Today I sat in a saggy old armchair at the back of a coffee-shop named after antique phonographs and finished reading Gene Wolfe's latest novel, The Knight. I liked it, of course; I don't think I've yet read anything of Wolfe's I can truly say I didn't like. Some of his books I like more than others, and it is thus natural to ask exactly where on the scale of Gene-Wolfe-likingness The Knight falls. It's hard to be sure until the second part, The Wizard, comes out, but one might have an inkling, mightn't one?

The trouble is, it's so difficult to work out exactly what I think of it. I'd like to know what John Clute thinks. (Although a Clutean review might prove more opaque than the text itself in this case, given the transparency of Gene Wolfe's [or rather, Able's] language in the book.) Mr Clute appears to be keeping his own counsel, as far as my half-assed Googling can determine; so I have little to play off in forming this so-called opinion of mine. (There are other reviewers out there, and other reviews, but I don't trust the average reviewer to say something interesting or able to spark fresh thought in my tired old nag of a brain.)

I do know what I think about the matter of names. Much of the mythology of The Knight takes its inspiration from the legendry of our past, primarily Norse but Arthurian as well, and most likely there are more. However, very few of the names are the names we are familiar with. The world of men is called Mythgarthr, which is recognisably close to Midgard, yet--and this is important--isn't. One of the problems with using Norse mythology is that people think they know it. If Wolfe called his world Midgard, readers would think they knew where they were. And they would be wrong. The Valfather is clearly a figure inspired by Odin--yet to think of him as the Odin we all know and love, despite his eight-legged steed and his Wild Hunt, would be wholly misleading. For one thing, the Valfather seems to worship Hebrew angels.

It must be said that Wolfe's cosmology is very cute. Most mythologies are maddeningly vague on the relationship of one world to another: where is the Christian Heaven, and where was Tolkien's Valinor after it was excised from Middle-Earth? Or in what sense are the Norse worlds connected by the World-Tree? Wolfe takes a vaguely Hellenistic approach, with worlds above worlds not unlike the celestial spheres...The Gods of Earth live in the world above Mythgarthr, called Skai. This world is, appropriately, the sky. Or something like it. And there is a great symmetry here: when one looks up in Aelfheim, the world below Mythgarthr, the 'sky' one sees is Mythgarthr, and the people of that world are the Gods of the Aelf. As above, so below...The sky of Skai, whatever it looks like, is where the Hebrew angels live, Gods of the Gods. What lives in the world above theirs?

Much of the fun of The Knight comes from its setting, a world not unlike the worlds of familiar legendry, but different in ways that keep the reader from becoming complacant. There is knighthood and there are giants and there are talking beasts and there is a boy's coming-of-age story, but they may not always be what you think they are. Although they might be. It's an attempt to do High Fantasy without turning into a Tolkien ripoff, a D&D tie-in, or a hopelessly fluffy farce.

That's the potential problem, too: it's an attempt to do High Fantasy. If anyone can make knights and honour into something vibrant again, it's Gene Wolfe...And it's a worthy start, entertaining and well-crafted...But it is still, despite its freshness, inextricably entangled in the cobwebs of High Fantasy, a book written and read in a world where--let's face it--honour and decency and the idea of knighthood are all stone dead. And the gallant knight is not necessarily a creature worth mourning. The historical world of knighthood, like Wolfe's Mythgarthr, was a place of stultifying poverty, ignorance, and brutality, of shit-caked peasants scrabbling for jousting despots. Some might be benevolent despots--ideal knights like Able or Sir Ravd, ideal monarchs like Arnthor--but a despot is still a despot. Most of Wolfe's worlds are ruled by despots of one sort or another, but Mythgarthr is different from most Wolfe worlds...One feels as if one should love it, since the narrator does. One never feels like that about Urth, or the Whorl, or even Blue, really. (All places it might be fun to visit, but which one is glad not to live in.) Perhaps this is Able's essential boyishness: he loves Mythgarthr because he can't see it as a man (of our time, and Able's) might?

