameter, w, which is the ratio of its average pressure to energy density. The degree of this runaway expansion impulse is expressed by w. What is the nature of dark energy and how does it overcome the attractive pull of gravitation in order to speed up the cosmic expansion, and what is the proper value of w? In the best known model, the "cosmological constant" in Einstein's famous equations of general relativity corresponds to energy and pressure of the universal quantum vacuum, and is constant in space and time. Here the value of w is -1. In a second popular model, the "quintessence"model, the dark energy is associated with a universal quantum field relaxing towards some final state. Here the energy density and pressure of the dark energy are slowly decreasing with time, and the value of w is somewhere between -1/3 and -1 (w must be smaller than -1/3 in order for cosmic acceleration to occur). In Caldwell's "phantom energy" model, there is no stable vacuum quantum state and the energy density and the expansionary pressure exerted on the universe seems to increase even as the spacetime itself expands (with ordinary gases, pressure falls with expansion). In this scenario w is less than -1. The implications of this new type of cosmology are that bound systems should in the course of time be ripped up (see figure at http://www.aip.org/mgr/png/2003/200.htm ). For example, at a w value of -1.5 the universe would last for 35 billion years before being ripped apart. About 60 million years before the end, the Milky Way would be torn apart. About 3 months before the end the solar system would become undone. About 30 minutes before that the Earth would explode. And about 10^-19 seconds before the ultimate moment of doom, atoms would be pulled apart. Caldwell (robert.r.caldwell@dartmouth.edu, 603-646-2742) suggests that deciding between this model and the others might be possible in coming years with much better data coming from microwave background, supernovae, and galaxy measurements. (Caldwell et al., Physical Review Letters, 15 August 2003; text at www.aip.org/physnews/select )

From the Missoulian:

GREAT FALLS (AP) - A teenager accused of deliberately running over a jogger so he could have sex with the corpse will be tried as an adult, District Judge Kenneth Neill said Thursday.

Larry Zolf, writing for the CBC:

One wonders who Stephen Harper is listening to. Who's giving him the reality checks he badly needs to have? Harper's Unite the Right manoeuvres are as ill-founded as they've ever been. All polls show that the Tories prefer the Liberals to the Alliance as a second choice. Liberals added to by the NDP vote are clearly a majority of Canadians. There is no Right to be united and Harper hasn't been able to expand his western base.

Idyllic, isn't it?

APPENDIX: Stephen Harper is the current leader of the Canadian Alliance, the Canadian party of evil which is also the official Opposition. The CA, formerly led by Stockwell Day, who was more or less a walking, albeit sick, joke, is rightwing, anti-gay, pro-war, pro-Bush, et cetera, et cetera. It is outnumbered in the House of Commons by the Liberals almost 3-to-1; its support comes almost exclusively from the west, Alberta and British Columbia and Saskatchewan.

Despite this, strangely, the provincial legislature of British Columbia is overwhelmingly dominated by the Liberals, with 77 of 79 seats. The New Democratic Party is the official Opposition, with two seats. Funny, isn't it? Note that the Marijuana Party took in just over 3% of the popular vote in the last provincial election, well ahead of the CA or the Progressive Conservatives (who are federally puny these days), who apparently did not field any candidates at all.

The BC Marijuana Party: overgrowing the government!

Alberta is in the thrall of the Progressive Conservatives, though its Premier Ralph Klein is a pretty big asshole anyhow; he is opposed to full marriage for same-sex couples, and has threatened to keep it out of Alberta if it passes federally.

Note that Dr Ken Nicol, Leader of the Alberta Liberal Party, graduated from Iowa State University, my alma mater's perennial rival.

Saskatchewan is narrowly controlled by the New Democratic Party in a coalition with two Liberals. Note with some alarm that the NDP Leader is a clergyman, and the Saskatchewan Party Leader served on the board of a Full Gospel Bible Institute. I don't know much about the Saskatchewan Party, but it favoured de-insuring abortions, and has a lot of small-government, private-enterprise positions, like teaching entrepreneurship in the secondary schools. It's anti-affirmative action and favours harsher punishments for juvenile offenders. And it wants to amend the Charter of Rights to include a specific right to own property, which is just weird. And it favours 'traditional family values'. In short, as far as I can determine they're your run-of-the-mill social and fiscal conservatives, just like Grandma used to make. Saskatchewan is scary.

Manitoba is solidly New Democrat. The mayor of Winnipeg, Glenn Murray, is openly gay. Ontario's Progressive Conservative (despite the presence of Toronto); Quebec's now in Liberal hands, rather than those of its own Parti Quebecois. And then there are some other provinces too, but they're all teeny, and I can't be arsed to dig up details.

So the deal seems to be that the NDP has two provincial legislatures, but very little federal standing. The Canadian Alliance has some support federally from the western provinces, but does not exist on a provincial level. The Progressive Conservatives are feeble federally but control a number of provinces; the Canadian Alliance has approached them about a possible fusion of the two parties, but the Tories aren't biting, because the CA brand of conservativism (more religious, more American) just doesn't play in the East. And of course the Liberals are everywhere, with a solid lock on federal politics.

