I had another brush with Lyndon LaRouche's zany cultists this afternoon. It was a bright and cheerful day, and I was feeling full of beans. I was heading to the HUB for some pizza when I spied yet another of LaRouche's dupes flogging his table full of pamphlets with titles like 'Children of Satan II' and spewing untruth into the ears of the unwary...He was giving his little spiel to an unfortunate girl as I passed; I happened to catch sight of his notepad, on which I observed him scrawling what appeared to be geometry. I felt it my duty to whisper in the poor girl's ear as I passed that the LaRouche people were crazy, since they sort of are. Mr Cultist--I don't know his name, so let's call him Pickles--happened to overhear, and did protest. How could I say such a thing? Had I even read their stuff, he asked?

Pickles engaged me in discussion. Which is to say, after he found out I was a mathematician, he threw out more or less unconnected, off-topic factoids from mathematics and (once or twice) physics, trying to wow me and cow me with his erudition until I succumbed. The thing was, he got all of his mathematical and physical points fundamentally very wrong. Like the other LaRouchies I've talked with, Pickles was jam-packed with names, dates (some even correct), buzzwords, and even a few pieces of genuine information. None of it, however, made sense. I pointed out to him his factual errors. Perhaps I took a somewhat combative tone, but I think on the whole I was fairly civil. He tried to talk about heat but he didn't know what statistical mechanics was. He tried to talk about nuclear forces, but didn't know the difference between a lepton and a hadron. (He thought a positively-charged electron was a proton.) Just like the last one, he was all about demonising Isaac Newton and Euler; I've also heard and read LaRouchian assaults on Lagrange, Cauchy, Hermite, and others. They're all about Kepler, though. And Gauss. Gauss' proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra seems to have mystical significance for them; I tried to explain that there are better modern proofs, but apparently most of modern mathematics is a malicious fraud ignoring the philsophical implications only Lyndon LaRouche has the wisdom to see. When he did his Newton/Kepler schtick, I tried to convince him that Newtonian gravitation was a hell of a lot more powerful than Kepler's laws of planetary motion; according to him, I was missing the point. After all, Newton was a warlock. And Kepler was an astrologer, I told Pickles; so? I kept hammering away at Pickles until he was completely sick of me, and he told me I was ignorant and closed-minded. A passing, gallant gentleman overheard, and leapt to my defense. He'd been dealing with LaRouchies for thirty years, he said, and it seemed he was even sicker of them than I am. He gave Pickles what you might call an earful. LaRouche's cult was packed with egomaniacs, he said, out to puff themselves up with fancy-seeming snippets of information they really didn't understand, flashing it around to make themselves seem superior and degrading anyone who argued with them. Which has certainly been true of all the LaRouche cultists I've met. In the end, Pickles got so sick of us that he told us to 'stop masturbating onto his table' and walked away.

It was a beautiful, beautiful moment.

Lyndon LaRouche seems to run a sort of intellectual cargo cult. He and his followers use mathematics like a talisman. They seem to think of it in magical terms. They scoop up bits and baubles and phrases from real mathematics, and they chant their stolen scraps like spells or incantations, as if the power resided in the words alone: as if saying it made them an Authority. And there is a certain power that comes from mathematics. I have yet to harness representation theory of semisimple Lie groups to make laser beams shoot from my eyes or bend the masses to my will, but there is still power. There is the power that comes from an ability to think logically and model the physical universe, but this is uninteresting to LaRouche and Pickles; this power takes long years of careful study to achieve. They want power over other people: they covet the power that comes with credibility and with 'expert' status. They mouth the words and expect the power to flow through them. Everything, to them, is about personality; nothing descends, in the end, to logic or fact. To discredit Newton's mathematical contributions they claim he was a warlock; they can't distinguish the man from his work. It doesn't matter if Newton was barmy as three ferrets in a burlap sack; he was still a genius. But it has to be all about personality to them, because without it, they are nothing. All they have is their Black Mass mockery of real scholarship, trappings and appearances. Their cargo-cult airfields. Which can fool someone, if they've never seen an airfield before. (Mathematically, most people haven't.) But when challenged they invoke their crude idols of bamboo and bone, utter their Words of Power...And it all fails them. The airplanes never land.

