Out of the goodness of my heart, I wound up covering for someone else's lecture today. It wasn't particularly hard to do, in theory; it's the same class I'm teaching, and we're in roughly the same places in the text. In practice, though...Just think of it: walking into a strange room full of strange, confused faces, where they have strange ways and strange customs all their own, like turning in homework on Mondays instead of (as prescribed by Scripture) Fridays, and not littering their lectures with bizarre al-Qaeda references...

Suppose, I said to them, you're walking down the street, and someone hands you a subspace out of the blue, and tells you that you'd better describe it in the simplest possible terms or al-Qaeda will fly a plane into your house...

I thought this would help to motivate bases for them. Everyone knows that bases help fight the grim spectre of global terror.

Actually, I use this same general hypothetical situation to motivate a lot of really abstract math problems to my students: solve this problem, or al-Qaeda will fly a plane into your house. I'll probably end up in Guantanamo Bay. (Not in the prison camp, but in the bay itself. Swimming with the octopi, as the saying goes.)

Oddly enough, I felt no fear. I introduced myself, found out where they were in the text, and managed to pick up there in a fairly coherent fashion...I even did the last part of the lecture noteless. And I didn't fuck up. I must've done fairly well, too...One student asked me after class if he could sit in on my regular lecture sometime. I guess I must be competent.

I have made mathematics both my bitch and a monkey, and now I can make it dance. Dance, mathematics! You're a monkey! Dance, monkey, dance!

(Note: all of us [me] here at HogBlog are firmly opposed to the bitchification of real monkeys, and we call on all people the world over: do not make monkeys your bitches. Not even the small ones.)

Some combination of graduate school and Seattle has made me a lot more confident over the last year. Soon I might be ready to rule the world.

Teaching is quite fun; it seems to energise me, when it goes well. I hope I get to do it again over the summer. David Bowie feels refreshed, uplifted, and invigorated by singing to an audience; I get my fix from giving math lectures. Perhaps David Bowie and I are soul-twins. That would be hot.

It's time to listen to the Talking Heads' 'Road to Nowhere'.

There's this certain undergrad I sometimes see around the department; I've never had a conversation with him, but even so I can tell that he's just about the gayest thing ever. Every time I see him, I think to myself that he belongs in a little coffee shop somewhere, with a jaunty beret on his head, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing a little ditty called 'Be Gay With Me'...

Also, every time someone says the word 'stack', I think every mathematician in earshot should start screaming and clawing at the air while they befoul themselves.

I'm making Cajun tofu tomato soup right now. With olives. Amuse yourselves quietly.

Thunder! There is hail, and I hear thunder! Come here, thunder, and give me a big ol' hug; I missed you...

In the looting and pillaging and wanton destruction that so untidily followed the collapse of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq last year, it seems that 60% of the documentation of modern Iraqi history was lost or burnt. Professor Juan Cole is blogging about this, and he isn't happy.

I was walking through the Quad just now on my way to the bank...

(Warning: the following post is very gay. According to US Senator Rick Santorum (R-Fucknozzle), reading this post may ruin your marriage, transform you into a homosexual, and force you to hump your dog. According to Weepy Myrmidon Bill O'Reilly (R-Lying Liar), the mere presence of this post in the space-time continuum may warp and scar your children, even if they have yet to be born. Proceed at your own risk.)

It's roughly 80 filthy Farenheit degrees out there, and sunny, and blissful, and green; so naturally the place is crawling with studly young men with their shirts off, tossing frisbees hither and yon and scratching themselves in deliciously inappropriate places. Someone, just before I passed through, was distributing free black, gauzy thongs to these tender blossoms of manhood: hunky shirtless guys in jeans were standing around mannishly, holding these wisps of black nothing confusedly, and doing other adjectival things in an adverbial manner too, in a way that asked--nay, demanded!--that I objectify them all at once...Alas, they did not try the thongs on, and then dance for me. Perhaps next time. Perhaps they are shy.

Sam, you should have been there.

I wonder where these thongs came from? There's an Israel tent set up outside the HUB, with music and food and nuclear warheads, and the Israelis have been giving out free cupcakes and fortune cookies...Have they been passing out free thongs, too? Just how pro-thong is Israel?

I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Mormons.

These are the questions that haunt us...

POST SCRIPTUM: It's time for more of everyone's favourite Messiah, Octopus Jesus! I scanned the little doodle I did Friday while proctoring the linear algebra midterm, a harmless little thing called 'Octopus Jesus Feeds a Duck'...

Then today I produced a little gem I like to call 'The Sermon on the Mount'...