One last note, on the Alliance:

In 1999 the Reform Party was renamed the Canadian Alliance in an attempt to escape its perceived position as a party of western Canada, and with the express goal of "uniting the right" by merging with the Conservatives. The first name chosen for the party was the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party, which the media quickly noticed created the unfortunate acronym, CCRAP.

AFTERWORD (25/08/03): To avoid confusion, the NDP is not a right-wing party; I threw it in for contrast in Saskatchewan especially. Historically it's been to the left of the Liberals, avowedly democratic socialist. How socialist? Quoth their Manitoba wing:

We wish to create a society where individuals give according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs.

In practice, though, Gary Doer's provincial government hasn't been especially leftist; it's clung to a lot of the economic politicies its Progressive Conservative predecessors embraced, like relentlessly balanced budgets and strict limits on tax hikes. They're sort of middle-of-the-road-ists.

Nationally, the party is more radical, favouring things like proportional representation, standing up to the US over softwood lumber, and of course same-sex marriage.

FURTHER AFTERWORD (25/08/03): A commentator at Electrolite reveals that the ruling B.C. Liberal Party in British Columbia is not in fact connected to the national Liberal Party, and is not even a liberal party, but a sort of conservative one in disguise, which suggests all manner of possibilities for creative political public relations. I should start a Republicam Party, and run for office on a platform of revolutionary Communism.

Today I was pointed via New Scientist via YAWL via Stet to this abstract of an article by Dr Thomas Gold of Cornell University, suggesting that solar sails may in fact be unworkable due to thermodynamic considerations. I would be greatly displeased if this were the case, because (a) solar sails are a neat idea, and (b) I hate thermodynamics. There are at least two points that trouble me about this abstract.

In fact, three. The first two are not terribly insightful.

First, and this may be just a misinterpretation due to the phrasing, he seems to suggest that the usual law of momentum conservation may not apply in interactions between radiation and matter. This would seem to represent a substantial hole in classical electrodynamics. But maybe it's true; I don't know. I want to find out more.

Second, and this I think I can comment on, in the final paragraph he claims that the momentum transferred by radiation is a scalar, rather than a vector. Unless I'm horribly misremembering, the momentum stored in an electromagnetic field is indeed a vector; the momentum density is proportional to the Poynting vector S, which in turn is proportional to the cross product of the electric E and magnetic B field vectors at each point:

p_density=m₀e₀S=e₀ExB

Relativistically, too, a photon's momentum comes as three of the four components of a 4-vector. I don't understand how this can be called a scalar. The magnitude of the momentum carried by a photon is indeed E/c as he says (where E is now energy), but that doesn't rob the momentum of its vectorial character.

On the other hand (and here we're at #3, if you're keeping count), energy absorption does seem as if it would bring a solar sail into thermal equilibrium with the radiation after a time. But I don't think this means momentum transfer will cease. This is completely a conceptual argument, nothing remotely precise, but...Suppose a sail is at the same average temperature as the radiation; it is still absorbing radiation (photons, and hence energy, and momentum), but it will re-radiate an equal amount of energy, for no net gain. Energy's scalar, so that's all well and good; it makes no difference how the energy is re-radiated. However, it does matter for the momentum. Solar radiation is not hitting it symmetrically: essentially, it is all coming in more or less perpendicularly to the surface of the sail, from one side only. The momentum boost from this is all in one direction. (Ideally.) When the sail re-radiates away excess energy, however, won't it do so more or less symmetrically? Pretend it's a two-dimensional sheet; if the whole sail is at the same temperature now, both sides should be radiating away equally. The incident energy is all lost, but there should be no net momentum loss from this, since radiation is being emitted equally both ahead and behind. The momentum from the incident radiation still has to go somewhere; the only place left is into the sail, and so it should continue to accelerate even in thermal equilibrium.

It's been a long time since I did thermodynamics or electrodynamics, and they were only at an undergraduate level; I make no guarantees as to my accuracy here. You are welcome to expose any and all holes in my woolly thinking you may find. But this seems plausible. The radiation emitted by the sail can't exert a net force on the sail itself; that would be silly. So no matter how much energy it absorbs and re-radiates, this cannot act as a sink for the incident momentum.

As I said, please savage me if you can. It's okay to sound like a braying ass-clown talking about politics, but this is physics. Which is not as sacred as mathematics, but still.

FURTHERMORE (24/08/03): I know the rough model I described above violates conservation of energy. If the sail is accelerating, it is certainly gaining kinetic energy, which has to come from somewhere. But equally, the momentum has to go somewhere, too. The conclusion seems to me to be that the sail just isn't going to behave like a blackbody in equilibrium.

It is exactly what it sounds like.

This is a weird thing that people in Alaska, if such a place can in fact be said to exist, like to do...

45 pink clover blossoms 100 fireweed blossoms 1 tsp. alum 10 Cups sugar 2 Cups water

Combine and boil 3 minutes. Strain and pour into hot jars.

