Have a gander at this old posting at Pedantry to discover just how often the US nearly went to war with Canada during the 19th century.
Speaking of Canada, the Vancouver Sun has more on the recent police raid on the offices of two aides to BC provincial cabinet ministers. It was all about drugs. No-one is saying why, exactly, these two aides were targeted, just that some unspecified information came up in the course of other investigations into drugs and organised crime. The Sun claims that at least one was directly linked to the drug probe,
...which the RCMP says was launched in the spring of 2002 into the involvement of organized crime in the sale of B.C.-grown marijuana in the U.S. in exchange for cocaine, which was then sold in Canada.
There is apparently some kind of police incompetence or corruption angle too:
Victoria Police Chief Paul Battershill has confirmed the drug investigation is connected to the suspension with pay on Dec. 15 of Victoria police Constable Ravinder Dosanjh.Sources have told The Sun the drug probe is targeting a suspected influential Victoria trafficker related to Dosanjh. The alleged trafficker is also a relative of a Vancouver resident who has worked on provincial and federal Liberal campaigns.
The RCMP issued this statement, which stresses the organised crime aspect.
The provincial government insists the aide raid has nothing to do with the business of governance and doesn't reflect at all on the BC Liberal Party (which is, you'll recall, not actually liberal at all, and totally unrelated to the federal Liberal Party). Premier Gordon Campbell, convicted drunk driver, had very little of any substance to say, when The Sun interviewed him by phone; he's still on vacation in Hawaii, where he was arrested for drunk driving a year ago. Drunkenly. (BC premiers have a history of fucking up like that.) However, some people are trying to link this to the recent deal to privatise BC Rail, which the BC Liberals had explicitly promised not to do, and which seems like a pretty poor deal for the province.
I don't really have a particular reason for mentioning this at all. Except that it paints British Columbian politics as being a bit scummy, and portrays the province as being held in a testicle-clamp of fear by drugs syndicates.
The logical conclusion seems to me to be that, if marijuana possession, growth, and distribution were legalised and regulated, not only would these crime rings be mostly neutralised, but family farms and small businesses could boom, and $6 billion (Canadian) or more a year could be added to the province's (legal) economy, more than is brought in by logging or, indeed, any other industry in the province; just imagine the tax revenues...
Which would you rather have in a province: the Canadian equivalent of the Corleones, or a bunch of happy, harmless stoners who remember not to operate heavy machinery and think about robots a lot?
And a Happy New Year.
It's snowing.
UPDATE: It's New Year's Eve, about 2pm. The snow's still there. There are whole millimetres of it heaped up in places. I'm scared. I think it possesses a malign sentience and wishes to eat me.
I've wanted for a while now to write some kind of posting about what a terrible human being Orson Scott Card is...Fortunately, someone's already done a lot of the work for me; I had no idea he called himself a Democrat, despite being, well, very conservative. But there is much more to his being a terrible human being than just pro-Bush-ism. Pretty much any possible good impression you could get of the man from Ender's Game is in fact totally wrong. Also, he really hates gays.
And, y'know, so forth.
UPDATE: There is more to be found on this here.
Am I the only one who gets creeped out every time they hear a US politician refer to our country as the 'homeland'?
I just don't think we should use that word. It has a lot of horrible, horrible connotations. It's white-supremacist language. It's fascist language. I'm not saying that anyone in the current government is either a fascist or a white supremacist; I'm saying that it's bad PR, and that bringing such language--which is already popular with people we all agree are loathesome--into common usage could help extremist groups seem more mainstream. And we have quite enough terrorism to deal with as it is, without encouraging our own domestic ultra-right brand any further.
On a brighter note, here is a math comic.
Bust out your camping gear, boys and girls...
William Shatner is recording a new album.
Guest musicians on the new disc, which was produced by Ben Folds of the Ben Folds Five, include former Black Flag lead singer Henry Rollins and country star Brad Paisley.
To warm yourself up for this blessed event, why not stop by the UberPage of the First Church of Shatnerology?
If you rearrange the letters in the words "William Shatner", you can spell "Animal Whistler".
...I am attempting excellence in music. I feel like I’m almost there, but I’ll have to wait for all of you to tell me if I have reached excellence or not. So it’s the search for excellence that I’m concerned about post Thanksgiving.
I have often thought that George Bush is nothing but a cheap, cut-rate Shatner wannabe. Only evil. Watch the man speak...