This, for me, has always been the troublesome thing about fantasy: the Mediaeval world was caked with shit. You don't think about Merry and Pippin wiping their arses with oak leaves in Fangorn Forest, but there it is. And one doesn't even want to think about the toilets in Camelot. Or the trail of horse-dung left by a questing knight. Fantasy worlds inherit this uncomfortably fecal aspect, one constantly downplayed and ignored, but one that nags at one from the dark places of one's head: what did these people wipe their bums with, and what did they do when they got the runs?

Err.

What I meant to talk about, actually, was the stratification of feudal society and the harsh and ingrained economic and political inequality, although I suppose Monty Python summed it up thus:

"...Must be a king."

"Why?"

"He hasn't got shit all over him."

Is it possible to read a book whose main character seeks to be just yet buys into an essentially hideously unjust world without feeling the prickings of an aggravated socialist conscience?

Are there fantasy novels about peasant revolts and workers' communes?

Should there be?

It seems to me that Able's origins as a young American have thus far been much under-used. While he will occasionally use a phrase or make a cultural reference that pegs him as one of our lot, he doesn't appear to see the world around him in a way coloured by modern notions. It's hard to imagine working modern characters into a fantasy world without turning the work wholly into satire, and Wolfe manages that...But the price paid is that the modern eyes through which we see are not really modern at all.

But I am just a simple mathematician, and I have little place opining on such things. We will see what cleverer people than I make of this...

Lovely day...Cloudy, rainy, springy and fresh...We had thunder earlier. Just one peal, of course. This is Seattle. But thunder is thunder, innit?

Each series of The League of Gentlemen is weirder than the one that came before. I really didn't think that would be possible, but there it is.

I think my roommate is appalled.

The LaRouchies are getting restless...They have taken their longstanding feud with the Math Department to the next level. Some of them wandered into Padelford Hall yesterday [which is to say, early yesterday, morning-ish] and plastered a bunch of flyers around the Department. They're good and crazy, so I scanned one for you...

(UPDATE: My sources tell me that the quotes in the flyer are complete fabrications. Which shouldn't come altogether as a surprise.)

They call mathematicians a 'Babylonian priesthood', which is already becoming a favourite office joke.

What I want to know is, how did they find out we worship Baphomet? Who broke the Vow of Eternal Sneakiness? They will be damned to the Forbidden Zone for all time...

In completely unrelated news, I think someone broke into my office last night, opened my desk up, and moved my emergency Pop-Tarts. My drawers were open, and so was the window. Nothing was missing. They'd just...moved the Pop-Tarts. And some staples. They were at my office-mate's desk too, and moved an envelope. This is just...silly. Who the hell breaks into a TA's office and moves their Pop-Tarts?

It's also sort of creepy. And by 'sort of' I mean 'extremely'. None of this makes any sense.

Did the LaRouchies get into my office? I really doubt it. Sure, I've pissed them off before, but I don't think I've given them my name...And if they went looking for a short math guy with a beard, they'd probably end up with Dave, not me. Was this some kind of a prank? Some kind of wacky frat thing? Was someone looking for incriminating smack and dildoes in my desk so they could blackmail me? What?

This is a strange, strange day...What the hell is going on? This is math! Who in fuck's name wants to mess with math?

UPDATE: The LaRouchies must've been in the building [again] last night, because they'd left some of their standard, non-mathy pamphlets all over one of our two graduate classrooms. The plot thickens...

In a totally unconnected but still paranoia-inducing development, the departmental computers have been under (apparently) heavy attack for weeks now by some random hackers, which is not only inconvenient for those of us who're trying to use them, but seems to have brought the FBI into the picture somehow. I hear there's some connection between these attacks and a hack attack on some kind of governmental supercomputer in a lab somewhere; I also hear there's some kind of military connection. This is just rumour and hearsay, but something piqued the FBI's interest...

"Clap your hands, children! Clap louder, if you don't want democracy to die!"

Monday nights are good nights: Monday nights are traditionally when math grads and faculty go out and drink and say weird, weird things. The highlight of this particular night was, I think, when someone asked 'Is there such a thing as softcore gay porn?' and this person was completely and totally not me, and not connected to me in any way, shape, or form.

