Never say any of the following things to your students:

• 'I have your final exam right here in my pants.'
• 'Mmph mmph hglughlugh oh sorry I thought you were a letterbox.'
• 'Good question! We should talk more about this. Why don't we step into my orifice?'
• 'I swear to Christ I'm going to kill you and everyone you've ever met.'

Now find me a new sofa.

Canadian election results are starting to come in!

So far the Liberals are doing quite well in Atlantic Canada...The new Conservative Party is taking in considerably less of the vote than the combined Alliance-PC tally from last time, which serves if nothing else to indicate that the Canadian population is not in the middle of a seismic rightwards turn. Queer Tory-turned-Liberal Scott Brison has been re-elected. Looks like about 10% of the ridings have their results in now, at least tentatively. 22 Liberal, 7 Conservative, 3 NDP. Although honestly who really gives a shit? Ontario's going to be the exciting part. Will Jack Layton win himself a seat? Will his wife win her's? Will the Conservatives have a breakthrough in Ontario? Will Stephen Harper rape twelve malamutes in an offering to his dark and terrible gods?

By the way, there was quite a good article in the latest Notices of the American Mathematical Society on the Poincare dodecahedral space and its possible connexion to the topology of spacetime. Can you believe that my old blog posting is the tenth site that comes up when you Google 'Poincare dodecahedral space'? Something is clearly wrong with the universe if an interesting 3-manifold gets so little attention.

Well piss my soul, it looks like the Bloc Quebecois just won its first seat of the election. That means we should soon find out exactly how hard an ass-pounding the Liberals have taken in Quebec. Is it a soreness-and-mild-headache sort of a pounding, or more of a teeth-falling-out sort of a pounding? I don't think it could be quite as bad as a swallowed-up-by-one's-own-inflamed-anus sort of a pounding. But don't take that as Gospel; I could be all coned up on rockies right now.

I really hope Transport Minister Tony Valeri loses; he's the chap to whom Paul Martin essentially gave Sheila Copps' seat. Some of the local Liberals are sufficiently miffed that they've been openly encouraging voters to go for the NDP candidate instead of Valeri.

Nothing particularly dynamic happening right this very pulsating moment, I don't think...I'm going to go for a pizza.

UPDATE: Change of plans...I got cheap Chinese instead. This election results business is going to take quite a while; maybe you should get a snack.

UPDATE: The Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada candidate in Mississauga East-Cooksville is ahead in his riding right now. I fucking love that.

UPDATE: Fun's over; looks like the Marxist-Leninist candidate has slid behind now. Oh well.

UPDATE: I need to buy a new sofa. I was looking through IKEA's catalogue online; it seems decent sofae are cursedly expensive. But that is life. A sofa is really an investment in one's future. Unless it is just a piece of furniture.

UPDATE: The Liberal candidate in Medicine Hat is named Cocks. So far the Liberals are looking unexpectedly strong: Ontario is being kind to them. Paul Martin and Jack Layton are both behind in their ridings right now, but only a teeny fraction of the votes have been counted so far, so this really doesn't mean anything at all, and so you might as well just disregard this update. Pretend I've been talking about fishing for the last paragraph.

UPDATE: The CBC has declared a Liberal minority government based on the results so far, thank crap; I think a Liberal-NDP coalition may just be a realistic possibility! And Jack Layton's catching up to Dennis Mills...Layton may just take this. (If he doesn't, he's probably finished as NDP leader.)

UPDATE: Layton's ahead by about 350 votes now!

UPDATE: That egg roll made me gassy. Better light some incense. Tony Valeri's lost!

UPDATE: A Liberal-NDP coalition looks pretty much inevitable now. The Bloc has apparently won more seats than ever before; the NDP looks to pick up at least 11 more seats, too. It seems every single pollster out there was totally and completely wrong about just about everything. Today's Jerkcity is just about the greatest thing I've ever seen. Ed Broadbent's won; I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts Layton will too.

UPDATE: He did! Unfortunately, it looks like Tony Valeri has pulled ahead again in his riding...Oh well. It's still going to be a Liberal-NDP coalition, just about the best outcome one could hope for. Layton talks about energy a lot; he sure does have enough of it. It's all that socialism. It's better than speed, you know. I'm cranked up on it right now. And it's beautiful.

And that's that! It's all over but the orgies.

It's a fact¹: Cher got her start in the entertainment business working as a men's urinal.

Happy Pride!