Now that I think about it, Prime Minister Paul Martin looks a bit Shatnery.
Washington state is now the Mad Cow capital of America.
Maybe this little scare will help people to realise that beef is really pretty disgusting, all things considered. And objectively pro-Saddam.
Quoth The Friday Thing:
- In 1972, Leonard Nimoy was captured, tortured and killed after being caught undertaking a near-impossible mission to depose the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. Despite a impassioned campaign by Nimoy's family, the American government disavowed any knowledge of the 52-year-old actor.
I hate to see the Internet used for evil, rather than good, but unfortunately a lot of people are doing just that. Some of them are, in fact, so thoroughly corrupt and maleficient that they use the Internet to attack Canadians, the most lovable and inoffensive creatures on God's green earth (except for hedgehogs and penguins). A perfectly nice and upstanding Canadian started this website, Canadians for Wesley Clark, which is perfectly sensible because a Clark presidency would improve US-Canadian relations dramatically, given that quite a lot of Canadians hate Bush, and that Bush has done a lot of things to screw over Canada. There is also, I should point out, a Canada for Dean whose stated goal is to encourage American citizens living in Canada to vote Dean. While searching for this site, I also found a really sad and dire piece of right-wing hatery called 'If you like Canada, You'll Love Howard Dean', which is, from my perspective, a very true statement: I think Dean would fit in very well with the ruling Liberal Party up north. The article's take is, as you might imagine, somewhat different. To the author, Canada is something bad, which just goes to show how intellectually bankrupt these people are. I won't link to the article, because it's not very good at all, like most right-wing propaganda. It compares Dean to Lenin, which pretty much says it all right there.
But this bit of tripe is a perfect example of a 'conservative micromedia' which lashed out against our valiant Canadian brethren and sistren. There are a lot of right-wing Internet gadflies out there. The Freepers, and their ilk. Matt Drudge. Bloggers like the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, or Little Green Footballs. Or even harmless old Andrew Sullivan, who, though he doesn't threaten liberals with personal violence or offer another forum for racists, still spouts a lot of untruths and half-truths and deliberate distortions (on everything except gay marriage and pot) while peddling conservative ideology. And that's just on the Internet, leaving aside the Rush Limbaughs, the Bill O'Reillys, the Michael Savages and so forth who infest television and talk radio.
As this gentleman informed me earlier today, these people discovered Canadians for Wesley Clark, and deluged it with hate-mail.
It seems to me--I'm no expert, you understand--that this conservative micromedia is behaving just like a good old-fashioned mob. It only needs some flaming torches and pitchforks. The mindless aggression, us vs. them polarisation, hysteria, and illogical thought are all there already.
Should these people alarm us? Well, maybe. Ask David Neiwert.
In the ongoing quest to sodomise the Internet with free, advanced mathematics textbooks, here is a preprint, in PostScript format, of a book on complex geometry. I've only just started reading the first bit, which is quite interesting; it connected a function's being holomorphic with a certain diagonalisation of its Jacobian matrix. Which I thought was fun.
Somewhere in America, kids are smoking phone books to get high.
Beer before liquor Never been sicker;Liquor before beer
Brings good cheer.
Allen Hatcher's book Algebraic Topology is free for the downloading, in PDF format, online. Gosh bless the Internet.
I've ordered a paper copy, so I can read it in the bathroom.
That's a compliment.
I was looking at Memepool earlier today, and came across this absolutely wonderful entry about an old ocean liner, which was being towed to Thailand nine years ago when it broke loose in a storm and wound up beached and abandoned and disintegrating away on one of the Canary Islands. The photographs of the hulk are stunning. Like industrial archaeology. I'm fascinated to see relics of our technological civilisation left to rot in the elements as if the culture that built them is already dead and forgotten; perhaps in a thousand years something like this will be our version of the Pyramids, left to titillate our successors with a whiff of entropy and the lost voices of dead souls.
I tried to employ the infinite bounty of Google to find more such hulks, with mixed success. I found here that Powell River, British Columbia has a breakwater made of ten old cargo vessels, built originally during the World Wars out of bloody concrete. I know steel was in great demand and all, but that just seems silly. This one, built for World War I, apparently shattered like a teacup when it accidentally bumped into another ship. Oh well, at least the octopi seem to like them. Then of course there are the toxic 'ghost ships' the US just recently sent across to England for dismantling, around whom lawsuits have circulated. And then there are the difficulties the UK is facing disposing of its decommissioned nuclear submarines; old submarines are very photogenic, although I'm having trouble finding any really good shots. Oh well. Oh, and then here's information on a bunch of ships' graveyards in Australia.