This fireweed thing of which they speak is apparently common as crack up there:

Fireweed is a member of the Onagracae family of plants. Its name refers to the fact it is a "pioneer plant" quick to appear in burned over areas. An area will only produce honey for 2 or 3 years, as the growth of new trees and shrubs crowd out the fireweed plants.(1,2)

No other major honey plant grows as far north as fireweed.(2) It is a hardy plant which regularly appears in North America from Alaska to California, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.(1) Weather is important for fireweed's nectar secretion, humidity must be less than 50%.(2) Depending on location and altitude, fireweed may bloom as early as June and as late as September, but it blooms through most of the summer.(1,2)

I have it on good authority from an authentic Alaskan that, when the blooms of the fireweed turn cottony, winter is near. It is said that the height of the blooms can indicate how severe the winter is likely to be. It is also said that Alaska is in thrall to the vicious Walrus Gods, who demand an annual tribute of virgin halibut.

Alaska, if such a place can in fact be said to exist, is very strange.

The worst thing about being a mathematics graduate student--apart, of course, for the immense pressure of qualifying exams, which consume years of useful mathematical time that could be spent, as it is in physics, joining a research group and working towards publication--is the grading. TAdom is how we earn our keep; it is an inevitable fact of life, like death and taxes, and talk radio. In addition to draining away our sorely-needed time and energy, grading also saps our hope. Students very rarely do well on exams. At least that has been my experience here. After a while, one begins to take a sadistic delight in splattering red, red ink across their helpless, virginal papers...

Every now and again, though, one gets a pleasant surprise. Mostly, these pleasant surprises are pictures.

Perhaps this is less common outside of maths...

Most students in the sort of courses we get to TA are not math people. Most likely they don't enjoy math in the least, and are only taking the class because it's required. Math does not come intuitively to them. Sometimes, they just give up. And sometimes when they do, they flaunt their other talents, as if to convince me that they're not total failures. I love it when students, in lieu of a solution, draw me pictures. I had a very good weeping puppy once...Many, many tearful cartoon faces...Just today, I had a rather fine one, a sketch of a squatty-headed and thuggish young man saying 'Sorry, I'm not good at math!'

I wanted to give him points for that.

But I could not.

Life is cruel.

Another highlight can be the student evaluation forms, after each term ends. Occasionally, their written comments can delight. Spring quarter, in response to a question about what detracted most from their learning in the class, one person wrote 'SARS,' and another 'Ugly girls.' There was also 'I don't like the kid with the curly hair or the one with the big teeth.' And, dear to my heart, someone even used the phrase 'Unless I'm smoking crack' in their comments.

I watched an episode of Buffy last night with robots in it. It caused me to reflect once again on how much I enjoy low-budget special effects in science fictional television programmes. It also caused me to reflect on whether or not there are limits. Television series operate on very limited budgets; it is a sad fact of life that monsters, aliens, robots, and exploding planets cost mad money. Sometimes, sacrifices need to be made. Babylon 5 is an example of a show that managed to look awfully good pretty consistently. I seem to recall hearing, at some point, back in the dim and murky mists of time, that it was fairly inexpensive, too, as such things go...In my eyes, this defines sort of an upper limit of what one can expect on a television budget, appearance-wise. On the other hand, at the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Doctor Who. Done on a budget of about ten pounds and half a brick, making liberal use of tinfoil and foam rubber, it still manages to get the job done, and even produce genuinely potent pieces of science fictional imagery--Daleks, Cybermen--despite being filmed in rock quarries and the boot of a Volvo. There are moments when even the staunchest of supporters must feel a flush of shame--pantomime horses, green inflatable condom monsters, Bonnie Langford--but by and large this is quite acceptable, if you're willing to indulge in some quirk. Below this level, we have Blake's 7, which had allocated towards its budget only four pounds, some cabbage, and Michael Portillo. Sometimes, even often, it makes Doctor Who look positively swank. Which is unfortunate, because this might distract the less dedicated viewer from its occasionally splendid characters and storyline. Star Treks tend to fall somewhere in this yawning Babylon 5-Doctor Who gap. These are vaguely the metersticks I use for television special effects.

The Buffy I viewed last night, as I mentioned, had robots in it. Or a robot, at least. An ancient demon, imprisoned in a book by Medieval monks, scanned into the computer system in the library at hapless Sunnydale High to wreak havoc upon the world. This demon, Moloch, arranges to have a robot body built for itself, right towards the end. It was, in a word, unconvincing. Not for lack of funds, necessarily...I'm sure it cost more than your average Cyberman. But the aesthetic of it was all wrong...Have a look. It looks just like a (Buffy) demon, only made of plastic, or rubber, or something. Which may be fine as a demon, but as a robot?

It seemed sub-Doctor Who.

Have a look at this, now. This is Drathro. He's a robot, too, off of mid-Eighties Doctor Who.
Say hello to the nice people, Drathro!

'Without me they serve no purpose.'