And since it isn't big enough to deserve a posting of its own, I'll add here that Moonies have something far, far sillier than the Mormon Magic Underwear: Moonies have the Holy Handkerchief. After man and wife are properly joined by the Unification Church, they are to ritualistically mate on three consecutive days under the watchful eye of a photo of the Reverend Moon, having sprinkled the Holy Salt. Then they are to wipe their naughty bits with this Holy Handkerchief, which they are never allowed to launder. Ever.

It has long been said that some people will believe anything. I cannot bring myself to disagree.

I gave my second lecture today. I wasn't nervous at all. I was more fluid and confident in my delivery, less stilted. It just goes to show that one can get used to anything (except the Bush presidency, which always finds new and creative ways to outrage us. Oh, and spontaneous human combustion). The students are a mellow bunch; they don't have pitchforks and burning torches. Some even ask questions. Even good questions! I almost used the word 'shit' several times, but always stopped myself. Maybe later in the quarter. The more confident I get, the more I'll want to swear. I can tell. I hear people like it when their English teachers swear, or Philosophy, or the like...The Swearing Rabbi at the U of Iowa was always very popular. Math teachers don't seem to capitalise on humanity's innate love of obscenity so much. It's sad.

Some day, I dream of using the phrase 'yack these bitches together' while describing the tensor product.

And I'm wearing a fucking cute shirt.

That wasn't so bad...

That wasn't so bad at all.

Just start talking, and focus on making sure English comes out of your mouth (and on maintaining proper and decorous control over your bodily functions) and the anxiety just...fades away.

They're such a docile, captive audience. Why, they're not intimidating at all! I'll bet most of them can't even drink yet. They're harmless as fluffy little lambs. And they'll listen to anything I say. Even if I screw up! Even if I repeat myself! Even if I trail off into ellipses...Which I didn't, actually. (Much.) Unless I start projectile-vomiting pea soup, they'll accept anything that comes out of my mouth. Not uncritically, not without question, but they'll accept it.

One lecture down, twenty-nine to go.

In just thirteen hours I'll be standing in front of a room of undergraduates, pretending that I know how to teach.

Their confidence in me is touching.

I sewed up a hole in my pocket, all by myself. I deserve a cookie.

Playing soon in Seattle:

• 2 April: Stereolab and Manitoba at the Showbox. Dan Snaith, the man behind Manitoba is a mathematician; he's studying number theory at Imperial College, London.
• 14 April: David Bowie at the Key Arena.
• 29 April: Sexy French band Air at the Paramount.
• 5 May: Belle and Sebastian, one of my favourite bands at the moment, at the Paramount.

My goal is to go to each and every one of these shows. I've already got tickets to Bowie and Belle and Sebastian. Air's a little pricey...But I'll do my best.

This will be a month (and change) of rocking.

My course web site is up and running. My syllabus is typed and copied. I've got lecture notes enough to take me through the first week and a little beyond. And I'm getting to the fun stuff, matrix multiplication! I get to show my class that GL(n,R) is a group without telling them what a group is. And I had about four inches of my hair chopped off yesterday. I feel good.

This can only mean it's time for more advice for graduate students! Today, I will share with you those things that help me to not completely suck as a TA. I must be doing something right, or they wouldn't have given me my own class. Right?

Right?

If you're teaching undergraduates...

Be quirky. If you're going to present an example to your class, make it memorable somehow. Last quarter when I was TAing integral calculus, I showed my students a lot of example problems involving calculating the work required to empty a tank. These get very repetitive very quickly; the tanks are always full of water, and no-one ever talks about where you're pumping the water to. So I varied the set-up of my problems a little: the tank was full of creamed corn (in honour of my Iowan heritage), and we were pumping it up to a waiting blimp. Which I drew. Or the tank was full of Kentucky bourbon. I think I threw in al-Qaeda once. Another popular class of work problems involves hauling things up with ropes; I told my students little Timmy had fallen down the well, and Lassie was going to save him. It doesn't really matter what you say, so long as you say something different. My students perked up a lot when we talked about bourbon and drew blimps and doggies on the board.