Octopus Jesus may be the Son of God, but he is also an octopus. He cannot speak human languages. What more do you want from him? He is Octopus Jesus! I do not know why he has a cross protruding from his body. It is a great mystery.

My tea does not smell like beef jerky, God damn it!

Do not be insolent. Or I will make you dance for me.

Dance for Aloysius! Dance!

Oh god, the voices...

The grading went surprisingly quickly and painlessly...It's much more fun to grade in the comfort of your own home, surrounded by tortilla chips and beer and Lemon Jelly, than in the lightless Stygian depths of the Math Study Centre.

People generally did quite well on the exam, too. I'll have to make the next one harder. I don't want them thinking I'm a pushover.

...Can I make my students all stand up and do a little jig in lecture?

Dance for Aloysius, students! DANCE!

O God...The power, it corrupts!

Lemon Jelly! Dance for Aloysius, Lemon Jelly! DANCE!

PS...Fafblog. Fafblog is the finest Fafblog in all of Fafdom.

For as it was written, the seas did boil, and the mountains crumble, and the stars did fall from the heavens, and letters were returned marked 'Insufficient postage', and the toast did burn, and the very Blogosphere itself was torn asunder by fiery cinnamon-flavoured chaos...

The famed Atrios wrote a posting on religion, bemoaning religion's influence over politics, even on the so-called Left. This distresses me, too. Every single Democratic presidential candidate had to beat the God drum at some point in their campaign, because the American populace gobbles up religion like it was dick. Remember how Dean took lots of flak from certain Democratic forces for being insufficiently religious? Yeah, you remember that. Don't try to fool me.

Atrios was good and snippy, and full of beans, and no sir, no no no, he did not want to wear that 'Have you hugged your Jesus today?' button. But he wasn't on the attack. (I am.) Religion is pervasive throughout America and throughout American politics; and it shouldn't be. Religion has no place in political discourse. On the Democratic side as well as on the Republican side. Just as it has no place in public education. Now, there's absolutely zero chance of getting religion out of politics, but that doesn't mean that those of us who aren't religious have to like it. And it doesn't mean that those of us who aren't running for office have to kiss Jesus' ass to help attract the Christian vote.

Then this fella here came along and launched an attack on the Mycenean One. And it got my dander up, for it grossly misrepresents what Atrios actually wrote. And he seems to understand precisely squat about atheists. For example, he writes...

A few people, me included, have questioned why some on the political left react with such anger toward the religious community – regardless of our theological beliefs or social stands.

It's really quite simple. It has nothing to do with politics whatsoever: people who dislike religion--like, for example, me: I am the archetype for every stone this person casts--don't dislike it for political reasons. They dislike it, by and large, because it's religion. By definition, an atheist rejects all faiths, and while it is possible to do so in a kindly, good-natured sort of way, it's really difficult, once you decide religion is not for you, not to develop a sort of blanket distaste for all religion. Because religion makes no sense. Religion demands that its adherents accept things that are wildly incompatible with what we observe of the world around us. God makes no sense. A Christian person could belong to the Church of Howard Dean and campaign for the nationalisation of utilities and universal health care and his God still would make no sense. There are plenty of progressive Christians and Jews and Buddhists and Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs and Jains and Zoroastrians and animists and Jedi out there, and godless people like me are glad they're progressive, but that doesn't make their religious beliefs any more palatable or any more logical, and while I, for one, am willing to embrace their progressivism, I am not going to embrace their faith. I can't pretend to like or respect their irrational beliefs, even if it would draw in more voters to progressivism: it would be hypocritical of me.

The gentleman then says...

Unfortunately, his remarks on religion are spiteful and bigoted and must be answered.

...When Atrios' remarks were no such thing. He never attacked any religion or doctrine or person. I would, in fact, argue that it is impossible to be bigoted against religion. Disliking conservativism isn't bigotry. Disliking religion is just the same. There's nothing wrong with disliking someone's beliefs when you find them disagreeable. Am I bigoted against Rush Limbaugh fans because I think they're deluded, bitter, and anti-intellectual? No sir! Am I bigoted against neoconservatives because their policies keep fucking the world over harder and harder? No ma'am! Am I bigoted against the Roman Catholic Church because I find its positions on homosexuality, birth control, and lots of other things despicable? Hardly! Am I bigoted against the Church of Latter-Day Saints because it's just as bad? Not in the least. My dislikes of all these belief systems are very reasonable, I think, and I could hardly fail to dislike them given my own ethical and political views. That is not bigotry. That is disagreement. Impassioned disagreement, with a side of malice, but still disagreement.

Where's the cut-off for bigotry?