I am very fond of Drathro. This is how an inexpensive television robot should look. He even looks almost sort of like he has horns. There is something present, aesthetically, in Drathro, that the Moloch-bot was lacking...

I think I've figured out what. Moloch is too cluttered. Look at all those rubbery bits, horns, articulation...He's too articulated to look like a robot. Instead, he looks like a man in a rubber suit. That's not to say that robots can't be articulated; I've no wish to offend any of my robot readers out there. But to give the impression of robotness on a tight budget...That is the issue. Moloch's too complicated, too pudgy. Complication distracts from the illusion. You need to keep it simple.

Alternatively, if you wish to go for detail, you need to worry about the texture. Consider the Borg. The Borg are fairly complicated beasties, lots of tubes, bits, wires, entertainingly moulded pieces everywhere. They have the rubbery texture of dead flesh. It works. Moloch just does not have the texture to go with his look. Gleaming steel sort of an effect, that could pull it off. Something chromey. Hard and unyielding. But.

That's my only beef, though. Otherwise I enjoyed it. Just a pity about that robot...

Jerker.

'IKEA names products after Nordic names, counties, towns, islands and rivers.'

An excerpt from Prime Minister Jean Chretien's speech to the Liberal caucus:

All of us understand that Parliament must always act in accordance with the Constitution. In the case of same-sex couples, we need to be guided by how court after court has been interpreting the Charter of Rights. And the courts have been telling us that the notion of separate but equal has no place in Canada.

Separate but equal...What a splendid way to phrase it! Read more...Chretien says a lot of very decent things, showing exactly how a statesman and steward of a civilised democracy ought to behave.

But I have learned over 40 years in public life, that society evolves and that the concept of human rights evolves often more quickly than some of us might have predicted and sometimes even in ways that make some people uncomfortable. But at the end of the day, we have to live up to our responsibilities.

A longer excerpt:

Now, I want to address another important issue of concern to all of us that was not part of our agenda. I do not have to tell you how challenging the issue of the constitutional definition of marriage is for each and everyone of us. Many of you have written to me directly to share your concerns and those of your constituents. Circumstances demand that we deal with the issue now because of very recent court decisions based on the Charter of Rights. The Canadian Alliance has attacked the courts for years. They attack so-called judicial activism. It is code for their profound opposition to the Charter of Rights. A Charter that was passed by Parliament and that Liberals and all Canadians respect and cherish. So let us not fall into their trap on this issue. This is not about weakening Parliament. It is not about weakening traditional religion. It is not about weakening the Canadian social fabric. In fact, it is about giving Parliament its rightful voice. It is about protecting religious traditions and rites. It is about giving force and effect to Canadian values. Values of mutual respect, justice and equality.

All of us understand that Parliament must always act in accordance with the Constitution. In the case of same-sex couples, we need to be guided by how court after court has been interpreting the Charter of Rights. And the courts have been telling us that the notion of separate but equal has no place in Canada.

Therefore we drafted a bill that guarantees the absolute right of churches to decide what is required for a religious marriage and guarantees as well the equality rights of all Canadians. We are now asking the Supreme Court to tell Parliament what is in accordance with the Charter of Rights, because I know that Liberals, and the vast majority of Canadians, do not believe in using the notwithstanding clause. When Members of Parliament know what is possible within the framework of the Charter, then they will be able to vote in accordance with their conscience and with all the facts in a free vote with no instructions from party whips.

So I urge you all to give this careful consideration at the appropriate time. To cool the rhetoric. Not to fall into traps set by the Opposition. Believe me, for someone of my generation, born and brought up in the Catholic rural Quebec of my youth, this is a very difficult issue. But I have learned over 40 years in public life, that society evolves and that the concept of human rights evolves often more quickly than some of us might have predicted and sometimes even in ways that make some people uncomfortable. But at the end of the day, we have to live up to our responsibilities. And none of these are more essential than protecting the Constitution and the fundamental rights it guarantees to all Canadians.

A kindly acquaintance recently sent the Hog household the first season of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer on DVD (which does not stand for discrete valuation domain)...This past day, I partook of the first four episodes. Long have I heard of this Buffy phenomenon; its fans are legion, singing hosannahs from one end of this vast land to the other. The premise, all can agree, is a silly one: a teenaged Valley Girl fighting vampires. Silly can be good; silly can be bad. It depends on the execution; what of that? In the wrong hands--and most hands in American television are wrong--this Buffy phenomenon could easily have turned tepid and lifeless, a collection of mindless conceits turned cliches. But I bit, at last...There is no harm in seeing, I thought. I will settle this, once and for all: is it good, or what, exactly?

Turns out, it's good.

Darn good.

I like it!

It is pop-culturey, I will not deny it. It is built of elements practically archetypical: the stuffy wise Brit, the spunky sassy girl coming into her own, the quiet lonely one who needs only a little consideration to blossom, the dateless stumbletounged yet oddly articulate boy. Vampires, witches, sympathetic magic, crucifixes and all. Brief Lovecraft references, his trademarked Old Ones now subsumed into the as-yet-vague demoniackal cosmology that gave rise to the vampires our Buffy is here to slay.