Don't worry about seeming too faggy, if you happen to be flamingly non-heterosexual. Most of your students won't notice anyhow. The rest aren't going to care. Students aren't really going to think of you as a three-dimensional human being with a sex life; it just won't compute for them. (Disclaimer: this advice does not apply in Utah, Idaho, Mississippi, Tennessee, or, in short, anywhere scary; but if you're flamingly non-heterosexual, what are you doing going to graduate school in a place like that anyhow? Be reasonable!)

Don't get too attached to your students. You're most likely going to be a lot closer to them, age-wise, than you are to the faculty, and you'll have a natural inclination to take the students' side. This is unwise for a number of reasons. First, students aren't going to return the favour. You'll be lumped in with the faculty in their eyes; you will always be an Outsider. Second, some of your students are bound to flunk. You shouldn't feel bad about this. It is not your fault. It is their's. Every student I've seen flunk or get a low grade has earned it. No amount of coaxing or guiding or tutoring will help students who aren't willing to work and aren't willing to study, or who don't have the time or background or aptitude to take the class in the first place. And you won't have time to help them all individually, anyhow. You need to keep a certain distance, and harden your heart. Third, they'll be gone soon anyhow. Students pass like a ripe spring day. Fourth, if you get too chummy, you'll lose any authority you might once have had. There will be times when you'll want students to shut the hell up and listen to you; they won't shut up for you if you're their pal.

It's fine to let slip that you smoke or drink. Students like it if you have vices. No-one likes a Puritan. However, if you come to class hungover, or stoned, or still drunk, try to keep it to yourself. No-one likes a Puritan, but everyone likes a professional.

Act confident, especially when you're not. Students need to believe you know what you're doing.

Housebreak your students as soon as the term begins. The habits and attitudes you foster in the first week or two will linger on 'til the end.

Don't offer to have too many review sessions outside of normal class hours. Students will take you up on them all around test time, and it'll take freaking forever, and believe me, you'll have things you'd rather be doing. Like eating. Or not being at work.

People won't usually come to your office hours if the professor you're TAing for has some of their own. Don't feel bad. It just means you can skip yours with a clear conscience.

Eat while you teach. Who's going to stop you?

When it's nice enough, and you don't need to use the board, take your class outside. This will encourage the hot ones to wear less clothing.

It's easier to remember students' names if you mentally give them little nicknames as well, like 'Exploded Beautician X' or 'Volvo Y'. Don't mention these to anybody.

Check out your hot students, if you can do so subtly and without anyone noticing. It is a perk of the job. Don't molest them, or buy them drinks, or accept gifts from them, or date them. Until after the term ends and they're no longer your students. Then, if they approach you, it's damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. (Funny story: one of my math chums is now dating one of his former students. After the quarter ended, she put an ad up for him in the Stranger's I Saw U's, he happened to read them that week, and the rest is history.)

In every class you ever TA, you will have at least one student who is really, really chatty and friendly while simultaneously being rather annoying and, sometimes, not very good. Keep your fury pent up deep, deep down inside. Never let it show. They'll be gone soon. (And you'll just get another one...)

Most importantly, drink.

The MT-Blacklist plugin for blocking and deleting comment spam on MovableType weblogs is a Very Good Thing. This baby really works! It's stopped 47 spam comments in the last week. Heck only knows how these things find me...

Get it. Use it. Love it.

Today I thought I saw a figure in a hooded yellow jacket without a face, with the merest shadow of a hint of a blur where eyes and mouth ought to be, a charcoal sketch of a person given blasphemous solidity...

It turned out my glasses were smudged.

It's a fact: Prime Minister Paul Martin looks like William Shatner.

(Why didn't William Shatner run for leadership of the Conservative Party? I have no idea if he's actually conservative or not, but it would've been fun.)

Here is a sort of choral swearing apparatus.

And I've added a new blog to my link area region thingy, off to the right: the Panda's Thumb, which sets itself up in opposition to the turgid foolery that is Intelligent Design, a sexed-up Creationism Lite^[TM] that is complete poppycock in every respect. I am sickened to say that Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery Institute that pushes ID crapola, lives in my neighbourhood. (He gave $2000 to Bush, of course.)

Bruce Chapman, Buffy's Swearing Keyboard has a message for you: 'Zebra bastard zebra zebra zebra fucker.'

I think that pretty much sums it up.

I would like, if I may, to talk to you about graduate school. And I will. Who's going to stop me? You? Ha! No-one can defeat the Hidden Monkey Hands!