The answer, as any fool knows, is yes: it's called Troy.

I came home to find that NOT ONLY had my eBay-bought Canadian DVD player arrived from Toronto, but my authentic British DVDs from Amazon.co.uk had arrived as well! It is a fucking miracle. I hooked this player, a Malata DVP-393, up to the (filthy American NTSC) TV, to test it out. I didn't adjust a single setting or enter a single code. I did nothing. I stuck in a British DVD--Region 2 encoded, designed for a PAL system. And it worked. The lil' fucker worked, right out of the box! It started playing Series 2 of The League of Gentlemen like nobody's business!

This DVD player represents the pinnacle of human technology and civilisation. This is why our species will be remembered through the aeons. For a DVD player that plays any fucking thing on Earth, right out of the box. It is so beautiful.

A lot of Americans are about to experience Chris Morris for the very first time.

So it seems my students have now found this blog.

Hi.

I'm a gay ultra-liberal and I say 'fuck' a lot. So you may not want to keep reading if that might offend you.

Hurrah! Another American praises the NDP!

There's an election coming in just over a month, you know. It's official.

Paul Martin accuses Stephen Harper of wanting to Americanise Canada.

Stephen Harper replies, 'My Canada will be as Canadian as any other Canada.'

Jack Layton still looks like Jack Nance. And, y'know, he's still standing up for social-democratic principles and values. And he began the official campaign season by partying with the Barenaked Ladies. You just can't lose with that guy.

This Ipsos-Reid poll shows the Liberals with the support of 35% of the electorate nationally, the Conservatives 26%, and the NDP 18%. The Bloc Quebecois is also bringing in 50% of Quebec voters. These numbers don't really mean as much as one would hope, for Canada's elections, like Britain's, tend to give the victorious party a disproportionate number of seats in Parliament. The Liberals' 35% would still translate, according to these pollster chaps, into a majority in the Commons, though just barely. The NDP is actually in second place, beating the Conservatives, in Atlantic Canada, and is just 8% behind the Liberals in British Columbia.

The Toronto Star even has an election blog!

What more could you want? (Besides an NDP majority government.)

UPDATE: Good news! The BC NDP is seven percentage points ahead of the BC Liberal Party, and seem at this stage to have a solid shot at recapturing the provincial legislature next year. And that's even with the Green Party factored in. The Green Party is well ahead of the Marijuana Party, which is a silly, silly party indeed.

Today when I was riding the bus I thought I saw a fellow passenger clasping a squirrel to his bosom.

This time I was right.

This chap's adorable little pet squirrel clung to his sweatshirt and seemed quite scared by the bus and the humans and the so forth. Poor little squirrel. If I ran the world, I would pass a law forbidding people from frightening little squirrels with their busses and flatulence and carnivore stench and bright disco lights and throbbing techno beat and their writhing hypersexualised dance moves and sweaty bodies meshing as one in a fog of alcohol and adrenaline as they move to the music of the flesh, the slow music of sex and death...

It would be a world of squirrels and robots. And hedgehogs. And penguins. And the BBC. And Canadians. And me; I'd have to be there somewhere. So we'd still need the Internet. And someone would have to make sake. Hm. This world would be more crowded than I had at first thought. I will have to give my plan of squirrels and robots further consideration. It may not be as brilliant as I had first thought.

What in the hell do you call this? I mean, really?

Don't forget to read this January gem from Fafblog, explaining that the Hutton Inquiry's verdict was in fact a fiendish plot against Doctor Who masterminded by the Master or possibly the Cybermen, or even, though Fafnir himself doesn't go this far, both of them together. It is the only logical explanation.

I thought of this witty little number just the other day; surely it's worth a groan or two:

"If Saddam Hussein wanted to go cruising for anonymous gay sex, would he go to a Ba'ath-house?"

This next one isn't funny at all, not even a little. It's a campaign slogan that I invented this evening:

"Bush/Cheney '04: Because those swarthy Arabs won't rape themselves."