The great advantage of starting off with such easily summarisable characters and such (by and large) familiar images from pop horror, of course, is that they're hooks. You have an immediate sense of who they are, and what these supernatural conceits are, and how they should work. There is no need for scene-setting, for justifying such transgressions of natural law as vampires. One can advance immediately to story. Part of the reason that FOX's 1996 attempt at a Doctor Who film failed so miserably (apart from the sad, sad writing) is that it attempted to introduce so much unfamiliar mythology so quickly: Time Lords, regeneration, time travel, the Master, blah, blah blah. Such trappings require a delicate touch. They must be delivered digestably. One must avoid the info-dump, in television...At first, at least. Once one is established, one can begin to weave one's mythopoeic tapestry. There is tremendous range for the characters and conceits of Buffy to expand and evolve. Or their was. Whichever the appropriate tense is. Because it's already happened. I just haven't seen it yet. I'm sure it does. Did. Will.

If this slips through a time-hole into the year 1996, I advise whoever reads this to watch Buffy.

It's cute. And funny. Entertaining. It isn't Twin Peaks or 'The Curse of Fenric', but it doesn't try to be. Well, not yet. As I said, I've only seen four episodes.

But I will see more. Oh yes. Much, much more. And I will keep you posted.

On hot, sunny, blistering summer days like this, I derive great pleasure and solace from the thought that, some day, the Sun will be nothing but a cooling and ever-shrinking white dwarf, radiating a pitiful 0.0028 times as much energy as it does now.

I will laugh. Ha ha ha. Just like that.

Have you ever wondered what your favourite cocktails look like crystallised and photographed through a microscope? Of course you have!

Wonder no longer!

The Black Russian is quite pretty...My beloved gin and tonic looks like a quantum road accident. The Tequila Sunrise looks like a flock of parrots, which goes well with the tropical theme. Also recommended is the Sex on the Beach...Aw, heck. They're all recommended. It's microscopy plus booze. What's not to like? So many happy, happy nights in the lab...

Coming up next: nuclear magnetic resonance imaging of your favourite recreational drugs!

Did you realise that 'Æquus et exæquatus' would be a Latin equivalent of 'Fair and balanced'?

Now you know.

Well, butter my ass and call me a biscuit; there be vast shoals of blogs swimming this Internet sea appropriating FOX's supposedly trademarked phrase 'Fair and balanced'. I would count them, but I would get bored. There are just that many. If blogs were hogs, then even beggars would be fat and greasy with bacon drippings this day. And if Ifs and Buts were candies and nuts, we'd all have a wonderful Christmas.

I think the true and rightful guardian of the phrase 'Fair and balanced' ought to be Tobey (Tobias Vincent, not to be confused with Tobias Vaughn) Maguire, rather than this unsightly FOX News beast. As for 'fair', certainly Tobey Maguire's features are infinitely more sightly than Bill O'Reilly's. If you, hypothetically speaking, had a magic mirror--possibly fuelled by the blood of virgin carp--and you asked it, 'O Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?'...What else could this mirror reply, but 'Tobey Maguire'? Those eyes! Those lips! That nose! And as for 'balanced'...Have you seen him in Spider-Man? Watch how nimbly and lithely he moves! Marvel at his coordination, his dexterity, his buttocks, and, yes indeed, his balance. Could Bill O'Reilly perform such feats without taking a tumble? The answer to that question is so painfully obvious that I will say no more about it, except that it is 'No.'

There you have it.

Tobey Maguire: fair and balanced.

Surely it is a fundamental axiom of any news service besides an open and unashamed propaganda outlet that, when in doubt, the government is always wrong.

Isn't this the way it should be?

Essentially, the media is the only way for the population to keep tabs on its government, unless you happen to live within easy commuting distance of your capital and enjoy spending your days nodding off in a stuffy public gallery during filibusters (or insert your own geographically appropriate quirky yet beloved parliamentary practice here). The odds are good, though, that you have better things to do. Much, much better things. We elect representatives so we can foist all that crap off onto them. No single person can stay on top of it all, not with the size and scope and obscenely bloated paper trails of a modern industrialised quasi-social democracy. That's why press coverage is so vitally important. No matter what the ideological position of a paper or channel, it is vitally important that they attack the government at every opportunity. Whatever they say, their readers or viewers will, unless they're terminally stupid, take with a certain grain of salt, knowing the source's ideological bias. Any attack on the government will be weighed accordingly. Spurious attacks will, hopefully, averaged over the entire population, be disregarded. But if the news outlets make no attacks at all, how is anyone ever to know anything is wrong? And something will be wrong; something is always wrong. If no-one criticises, nobody knows where to look. If everyone criticises, people can seek out the eigencriticisms, compare notes, work out what might be plausible and what's probably hysteria. It's this relentless criticism that stands between a vaguely representative system of government and a secretive self-interested oligarchy manipulating the populace through its tamed media outlets for its own venal gain (not unlike the Bush administration).