As many of you already know, but mysterious Internet people may not, I am a real live metabolising graduate student. Grad school is what I do all day. (Except for other things.) This is my second year in the Ph.D. programme in the Mathematics Department at the University of Washington, and I know already that I just used far too many prepositional phrases in a row, so let's never speak of it again. I think I'm making pretty decent progress. I've passed all my prelims (aka preliminary exams, aka quals, aka qualifying exams) and picked an area of specialisation (algebraic topology); I haven't yet got a thesis advisor, but I'm working on it. In the five quarters (and one summer) I've been here I've TAed various calculus courses five times, and graded once for an undergraduate- and Master's-level real analysis course (which is sort of funny, because I am an anti-analyst). Next quarter, the Powers That Be in Their transfinite wisdom have seen fit to let me teach my own course, introductory linear algebra. I'll have fifty tiny wee little undergrads all of my very own, getting high off the fumes from my dry-erase markers. Next quarter, by the way, starts on Monday. I'm starting to get a little edgy.

It's a lot of responsibility. My own class. That's ten weeks of lectures to prepare (or start preparing, at least); a syllabus to write up; homework to assign; I need to make a tentative schedule of which topics to cover on which days...And I have to convince a hall full of engineering students three times a week that I know what I'm talking about (which, fortunately, I do) and that I am confident and secure in my pedagogical powers, all while suffering from a wholly unreasonable fear of speaking in front of crowds. I get nervous just speaking up in my graduate classes, which are tiny and intimate. I had to give a presentation on Lie algebra cohomology in one of my classes two weeks ago; as I sat there shuffling my papers waiting my turn, I felt like Dick Cheney was sitting on my chest; I felt his cold, dead hand crushing my heart. I sweated, covertly. I was a deer, staring into a headlight, which belonged to an oncoming train. A subway train. In New York City. At the Bergen Street station, as seen in Jacob's Ladder, the most disturbingly terrifying film I've ever seen.

Oddly enough, all of that goes away as soon as I start talking. Because I do actually know what I'm talking about. It's math. I can do math. As soon as I stop thinking about doing it and just do it, I'm fine. I forget all about Dick Cheney and tiny eyeless figures with melted faces plunging hypodermic needles into people's foreheads. After the Lie algebra cohomology talk, someone even claimed to me that my talk had been enjoyable, if you can believe that. And a number of students I've TAed have claimed to enjoy my style of presentation. Something very similar will happen here, too. As soon as I start lecturing, I'll be fine. I just have to make it to Monday morning without freaking out.

I'm making good progress. I've got a couple lectures' worth of notes written out now, and I have a rough schedule in mind. This evening I'm going to do my course web page and write up a syllabus. And listen to Belle and Sebastian. (Are you familiar? They're Willow music. As opposed to They Might Be Giants, who are Xander music. I've been grooving on them for about a month and a half now.)

Since I'm being all scholastic today, I thought I might share with all of you what I laughingly call my accumulated graduate school wisdom.

My first piece of wisdom is this: go to graduate school.

If you're involved with mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, statistics, or other hard sciencey fields, at least.

As far as I can tell, by and large, graduate students in mathematics and the sciences and so forth get a much, much better deal than the average graduate student in, say, English. We don't have to read shitty potentially-plagiarised undergraduate papers for general education courses, for starters. And our students can't disagree with us about anything, because we're always right. The things we teach them are objectively True; there is no room for a difference of opinion.

In mathematics, at the very least, graduate school can be a pretty sweet racket. If you get into a Ph.D. programme at any school worth pissing at, you'll be guaranteed a steady TA job, which may not let you live like a king but will at least pay the rent and keep you in cheap Chinese takeaway. And it's easy money. Most commonly, entry-level TAs will handle discussion sections for large lecture courses, which is easy as spitting on a toad. Or you can grade for a graduate course whose equivalent you've already passed. Or, as time passes and you get bolder, you can teach your own class. Like me. This, as I am learning, means considerably more work, but compared to sitting for eight hours a day in a cubicle at RealNetworks staring towards the water cooler with cold, dead eyes and a heart full of sorrow, it doesn't seem so bad. (Unless you care about making respectable amounts of money, as opposed to just not starving.)