I've come to suspect that there really isn't a rock bottom at all to current events. No matter how shocked, horrified, or sickened you might find yourself, it seems that in a week at the most something will turn up to make it so much worse. What the hell kind of world do you call this? Fuck you, George Bush, fuck you very much for launching a war that turned ordinary dumbass Americans into rapists and torturers. Fuck you, and fuck Rumsfeld, and Cheney, and Rice, and Wolfowitz, and Feith, and Perle. And fuck Karl Rove. Fuck anyone out there who thinks "at least we're not as bad as Saddam." Fuck anyone who thinks we should shut up and "support our troops." Fuck you, every single person who has enabled this grotesque parade of disasters and atrocities. Here's a big "Hey, way to fucking go, you morons," to everyone who ever trusted George Bush, ever. Here's a very special "Go fuck the M11 'til you're hit by an articulated lorry" to Tony Blair, who doesn't have the excuse of being a deliberately-ignorant spoon-fed boy-king fucktard. There are lots of other people I'd like to swear at by name for destroying any slender chance I may ever have had of believing something positive and idealistic about this country or the human race, but I just don't have enough bile in me to really deal with the whole Iraq Bush thing as it deserves. Instead I will go drink my sake and dream of the day the machines take over. Or the ducks. Either way, I'll be cheering them on.

I need to invent a construction called the 'associated category'. Then, when writing on the blackboard, I can abbreviate it 'ass cat'.

Filking, fisking, fisting, felching...Who can keep track?

Today on the bus, I thought I saw a man hold a weasel to his face like a cold compress, to keep the swelling down.

I was wrong.

So I'm listening to the Eurovision Song Contest on BBC Radio 2...

Bosnia-Herzegovina just went on. Terry Wogan (I think that's him?) just described the performer as the campest thing ever; if John Inman, Graham Norton, and (someone else) walked in right now, this Bosnian would still win. My math departmental mug has John Inman on it. Pink vest, hip-huggers, thrusting, a techno-disco number that really has no place whatsoever ever being aired outside of a gay bar late at night, when everyone's really trashed...

My god, this Eurovision thing is like an audio trainwreck...It's so grotesque, but I can't stop listening...Man, I wish I were wasted right now. This would be so great...

Apparently Hamburg is 'really freaking out'.

UPDATE: Vile, really vile. Eurovision is some kind of concentrated outpouring of malice and rage that Europeans bottle up towards one another all year long.

Macedonia, what were you thinking?

I feel like I woke up in some kind of parallel universe this morning.

Again.

It's nothing I can quite put my finger on, but there's something weird about today...

UPDATE: I checked with some other people...They think today was sort of weird, too. I can best describe it by grimacing and moving my hands in little circles, the left counterclockwise, the right clockwise.

The voters of India are about to make Sonia Gandhi, born and raised an Italian Catholic, their Prime Minister. Which just goes to show that it is a funny old world, innit?

I think this is splendid. Apparently the socialists and other leftish types did rather well. If there's one thing India needs, it's socialism. Globalised capitalism has made India a software powerhouse, but very little of that has trickled down to the general populace: India is still rife with poverty, and lots of its people are still rural and agrarian. The distribution of wealth is horribly unjust. I think (and keep in mind that I know absolutely nothing about anything) that how the Indian people fare over the next several decades is going to have an immense impact on the future of humanity: India is already the world's largest democracy, and before too long will surpass China to boast the world's largest population. (Don't forget it's a nuclear power. And it has Bollywood.) If the Indian government could bring prosperity, health care, and education to the masses...

Well, we'll see, I suppose. We'll see.

So I've been playing a lot of Sleuth lately; to help myself keep track of everything, I tend to draw a directed graph for every game, with one vertex for each suspect, and an arrow from one vertex to another if the first suspect tells me the motive of the second. In this setup, a very simple proposition follows immediately...

Prop'n: In any game of Sleuth, the corresponding (connected) directed graph contains at least one cycle, and therefore the graph has nontrivial homology.

pf: Someone must supply your client's motive. QED.

