Thesis

or

(wordle)

Which Springer Graduate Text in Mathematics would you be?

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Saunders Mac Lane's Categories for the Working Mathematician. I provide an array of general ideas useful in a wide variety of fields. Starting from foundations, I illuminate the concepts of category, functor, natural transformation, and duality. I then turn to adjoint functors, which provide a description of universal constructions, an analysis of the representation of functors by sets of morphisms, and a means of manipulating direct and inverse limits. Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test

Hat tip to finiterank.

David Foster Wallace

kids get exposed very early to the idea that "you are the most important" and "what you are is the most important" and "your job in life is to gratify your own desires"...that's not happiness, that feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire, it seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery, nobody talks about it as such tough, they talk about freedom of choice, and you have the right to have things...

[part 1 out of 10]

Infinite jest awaits on my nightstand.

[hat tip bluelephant]

Flies and male psychology

Why is there a fly in the urinal?

Answer: To reduce spillage.

"So what do you think most men do? That's right, they aim at the fly when they urinate. They don't even think about it, and they don't need to read a user's manual; it's just an instinctive reaction. The interesting feature of these urinals is that they're deliberately designed to take advantage of this inherent human male tendency."

The fly in the urinal is a practice pioneered in Amsterdam's airport.

Talking about the science of urinals...

Colombian spanish

Originally uploaded by 9 0 0 0

Logicomix

I picked up a copy of Logicomix (A. Doxiadis) last fall in Vancouver. The prospect of seeing Bertrand Russell turned into a comic character was enough of a motivation, not to mention the likes of Wittgenstein, Gödel, and Alan Turing.

Always since I heard about Russell's paradox I've had some sort of mathematician envy. Understanding this very simple contradiction changed the way I looked at maths, and got me quite obsessed for a little while. Well, the story of the barber who only shaves people who don't shave themselves is right there in the comic, and it goes on to tell the tale of how the foundations of mathematics were shaken by a group of freakish mathematicians. It is exactly the characters, more than the "science" itself what the focus of the book is... rightly so I believe, although I can imagine that those who are actually trained in maths might finish the book with some sort of bittersweet taste to it, wanting to see more science.

The book is coauthored by a computer scientist, and it is quite a thrill to see how the very core of maths is historically and scientifically connected to the machines that are nowadays (virtually) in everyone's life.

PD: If you like this one, read Uncle Petro and Goldbach's conjecture, from the same author, it s at the very least just as good, although that's a rather void comparison, since the latter is a novel, and not a comic book, and I don't particularly like comics.

Economics degree

I get the feeling here "philosophy degree" could be perfectly swapped for "economics degree".

Just to give an example.

Tumblr

Not blogging that much lately. Blame it on tumblr. Tumblr gets the job done for small posts (laziness, busyness ...)

Economists...the truth might not be beautiful

I once heard a professor at my faculty say that computer simulations are not economics. That's at the very least naive. Take away numerical solutions from physicists and we probably wouldn't have cellphones. Economists strongly prefer beautiful math over more insightful potentially less beautiful things, and that is hurting the field as a science.

... the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth ...

How did economists get it so wrong? @NYT

Total eclipse flow chart

See the flowchart here.

Alternating between crooning and belt singing is very important...

(source)

How fair is that some are smarter?

How willing people are to give to others depends on what they like and what they believe. There's (between-individual and between-group) differences in what is considered (believed) to be fair...

...Turning to the effects of the belief variables, our results showed that these too vary significantly across countries. Believing that coming from a wealthy family is important to get ahead in some countries had basically no effect while in others it involved an over 20 percentage point increase in the probability of supporting redistribution. The effect of believing effort to be an important income determinant varied from being statistically non-discernible from zero to decreasing the probability of supporting redistribution with around 15 percentage points. With respect to believing intelligence/skills to be rewarded the results were mixed, with both negative and positive but in most cases statistically insignificant effects.

Isakssona and Lindskog. Preferences for redistribution- A country comparison of fairness judgements. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

we are the wwworld

we are the wwworld, originally uploaded by 9 0 0 0.

5,113,758,962 humans don't give a shit about comments, profiles or your favorite song of Morrissey ... Congrats b#tch, you are the minority!

illustration + text by 9000

{entrevista con 9000 - in Spanish}

Animatronics by Banksy

Here's a small (self-made) video from the animatronics at the Banksy vs Bristol Museum exhibition. Most of them were already shown at the Pet Shop project in NYC (see coverage by the wooster collective).

(source)

Narcissism and Facebook

Not that it's a particularly surprising result, but at least it's been given scientific rigour now...

Narcissism predicted (a) higher levels of social activity in the online community facebook and (b) more self-promoting content in several aspects of the social networking Web pages facebook

here's the paper. Hat tip to the marginal revolution.

It's anarchy! (Amsterdam)

“The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual”

Bakunin

(source)

pd: Now maybe that's because the US has ten times as many people, right?....

EDIT: See English coverage by NRC

No more googling for LaTeX

just draw it...get the code.

Parkway (holiday read)

Parkway is a novel about a group of youngsters devoted to the britpop scene in mid-90's (probably the only novel with a myspace). It takes place in London's Camden Town, of course, and the soundtrack features blur, oasis, pulp, suede and so on... The target readers, I suspect, are those like me: britpop moaners. Those who cling to a very short-lived and local scene that is well gone. The book reads very easily, and I doubt anyone without a particular interest in the scene or above 20 would find the teenage rage and romance any interesting. Nevertheless, it is a good guide to those lost tracks and can serve well as a handbook for britpop pilgrimage and worship... if you happen to be into it.

Here's the trailer for live forever, the documentary on britpop and cool britannia....

(source)

Good old days I never lived.

9000

, originally uploaded by 9 0 0 0.

and June becomes July...

source

It`s warm outside

But I can hear the snow

Falling on my window

I had to go away

To somewhere deeper down

I know it`s my mistake

To take off out of this town

And June becomes July

This road`s on fire

And my train`s running slow

It rains against my window

I had to get away

To somewhere no-one knows

I know it`s my mistake

To take off now in this way

And June becomes July

The air is thin

When you`re above the clouds

I see them from my window

It`s strange to get away now

To somewhere no-one goes

I know it`s my mistake

But I don`t even know now

And June becomes July

And June becomes July

Banksy in Glasto?

Plain clothes drug dealers in operation.

Ketamin Parking

Is Banksy in Glastonbury? Maybe...Maybe not.

(via this)