It is infinitely better to be critical on a hair-trigger than it is to give the government the benefit of the doubt. Isn't it?

This is exactly why I think the BBC was right to stand by Andrew Gilligan's story, despite its qualms about his intemperate language. If a journalist sees any significant possibility that their government is behaving abominably, it's their job to report it. That's what journalists are for, in some sense. They are our, the people's, tools for monitoring their, the government's, activities.

If you think the government is always on our side, and that 9-11 changed everything and that criticising the regime is unpatriotic and antisocial and that now is the time for all good men to rally round the banner and mangle their cliches...Then you're probably stupid.

If you give the Powers That Be a free pass, you get the PATRIOT Act.

The Hog household was blessed with the new IKEA catalogue the other day. I flip through it wistfully in the bathroom. Are you familiar with IKEA? A wonderful, magical place...It's a furniture store. Well, more a sort of general household goods store, really. A Swedish firm, it has stores all around the world: in Finland, in the Czech Republic, in Baltimore and in College Park, Maryland, and, mirabile dictu, right here in the Seattleland area. The hallmarks of IKEA, I suppose, are low cost, lots of wood, bizarre product names, occasionally bizarre designs, and did I mention wood? Many of their furnishings come in kits you assemble yourself, using the dizzying variety of screws, bolts, and tiny misshapen Allen wrenches you find lurking in the box, like secretive metal bugs. I love wandering through the IKEA store. Normally I hate to shop. I will happily browse through a bookstore, but I avoid shops religiously otherwise. Unless I need something very specific and it would cost too much or take too long to order it off the Internet. But walking through IKEA is like following your own little Yellow Brick Road (or Red Linoleum Path, as the case may be) into an enchanted faerie-land of nonsense words and really convenient bookcases and wood...Did I mention wood? It's all so cute, and divorced from mundane reality...

Did I mention the first few pages of the catalogue are full of creepy floating kids' heads saying cute yet oddly Lynchian things like 'Welcome to the factory of good smells'?

This arachnid little FÖRBY stool has a name very close to Furby. And it is only five dollars. Can you believe it?

The PÄLLBO footstool is a cube. A big fucking turquoise cube. I love it.

The ROLIG and the multicoloured version of the KLAPPSTA are so wonderfully obnoxious...They triggered all of my magpie instincts. I wanted to grasp them in my talons and carry them back to my nest. Though they are the sort of furniture a decorator would kill you for keeping. There is no chance they would ever match anything else in your household, unless maybe you're David Hartwell, when they'd look positively tame compared to your jacket.

Of course, in this house, we swear by the BILLY bookcase.

For some reason, IKEA always makes me think of Autons. Happy, woody Autons. I'm sure it's a front for some kind of alien invasion. But then, what isn't?

Where do ideas come from?

I began to wonder about that particularly just over a week ago. I'd been set a complex analysis problem to do for my review course; the results of which are visible here. I looked at it and looked at it and looked at it periodically for several days, but never got anywhere at all. Then, while I was riding a bus back to Capitol Hill (the one in Seattle, not the one in DC), staring out the window and thinking mainly about how poor the suspension on a bus is, a thought suddenly popped into my head, like a tiny weasel into a bag of crack-coated eggs. 'Herglotz,' it said. 'Herglotz.' Which meant, of course, that the way to relate the convergence properties of the real part of an analytic function to the convergence of the whole thing is, locally, through the Herglotz integral formula. And so it went. After that, the problem was a straightforward matter of patching up all the details, finding the holes in my argument and filling them. A very sequential, logical, and above all conscious procedure, qualitatively very different from the flash of inspiration preceding. On reflection, this seems to be the way I usually do math. I'll think about a problem for a bit, maybe get bored and go do something else, have a bath, belittle a certain gay conservative blogger, juggle ferrets or whatever it is I do with my free time...And then, in the middle of something completely unrelated, I'll suddenly realise how to attack the math problem. The same thing happened again Sunday, while I was drinking beer (Boulevard Wheat, brewed in Kansas City, and very palatable for a lighter beer) at a pizza joint called the Airliner in Iowa City. (They include Muenster cheese on their pizzas.) Then there follows a tedious and very sequential, focussed process of turning an idea into a proof, which is absolutely vital, yet which does not usually yield a solution on its own. Really nice ideas seem to come in flashes, after a certain amount of initial puzzling and then distraction. Ideas wrought entirely out of sequential, step-by-step brute forcery are usually unsatisfying. They do not seem pretty. Pretty ideas flash.

It almost seems like cheating, in a way. I'm not conscious of doing any actual work to concoct these ideas; they just happen. I'm foisting most of the work off onto my unconscious mind, I suppose. Part of me is thinking about it, just not the part of me I'm aware of. I love the unconscious mind; whatever sins he may be guilty of, I do applaud Sigmund Freud for the unconscious.

Why is Unconscious Luke so much more mathematically insightful than Conscious Luke?