I just bought a (hopefully) region-free DVD player which does NTSC/PAL conversion off a Canadian on eBay, for an insanely small sum: US$25, plus shipping. Cor and blimey. Why did I do this, you ask? Well, it's simple, really. I did it so that I can play the DVDs Amazon.co.uk is shipping me: The Day Today, Brasseye, and the second and third series of The League of Gentlemen. And it's all the fault of this man, the Siren of British Television. Beware! For he will convince you to watch things, and they will please you greatly, and you will never again be content to live in America. And he'll get to see the new series of Doctor Who long, long before I will. (Apparently there will be Daleks. And absolutely no Eric Roberts.)

UPDATE: It's time for an official Hog^[TM] recipe, for lazy chefs everywhere! Today: Fried Things in Stuff...

Heat some butter in a skillet. Dice several red potatoes, some green onions, and your favourite mushrooms. Oh, and garlic. Put these in the butter and sprinkle with random quantities of salt, oregano, basil, sage, thyme, and Hungarian paprika. Let fry for about half an hour while you listen to the Beatles, poking the seething mass occasionally with a spatula. The smell is splendid, and guaranteed to make your roommate hungry. Serve with a fried egg on top of it, but no Spam. Die of a massive heart attack thirty years later.

Bon appetit!

UPDATE to the UPDATE (5/16): It is also acceptable to serve this with poached eggs on English muffins. I find that adding wine to the water helps the eggs to keep their shape better while poaching. It is not acceptable to serve this with shrimp, for that is an abomination unto the Lord.

The topology seminar has come and gone...How did it go, I hear you ask? I've really no idea...

Ursula told us how to go about knitting Klein bottles and Mobius strips, and directed us to this website for further details, and to see one person's valiant attempt to knit the projective plane. Her Klein bottle was quite splendid: I am tempted to learn how to knit so that I can make one of my own. (You know I'll try wearing it as a hat.) I'd always pictured the projective plane as looking a little bit swirlier, though...I think of it as being some kind of funky seashell. There's really no mathematical reason why I should; I just do.

I'm not sure how well my talk went over; it may have been nonsense. I took a lot longer than I'd expected, even without giving the details. And my subject matter was, to say the least, eclectic. I spoke on the de Rham cohomology of compact Lie groups; my goal was to relate them to objects defined only in terms of the Lie algebras. To everyone's shock and disgust, I started off doing Riemannian geometry, with metrics, Hodge stars, harmonic forms...Used a lot of Lie derivatives...I finally related that to topology and de Rham cohomology with the Hodge Decomposition Theorem, which (as a corollary) tells one that the k^th de Rham cohomology group of a compact Riemannian manifold is very isomorphic to the space of harmonic k-forms; in the bi-invariant metric I put on my group G, harmonic forms turned out to be precisely bi-invariant forms, as one would hope. I used that to translate de Rham cohomology into the cohomology of the Lie algebra, and, upon translation, found that the Hodge decomposition gave a completely natural and completely representation-theoretic description of both Lie derivatives and the cohomology spaces: the cohomology spaces turned out to be the submodules of invariants in the cochain spaces.

So de Rham cohomology on a compact Lie group is really a special case of the representation theory of Lie algebras. I find this splendid.

Geometry, topology, representation theory...I even fielded a question on measures from someone in the audience. I got some weird, weird looks from the topologists, let me tell you...Analysis is rubbish.

I hope they realise that I really am one of them. They should not be afraid. I'm just...interdisciplinary, that's all.

Another seminar tonight...This time on fluid dynamics, in particular the dynamics of really cheap gin and tonics as they pass through my esophagus. The Rosebud has a happy hour running from 4 'til midnight daily: $2 well drinks. The price is right. This is especially splendid.

I'm giving a talk in the student topology seminar in just under two hours (on using geometry to turn topology into algebra, in the context of de Rham cohomology on a compact Lie group). I am filled with an unaccountable desire to start singing 'Once in a Lifetime' as soon as my talk begins.

