Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Goldberg

201 words

I love my Glenn Gould Goldberg Variations CDs. – However, I must remember to not leave them in the CD player overnight. This morning I only woke up somewhere around the 20th variation, at 8:57 to be precise...

... and set a new personal best: 20 minutes for getting out of bed, dressed, cycling across town, buying a cup of coffee and sitting in a seminar room only two minutes late. And then I realised that the guy talking was the same one who talked last week – not satisfying but killing all the curiosity I may have had concerning the proof of Bott periodicity.

More cheerfully: Hilbert's Hotel written up by Mark Pilgrim – and called a rather unexciting infinite hotel strangely. Makes me remember that 'mathematicians on a road trip' thing when they're singing: 0 bottles of beer on the wall, ℵ0 bottles of beef on the wall – take one down and pass it around – ℵ0 bottles of beer on the wall.

Fun trivia: ℵ can be generated in XHTML using ℵ, &#x2135 or א. The first two are the same – and most likely the only appropriate ones to use here.

December 5, 2003, 21:03

Comments

Comment by d.w.: User icon

I saw Mark’s post in my aggregator this morning and realized that it would be a decidedly finite number of seconds before you linked to it. ;)

December 5, 2003, 21:11

Comment by ssp: User icon

Predictable? Me?

December 5, 2003, 21:16

Comment by d.w.: User icon

No, not predictable, but as a mathmematician you could no more resist linking to that as I could resist tearing into a juicy steak. :)

December 5, 2003, 21:28

Comment by ssp: User icon

Let’s say I appreciate seeing maths in the public. Particularly when maths are (is?) delivered to people who wouldn’t otherwise consider them (it?). As is the case for Mark’s readers whom I assume to be mostly computer people.

[I guess now I could rant about computer people and how many of them simply ignore or even hate mathematics… and how they’ll only jump for the vaguely popular topics and ‘paradoxes’… like infinity, say, or Gödel stuff… and how the same holds for an even greater extent for the ‘general public’… and how it’s sad that I can tell my flatmates I’ve heard a talk about wavelets… and immediately know that telling them ‘well, a wavelet transform is a bit like a Fourier transform, just different’ won’t help them much… which is sad again as probably the discrete Fourier transform and its FFT algorithm could very well be the most used (non-trivial) algorithm in the ‘real world’ these days… and so on.]

I’ll think about a juicy steak instead.

December 5, 2003, 21:45

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