Sure, graduate school means taking horrifically difficult courses and passing grotesquely difficult exams...But if you can get into the programme in the first place, and you don't mind biting the bullet every now and then, it's quite doable. It's not like you'll be on your own. Work with other grads. Pool your resources. Don't be shy. It'll even be fun. And don't worry if your grades suck. You just have to pass.

It beats looking for a real job in these dark economic days.

Latter Days: it appears to be one of those odd-couple romantic tragicomedies, you know the type, love, loss, love, repeat. Only half of the couple is a homo party boy, and the other half is a Mormon missionary boy.

It's playing at the Harvard Exit here in Seattle at least through next week, as far as I can tell. I'm going to see this.

I know a lot of gay former Mormons. (They all hate Mormonism now, and I have to say I can't blame them.)

I also used to live upstairs from some Mormon missionary boys. (While I was living with these people.) And I have to say, they were sort of hot, in their sick Mormon way, with their sensible haircuts, and short-sleeved shirts with buttons and collars, and their bicycles, and their lack of first names...I don't think I actually ever spoke to them. Maybe it was for the best...Maybe they were bigoted assholes, in accordance with their bigoted asshole church. Then again, maybe not. Maybe their spirits, deep down, quailed beneath the yoke of religious silliness; maybe they were just waiting for someone to open their eyes and set them free. With sodomy.

The world may never know.

But there's a movie now, so who cares?

(Edited 4/1 to reduce overenthusiastic linkage.)

Someone has finally said what the rest of us could only think, deep down in the secret caramel centres of our hearts: the terrorists want Bush to win.

The statement said it supported President Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader "more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom."

In comments addressed to Bush, the group said:

"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization."

"Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."

This message made possible by a grant from the National Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction Foundation.

(Updated around 10.33 when I remembered to add the link.)

This is Dave's joke; I can't take credit for it myself, much as I'd like to...

Q: What was Chairman Mao's favourite induced map?
A: The Great Push Forward.

Via the notorious Stet, I see that a certain gentleman calculates that there is a 67% chance God exists.

His methodology puts me very much in mind of the following.

Suppose we're given two variables, A and B.

• Let A=B.
• A(A-B)=A²-AB=A²-B²=(A+B)(A-B).
• Cancelling, A=A+B.
• Let B=1.
• Then subtracting A from each side, 0=1. Call this equation (*).
• Winston Churchill has one head. Therefore, by (*), Winston Churchill has no head.
• Winston Churchill has no green leafy top. Therefore Winston Churchill has one green leafy top.
• Multiply each side of the equation (*) by two. Then two equals zero. Since Winston Churchill has two arms and two legs, Winston Churchill has no arms and no legs.
• Multiply each side of (*) by the waist size of Winston Churchill. Then the waist size of Winston Churchill is zero: Winston Churchill tapers to a point.
• Multiply each side of (*) by l, where l is the wavelength in nanometers of any photon reflected off of Winston Churchill. Then l=0 nm. Now multiply each side of (*) by 620 nanometers: 620 nm=0 nm. Therefore, we obtain l=620 nm. Winston Churchill is orange.
• Winston Churchill has no head, no arms, no legs, and a green leafy top; he tapers to a point; and he's orange. Therefore Winston Churchill is a carrot.

Which just goes to show that if you plug batshit into an equation, you shouldn't be surprised when you get pureed hogsbollocks out.

This message has been brought to you by the National God Almighty I Need A Drink Foundation.

The other day, I had a sudden bee in my bonnet to listen to the Violent Femmes, which reminded me of high school and this nice but horribly stoned boy I used to know; before I knew it, I was on a full-blown nostalgia kick. In honour of this, I decided to re-read The Mote in God's Eye, a science fiction novel dealing with first contact, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I'd loved it when I first read it as a kid. Much of my early exposure to science fiction came from my father's books. The house was littered with them. Many of them had a militaristic bent: Jerry Pournelle, David Drake, later David Weber. Lots of military books in general, not just science fiction. Techno-thrillers. Various Jane's tomes. Books on naval battles, and on military hardware, and missiles. I knew what a Trident missile was in second grade. To this day I have dreams involving nuclear weapons. Never real Bomb Dreams, with one almighty flash and then the end; the bombs are just there. Part of the dreamscape. Morally neutral. (I'm not sure if that bothers me.)

