So Zion Train came to town for the Wee Dub Festival. So I went. And we stood there, packed as matches in a matchbox, on the pogo floor when they lay down the thick and heavy beat, driving, bouncing, making us all temporarily believers in Jah.

And we pogo'd. At least a few must have come away with bruised kidneys the way we pogo'd.

It is in this context. This marvelous, delirious, exhilirating, fantastic context, I ask...

What the H*** is wrong with you people? You people who see this pandemonium of a dance floor, and then bring your drink to the heaviest pogo-part of it? You people who bring glass bottles of beer out, dance with it waving around like a club, and then PUT THEM DOWN ON THE STONE FLOOR? You people who bring wide-brimmed, flimsy, and brimming mugs of beer, and expect noone to do anything unexpected. Yeah, not even when Zion Train decides it's time to drop the Beat Of Jah, and the entire house starts jumping from the beat together with the dancers. But you expect not to spill your drink.

WAT?

This week I'm in Ft. Collins, CO, visiting collaborators and doing research.

At first, I was fighting a feeling of Ft. Collins being a quintessential Small Town; but with the days I've spent here the town has grown on me.

The beer As much as San Francisco obsesses over its micro-breweries, some of the breweries I drank the most of are actually situated right here. And it shows! EVERY place in this town serves New Belgium and O'Dell.

The hot sauce There are local hot sauce producers as well. I ended up buying 4 bottles to take home with me — the chipotle smokey hot sauces are amazingly good.

The delightfully weird The lunch place we went to today offers free chair massages every day 1pm-4pm. I didn't take them up on it, but probably should have. On my way to dinner, I stopped at a window to a “Scientific Toy Store” that looked interesting. Before I was able to take off again, I had had 8 toys demonstrated to me, and the proprietor had invited me to come have dinner with him and his wife sometime.

The pizza So, apparently, Colorado style Pizza is a thing. It's a thin-crust pizza with rolled up edges and about 3x the usual amount of fillings. Once you're done with the middle, you pour honey on the edge for dessert.

The views Right on the edge of the Rockies. When I got picked up from the airport, we drove north along the mountain range edge as the sun set, the moon rose and glorious colours sparkled across the sky as the huge full moon edged up from the horizon. It is beautiful out here.

It's that time of year again; where silmaril has already done one of these, and I feel inspired.

Here is the year that was. First sentence of a posting in a month for each paragraph. Commentary afterwards.



( The months! )

This year my presence on LiveJournal has been low. I averaged maybe 2 posts a month, and many of them were memes. That said, I tended to post about important personal things, and some rants. At least one post in this list was directly related to my photo hobby, one post to my health, and one post to current politics and People Being Annoying On The Internet.

During the year, I have had a much more prolific presence on Twitter, on Facebook, and even — in spite of the #nymwars — on Google+. I still read LiveJournal a lot, and follow everyone else; it's just not my own main outlet any more.

Since the Assange case is making the rounds again, once again I cringe at seeing my twitter feed, and many people I have great respect for saying things that betray fundamental misperceptions about what's going on in Sweden about the whole mess...

On suggestion from pozorvlak, I'd like to offer an overview of some of the quirks of Swedish judicial process — the things that make Sweden behave in ways that seem erratic. I am not an insider here, and I do not claim that the following is an accurate picture of what has been going on in the prosecutorial office and police offices; but I spent some time reading up on the Swedish judicial process when the mess first started, and have experience with the Swedish climate, and what can be expected from Swedish civil servants.

Fundamentally, every single claim I have seen about an underlying conspiracy refers to behaviours that are at least as likely explained by common types of incompetence. There has been significant pushes — especially early on — from the Defense to frame this as really being a case not of Sweden following its processes, but of puppeteers in the US shaping world events. I do not buy this view; specifically because I see no essentially surprising actions from Swedish authorities.

I do however see how non-Swedes might be surprised by the sequence of events.

The first surprising part is the Swedish definition of våldtäkt (rape). It includes sexual acts when one party is in an insufficiently conscious state to reasonably give consent. Sleep is explicitly given as one such state. While many crimes require the same definition to hold in all involved countries for an EAW and extradition, rape is on a shortlist of crimes where a unilateral definition is enough.

The second surprising part is the lack of influence of the two women on proceedings once they had given their initial statements to a police officer. In Sweden, when a police officer has reason to suspect he has been given a report of a rape, he is bound to file a report — similarly to several other categories of abuse. Once the report is filed, a prosecutor is bound to open an investigation, and initiate a collection of evidence and also to press charges if evidence seems to support it.

The third surprising part is the role of the prosecutor. While in the US (for instance) prosecutors fill the role of an attorney for the state part of the trial, in Sweden they have a different role — they lead the investigative work and coordinate the police in initial discovery and evidence-gathering. They also issue arrest warrants, and deal with the various degrees of freedom infringement for suspects. They do, however, have to defend their various calls to a judge superior prosecutor periodically. (Thank you kjn for corrections — there are stages that need to go past a judge, and in the Assange case they have.)

It is important in this to notice that Sweden mainly follows the civil law judicial tradition, not the common law common in the US and the Commonwealth. In addition, Swedish prosecutors differ significantly from US district attorneys — the trial is not adversarial, and the prosecution is under a requirement for objectivity.

A fourth part is the lack of information flow from Swedish prosecutors. In Sweden, pre-trial investigations are supposed to be utterly secret, and leaking information is considered a serious issue, that may well in bad cases invalidate any actual trial at the end. For the Assange case, the mere initial confirmation to the press that the prosecutorial office was in any way interested in Assange was a breach against this confidentiality — and much of the behaviour afterwards can be explained as bureaucrats desperately covering their asses by acting meticulously by the book to make up for the initial gaffe. Connected to this is the inexperience of the late night on-call prosecutors to deal with a media storm, which precipitated the initial quick changes in prosecutor dealing with the case.