Bush to Ireland:

"I wouldn't have made the decisions I did if I didn't believe the world would be better. Why would I put people in harm's way if I didn't believe the world would be better?"

Shorter George Bush: 'I did it...So it must be right!'

Watch the interview here, to see the president whining and squalling like a cross and stubborn mildly-retarded child. It's like he honestly can't see how or why anyone would ever disagree with or question him. Or how anything he believes could ever turn out to be wrong. We call such people fools.

I'm sure you've heard this one before...

Vice President Dick Cheney has been dropping F-bombs on Democratic Senators. Since this is a family weblog, I won't explain what F-bombs are, except to hint that they involve gratuitous use of the word 'fuck'. Like 'Fuck yourself.'

The best part?

As it happens, the exchange occurred on the same day the Senate passed legislation described as the "Defense of Decency Act" by 99 to 1.

Cute, eh?

On a not-terribly-related note, here is a partial transcript of an exchange in my living room several nights ago.

"Reagan made ketchup a vegetable."

"Then time made Reagan a vegetable."

In other not-terribly-related news, Monday's the Canadian election! Just to make sure you get the idea, yet another Tory MP has come out in favour of bigotry. Just in case you'd forgotten that, y'know, the Conservative Party of Canada hates gays and stands for repressive backwards-looking Bush-felching, and that Stephen Harper is perfectly willing to override the Charter of Rights.

For those of you keeping score, the polls seem to be showing...

SES-CPAC:

• Liberals: 34%
  
• Conservatives: 30%
  
• NDP: 21%
  
• Bloc Quebecois: 12%
  
• Greens: 3%

Ipsos-Reid:

• Liberals: 32%
  
• Conservatives: 31%
  
• NDP: 17%
  
• Bloc Quebecois: 12%

Despite having pulled slightly ahead in the polls, the Liberals are still projected to win fewer seats than the Conservatives, because Canadian elections are a bit silly. In some ways, it makes sense to run things this way: Canada is split up into hundreds of ridings, and each riding elects one MP, in a first-past-the-post fashion. This seems like an obvious way to do things, if you want your MPs to be local (and who doesn't), accountable to local people and concerned about local things. However, there is a problem. That problem is the party system. Political parties are organised so as to impose cohesion on their members. Liberal MPs will, by and large, toe the official Liberal Party line. Conservative MPs will toe the Conservative Party line. So MPs really aren't as local as all that, when all is said and done. And party discipline opens the door to some horribly undemocratic politics.

For example, suppose the Fruit Party won 49% of the vote in every single riding, while the Nut Party won 51% of the vote in every single riding. Then despite the Fruit Party winning over almost half the populace, the Nut Party would end up with every single seat in Parliament. This clearly does not reflect the will of the people. And while, as far as I know, nothing this extreme has ever happened, this phenomenon does make itself felt. Take the NDP. Right now, Ipsos-Reid is projecting that the NDP's current polling numbers, 17%, would translate into 24 seats. There will be 308 seats total in the Commons after the election, unless I'm mistaken. 17% of 308 seats is 52 seats. And the SES-CPAC numbers would give the NDP 65 seats. However you slice it, the NDP is getting dicked here. It's a quantisation effect. Canada is partitioned into ridings coarsely enough that a significant number of voters are, in effect, being disenfranchised: the composition of Parliament does not accurately reflect the will of the populace. The Conservatives, on the other hand, are projected to win about 115 seats based on the Ipsos-Reid numbers, whereas their 31% of the vote would naively translate into only 95 seats. There is a very real chance of Canada being saddled on Monday with a Conservative government supported by less than a third of the population.

Given how entrenched the party system is, it seems only reasonable to change the electoral process to ensure that parties' strength in the Commons reflects their strength with the public. Is proportional representation the answer? I don't know; I'm a mathematician. What do you want from me? But Jack Layton and the NDP are pushing for it...And Paul Martin might consider it...And the Bloc supports it...And so does the new-ish Green Party. (David 'Nutjob Conspiracy Theorist Obsessed With Shapeshifting Reptilians' Icke hates them and accuses them of being tools of a Jewish conspiracy, and links them to Satanic ritual abuse and paedophilia. Which is pretty much par for the course for Icke.)

First-past-the-post really only seems reasonable in an election where every candidate is expected to function autonomously, rather than as a cog in some political machine. And legislatures are great big fat coggy machines.