I should have been paying closer attention! Weeks ago now, Kathryn Cramer blogged on an experiment carried out by Dr Shahriar S. Afshar, which appears to offer solid evidence at last that the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics is, in fact, rubbish: Afshar has been popping photons through a pair of pinholes, and, by means of a cunning arrangement of wires, has found that wave phenomena like interference persist even when he's measuring particle properties of the photons, like which pinhole they're passing through. The good news is that, according to the canonical Copenhagen Interpretation, this can't happen. The really good news is that I never liked the Copenhagen Interpretation anyhow, and it's one of the things (along with data analysis and sloppy maths) that drove me away from physics. It's aesthetically and intellectually wholly unsatisfying, unable to offer a satisfactory explanation for why wavefunctions should collapse and filled with dark and terrible suggestions that measurement by a conscious observer is somehow a priviliged act. It has no business corresponding to the physical world, and I for one will fiddle while it burns, if in fact these preliminary results are borne out. There will be papers out soon.

The Transactional Interpretation of the University of Washington's own John Cramer appears to survive this experiment unscathed, which is excellent, as I think the Transactional Interpretation is splendid. Aesthetically, I find it highly appealing, because of a much greater degree of time-symmetry: interactions are built not just of waves propagating forwards in time, but waves propagating backwards as well. And it makes me think of the universe as a vast spiderweb glistening with dew.

Good news at last, at a time when America's leadership seems bent on taking the country straight to the inner circles of Hell, without passing GO or collecting $200.

Why do cicadas have prime-number (13- or 17-year) life-cycles?

Glenn Webb, a mathematician at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has demonstrated mathematically that prime-numbered lifecycles could help cicadas avoid damaging “resonances” with the two- and three-year population fluctuations of their predators. These would result in lots of predators being around in years when there were lots of prey. Dr Webb's model shows that, over a 200-year period, average predator populations during hypothetical outbreaks of 14- and 15-year cicadas would be up to 2% higher than during outbreaks of 13- and 17-year cicadas. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to drive natural selection towards a prime-numbered life-cycle.

Only one predator—or, rather, parasite—is known to have overcome this anti-resonance strategy, by developing its own 17-year clock. Massospora cicadina, a fungus, lives in cicada larvae and passes between adults when they mate. But according to Gene Kritsky, an entomologist at the College of Mount St Joseph, in Cincinnati, Ohio, natural selection is working against this resonance too. In 2000, he recorded thousands of Brood X members emerging four years early—in other words, shifting to a 13-year cycle that Massospora is not equipped to match. Lo and behold, when Dr Kritsky examined several dozen members of the “accelerated” Brood X that emerged in 2000, he found only one infected female among them, and she had but one fungal spore. By contrast, he found from 50 to 300 spores in each cicada female from another brood that emerged on time that year in North Carolina. Brood X, it seems, is splitting up, and a new 13-year cicada population is evolving.

The article's also got a really rocking photo of a cicada. I do miss hearing them over the summers...

(I found the article thanks to the fine folks at Crooked Timber.)

A nice young lady and I just spent about five minutes staring silently at jam at the supermarket. There were just too many sorts to choose from. We drew comfort, I think, from one another's indecisiveness.

I finally got raspberry.

When I left, my temporary companion was still ensorcelled by the profusion of jam. In a hundred years, we'll all be dead. So it goes.

UPDATE: This jam is good jam. It is pleasing to my mouth. This source claims that English muffins are American. However, this source claims that they are English. These two sources seem to favour rival English muffin conglomerates; truth is the first casualty in their corporate war. Perhaps the English muffin is a form of perverted crumpet? Whatever the truth may be, they are crisp and delightful and hold my new jam very well.