Lots of the books I read back then were what you'd call 'hard' science fiction. In particular, they were distinctly mannish. Engineery books, books about problem-solving, books which shied away from investigating too deeply their characters or their emotional lives, except in the butchest of ways; books written for plot rather than for prose. Although not all of them were of that character. There was Asimov, who was much cuddlier; and there was Ray Bradbury...

To make a long story short--

CHORUS: Too late!

--I decided to re-read The Mote in God's Eye to see what I thought of it years later, now that I've become a gay pacifist socialist aesthetic Seattle type, left the rotting town in Iowa where I'd grown up, and met people who aren't white.

My reaction involved a lot of giggling. The future society, the Second Empire, Niven and Pournelle used is just silly, a Puritanical misogynistic classist bunch of prudes. And Anglo? You had better believe it's Anglo. Their future is white as a sheet. There is exactly one black person, mentioned in passing. The only significant non-Caucasian characters are an Arab trading magnate and his manservant, shifty and unprincipled and moneygrubbing, not portrayed as actively villainous but most definitely Outsiders. Where the heck, I asked myself, are all the Asians?

Women really take a beating. So to speak. There's exactly one female character, who fits into the deeply unfortunate mold of the spunky independent young woman who deep down just wants to knit little booties for her brood of hellspawned young, and make her man a sandwich. Maybe pie. I know the book was written thirty years ago, but come on! The feminine is equated with the domestic to a degree that'd make Donna Reed moist as a snack cake. There was one passage that really leapt out at me; Sally, you see, an anthropologist, is busy studying the first intelligent alien species humanity has encountered, and realises in the middle of all that that what she really misses is 'girl talk. Marriage and babies and housekeeping and scandals'. Now, I'm no woman, but even I can tell you that there's more to women than sitting around crocheting and talking about bleach. She's desperate to swap recipes with someone. There's nothing wrong with recipes as such. I even swapped one myself, once. But that is the uttermost limit of her identity as a woman. Recipes. And swooning over that big strong Captain Blaine, with his duty and his square shoulders and his passive sodomy. (Well, come on. He commands a ship crewed entirely by men, off in space for ages at a time in high-stress conditions. You know they do it.)

And they're all such total prudes! All the menfolk go all red and blushy and incoherent with great big sticks up their asses when Sally takes her clothes off so the aliens can inspect her, on another ship, where not a single human can see her. The very thought of an exposed bosom sends them reeling with maidenly vapours. (Just like Republicans, really: SHRIEK! Titties! *swoon*) Really, what kind of a science-fictional society do you call that? Even E. E. Smith's whiz-bang Boy's Own adventure yarns were filled with people getting their kit off left and right. And Isaac Asimov, in contrast, with his sexbots...? He was a dirty, dirty man, and I respect that. Dirtiness is much truer to the human spirit.

Now, this is not to cast aspersions on the personal politics of the good masters Niven and Pournelle, about which I know nothing whatsoever. I don't know if they genuinely have 'Two White Dudes' written across their foreheads in letter of fire thirty feet high. It is only a fictional society, after all. And it's a possible one. It's not unlike societies of the past. But it's a thoroughly disagreeable one. I found myself very disappointed that the authors didn't take a more critical tone. To my surprise, they don't seem to take the piss at all. They write with straight faces, unless I've missed something. And I am surprised that they could've written a book thirty years ago, when the politics of race and gender were going through such transformative uproar, and David Bowie was still wearing dresses and fellating Mic Jagger, and then filled it with such regressive and archaic politics, never once commenting upon this in the text. The injustice is quite blatant, but the authors don't critique their own creation; the protagonists are all stamped as Heroes, and their values are all very Noble. It feels naive, and absurd.

And none of this ever occurred to me when I was a kid. This is why it's good to grow up.

What would Samuel Delaney say about a book like this, I wondered...

Then I laughed until tea almost came out of my nose.

(Answer: shoe orgy.)

I got obsessed with this ASCII game sometime during my early adolescence. Let's all relive a few memories.

Now, I'm not much of a 'things' person, but this Czech plumber's bag looks like the most wonderfully useful and marvellous and hot and desirable and sexy carrying device ever crafted by the hand of Man.