Crooked Timber is a good place to look for more discussion of voting systems...Like this. Or there's this oldish posting on Kieran Healy's blog.

Last but not least, Chris Morris' Jam includes the phrase 'You were born dead through your own ass.'

Think about that for a moment.

Ed's Back.

If you like videos of elderly white men rapping about social-democratic politics, you should visit the website of former NDP Leader Ed Broadbent.

"Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee, it's time for voting NDP."

This is quite outrageous.

Apparently Conservative operatives this afternoon sent out a press release entitled 'Paul Martin Supports Child Pornography?'

I know politics is a rough game and all, not really a place for gentlemen, but...Marketing your opponents as kiddie-pornographers? That's just sick. Sick sick sick. Sick and really opportunistic, given that Canada's been having a child-murder trial where the killer admitted to looking at child porn online. Apparently opposing child porn is enough in Conservative eyes to get one branded a 'supporter,' if one does it without being a Conservative.

They retracted it an hour later. They also sent out one saying the same about the whole NDP, which they did not retract. This is the worst and basest kind of political fuckery, without even the redeeming humour value of the 'Evil Reptilian Kitten-Eater' line the Ontario PCs trotted out in the last provincial election.

I could say more, but really it speaks for itself. So I will just say this:

Stephen Harper should be publicly bummed by a giraffe.

Ticktock!

Only ten days remain until Canada's federal election, called by Prime Minister Paul Martin in a spasm of twisted brainwrong. Things have not gone at all well for the reigning Liberal Party. Martin was originally hoping to make a grand sweep of all the Canadas; now the Liberals are struggling to stay neck-and-neck with the Conservatives, and the papers are full of stories about Stephen 'I'm Actually Quite Unpleasant, Really' Harper, the Conservative leader, predicting a majority government for his lot...There was this huge scandal business a few months back that really pissed people off at the Liberals, who have been in power now since 1993, and pissed off the Quebecois most of all, who have been defecting en masse from the Liberals to the separatist Bloc Quebecois.

The Bloc is a funny, funny beast...On most issues it's pretty social-democratic, as far as I can determine. It likes things like the Kyoto treaty, same-sex marriage, affordable housing, universal health care, and so forth. Unfortunately, there's this whole secessionist thing. And the Bloc's leader has toyed with the notion of propping up a Conservative minority government. Of course, he tacks on loads of conditions: the Tories couldn't attack same-sex marriage, they couldn't withdraw from Kyoto, they couldn't...essentially, they couldn't do any of the things they've said they'd do. Now that is just silly. Either the Bloc leadership is very silly indeed, or this talk of propping up minority governments is only there to make the Bloc look useful and unlike a total bloody waste of votes and space--I mean, where's the sodding point in having a secessionist party in the federal government? They can't do anything--or the Bloc leadership is actually quite unprincipled and, despite their social-democratic ideology, they really would prop up the Conservatives even without their unlikely caveats in return for a weakening of the federal system. That would be naughty.

The Bloc does seem like a horrible way to cast a protest vote. Why not just smear your ballot with feces? It amounts to the same thing.

There are lots of good reasons to be cross at the Liberals. They have been corrupt and arrogant, and they've been in power ten years now; they need a good shaking-up. But one can't shake them too hard, or else the Conservatives might weasel into power; and no-one wants that. Except Conservatives. And who cares what they think?

I sure don't.

Let's have a look at what Canadians for Equal Marriage have to say...

The Conservative Party is objectively anti-gay; it inherits the virulently homophobic Alliance's MPs. Also, Stephen Harper looks a bit like David Foley all bloated with venom and malice.

The Liberals, despite internal disagreements, are much, much nicer. I suspect that they would, in the end, however reluctantly and grumblingly, go along with same-sex marriage. They certainly wouldn't try to roll back gay rights any. Unlike the Conservatives. Also, Prime Minister Paul Martin looks like a worn-out old William Shatner.

It should come as no surprise that the New Democratic Party is the most gay-friendly. It's unashamedly leftist. It's greener than the Greens. It is led by Jack Nance impersonator Jack Layton. This poll has the NDP winning the support of 22% of the electorate, and they've been consistently pulling in over 16% even in the most pessimistic polls.

Who cares where the minor parties stand on gay marriage? The minor parties are there purely for entertainment value. And they do not disappoint. A Marijuana Party candidate was evicted from his campaign office for, of all things, marijuana. Apparently he was offering pot cookies to anyone who made a $4 campaign contribution. I'm sure it was a brilliant idea on paper, or at least it would have been if his hands could've stopped grooving long enough to write anything down.