I totally did not suck today. As a lecturer, I mean. In fact, I think my lack of suckage today actually makes up for all the sucking I did on Wednesday: the pinnacle of my failure Wednesday was a rambling, incoherent proof that the rank of any matrix equals the rank of its transpose. I got it from another textbook, and, while I liked it more than in the book my class is using, it was still less than optimal, even modulo my cracked-out delivery. Yesterday I sat down and wrote out my own, which I thought was much more illuminating, and pedagogically valuable: I went through a series of steps, reducing the problem at each stage to another, hopefully simpler problem, and on the way used the ideas of nonsingularity and dimension we've been doing in class. I liked it a lot...And they seemed much less confused today, so maybe they liked it, too. Or maybe they all secretly hate me and stick little pins into a voodoo doll crafted in my image. That might explain where this bruise on my calf came from. Either way...

And that's not all! I sat down and very professionally typed up their next extra credit assignment in LaTeX. I ask them to prove Fitting's Lemma, which is a really simple yet nontrivial statement about both the structure of matrices and representation theory. I've used it myself, in conjunction with the Casimir element of a Lie algebra's enveloping algebra, to break down a representation.

And I have some killer quasi-real-world-applicationy examples to give them Monday, to motivate the stuff we're going to do next.

And I realised this morning that the Bush administration can be summed up very succinctly with a reference to The Princess Bride: they got us involved in a land war in Asia.

(Here's a big shocker: when I took the 'Which Princess Bride character are you?' quiz, I was Vizzini. I'll bet you didn't see that one coming.)

Indeed it is the case that I am the man.

I've had some pretty harsh words for corn in my time, but corn is not all bad. It gives us cornstarch, which in turn allows researchers in Texas to discover bizarre behaviour in a vertically-vibrated mixture of cornstarch and water. Via the AIP's Physics News Update (#684):

PERSISTENT HOLES have been observed in a shaken fluid. Normally, a fluid takes the shape of its container; any puncture of the surface will quickly fill. However, in an experiment performed at the University of Texas by Florian Merkt, Robert Deegan, and Erin Rericha, a mixture of cornstarch and water is vertically vibrated at frequencies as high as 120 Hz, with accelerations in the range 12g-25g, where g is the gravitational acceleration. If a stick or puff of air is used to poke a hole in the fluid, the researchers found that the hole can persist indefinitely, with a characteristic diameter comparable to the depth of the fluid and extending to the bottom of the container. This is quite surprising--a hole produced in a similar way in ordinary fluids or in the cornstarch mixture at rest quickly collapses. The holes in cornstarch can survive as long as the shaking persists and can move around, coalesce, annihilate, or even scatter. (Pictures and movie at http://chaos.ph.utexas.edu/research/vibrated_cornstarch.htm; be sure to watch to the end) As yet the physics behind the persistent holes cannot be explained. (Merkt et al. Physical Review Letters, 7 May 2004; Contact Harry Swinney, swinney@chaos.ph.utexas.edu, 512-471-4619.)

Follow that link; watch that movie. And do watch it to the end: it is severely cool. One might even say trippy. At the end these 'finger' formations start appearing on the surface as the persistent holes delocalise, and it's just about the most bizarre thing I've seen since some other time. It's like the cornstarch starts growing tentacles. Just like Octopus Jesus.

Yeah, I'm skipping class right now...

Does that excite you?

I just gave the worst...lecture...ever...

So sleepy. So very, very sleepy. I should've gone to bed two hours earlier last night. Maybe I could do the little-sleep thing when I was a strapping young undergrad, full of beans, but I am old and worn now. I need a good solid eight hours. My delivery was fumbling, my expositions disjointed and rambling...A disaster. An utter disaster. I will not let this happen again, I can tell you. I take pride in my work. At least, I do when I'm not screwing it up.

On the bright side, the Belle and Sebastian concert is tonight. That will wash the acrid taste of substandard performance from my mouth. (One of my students will be there. What if I bump into him? While I'm full of gin and rock? Will my instructorial dignity survive? Do I even have any? These are the questions that plague us...)

Now I will drink my tea and beat myself up on the inside.

I made Octopus Jesus cry.

According to this Salon article, Iraqi con-man, blackguard, scoundrel and swindler Ahmad Chalabi has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, with a thesis entitled 'On the Jacobson Radical of a Group Algebra'.