Someone arrived at my website after running a search on the following phrase:
nikola tesla oh please don t go out on me don t go on me now never acted up before odn t go on me now i swear i never took it for granted just thought of it now suppose i abused you just passing it on go...fuck... once fastened servile now your getting sharp moving oh so swiftly with such disarm i pulled the covers overhead shoulda pulled the alarm turned to my nemesis a fool not a fucking god no...time...suck...my...please... don t go on me 4x please...oh... suck...blood...touch...please tunnel vision...tuck...time...see... please please please... don t go on me 4x please...don t you want me...don t go on me... please...don t go on me..
That should win some kind of prize. For...something. I'm not sure what yet.
If you happen to be in the market for computer parts, you might want to visit newegg.com...I just bought a power supply from them (which, I might add, I installed all by my very own self without setting a single thing on fire) and I'm very pleased. Newegg.com has a heck of a selection, and really reasonable prices; it seems cheaper to buy through them than to go to the computer stores here in town. And the thing shipped in no time at all. I'll definitely be shopping there again.
Now my computer sounds quieter and much less likely to explode. This is a good day.
I find the whirring of computer fans very soothing...I sleep much better at night when I leave my computer running. It's like listening to waves lapping at the shore. Only computery.
However, despite my fetish for all things technological, I hate the sound of automobiles. Go figure.
I find it rather ironic that the Bush administration and its gargoylesque hangers-on like Richard Perle should sing such hosannahs to democracy and the spreading thereof, while doing so much to discourage it here in America.
Does this count as doublethink on their part? Or just manipulative cynicism?
Or is Richard Perle just a sexually-impotent shell of a man out to substitute violence and political power for his own lost virility and charisma?
I'll bet he hasn't been able to achieve an erection since the Cold War, and fantasises about sexual congress with tactical nuclear weapons. Every now and then he probably has lustful thoughts about warheads being inserted into his anus. But that is okay; it most certainly does not make him gay. That is for damn sure.
Nothing says Christmas like a colonoscopy.
~CBC News
What is the world to do with Saddam Hussein? So many people want a piece of the toppled tyrant. Perhaps the only way to appease them all would be to encourage life to imitate a Terry Bisson story. I would also like to guide the seeker after wisdom towards Michael Blumlein's 'Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration', but it is not, alas, available online...
Despite being in theory some kind of socialist anti-consumerist anti-materialistic idyllic la-de-da sort, I am deeply in love with consumer electronics. A part of me feels ever so slightly guilty, that while the world is filled with people in need, in genuine poverty and material want, I can fill my home with flat-screen monitors, Palm Pilots, Playstation IIs, DVDs, a digital camera...So many things that, fundamentally, are not at all essential to human life. Yet I don't feel nearly guilty enough to give any of these wonderful, wonderful things up. It just isn't going to happen. Maybe this makes me a bad socialist, but you'll still have to pry my Palm Pilot from my cold, dead hands. I love a good gizmo. Although I usually prefer to refer to such things as 'thingies'.
My latest thingy is a portable mp3 player. I have been a bit late getting onto the portable music bandwagon; I never did get a Discman. I don't own enough actual CDs to make such a thing terribly cost-effective. And the Discman just wasn't computery enough to trip my gizmo trigger. A really good gizmo ought to jack into my computer somehow. Ideally, everything remotely electrical, including my toaster and electric kettle, should jack into my computer. But that is neither here nor there.
There are a number of discouraging things about Padelford Hall, where the Math Department is kept here. Several of them are pillars, placed in the stupidest locations around the lounge and our one dedicated departmental classroom. They block your view of windows, other students, sometimes the blackboard. I hate them. Another thing is the absence of music of any sort. When I'm in my office, grading, or TeXing, or whatever, it gets very quiet and lonely. I think to myself, 'If only David Bowie were here to save me!' So, after moaning and bitching about the total absence of Bowie for a year or so, I finally decided to do something about it. I vowed to acquire an mp3 player. After consulting a Knowledgable Source, I decided to get a Sonicblue Rio Fuse.