If one wishes to scold the Liberals, why not vote NDP? They're jolly nice! While they're certainly not going to form a government themselves any time soon, a Liberal minority government propped up by the NDP would seem to be a Good Thing, and Canadian voters apparently agree. Why not give that a go, eh?

I hope to Jelly that Canadians aren't foolish enough to bring in a Conservative government. There's never an excuse for that. Conservatives are, after all, just wrong.

So you can follow along at home, here is the Toronto Star's election section. And here is the Globe and Mail's. And here is the CBC's. Here is Canda.com's, an appendage of media pimp CanWest, which owns the National Post, the newspaper for assholes. And that's all I can be bothered to link to, as I'm hungry and feel like poaching some eggs. Ta.

Someone--an undergraduate--asked me today for some kind of add code, or something, to take my integral calculus course this summer. I didn't know what that was, so instead I took an online quiz to find out which American city I was. (Chris "The Virtual Stoa" Brooke was Boston.) And--mirabile dictu! as the Romans might say, or blow me! in the manner of the English--I turned out to be Seattle. Which is where I live. And I wasn't even trying. Is that convenient, or what?

Take the quiz: "Which American City Are You?"

Seattle
Your dark exterior masks a caffeine driven activism. You'll take up a cause and you'll get ugly to advance it.

All this administrative stuff, with 'codes' and 'forms' and 'grades'...I don't know a flaming thing about any of it. How do you add a class? Damned if I know. Overloading? Couldn't tell you. What's the departmental policy on blah blah blah oh sorry were you asking a question I was miles away who are you again and what are you doing in my bedroom? I did successfully give grades to my linear algebra students, but that's only because someone stuck a sheaf of bubble-forms into my mailbox with very simple instructions typed in a large, bold font, and someone in the office took care of the difficult parts like getting these 'grades' to the people who keep track of such things. I suppose they must have a building, somewhere. Maybe a cavern, underground, filled with legion upon legion of little gnomes scanning bubbled forms and playing tinkling crystal flutes that sound like falling water. I hope they get paid well. Can you pay gnomes in radishes, or am I thinking of something else? Undergraduate graders, maybe?

It's all too confusing; I shall have to have a lie-down.

UPDATE: Wound up reading about alternative voting systems today and came across a family of them whose basic idea is apparently due to Ramon Llull, the combinatorial-disks chap whom I first heard of when reading up on Giordano Bruno, I think in this book here. Six Degrees of Giordano Bruno, anyone? Condorcet methods sound like graph theory to me.

Whenever you're feeling blue or a bit down; whenever you feel alone and adrift on a cold and fishy sea of humanity; whenever you start to feel like the world's ugliest lighthouse...

Just say to yourself, 'At least I'm not choking to death on my own nuts.'

Much has been said about Ronald Reagan this week: that he has been a brain-devouring zombie for the last twenty years; that he and his administration got a good laugh out of AIDS when the queers were dropping like flies; that, if Jesus had any balls, Reagan would spend the rest of eternity--that's at least aleph-null moments, even in a quantised universe--riding a flaming pitchfork in the lowest, foulest anus of Hell, but that even so he wasn't as bad a president as the one we have now...All this has been said (by me). But with this torrential downpour of hagiography soaking us all to the skin, it is easy to lose perspective. Dazzled by the glittering mosaic of Reagan, the Senile, Malicious Old Bigot here erected in glowing tribute, one loses sight of Reagan the Man. At times such as these, when we as a nation blubber uncontrollably into our little lace hankies like a bunch of girly-girls, it behooves us all to dry those eyes and wipe the glistening snot from those noses, pull our mucus-smeared heads from the Rectum of Tribute, and have a look at the big picture.

Ronald Reagan was not only a warmed-over carcass worked by hidden strings and gears, spouting platitudes and snippets from old films, emptying his tired old bladder upon the greatest health crisis in modern American history. He was also a man. Ronald Reagan had a heart; and he had lungs; and he had a spleen. He also had a brain, pancreas, a gall bladder, a liver, kidneys, a colon, a small intestine, a stomach, adrenal glands, a thyroid, a thalamus, a hypothalamus, an amygdala, a hippocampus, a cerebellum, axons, dendrites, mitochondria, plasma, lymph, platelets, adipose tissue, skeletal muscle, smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, an aesophagus, a larynx, a bladder, a pineal gland, a pituitary gland, nodes of Ranvier, femurs, ulnae, radii, humeri, ribs, cervical vertebrae, thoracic vertebrae, lumbar vertebrae, a sacrum, a coccyx, at least one maxillary process, a dura mater, a corpus callosum, dermis, epidermis, and testes.