(Luke being, as it were, me.)

Is this more evidence for the bimodality of the mind's logic? Is there, as Ignacio Matte Blanco hypothesised, an asymmetrical, Aristotelian logic of the conscious mind, linear and, well, logical, and a symmetrical logic of the unconscious, processing information in a relentlessly and unreasonably even-handed way that does not distinguish between P and not-P, and thus able to leap tall theorems in a single bound? What is it about planning an attack on mathematics that makes symmetrical reasoning more fecund?

Can I get paid to let my unconscious do all the work?

Are you curious as to what Gene Wolfe is up to these days? Of course you are. Then consult the Lupine Nuncio! An entire blog devoted to Wolfe-watching. I am sure it is a passtime that will catch on. Wolfe is very entertaining to watch.

Behold! According to Joan Walsh, writing for Salon.com, not only is Howard Dean a mighty political Juggernaut crushing all those who stumble beneath his relentless wheels (like the DLC, who are amazingly, wonderfully good at losing elections), but he is also sort of short, apparently, and a total stud muffin.

He's also sort of ... sexy, which I mention because it counteracts the associations folks have with short, which is supposedly not charismatic or presidential, and also probably because I'm shallow.

It just goes to show. Short is sexy.

Very sexy.

Perhaps you have heard the hoary old stereotypical rustic exclamation of surprise: 'Well, shut my mouth and paint me red!' Perhaps you are familiar with this more urbane variant: 'Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle!' I, myself, am known to favour 'Well, twist my titties and call me Susan!' This past weekend, however, I encountered a new example of this species, in the short story 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain,' by Andy Duncan. It goes as follows:

'Well, butter my ass and call me a biscuit!'

Use it wisely.

(Running on very little sleep...Unwilling to think tonight.)

In the words of the great Billy Idol,

Hey little sister what have you done Hey little sister who's the only one Hey little sister who's your superman Hey little sister who's the one you want Hey little sister shotgun!

It's a nice day to start again
It's a nice day for a white wedding
It's a nice day to start again.

I'm off 'til Monday to bless a marriage!

Behold the most amazingly fabulous astronomy picture I've seen in an unspecified period of time!

N49 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

I really don't have much to say about it, except that gosh, it's amazingly fantastically lovely...The filaments, the colours...I have a real weakness for objects like that, knots of colourful string. Maybe I'm part cat.

While you're there, you can see the nebula giving us the finger, which I encountered originally on Memepool. Have I mentioned how much I love space?

While I'm at it, here's a commencement speech by Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, which is full of Gnosticism.

And here is a collection of palindromes, some of them in Finnish:

ajoreittieroja

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith used to be the Inquisition.

And, via Mr Happy, here is a quiz: Which Doctor Who Season Are You? I am, unsurprisingly, Season 26.

I was under the weather today, so that's all you're getting.

They have finished renovating the lily ponds in Volunteer Park...They're quite attractive.

I met a magician next to one.

Sort of a clown magician. Or harlequin, possibly. With a grotesque Medieval nose strapped to his face, and a Satanic black beard, below white-painted cheeks. He wore a black vest, with shapes--a heart, perhaps a diamond--roughly stitched to it. He had false cuffs, which he wore on his wrists like bracelets. His name was Winston, and he wanted to show us (myself, two other walkers) a trick.

He showed me his deck of cards. Indifferent cards; he was insistent on this, repeating it often. The cards didn't care; they had no feelings. He flipped through the deck, until I told him to stop. I pulled a card out, the four of hearts, and showed it to the others. I slid it back into the pack; he raised and lowered the deck three times, perhaps, rocking back on his heel, and pulled the top card. Was this it, he asked? It wasn't; it was the five of clubs. He pulled off his hat; inside was the four of hearts. He'd spotted that I was watching his hands and cuffs particularly...But his finale has me stumped. He said it was an example of mass hypnosis. He distracted us with more talk of indifferent cards while he prepared; someone had once told him that there was one card that wasn't indifferent, the Queen of Hearts...He said he could only do this once, that he didn't know what we would see...Then he flipped through the deck again, so we could see each card in turn, for a split second.

They were all the four of hearts.

I believe he was there as part of Bubble Rally '03, a deeply surreal event I'll describe tomorrow...

There were so many bubbles.

I happened to visit Andrew Sullivan's site again today, because I'd heard he was turning on the Church of Rome. And he is. And that amuses me. Maybe next he'll turn on the Republicans. But that's neither here nor there. I noticed a teeny bit of commentary about the Kelly Affair in the UK, and it's the funniest darned thing. Sullivan has a positive loathing for the BBC, and attacks it every chance he gets. (Along with Paul Krugman.) Naturally, he's convinced that Lord Hutton's inquiry will be a huge black eye for the BBC. He links to this story from the Guardian on Andrew Gilligan's grilling by the Commons foreign affairs committee, just before Dr Kelly's suicide. The Guardian has seen transcripts; I love the way UK papers lace their stories with phrases like 'the Observer can reveal' and 'the Guardian has learned'. It's charming. Anyhow, members of the committee accused Gilligan of bald-faced distortion, of changing his story on his source's (Kelly's) fingering of Alastair Campbell as the source for a specific (false) claim in an intelligence dossier. The committee was accusing Gilligan of having cut this from whole cloth, of having put these words into his source's mouth. Sullivan's summation: 'Hard to get more damning than that.'