I love it! I call it Dr Prunesquallor.
It's so tiny! It's about the size of two of my fingers, neither of them middle. It's so cute. It fits anywhere. In coat pockets. In pants pockets. In shirt pockets. One could carry it rectally, if one were so inclinded, for it is of such diminutive dimensions. And it's pretty peppy, too. It'll hold 128k, enough for two full CDs and some change, or possibly more, depending on file quality. It gets me through the day, that is for darned sure. And it jacks right into a USB port. Did I mention it's tiny? The one flaw I've found so far is the earphones that came with it. They're these little wee 'earbud' things, the sort that wedge themselves into your ear so people often can't tell you're wearing them at all unless they notice the black wires leading up to your head (although they may just think you're turning Borg or something). They get uncomfortable. Perhaps my ears are simply too tiny to accept them. The normally-sized among you would probably find nothing amiss.
Anyhow. Big thumbs-up here. It's a miracle of modern technology, and fills me with hope that in another ten or twenty years our soft, fleshy organs will be replaced with tireless metal and plastic, and we will evolve into a race of unstoppable cyborgs and dominate the universe.
Come and shoot Flash turkies. You know you want to.
They're armoured now...They're learning. The fiends.
It should not suprise you to learn that the deregulation of Ontario Power Generation by Mike Harris's Tory government years ago has left the company haemorrhaging money and generally fucked.
Do not deregulate your power companies.
"Be smart. Be socialist."
Don't ask how, but Sunday afternoon I wound up in Greenlake at a Mary Kay cosmetics party.
I said don't ask.
Look, if you're going to keep bringing it up, we'll end this thing right now. Is that what you want? I'll walk right out of here, I swear to Hog.
Okay then.
It was quite odd. It was almost like a support group. This pleasant primped woman in the sort of professional skirty clothes I didn't realise still existed in this world (I'm a mathematician; we don't dress for success) sat us in a circle and we had to introduce ourselves, then slather our faces and hands in odd exfoliating creams and ointments guaranteed to keep your skin young and tender. They were greasy; I felt like I'd been swimming in butter. I tried to unobtrusively rub it all off with a tissue when no-one was looking. And they're so much work; these things come in so many flavours and species, and need to be applied in such specific combinations for maximal effectiveness...Is it really worth that much effort just to cloak a few tiny crinkles around the mouth? I think not, o sirs and madams! And then they started talking about makeup, which I opted out of (except for lipstick, just for a laugh; I discovered that lipstick makes me look like a slut. A really weird, scruffy slut), which is even worse...I watched with mounting horror and incomprehension as these poor women were deluged in foundations and eyeliners and glosses and pigments and guano and hippopotamus lard and who knows what else, in what seemed to be an intricate form of ritual torture. I wondered if this is what had happened to Elizabeth I. Or maybe the Mummy. What an abomination against all reason and rationality, that a substantial fraction of the human species should be expected to devote a non-trivial amount of its time and energy to such futile, such meaningless, such awkward, almost demeaning procedures. As if your faces aren't good enough as they are...
Our society really screws women over, subjecting them to such bizarre and unnatural social expectations. I feel sorry for all of you who have to put up with this on a regular basis. I wish there was something I could do to help.
I have learned to be thankful that evolution has left me with the power to sprout hair upon my face, as a barrier against most forms of cosmetic assault. Now I will read Jerkcity, and feel manly.
Why aflame is not at all to flame as asexual is to sexual:
Prefixing a- to verb forms ending in -ing, as in a-hunting and a-fishing, was once fairly common in vernacular U.S. speech, particularly in the highland areas of the South and in the Southwest. Such verb forms derive from an Old English construction in which a preposition, usually on, was placed in front of a verbal nouna verb to which -ing had been added to indicate that the action was extended or ongoing. Gradually such prepositions were shortened to a- by the common linguistic process that shortens or drops unaccented syllables. The -ing forms came to be regarded as present participles rather than verbal nouns, and the use of a- was extended to genuine present participles as well as to verbal nouns. Eventually a- disappeared from many dialects, including Standard English in the United States and Great Britain, although it is still retained today in some isolated dialect areas, particularly among older speakers. Today, speakers who use the a- prefix do not use it with all -ing words, nor do they use it randomly. Rather, a- is only used with -ing words that function as part of a verb phrase, as in She was a-running.