It's okay to attack someone's religious views; they choose to believe these things, and Christianity is not an intrinsic trait, like being gay, or black, or a woman. It is not okay to attack someone because they are religious. The views are not the person. It is okay for me to say that God is silly. It would not be okay for me to dish out personal abuse to someone just because they happened to be Catholic. And I don't do any such thing. I just dish out abuse to the Church. Which is inanimate and has no feelings, so it's okay.

It is a fact that lots and lots of Americans believe that I am going to burn in Hell for all eternity for being an unrepentant gay atheist. I think it's perfectly reasonable for me to reply 'How about a nice tall glass of shut up and go fuck yourself?' to such people.

You need to listen to the song 'Nice Weather for Ducks' by Lemon Jelly, right now. I mean it. Do not delay!

Have you listened? Are you back? Yes? Very good. Let us continue.

Clearly, Atrios is hostile towards religion and obviously uneducated over the hard work done by religious progressives over the nation’s history to fight for social justice. On many issues (slavery, nuclear weapons, globalization, etc) Christians have been at the table long before the secular community.

Now this is a lot more attack-like than anything Atrios wrote...And it's arrogant, and dismissive of anyone non-Christian. And a load of hooey. Religious progressives have done good things, and no-one will deny that. But non-religious progressives have done good things, too, and we would still have progressivism even in a world completely devoid of religion, and don't try to pretend otherwise. And religious conservatives have done lots of bad things; non-religious conservatives have done plenty of bad things, too, and we would still have conservativism even in a world completely devoid of religion. Many Christian persons loved slavery, and didn't want women to vote, and today love globalisation and nuclear proliferation (ahem, John Ashcroft. Ahem, George Bush). There is no correlation between someone's being religious and their being progressive, or even moral, or anything except religious.

Historically speaking, trumpeting past triumphs of progressive religion as opposed to progressive secularism is manifestly unfair, given that for most of the last two hundred years or so in America it has been socially unacceptable to be openly secular at all, and the secular are still marginalised politically.

On a cheerier note, here is a religion devoted to Jediism: The Jedi Religion.

Before anyone gets the impression that I hold all religions in uttermost contempt, keep in mind that I quite like the Anglican Church. Which is to say, more specifically, I quite like Archbishop Rowan Williams. He quite enjoyed Phillip Pullman, and impresses me as a thoughtful, good-intentioned, compassionate man who can work and play well with those who don't share his religious beliefs.

And I am really getting into Lemon Jelly.

Archbishop Rowan Williams would not attack Atrios.

Here is a much better posting than mine, by someone with much less anger directed against organised religion.

So there.

I am an angry little man, and I do hate religion. And that is just fine.

You know what's some good grading music?

'Stay Loose', by Belle and Sebastian.

You know what's some good grading beer?

Pyramid IPA.

You know what's some good grading food?

Eggs Benedict with smoked salmon. But I ate that much earlier.

PS...Fafblog.

What the hell do you call this?

You call it 'Poke Alex in the Eye', apparently.

Poor Alex...

The midterm seemed to go quite well today...A number of people finished early, while some took the entire time; and it looks as if the scores will be generally quite high, too. I underestimated my flock. I gave them two questions that I really had no idea how they'd do on: I defined for them what it meant for a matrix to be nilpotent and idempotent, and asked them to come up with a nontrivial example of each. It's easy as sluts if you know what you're doing. I didn't know if my students knew what they were doing. It seems they generally do. Which is a nice surprise. They've been learning!

Do you know what's much more boring than taking an exam? Watching other people take an exam. I wound up doodling again...I came up with a little something called 'Octopus Jesus Feeds a Duck', but I was too lazy to go all the way up two flights of stairs to scan it for you. I don't know why, but I just can't get enough of octopi lately; I drew a big one on the chalkboard in my office this afternoon before I left, as a little surprise for my office-mate Monday morning. This octopus bears a message:

Octopi are just so darn cute!

Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, decimated by the cruel hat trade.

There's a little story I like to tell whenever test-time rolls around...My second year as an undergrad, as I was still foolishly in physics, I had a classical mechanics course, and in this course we had a midterm. The professor--I can't recall if this was before or after we took the exam--explained to us his strategy for grading exams. He would gather them all up in a big envelope and take them home, and stash them in his study to fester a while. He would wait a few days, until he felt that test-grading magic flowing through him. Then he would have a nice dinner, go up to his study, whip out a bottle of bourbon, and start drinking continuously until the exams were all graded. If one had done well, one wanted to be on the top of the pile; if one had done poorly, one hoped to be on the bottom.