Now, the punchline! The esteemed Mr Sullivan didn't read past the first two paragraphs, which report only what the committee members claimed, not what Gilligan actually said. The rest of the story asserts completely the opposite: 'The transcripts reveal Mr Gilligan holding his ground that Mr Campbell was responsible for transforming the dossier in the final weeks prior to publication.'

Andrew Sullivan is no more a journalist than I am a bag of crisps.

I certainly don't know exactly what Dr Kelly said to Mr Gilligan. I'm inclined to think, however, that it was, for the most part, just as Mr Gilligan claims. Newsnight's Susan Watts also broke a very similar story about the Government's diddling of intelligence, also based on information from Dr Kelly, also casting doubt on the '45 minutes' claim, though not attributing it specifically to Campbell. Furthermore, Ms Watts recorded one of their conversations. Moreover, and so forth, it appears that Gilligan discussed with Dr Kelly which quotes from their conversation he could and could not use, prior to his report. The BBC has his notes, which are, with the recording and all the other records kept, a formidable body of documentary evidence. If the notes did not bear out Gilligan's claims, the BBC would be utterly sunk, and a lot of resignations would be in order, given that the top brass have all come out in Gilligan's defence. If the BBC is willing to stick to its guns, it probably has a solid case, and the inquiry will show it.

Vote Liberal Democrat, dammit.

Let R be a connected open region in the plane, and let f_n be a sequence of holomorphic functions on R such that {Re(f_n)} converges uniformly on compact subsets to a harmonic function u. Suppose there exists z₀ in R such that v(z₀)=lim Im(f_n(z₀)) exists. I wish to prove that {f_n} converges uniformly on compact subsets.

Why do I wish to prove such a thing? Because I'm preparing to take my Ph.D. qualifying exams in September, which make strong women weep and strong men befoul themselves, and the more of these problems I can do, the better my chances are. Also, I had trouble finding references to the Herglotz integral formula online...Maybe someone out there will find this useful. Also I think the name 'Herglotz' is just really keen. Apparently people liked him. I'm a big fan of his hair. Can't find a biography of him at the University of St Andrews site, which is a shame...I like them.

{f_n} is normal on R iff it is normal on all disks D whose closures are contained in R. It is normal in such a disk, by the Arzela-Ascoli Theorem, if it is equicontinuous on compact subsets, and pointwise bounded. Let K be a compact subset of D, and let z and w be any points of K. We may map D linearly to the open unit disk U, and apply the Herglotz integral formula, which is just like the Poisson formula, only for analytic rather than harmonic functions:

Thus on each compact subset K of a disk D in R, there is a constant C with |f_n(z)-f_n(w)| less than C|z-w| for all n and for all z, w in K.

Suppose in some disk D there is a point z with {f_n(z)} bounded. For all z in D, there is a compact curve g contained in D (a straight line segment, even) connecting z and z. By the above, |f_n(z)-f_n(z)| is less than C|z-z| for all n, so |f_n(z)| is less than sup|f_n(z)|+C|z-z| for all n: {f_n} is pointwise bounded on D. If E is the set of points z in R for which {f_n(z)} is bounded, this shows E is open (and nonempty, since z₀ is in it). Now suppose w is in R-E; since R is open, there is a disk D containing w whose closure lies in R, which contains an even smaller disk whose closure is a compact subset of D containing w. For all z in this smaller disk, |f_n(z)-f_n(w)| is less than C|z-w| for all n; since {f_n(w)} is not bounded, neither is {f_n(z)}. Thus R-E is open, so E is closed. Since R is connected and E is nonempty, open and closed, E=R: {f_n} is always pointwise bounded. Hence the family is normal on all disks D, and thus on all of R. It contains a subsequence converging normally to some analytic function f on R. Of necessity, Re(f)=u. Suppose g is any other normal subsequential limit of {f_n}. Then Re(g)=u also, so f-g is an analytic, pure imaginary function: the Cauchy-Riemann equations imply f-g is an imaginary constant A. But since lim Im(f_n(z₀)) exists, the imaginary parts of f and g are both equal at z₀, so A=0. Thus any normally convergent subsequence converges to f. Suppose {f_n} as a whole did not converge to f uniformly on some compact subset K: then on this subset, there would be e greater than zero such that for all N, there exists an n greater than N with sup|f_n-f| greater than e. Therefore we can construct a subsequence {f_nk} with sup|f_nk-f| greater than e for all k. But this subsequence in turn contains a subsequence converging normally, necessarily to f, since {f_n} is a normal family, which is a contradiction. Therefore {f_n} is uniformly convergent on compacta.