Here he is in the Mathematics Genealogy Project. He can trace his mathematical lineage back to Schur, Frobenius, Weierstrass, and eventually Gauss...Though who can't, really?

This doesn't change the fact that Ahmad Chalabi is a sack of crap who bears a lot of the responsibility for the disasterous way things have gone in Iraq.

On the bright side, Art Garfunkel got an MA in mathematics from Columbia, and seems to have pursued but not completed his Ph.D. Art Garfunkel has never conned a world power into launching a poorly-thought-out war of aggression followed by an even more half-assed occupation full of repression, torture, mercenaries, and the utter obliteration of any slight chance for an acceptable outcome. Perhaps Art Garfunkel and Ahmad Chalabi were born to be one another's arch-nemeses, Art the defender of all that is good and true, Ahmad a creature of purest evil...

Octopus Jesus does not like Ahmad Chalabi. Octopus Jesus does, however, like 'Bridge Over Troubled Waters'.

David Bowie was in a 1983 queer vampire flick called The Hunger!

I had no idea...I have to see this at once. Lives could depend on it.

My challenge to the world: come up with a Sherlock Holmes joke whose punchline is 'Alimentary, my dear Watson', and which does not suck.

You won't win anything if you come up with one, but you shouldn't let that stop you. The satisfaction should be its own reward.

I almost forgot...Happy May Day, everyone! Be sure to hug a Communist.

You know what's some fun Internet gamery? Sleuth. Watch the hours fly by while you solve murders and dream of the day your detective can own his own fez.

Thank you, Nick!

EXTRA! EXTRA! STOP THE PRESSES!

Another Globe and Mail columnist, Heather Mallick, today gives weepy myrmidon^{[TM PNH LLC INC WTO CFL HST TOR]} Bill O'Reilly a solid mocking!

John Doyle seems to have started a new fad. This could be bigger than hula-hoops. Heather Mallick's take on O'Reilly?

Mr. O'Reilly is not a smart man. He's like one of those old guys you see on the street ringing a bell and shouting about eternal damnation. He talks to his trousers. You know the type. They let wasps nest in their hair so they can lure weasels, trap 'em and eat 'em slow over the summer.

We were supposed to be discussing American deserters fleeing to Canada; instead, he went off on some wild thing about the mayor of Vancouver injecting people with heroin and unless Canada shapes up, "we" will boycott you and destroy your economy, just like "we" did to France.

I said France seemed to be doing fine. He implied that France now looked like Dresden in 1945. I hadn't heard that.

I said the United States couldn't boycott Canadian goods because it would be mutually damaging. "We're your biggest trading partner."

"No, you're not." (We are.) Naturally, I wanted to reply, "Yes, we are," so that he could say "No, we're not," and then I'd say, "Everything you say bounces off me and reflects back on you, so there," but I couldn't regress that far. Mr. Doyle would have been shrieking.

And then he asked me if I was a socialist, and I said, "Certainly," and it was as if I'd said I like donkey semen in my latte instead of milk. He then went into a mad rant about lefties like Mr. Doyle and how I was a typical Globe columnist. I said, no, truthfully, I think I'm regarded as "idiosyncratic" (the first six-syllable word ever spoken on the O'Reilly show), and he erupted again.

It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response -- not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.

And what of the reaction from the FOX side of the fence? I haven't found anything current, alas, but I did come across this...One year ago today, the FOX News website published this so-called 'thing' mocking one of Mallick's old columns, showing off that famous conservative sense of humour: the author implied she was a militant Communist who likes blowing up settlements full of children. Hilarious! The zingers just keep coming, don't they? Oh, those zany wingnuts; what will they say next?

Quite possibly 'Shut up.'

PS...Remember, Saturday is Randy-the-Cat day!

UPDATE: I almost forgot! Here's another column from the delightful Mr Doyle! And here's an article about the Doyle-O'Reilly tiff from last Sunday's New York Times. And here is a photo of an octopus.

UPDATE UPDATE: The Webgirl, being Canadian, has coverage of this maelstrom superior to mine in every respect. Except, of course, for the complete and baffling absence of octopi...