Not that I advocate any such thing, you understand. Nor would I ever consider the merest notion of pondering a dream of employing any such strategy myself. The very idea! I mean, pshaw. Get real, dude. Pay no attention to the bottle of sake behind the curtain. (Really, though, the sake is for something else. Seriously this time. It's the beer that's for the grading.)

It was a beautiful, beautiful day today...The sun was shining, the mountains were jagged, Alanis Morissette was hundreds and hundreds of miles away...It was the sort of lovely springy day that just begs you to go have a nap under a tree somewhere where you could be reasonably confident your wallet wouldn't wind up stolen. And I was stuck indoors typing up a midterm exam.

I think it's a really easy exam, but then I would, wouldn't I? Either the students will agree, or it'll make them bleed through the nose and rectum. I suppose we'll find out tomorrow, won't we?

PS...This week's copy of The Friday Thing came! For your reading pleasure: behold the arrest of a necrophile in California named Mahdi Allah, caught passed out atop the corpse of a granny in a funeral home. Invent your own wildly-offensive Islamophobic headlines to accompany the story. Hours of fun are to be had.

Columnist John Doyle of The Globe and Mail has, from the frozen lands of Canada, successfully offended pompous, egotistical, thin-skinned crybaby windbag Bill O'Reilly. Which, it must be said, is not terribly difficult to do. In fact, it may take absolutely no effort whatsoever: I suspect he actually offends and annoys himself.

The secret to Doyle's success? He laughed at FOX News. And he did it in a lovely, condescending sort of way. I will paraphrase:

'Oh, you Americans with your FOX News. How quaint. Come, hold it on high, this FOX News, hold it aloft before the eyes of us all, so that we might laugh, ha ha ha, just like that.'

What else can I say? I've got a midterm to write.

No blogging today, on account of this having been Free Beer for Grad Students night at the student union. I'm not sure who is responsible, or how, or why...I don't question these things. Normal service will resume tomorrow.

The midterm's coming along well, though...It's not so hard to come up with problems when one sits down and applies oneself and one makes sure there is nothing interesting around to distract one, like shiny objects, or chalk, or the sky.

Or Manitoba's 'If Assholes Could Fly This Place Would Be An Airport'...Or 'Lemon Yoghurt'. Or 'Tits and Ass, the Great Canadian Weekend'. Or et cetera.

Last night I accidentally set my alarm clock for 7pm instead of 7am...I woke up about ten minutes before I had to catch my bus, wearing my toque so no-one could see how horrible my unwashed hair looked. I still have to write a midterm for my students; on the bright side, I got to tell them this great cross product joke I heard from Dave:

Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant and a monkey?
A: |Elephant||Monkey|sinq
Q: What do you get when you cross an octopus and a mountain climber?
A: Don't be silly. You can't cross an octopus and a mountain climber! A mountain climber is a scalar.

Ba-dum-bum.

I did another little doodle in one of my classes today...I was thinking about that cross product joke, and crucifixion, and Hellboy, and I suddenly realised how I could combine my loves of blasphemy and cephalopods. Here's a little something I call 'He Died for You, or: The Passion of the Octopus'.

This one's for you, Mel Gibson.

(As always, I am inspired by the works of Mr T. Sanford Clake...This time around, I would be remiss if I failed to mention this painting by one Scott Musgrove which quite caught my eye. And of course I'd like to thank David Bowie for making this all possible.)

UPDATE: Octopi are very clever, and several have learned how to open jars, which is more than I can say for myself. They'll be inventing nuclear fusion next. And don't forget that Octopus Jesus died for your sins.

Finished!

On a compact, connected Lie group, every closed differential form is cohomologous to a left-invariant form, and you can compute the cohomology groups using only the left-invariant subcomplex, which is precisely the exterior algebra of the (dual of the) Lie algebra, and thus amenable to completely algebraic treatment.

Topology=Algebra.

And I did it in a cute little way, too! With respect to the unique bi-invariant Riemannian metric on the group, the harmonic forms all turn out to be left-invariant. QE freaking D, baby.

...Unless I'm wrong, of course.

Oddly enough, I got a lot of my inspiration from Samuel Goldberg's Curvature and Homology, despite the fact that I couldn't even read most of his coordinate-heavy proofs. (Though perhaps 'couldn't be bothered to try and read' would be more accurate. Coordinates are the Devil's assgoblins.)

It is time to answer the question that has been foaming hotly upon the lips of all the world lo these past days: how was David Bowie?

For David Bowie did play the Key Arena here in Seattle on Wednesday, and I was there. Oh yes, I, Aloysius Hieronymus Hog, was there! Bowie had played the Paramount Theatre here back in January, but I hadn't been able to score tickets...My sadness was bitter and clotted, like an ancient latte. Imagine my uttermost bliss when I learned he would return in the merest blink of an eye! Imagine it now. Have you imagined it? Yes? Good. Then we can move on.

