The Internet: what isn't it good for? It's made mathematical research so, so, so much easier. I can't imagine how mathematicians ever got by before searchable databases like MathSciNet, which not only lets you hunt down articles based on author, title, or keyword, but even spits out BibTeX code you can just cut and paste into your bibliography!
I made extensive use of this when I was writing a paper for my general exam. Which, by the way, I have finished. That's right! A 20-page summary of my current research interests, all typeset with diagrams and everything. Chilling! Exciting! Spectacular! Action-packed! Thrill to the torrid, turbulent transgressions and death-defying derring-do of double-coset decompositions! Marvel at mysterious machinations of Morse-theoretic mayhem! Peer at propositions that pout and preen prettily while plied with polished prostrate plaudits and palaver, panegyrics of proof!
You know what else the Internet is good for? Archiving our civilisation's mountainous wastes of cultural flotsam and jetsam. The campish fragments that would surely be lost and forgotten forevermore were it not for YouTube. Windows onto the odd taste of yesteryear! Just today I encountered one such fragment. On a political blog, of all things. I guess they've gotten tired of Transhumanism and have moved on to falsetto-voiced ukulele player Tiny Tim and his unforgettable rendition of "Tip-Toe Thru The Tulips", which, despite my comparatively meagre years on the cosmic scale (being as I am still in my late-mid-twenties, though I can feel my early-late-twenties creeping up on me), I remember seeing back in the days of my childhood on re-runs of Laugh-In. It is, as they say, something. Something is exactly what it is.
But there's more Tiny Tim out there. Oh so much more.
And we mustn't ignore this one, oh no. Oh no. Did you realise that Tiny Tim lived for a time in Des Moines of all places, and had very conservative views about a woman's role in a marriage?
I like this one a great deal.
I wish I had talent like his. I would take my ukulele everywhere. Especially to class. On exam days. Picture it. Just...picture it.
BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!God bless this man. It's Harvey Sid Fisher, the astrological lounge singer! I caught his act once at Gabe's Oasis in Iowa City. Unforgettable, although he was a little older and...not so much in a tuxedo as a T-shirt. Of course, at the time I was very, very drunk.
Very drunk.
STILL MORE! Oh YouTube, you'll be the death of me. So much Shatner. Oh the Shatner. And Nimoy? You'd better believe there's Nimoy. Now you too can enjoy "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins", as I have done these many years. It's honestly surprising that everyone involved in the making of that song hasn't died of shame. You'd think that it would kill something inside you.
DEAR GOD HELP US ALL, IT WON'T STOP. The Internets are full of horror today. It's like I woke up this morning and found the world overrun by Daleks.
Tiny Tim, for all his quirks, had a real talent and a rare flair. This...this is just a trainwreck. I don't know which is more alarming: that western civilisation could produce such an abomination, or that someone out there preserved this like a turd in formaldehyde to sicken future generations.
Tim, how could you leave us when we need you now more than ever?
It's happening again: Doctor Who references on political weblogs. Surely this is a sign that the End Times are upon us.
I was finishing up Penrose's The Road to Reality before bed today, thinking to myself how incredibly ropey the last few chapters seemed and gnashing my teeth ever so slightly when Penrose couldn't help but mention his belief in consciousness as a non-computational quantum phenomenon, with which I have previously taken issue--without, perhaps uniquely for this blog, any swearing.
(Fuckarsebitchtits!)
Anyhow, the book was winding down, and I was juuuuuuuuuuust getting ready to put it aside, when I noticed something, on page 1042 of the Knopf hardback edition...
What appears to be true, in essence, is that there is something deep in the idea of a quantum field theory based on the mappings of Riemann spheres into complex manifolds...
...Which just made me sit up and go "Whoa now, Bessie."
Let me explain.
When I started my university years as an undergraduate, I was into physics. As time passed, I got more and more into mathematics and less and less into physics because the mathematics was so much prettier (and it didn't catch fire when I tried to set it up). Nowadays I'm just about as far from physics as you can get in a lot of ways, but I still have, in the back of my head, this daydream of one day dipping my toe back into mathematical physics somehow, maybe looking for loopspacey maths that I can apply to loop quantum gravity or (God help me) string theory or summat. But this was just pipe dreams and whimsy for the most part.
But...
It turns out...
A piece of pretty abstract and very strongly topological maths that I've been writing up to include in my General Exam paper involves Schubert varieties in the Grassmannian model for the loopspace of a compact Lie group. Believe it or not, some of these Schubert varieties are known to have the homotopy type of...the space of holomorphic mappings of the Riemann sphere into certain complex manifolds.
*GASP*
Am I secretly doing quantum field theory? We're through the looking-glass, people.
Just saw the first part of Doctor Who's season finale...Gimmicky, for sure, and very much a set-up for the second part next week; not a whole lot of story or depth, to be sure; a string of glossy, exciting, shocking, generally "cool" scenes. But they are really, really, really cool scenes. It's a feeding frenzy of cool. And that worked for me. I was giddy and wide-eyed. I said "oooh" once. "Ugh", too. And I squealed like a hog when the Big Evil Metal Evil Sphere of Evil Spherical Metallic Big Evil opened and you know what came out...
There's been sort of a tendency for this season of Doctor Who to go that way, ish...Sort of action movie-like. Happened with the Cybermen story. Happened with The Satan Pit. Didn't like either of them much, 'cause I don't dig sci-fi action movies much. Depth and plot and theme sort of boil away in a cloud of shooty monsters. Seems to be happening again this time, but now it looks like it might actually work. I have high hopes.
Russell T. "Queer as Folk" Davies, the mastermind behind the show, really knows his shit (or as the Americans would say, his shizzle). He gets what makes Doctor Who tick, and he knows how to throw raw bleeding tender meat to the baying fans. He's quite witty, and writes excellent dialogue. And even though he's being very safe and conventional this episode, he still knows how to give moments a...twist. The Doctor kills three people, suddenly and cavalierly. Technically they're already dead, and it doesn't seem out-of-character, but...it makes you stop a moment. (Then a woman's brain is pulled out her ear.) David Tennant's acting has grated on me from time to time, as he has a tendency to get a bit too "hey look at me, I'm Doctor Who!", particularly whenever he's got a big speech to make, but I loved him tonight. Russell Davies seems to know just how to write for Tennant.
And did I mention it's really cool? Like, really really cool?
Ghosts. Loved the ghosts. Loved--really, really loved--the way the Doctor immediately dismissed the idea that they were actual ghosts of the dear departed, no matter how beautiful an idea people thought it was or how much they wanted to believe. The Doctor is a scientist and an atheist. Nice to see that played up this time.
And it was cool. Did I mention that?