PS: An acre is 160 square rods. 'Square rod'. Now giggle. I command that it be so.
Capturing Saddam Hussein is without any doubt a Good Thing, and no reasonable person thinks otherwise. Just so we're clear on that.
So...
Anybody seen that bin Laden guy lately? Remember him? America's other arch-nemesis? You know, with the planes, and the terror, and the killing? That guy.
All hail Paul Martin, Emperor of All the Canadas!
Did you realise that if you Google 'paul martin emperor of all the canadas', the top two hits are me? Bizarre. I didn't invent it.
This poor man, a gay Tory MP, has defected to the Liberals...One can hardly blame him. Now that the whole Uniting the Right thing is in principle a done deal, the new Conservative Party of Canada will, one expects, be just pipping with eagerness to flaunt people like Brison as proof that it isn't as horrid and evil and bigoted as the old Alliance, no sir...Even though a lot of it will be. I would not want Stephen Harper's hand deep within my rectal cavity, working me like a sock puppet, if I were him.
One great advantage I have over most of Canada is that I am spared the horrors of winter. That's right. Still 9C...Beautiful blue day today...Blue clouds, some blue sky, blue sea, blue mountains, everything's blue. Except the grass. Which is all green. Lusher and more verdant than it was this summer, in fact. And balmy. I can run around in a T-shirt and my jean jacket. Are you jealous yet? Because I want you to be jealous. Get jealous. Now.
For I am a rock star!
--
PS. Dalek
It is after 5pm Pacific Time, so at last my lips are unsealed...I can reveal to you at last the shocking, explosively revelatory news that the universal covering space of RP2vRP2 looks like an infinitely long caterpillar, or snowman, or string of anal beads. To see why this should be, imagine someone hands you a wedge of two projective planes, and asks you to cover them. A projective plane is just a crushed sphere, so the first thing you'd probably think to do is to blow up one of your planes into a sphere again. You want to build a two-sheeted covering of your original space; your blown-up sphere covers one of the planes twice, but the other plane is covered only once so far, by itself, so to balance things out we need to attach another copy of the projective plane to the sphere antipodally from the first. Then you'd say to yourself: Well, Self, the obvious thing to do now is to blow up one of these projective planes again...You'll get a sphere there, connected at one end to another sphere, which is connected at its other end to a projective plane; and now, to keep the covering even, you have to attach both another sphere and then a projective plane to your new sphere, antipodally, so you always get a symmetrical structure...If you keep blowing your planes up indefinitely, you'll wind up with the Snowman Space, which turns out to be simply connected and a countable cover of the original space. Keen, eh?
This take-home Manifolds final was my only exam. I love graduate school. I'm now free of all responsibilities 'til January. And you know what that means: video games that involve smashing dirty zombies with a pipe.
If you ever find yourself forced to type up an algebraic geometry assignment in LaTeX, and you realise you need to find out how to write matrices, please, please, do not do a Google search on 'latex matrix'. I'm serious.
I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, but it's addictive.
(Also, other polls are confirming that the NDP is the second-place party in Canada right now. Admittedly, the Liberals have about a 3-1 advantage, but second place is second place. Let's not split hairs.)
This poll here gave me extreme pleasure, in a completely legal, safe-for-prime-time sort of a way, requiring absolutely no lubrication. This CBC national poll--which I know is an isolated thing which may mean nothing at all and have no real significance, et cetera--shows the Liberals (of course) with an overpowering, like really totally overpoweringly crushingly huge, lead among Canadian voters.
And in second place? The lefty social-democratic NDP! Beating out a united Conservative Party of Canada (that's the Tories and Alliance all rolled into one hellish political quiche) by almost five percentage points! Ha!
Ha, I say, and ha ha ha, and again, ha! I say 'ha' repeatedly, without limit. Unto the end of time itself.
If you do a Google search on 'Dalek', the top two hits are an artist who draws stylised, quasi-obscene Space Monkeys, and some kind of rap singer music thing with an umlaut. (The Monkey Dalek turns up again later, at a gallery's site here.) A bit later, there's also a Hungarian techno DJ named Corvin Dalek. There is a blog called Salvador Dalek, which does actually mention Dalek Daleks. Apparently, there is a master clock and watch restorer in Germany named Guenther Dalek. Here's a band called Dalek Beach Party!
Which just goes to show that it's a funny old world, and no mistake.