I was so excited...It was to be the perfect end to an almost-perfect day. I took my friend Sam, who got all dolled up for it: he had his bangs down almost over one eye, lipstick, shiny things...He was so quasi-gothy-glam! I wore a new shirt. I was all a-quiver with anticipation...

I had forgotten to check who the opening band was. I saw weird little smock-things at a souvenier stand saying 'Polyphonic Spree', and I thought this sounded vaguely familiar, but I didn't make the connection until just before they came on: Polyphonic Spree is the weird cult band! I don't mean that they're a weird band with a cult following, though they are that, too. I mean they're a weird band that is its own cult. Read the press kit on the band's official site; it's all flashed up so I can't link to it directly, but the gist of it is that the founder started hearing things after a member of his old band died of an overdose and put together this Polyphonic Spree thing to mend hearts and spread sunshine and flog some kind of spirituality. They're twenty-something people in white robes playing a shitload of instruments and singing about third eyes and the Sun and growing, sort of like a Mormon Partridge Family on crack, and they're really compelling in a train-wrecky sort of a way. They're not untalented, don't get me wrong; they sound decent. It's just that they are, in a word, incredibly silly. There's something about a guy dressed as an altar-boy with a French horn doing a little kangaroo hop, or singing in a choir of people all doing a variation on the Robot...I kept asking 'Are they for real?' I guess they are. They should get more into the cult thing...I want to see Polyphonic Spree become the eighth-largest religious denomination in America, one giant multi-million-member band whose sub-bands play in our airports and bus terminals.

Polyphonic Spree was fun, and all, in their bizarre, campy way. But even if they engaged in pagan fertility rituals live on-stage, they still wouldn't have half the impact of David Fucking Bowie.

Bowie is a rocking machine. He's such a performer! Self-consciously theatrical, full of bad puns and Englishness and Eurovision jokes, with a fantastic purple coat, and cute floppy hair...He really seems to love performing, playing with his audience, goofing around all sillily on-stage...He gave us a few seconds of 'A Hard Day's Night' between two of his songs...He did this great little dance for 'Fashion', posing like a model (think Zoolander). He started to sing 'China Girl' in Mandarin but forgot the words because, he explained, he'd only translated it that morning and his Mandarin was all rusty...To make it up to us, he sang it in English. I forget which song it was, but during one of his numbers he walked to the back of the stage and knelt with his head down for a while...After the song he explained that he didn't know what that'd been either; it was a 'performance malfunction'. He claimed he wasn't feeling his best that night, but that singing to the crowd helped him forget it...And he gave us our money's worth. He opened with 'Rebel Rebel' and I nearly moistened myself. He did 'Fame' and 'Fashion' and 'Under Pressure'...A hard-rocking version of 'Hallo Spaceboy'...'The Man Who Sold The World' which has to be 32 years old now if it's a day...'China Girl'...'Let's Dance' all funkified...'I'm Afraid of Americans' with all kinds of rocking animations like dancing Captain America heads...And he did my absolute favourite Bowie number, 'Ashes to Ashes'. And 'Quicksand'...And some numbers from Heathen and Reality that I don't know by name yet...Tight pants. Tight, tight pants. Of course. Did I mention he's just adorable? I was like a little schoolgirl, screaming and bouncing and doing my weird little spastic quasi-dancy thing...I would've thrown my underwear if I could've gotten them off without taking down my pants. He closed his set with 'Heroes' and his voice just made me melt.

And the encore! He gave us 'Changes'! The very song that featured in my regenerating David Bowie Mafia dream! My bliss transcended space and time. I was hoarse with my vocalisations of glee. Bowie seemed to appreciate our frenzied acclaim...

'You've made an old man feel very happy,' he told us.

It was the best concert I've ever been to...It was even better than hearing John Linnell sing 'Birdhouse in Your Soul' and say 'Hey, fucks' to a gang of high-schoolers with accordions serenading him outside his trailer. Even better than hearing Lou Reed threaten to walk off if anyone took another fucking flash photo. David Bowie is the ultimate showman.

It's only a shame he won't be the next Doctor Who.

Oh well...I can dream.

Here is a big fat helping of Bowie lyrics.

