Pretentiousness

Pretentiousness is disliking opera but loving Wagner, and feeling justified because "after all, Wagner is Musikdrama...."

Place-blogging

I don’t think that Huntsville’s going to feel like home anytime soon. Perhaps that’s as it should be: I never intended to settle here, even when there was someone here I was planning to be with. Still, there are a few things to recommend the city, and if I must have my life shipwrecked and then be tossed unceremoniously on shore somewhere, there are much worse places.

I’m at Big Spring Park (again). I’ve blogged about it before. It’s a gorgeous day and I refuse, point blank, to go home and surround myself by the entombing four walls of the familiar when there is so much else to see. (Since you’ve asked, I’m including a picture. Have I mentioned that I have a thing for clouds?)

I was half-tempted to go to Monte Sano State Park and do some writing there. I opted not to, for a couple of reasons. In the first place, it costs money to go up there; it is, after all, a state park. For another, there’s no wi-fi there. Not a huge reason but having wifi has its perks. For a third, it is a bit of a hoof, and already being 5 PM, I’m not sure I want to go there for just an hour or so. Finally, perhaps the real reason, it’s still lousy with memories of her. Maybe one day. Just not yet.

But I was driving around a bit before getting here. Huntsville, unlike Birmingham, is small enough to be relatively self-contained. You can get the entire range of the Huntsville experience and not drive more than, oh, 20 minutes. Unlike Tallahassee, which is similar in size, it has both topography and character. And of course, multiple park locations with free wi-fi….

I’ll probably start, since it seems like a fun thing to do, blogging about these places in the near future. It will give me a reason to expand my slowly-widening circle of haunts, and give me a decent excuse to go out exploring, something I’ve never really before been tempted to do. So, expect some place-blogging in the future. This will be fun!

This is funny...

Hillary Clinton is the Democratic Party's Psycho Ex-Girlfriend...

It's only ironic if you think about it

Why do Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo?


Because we're a nation of German and Irish Immigrants.

More Outdoor Blogging!

At Big Spring Park again, on the other side of the street. Different look over here. Lots of shade, people on blankets - it's Sunday afternoon, after all.

There's a group of people - out on the far side across the bridge, just beyond the picture - on drums and other indigenous percussion instruments, banging out a tribal tattoo to which a belly dancer has been dancing.

There's nothing quite like this in Birmingham; this city's not a bad place to be this time of year....

Of Math, Geekdom, Comics, and Sex

I nearly wrote a blog about Paul Erdős once.

That statement in itself is almost a half-joke.

(I still remember what I would have blogged about, had I actually written the blog in the first place. In fact, this is inspiration to go ahead and blog about it in the near future.)

A friend of mine long ago introduced me to xkcd: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. I don't read it nearly as often as I should. I have a couple other friends who also read it - given the subject matter, it would be hard not to love it. The thing is, it is brainier and geekier than any of my friends can probably appreciate: this isn’t a knock on my friends; it’s just that I am deficient in having friends who are mathematicians.

Though there are numerous mathematics in-jokes in the comic – and please don’t let that scare you from reading the comic: it is easily one of the most clever, smart, charming, and even heartwarming comics out there – there is one particular case in point that inspired this post. Needless to say, it has something to do with Paul Erdős, (pronounced Air-dish) the late mathematician who was the most prolific in history.

The title is Convincing Pickup Line. A girl and a guy are sitting at a table. The girl is showing him something on a piece of paper and trying to convince the guy that they should get together. “We’re a terrible match,” she says. “But if we sleep together, it’ll make the local hookup network a symmetric graph,” to which he responds: “I can’t argue with that.”

A little bit more about Erdős: because he was so prolific, and, more importantly, had so many collaborators, he constitutes a unifying thread among mathematicians. Just like Bacon numbers link actors according to how many movies it takes to link them, through co-stars, to Kevin Bacon, mathematicians have Erdős numbers that depend on how many papers it takes to link them to Erdős, either directly or through collaborators. Having written one with Erdős himself gives you a number of 1, having written one with one of his direct collaborators gives you a number of 2, etc.

Mathematicians are a weird bunch. Not only do they maintain their lists of Erdős numbers, take pride in their low numbers, etc., they even discuss the network of mathematicians who have collaborated at various removes with Erdős as a mathematical object itself! One mathematician once published a paper on the Erdős number network, noting that if two particular mathematicians within it published a paper together, the network would have an interesting mathematical property. The sappy conclusion to that story is that the two mathematicians did indeed decide to collaborate, in order to give the network that property.

While only a mathophile is likely to be familiar with that story, it doesn’t take a geek to figure that it served as the inspiration for the comic. I’m willing to bet that even my friends who like xkcd are unfamiliar with that story. But what I found most amusing was the rollover caption for the strip, one that I didn’t notice for a while because of a glitch that keeps it from appearing in Firefox, but which confirmed that that story was indeed the inspiration for the comic:

“Check it out; I've had sex with someone who's had sex with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erdős!”

And since it might somehow be tangentially relevant to this post, I guess I should acknowledge that I once made out with a girl who’s had sex with Trent Reznor….