Cory Doctorow likes it, so it must be good.

If anyone happens to be in Minneapolis, they should buy me one. Out of the goodness of their hearts. For the good of all humankind. For the children.

So what's going on in Seattle?

The Stranger has a feature on the last week or so of gay marriage activism here in Washington. There's a lawsuit under way now challenging Washington's anti-gay-marriage Defence of Marriage Act, on the grounds that the state constitution's equal-protection guarantees trump it. Stupid hicks are challenging Mayor Nickels' executive order extending marriage benefits to same-sex spouses of city employees. Apparently, it's mainly Christians working with a group out of Mississippi. This group, the American Family Association, fills its website with really amusingly silly religious language, and says that 'The American Family Association exists to motivate and equip citizens to change the culture to reflect Biblical truth.' Which is to say, they're silly assholes, and God will roast their stomachs in Hell, stuffed into the stomachs of donkeys which are in turn roasting in the stomachs of some larger beasts, possibly sperm whales, or the large (but not giant) squid that live at the bottom of Puget Sound. I know this because God speaks to me personally. God also tells me that His favourite colour is lavendar, and that Mel Gibson was the worst Hamlet He'd ever seen.

Someone tried to move the Sauk River. Secretly. Without anyone noticing.

It is claimed that, back in November, while a crew was removing a Trident SLBM (equipped with about 800 kilotons' worth of nuclear warhead) from the USS Georgia at Bangor here in the Puget Sound area, they whacked the missile into an access ladder and punched a nine-inch hole in its nose cone. Do you feel safe yet?

And that's all the news that's fit for me to summarise while eating.

The Poor Man has the storyboards for the Bush campaign's hottest ads.

Beware of swarthy men, and the Frenchified Kerry from Saudi Taxachussettsstan. They hate us because we are free.

Marriage licenses are handled by the county, not the city, so Mayor Nickels can't go around issuing any marriage licenses himself...But he's issuing an executive order giving full spousal marriage type benefits to city employees in same-sex marriages licensed elsewhere (like, say, Portland, conveniently located just a few hours to the south). He's sending an ordinance to the City Council to extend this recognition citywide, although it would fall short of requiring all employers in the city to recognise the marriages and provide all the benefits. (Which would probably be technically illegal.) Still, this is one hell of a lot better than I'd expected.

Ron Sims, the county nabob, could engage in a bit of civil disobedience (Washington state has a barbaric law defining marriage as a hetero thing) and start issuing licenses...But he isn't going to. He wants to succeed Gary Locke as governor, so he can't piss off the queer-fearing hicks in Spokane and Yakima too much.

(Can we please sign a treaty donating Eastern Washington to Idaho or Montana or something? Even better, could we arrange for Western Washington to become a province of Canada? We could rename it something totally un-American, like Emerald Canuckistan.)

Mayor Greg Nickels issued an executive order Monday requiring the city to recognize same-sex marriages by municipal employees.

In an exclusive interview with KING 5 News, Nickels explained why the issue is so important to him.

"I think it's a question of fairness," said Nickels. "If two people are committed to one another, they love one another and are willing to take on the responsibilities of marriage, they ought to have the rights that go with that."

Nickels also said he'll ask the City Council to protect gay married couples throughout the city from discrimination in employment, housing or the use of parks or other city facilities. If the council approves the ordinance, it also would require contractors doing business with the city to recognize gay marriages among their own employees.

Rick Forcier, head of the state Christian Coalition and a critic of extending marriage licenses to gay couples, called Nickels' plan a clear violation of state law.

"What he's about to do is anarchy - taking the law into his own hands," Forcier said. "People cannot be recognized as married in one jurisdiction and not in another."

Nickels said he lacks the legal authority to issue same-sex marriage licenses or certificates like mayors in San Francisco and New Paltz, N.Y., have done.

State lawmakers passed a "Defense of Marriage Act" in 1998, making Washington one of 38 states defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Gov. Gary Locke vetoed the law, but lawmakers overrode the veto.

Seattle has offered domestic partnership benefits to its employees since 1989, but that process requires extensive paperwork - a step same-sex couples would be able to skip under Nickels' executive order.