Here's the full set list, from the bowieNet news thingy (posted 15 April):

01 Rebel Rebel 02 New Killer Star 03 Battle For Britain (The Letter) 04 Fame 05 Cactus 06 Fashion 07 All The Young Dudes 08 China Girl 09 Hang On To Yourself 10 Never Get Old 11 The Loneliest Guy 12 Modern Love 13 Let's Dance 14 The Man Who Sold The World 15 Hallo Spaceboy 16 Sunday 17 Heathen (The Rays) 18 Under Pressure 19 Days 20 Afraid 21 Looking For Water 22 Ashes To Ashes 23 Quicksand 24 I'm Afraid Of Americans 25 "Heroes"

(Encore)
26 Changes
27 Suffragette City
28 Ziggy Stardust

(Warning: near-terminal flippancy ahead.)

Suppose that the triune God of Catholicism exists. Then God is both three beings (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) and one being (God). Therefore three equals one. Therefore, two equals zero.

Therefore, you have no legs, and any that you may believe yourself to be walking about on are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

I was walking over to the HUB to get some pizza not too long ago...It's a beautiful day, a lovely, perfect, juicy, sweet, appetising day full of vitamins and those other things that make you not die...A little bit cool, a little bit moist, a little bit cloudy...The clouds are nice and fluffy and mostly white, their underbellies just dark enough to suggest that, if they really felt like it, they could piss down on you, but they're feeling jolly so the worst one can expect is an occasional moistening...It's this sort of day that makes one acutely conscious of just how many plants are growing around here. One can smell them growing lushly. So, as I was saying, I was walking past the HUB...The Bush/Cheney '04 team from the College Republicans ('Why change horsemen in mid-Apocalypse?') were out today; as I was walking past their table, a sudden gust of wind took hold of their giant sign and blew it away to land face-down on the filthy earth. I raised my hands to the heavens and shouted out 'It is a sign from God!'

I had an excellent time lecturing today...We were very laid-back. I told my students how to 'prove' that Winston Churchill is a carrot, since one of the homework problems I'd assigned was a variation on the old '0=1' thing using matrices instead of real numbers...They seemed to enjoy it. And I gave them a quick introduction to mathematical notation, so I don't have to avoid using it on the board. Lenin is in the set {a,b,cheese, Lenin} but Lenin is not in the set R³, so {a,b,cheese,Lenin} is not a subset of R³. That kind of thing. And we actually did do some matrix algebra too...Good times. Good times.

David Bowie tonight. I'm so excited I'm about to vent bodily fluids from my every orifice.

My officemate heard me refer to 'A-Top' this morning, which is, I explained, what those 'in the know' call algebraic topology. I wish to share a piece of wisdom with you, that I gleaned from this. If you absolutely must say something like 'Yeah, algebraic topology is like a gang, with secret handshakes and everything; and "A-Top" is the secret password we use to filter out the damnable analysts,' and you find yourself compelled then to add in a silly nasal Comic Store Guy voice in mockery of analysts 'A-Top? What's that? You're so silly. Hey, guys, I can do derivatives! Can I be cool too?' and then giggle and snort for a while, make sure that the analysts next door can't hear you. Furthermore, make sure they can't hear you before you start talking. You don't want to mess with analysts. They're probably bigger than you are.

I swore while lecturing today...Though I was talking pretty quickly at the time, and I'm not sure anyone caught it. I was in the process of writing down a 'big-ass augmented matrix'. I should be more careful what I put up on my course page...When I was making up a tentative schedule of topics for my lectures, there was one day (this Friday) that I just had no idea what I'd do with...So instead of doing the sensible thing and listing it as 'TBA', I wrote 'Where do babies come from?' I didn't realise the students actually looked at that page...They are wily. It has been the source of some speculation on the class discussion board. In my defense, matrix is late Latin for womb...

As soon as I get home, I'll post my latest in-class drawing, a little something I like to call 'Welcome to Alaska'.

UPDATE: Here is my drawing...Mostly it is tentacles, in honour of the movie Hellboy, which was rather fun...It featured some really kick-ass tentacles of unspeakable ancient evil, let me tell you. Also a Machine German; clockwork Nazis have got to be some of the best comic-book-esque villains ever.

As the last minutes of this most blessed holiday leak slowly like marmalade through the cracks in the aged jar of Time, let us pause and remember that Easter is not just a time of chocolate, but a deeply spiritual occasion.

Do you know the story of Easter, boys and girls? No? Then listen...