They're all dead now, and going all rotten and soft like a McDonald's hamburger.

Can one understand the legacy of Reagan, if one does not understand that all of his bits and organs are now utterly dead and decaying away to mush and dust? Can one truly understand what Reagan meant to the world, particularly to portions of Central America, and to the people of Iraq, without contemplating for a moment rotting corpses and the slow erosion of bones stripped of flesh by ravenous maggots and worms?

I think not.

I think not.

I told you this would happen.

"Zombie Reagan: The Great Necrommunicator."

You couldn't carry out the tissue ablation when I asked, could you? No, you just had to go get that sandwich first. Look what happened while you were away! Not only has his shambling zombified corpse escaped to run amok, but he's running for Vice President now.

I hope you're happy.

Ronald Wilson Reagan is still dead.

But is he dead enough?

That is the question.

Can we really take the risk that some extraterrestrial parasite might take root in his rotting cadaver and imbue him with a grotesque parody of new life as a shambling zomboid with only the barest remnants of memory and consciousness?

Just as happened in 1981?

And 1985?

And pretty much once a fortnight through the Nineties?

Can we run the risk that Reagan's animatronic corpse might once again propel the human species towards nuclear annihilation?

Clearly we cannot.

There is really only one sensible course of action: tissue ablation and variant regeneration. It's only a pity we didn't act sooner.

(For further details, I refer you to 'Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report', by Michael Blumlein.)

O Ronald...

At last your body is as dead as your brain.

As dead as all those homosexuals in the Eighties when you were hushing up AIDS, facilitating its spread and growth into the world-spanning plague it is today.

As dead as subtle political commentary.

But I don't hold AIDS against you, Ronald. You probably had no idea what was going on around you; you were more prune than man. Your long descent into Alzheimer's and dementia was something I would not wish on any man or woman, or house pet, or disembodied alien intelligence. But I am sure your humiliating and tragic decline was a price you would have been willing to pay so that the modern Republican Party could propagate senseless, irrational opposition to the stem-cell research that could some day keep others from sharing your incontinent fate.

As we stand now poised on the precipice of another election, your presidency seems to shine more brilliantly than it ever has before, much as a dull and leaden pebble might seem to shine when compared to a plate of hog's shit. I would rather have your baffled vacancy than George W. Bush's malevolent ignorance any day of the week. Though not as much as I'd like a government composed of rational persons.

Goodbye, Ronald.

You will be missed.

Just...not by me.

Set phasers on 'Torture'.

Just so we're all clear on this, the Conservatives in Canada are still evil:

"People are going to mobilize a lot more as they realize that Mr. Harper is a real threat to equality," said Laurie Arron, a gay-rights activist who trailed Harper from Hamilton to nearby Guelph, Ont.

Things turned ugly in Guelph, Ont., as Arron and fellow protester Bob Smyth tried to question Harper about his party's stand on gay marriage.

Conservative supporters shouted "shut up, shut up," and a frail elderly man punched Smyth in the face and bashed him on the head with a campaign sign.

Stephen Harper seems to have hit upon the strategy of being too boring to demonise in the way one could Stockwell Day, but he's still a big flaming horse's ass and a vote for his party is a vote for Republicanism Lite and bigotry hidden like Adam West behind a domino mask.

The quarter is ending. Therefore, I am busy. I typed up about a hojillion sample exams for my linear algebra students this afternoon and evening. I still have to write the final. And things. And stuff. I'm busy.

To tide you over until I am no longer busy, here is something Nick showed me: Van Helsing in 15 Minutes.

Troy is three hours of buff men in leather skirts oiling up their nipples, and I mean that in the worst possible way. Sooooooo boring...

After seeing that, I read Dan Simmons' new-ish novel, Ilium. Despite having fewer instances of homoeroticism, I found it wildly more entertaining. Quick read. Cute robots. Lots of exposition. And John Clute has reviewed it.

I saw the director's cut of Donnie Darko last night. And I'll bet you didn't. Ha. Ha. Ha. (It's good; different, less confusing [which is not necessarily a good thing] but still good.)

Now I grade things.