State Rep. Ed Murray, one of four openly gay men in the Legislature, applauded Nickels' proposal but said the battle should be fought on a statewide front.

"We have to be clear about it: legalizing gay marriage has to be handled in courts and in the Legislature," Murray said.

More than 3,600 same-sex marriages have been performed in San Francisco in the last three weeks, and hundreds of gay couples were granted wedding licenses last week in Portland, Ore. The marriages are being challenged in court.

Nearly 40 gay couples have received marriage certificates in New Paltz, N.Y., where Mayor Jason West has been charged with solemnizing marriages without a license, a misdemeanor. A judge has temporarily barred him from marrying any more same-sex couples.

Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
Love is all you need
That is all you need
That is all you need
That is all you need
That is all you need

Ha! I have done it! I think...

A nice, clean, totally non-computational proof that the homology groups of a semisimple Lie algebra with coefficients in a nontrivial irreducible module vanish!

Thus implying that the cohomology groups vanish too, by Poincare duality.

This seems like such an easy proof...

UPDATE (7 March): No, I was wrong. Sorry.

Here are some documents online dealing with cohomology of Lie algebras. I'll bet you aren't going to look at them. That makes me sad.

Here's one brief summary stressing connections to de Rham cohomology.

This one describes itself as 'quick and dirty', just like me.

Here's someone's thesis, which is mainly on cohomology of restricted Lie algebras, but has a section on the more standard case as well.

I've got Jacobson's Lie Algebras...We'll see how that goes. I should check out Knapp.

Portland, Oregon is about to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Oregon law states that marriage is between consenting males and females aged at least 17, but does not state that a marriage requires one of each.

When is this all going down?

Tomorrow. The report suggests 'hundreds' of couples will take the plunge.

The address, it seems, is 501 SE Hawthorne; the fun starts at 10am.

This thing is spreading like wildfire. (Slow wildfire, but still pretty firey.)

While I still think most people suck, this gives me a small flicker of hope that suckingness isn't quite as universal and widespread as I'd thought...

Mel Gibson's Jesus Chainsaw Massacre has killed a woman in Kansas.

Let this be a lesson to you: Christ kills.

Just say no to Christ.

This is your brain. This is your brain on Christ. Any questions?

Don't drink and Christ.

How many Christs does it take to change a lightbulb? None; he's dead.

'Hey, Mom, I can see the whole town from up here!'

Christ: the other white meat.

Three Christs walk into a bar. The fourth one ducks. Then they nail him to it.

Jesus Peanut Butter Cups. I only wish I'd thought of them first.

Remember that exercise I mentioned, about the path components of a certain subset of the orthogonal group O(n)?

Consider the subspace X_n of orthogonal matrices with square the identity: in other words, symmetric orthogonal matrices. Let O(n) act on these by conjugation: certainly any orthogonal conjugate of a matrix in X_b is still in X_n. Consider the conjugacy classes. Since symmetric matrices are orthogonally diagonalisable, each conjugacy class contains a diagonal matrix; since it's orthogonal, its diagonal entries are +1 and -1 with certain multiplicities. Two such matrices are similar iff they have the same number of +1 entries; thus we have distinct classes C_k, k=0...n, where C_k is the conjugacy class of the diagonal matrix D_k with k +1 entries followed by n-k -1 entries. The elements of this conjugacy class are uniquely determined by their 1-eigenspaces, which are k-planes in Rⁿ: in fact, C_k is the Grassmannian G_kRⁿ.

Note that each conjugacy class is path-connected as a subspace of X_n, since the special orthogonal group SO(n) is path-connected and acts transitively on each class. Note also that the trace function takes on the constant value 2k-n on each C_k. Therefore, the C_k are exactly the path components of X_n.

Since O(n) acts transitively on each C_k with the isotropy group of D_k a closed Lie subgroup--the same as the isotropy group of the standard k-plane in the Grassmannian; you can find it explicitly without much fuss--we can give C_k a unique smooth manifold structure so that the O(n)-action is smooth; with this structure, C_k is diffeomorphic to O(n) mod the isotropy group, which is also diffeomorphic to the Grassmannian; so C_k is diffeomorphic to the Grassmannian of k-planes (equivariantly, even). It's not too hard to go on and show that with this smooth structure, C_k is an embedded submanifold of O(n).

So there.