For the Lord our God so loved mankind that he sent his only begotten son Jesus Christ to die upon the cross for our sins. And on the third day, Jesus rose from the dead, and emerged from his sepulchre to share God's grace with the faithful and uplift their hearts, and also to eat their brains. For the resurrected Jesus was a zombie, and zombies crave brains above all other things. Zombie Jesus blessed and terrorised the devout across the world, awash in a sea of gore and atonement, until at last his undead body washed ashore upon Easter Island in 1978. Here on Easter Island lived a most enlightened Bunny, fluffed with wisdom and cleverness. Zombie Jesus would have devoured the Bunny for his sweet bunny brain, but the Easter Bunny was full of tricks: 'Oh Lord,' said the Easter Bunny, 'gladly do I give up my life to Thee; my only regret is that I shall die before I can share with Thee my collection of delicious gourmet chocolate-covered brains.' And Zombie Jesus spoke thus: 'Aaargh! Waargh! Glaarp! Brains! Brains!' And he did spare the Easter Bunny, who led him hippity-hop to a clutch of chocolate eggs. Seeing them, Zombie Jesus did think them brains, and gorged himself upon them until he was fat and bloated and pimply and weak and sluggish from an excess of junk food, and his teeth all rotted and fell out of his mouth, and he spoiled his dinner. And the Easter Bunny and his friends--the Groundhog, the Reindeer, the Pentecost Walrus, the Lincoln's Birthday Giant Robot--did tip over a giant stone head, crushing Zombie Jesus to a pulp. And this pulp was harvested by an alliance of the Catholic Church and major confectioners and processed into a cloying yet holy marshmallowy fluff and extruded into the form of tiny chicks, so that all might eat of the Body of Christ and be absolved of their sins.

And that is why we crucify Marshmallow Peeps.

Next time, children, we will learn where babies come from! (Answer: machines.)

Comrades, let your brains ejaculate pure, honeyed delight at the glorious return of Randy-the-Cat, in another lovable, madcap, morally-edifying adventure for adults and kiddies alike.

This week, behold Randy-the-Cat gently coaxing the ferret of News from the trousers of Propaganda.

Randy reports, you decide.

Stay tuned for The O'Randy Factor, where author, statesman, and True American Hero Randy O'Cat tells the truths the Liberal Media doesn't want you to hear: there is no uprising in Iraq, and all the bombs and killing and gunfights and collapses of the Iraqi Governing Council you may see reported are merely mass hallucinations, twisted delusions from the dark heart of the rotten Liberal psyche brought on by their hatred of freedom and Howard Dean's hellish screaming. Randy O'Cat then huffs paint fumes and tells the world he is a self-actualising Man-God whose latest o'book has sold twelvety hojillion o'copies while cutting off his guests' microphones and lighting his o'farts on fire, much to the delight of Ann Coulter, who then kills the leaders of the New York Times and forcibly converts all the employees to Christianity, believing Christ to be a Marshmallow Peep who whispers 'Kill the fucking fuck fuck kill the fucking kill' to her from her handbag.

Coming up next: sport!

(Disclaimer: this message has not been endorsed by Randy-the-Cat Incorporated International Trust Holdings Press Media Conglomerate Unlimited and may in fact just be silly.)

I just realised I'm a total caffeine addict. Which revelation surprised me, since I don't drink coffee (except a mocha maybe once a month) and I don't drink soda (except root beer maybe once a month). But I do drink tea. Oh, do I. From morning to early afternoon when I'm mathing, I average one cup of tea an hour, for three or four hours; and I'd drink more if I didn't make an effort to cut myself off. Then I have another at tea time. (These days I usually have lapsang souchong.) On days when I don't go in, I'm usually too lazy to make tea, and I'm infinitely more sluggish. Like today. Until I had a mocha at Victrola while thinking about de Rham cohomology on compact Lie groups, when I suddenly transformed into a quivering bundle of intellectual fabulosity. It's all so clear, don't you see? Ah ha ha ha ha! Ha ha! Invariant p-forms! Cyborg zombie Alaska gay love story!

Ho ho.

Maybe I'm a total math addict. Maybe I'm hooked on both.

Know how Condoleezza Rice is finally testifying before the 9-11 Commission today?

Guess what? Either she's horribly incompetent or she's an outright liar, because her opening statement alone is riddled with inaccuracies.

Oh, and so is the rest of it, too.

And Neal Pollack is back to blog it!

(Via the Mycenean lord of the liberal blogosphere, Atrios.)

Oh lawks, Bush administration officials distorting the truth, both to the public and to Congress. Who would ever have imagined such a thing?

9-11 widows, that's who. Apparently four of them went on this 'television' thing to rip the Preznit a new arsehole.

Oh, and as I'm sure you've heard, insurrectionists are running amok in Iraq and the White House has been lying about the extent of the uprising. And a group of gunmen is threatening to burn three Japanese hostages alive unless Japan withdraws its troops. Oh, and US forces bombed a mosque compound. Way to win those hearts and minds, guys. So things are fucked; things are fucked good and hard.

Afghanistan's not doing so hot, either. Remember Afghanistan? The place where the terrorists actually were? Where the Taliban is trying to make a comeback now, because we diverted most of our resources to fight an unconnected war against Iraq?

It's sort of comforting to see that, admid the fiery collapse of all their grand designs, the Administration still finds time to lie shamelessly to us all. Some things never change.

Can you give me one good reason to vote for these fucking assbags? That's a rhetorical question and the answer is no, no, no. Everything they touch turns to elephant shit. They should be thankful that, as loyal, moral conservatives, none of them would ever dream of touching themselves.

When I made it to my bus stop at Broadway and Harrison this morning, I found that overnight some mysterious gang of roving street artists had left four curious and rather morbid sculptures on the corner in various poses...They all have the same basic form, a white box of about human height (one has a cavity, two are bent); they have arms with realistic human hands (though two are broken off, whether by design or due to vandalism I'm not sure) attached to boxy pseudo-shoulders. The morbidity comes from the faces...They're detailed casts (I think) of human faces wearing various, unsettling expressions, complete with teeth, tongues, realistic nostrils; they look pained. One seems to be screaming. My first thought was of the robot Box from Logan's Run. My second was of the Master's face at the end of The Deadly Assassin, superimposed over his grandfather clock TARDIS.

Hopefully they'll still be there this evening, so I can get some photos...They're pretty great.

UPDATE (That very evening): I got a few photographs...Unfortunately, some assclowns have been vandalising them. Someone poured coffee on one; one had its arm torn off. I tried to fit it back on as best I could...

Each photo is 600x800 pixels (or 800x600), and less than 70k. I'd have thumbnails up, but MovableType doesn't want to make any for me right now.

First Figure
Second Figure
Third Figure
Fourth Figure
Second Figure's Face
Third Figure's Face
Second Figure's Face II

While I'm on the subject of fury, here's another crazy pseudo-mathematical crank's webpage asserting, among other things, that 1950's juvenile space opera 'Tom Corbett: Space Cadet' was thinly-veiled documentary, telling of High-Ranking Officials' secret knowledge of an ancient civilisation from an exploded planet that tie in to said crank's claims (which are debunked in excruciating detail here) that Mars is just stuffed to the panties with signs of past habitation. Which it isn't.

Go and laugh at him.

This particular crank, one Richard Hoagland, dabbles in numerological mathturbation, and has also been debunked by one of the faculty in the Math Department here at the UW, Dr Ralph Greenberg, an extraordinarily nice man who even offered to debate Hoagland on Art Bell's radio programme.

Dr Greenberg also has a page of quotes on the poetics of maths.

And I found the vacuum cleaner.

So back in early February I lost my old Palm m105, Gregorovius, and bought myself a newer, keener m125 off eBay, which I named Gregorovius II: The Wrath of Khan. Unfortunately, Greggy Jr. seems to be having some problems recently, after I replaced the batteries for the first time. The problem is that, in technical terms, it's a piece of goddamned shitty fucking ass bitch hell crap.

Every time I do a HotSync now, as I must in order to reload my address book and so forth, the digitiser gets completely fucked up: when I touch the screen with the stylus, it registers a touch on a completely different part of the screen. In particular, the offset is so great that I can't actually access any of the menus I need to get to in order to recalibrate the fucking ass crap whore. I Googled the problem and found out other people have experienced the same damnable thing from their own m125's...And none of their fixes work for me. I downloaded a utility that's supposed to automatically run a recalibration every time I soft-reset, but for some reason it refuses to run. I can hard-reset the thing and erase all the stored data and get it working again...I think my problem may be AvantGo; I've created a new user profile, imported the addresses and dates without installing any programs whatsoever, and it seems to continue functioning normally...We'll see how long this lasts.

I have one idea on how to fix this. That is to take a hammer and smash the machine into thousands of tiny, tiny pieces of silicon and plastic and glittering wire. Stupid ass-bitching heap of Twentieth Century Christballs.

The fury courses through my veins!

Send yourself wafting off serenely to sleep with First Lady Laura 'Pickles' Bush's tips on fellating your Christian husband.

This is what I do sometimes during graduate courses.

I create angular doodles of Vice President Dick Cheney with long, baby-rending claws and sort of mechanical spider-leg-things attached to the base of his exposed spine, with a tiny President nearby on a pile of skulls and femurs, holding a lollipop and a bottle of moonshine.

Well, usually I just do rabbits. I like rabbits.

UPDATE (4/5): Now with extra rabbit!!

I just gave my last lecture of the week. You know what that means.

I'm putting on my Crackwhore shirt.