It is surprising that Sweden is actually pulling through this much on the case — and I would wish that this much attention was given to all rape cases. However, apart from the surprising amount of due diligence given by the prosecutorial office and the occasional (but far fewer than the Defense alleges) procedural errors made by Swedish law enforcement, from a Swedish perspective, the actions of Sweden in this issue are those of a judicial authority forced by its own rules to follow up on rape allegations regardless of whether the alleged victim still backs the allegation — a rule instituted to deal with “Stockholm syndrome” or abuser-threat induced withdrawals of abuse allegations; and of a judicial authority utterly surprised by the exact magnitude of the mess they suddenly were dealing with.

ETA the distinction of common/civil law, and the non-adversarial role of a Swedish prosecutor.

Today in my household…
Me: “Oh hey, my accrued vacation time actually covers the time I'll be in Sweden!”
Susanne: “Well, that's nice and all… are you… are you actually going to take time off then?”
Me: “Don't be ridiculous — I have deadlines coming up!”

It struck me recently, while crossing the atlantic in an Air France plane and thus trying to keep my conversations with the flight staff to french in order to stretch out my language muscles, how differently we perceive politeness in different cultures and languages.

In particular, in Swedish, we do not have a word filling the same function as «please» or «bitte» or even as «s'il vous plait»; while the french comes closest to the Swedish situation, we simply do not have a single always usable set phrase — politeness is marked in Swedish by circumlocution, by using a more convoluted phrase that includes some of several markers for politeness.

Thus, in Swedish, I might say things like
«Skulle du kunna vara så vänlig och » (would you be so kind and )
«Kan jag be att få » (could I ask to receive )
«Jag skulle vilja ha » (I would like to have )
and so on...

This came up, in particular, when I called for the hostesses to ask for more to drink: I am comfortable saying things like «Une coke, s'il vous plait.» when they ask me for my order, but when I myself have summoned them, it feels somehow insufficiently polite, almost like barking out an order, to my Swedish ears. In German, my language skills are sufficient that I can _both_ circumlocute in the subjunctive tense _and_ use «bitte», but my French simply isn't quite as solid.

Dear readers, how do you perceive politeness markers? Do you notice them at all?

So I have lived in a few places by now: Stockholm, Nürnberg, Jena, San Francisco, Edinburgh (though barely this as of yet). And today, in-flight, I was struck by how different it has been leaving the various places I have passed through.

In particular, I lived in Jena about as long (give or take a few months) as I did in San Francisco. When I left Jena, it was melancholy to leave my old friends behind, as it always is — but it was the beginning of a new adventure, an emerging from a chrysalis, in some sense. And I was not particularly homesick for Jena afterwards.

Returning to Jena has been similarly undramatic. It is pleasant, and I love reconnecting with all my old friends and hang-outs, but it didn't haunt me when I had to leave again.

San Francisco is … different.

San Francisco got under my skin.

I write this at the Charles de Gaulle airport, having left after my second visit back to Fog City after I moved away. And I am endlessly fascinated with just how many layers of complex and conflicting emotion I build up.

I am hours away from coming back home to my wife, after almost a full month apart. I am elated, and filled with anticipation and joy at coming home to her, seeing her again, holding her, enveloping myself with her scent, …

I am filled with energy and enthusiasm for all the work I have to do the coming month — the paper I am writing, the research projects that have surged during the trip and now can be consolidated in a fall and early winter filled with glorious research.

And at the same time, my thoughts go as often to the friends I left behind, again. To the wonderful reception I get whenever I come to San Francisco, of memories of all my old haunts, favourite hang-outs, dear friends.

San Francisco felt like home when I lived there, and it still does.
Leaving brings out the same melancholy and separation, over and over again.

Which is not to say that Stockholm doesn't feel like home — they both do, and it is more than a little frustrating to be stretched out emotionally like this.

And it saddens me, right now, that I do not know when I will be returning to the Bay. Last two times I left, I had return dates in place. This time, there is nothing actually planned.

Au revoir, San Francisco, au revoir. Je t'aimerais toujours.

Inspired by my good friend @DRMacIver, I have now created a tumblr dedicated to my exploration of booze and other libations.

Follow, if you feel like it, http://sapores.tumblr.com

Went for North Carolina BBQ yesterday with culfinriel and the conference crowd. Serious amounts of Nom followed.

Also, it seems I am about to scoop one of the Stanford grad students. This is seriously unfortunate, and I'll be meeting with him today to figure out what we can do about it.

My darling amerikabrev gave me a professional studio photo session for my birthday. The result, after I b/w-ed it, is my new default icon.

After 4 years of marriage, the wedding photo DOES start to seem a bit aged.

Inspired by turnberryknkn's post about seeing the light at the end of his tunnel, for all my US friends, here are some major timings to keep track of in my life:

• Oct 5-10: Raleigh, NC.
  
• Oct 10-11: Lancaster, PA.
  
• Oct 11-15: Philadelphia, PA.
  
• Oct 15-16: Austin, TX.
  
• Oct 16-22: College Station, TX.
  
• Oct 23-27: Hanover, NH.
  
• Oct 27-Nov. 1: San Francisco, CA.
  

If you wanna meetup for a beer or something at some point — get in touch. Comments here, or emails to [username]@gmail.com are effective ways to reach me.

And I've settled on my travel plans for October.

Oct 6-9: Raleigh, NC.
10-11: Lancaster, PA.
12-15: Philadelphia, PA.
15: Austin
16-21: College Station (Texas A&M)
22: Austin
23-27: Dartmouth
28-Nov 1: SF/Bay.

If you're there when I'm there, give me a poke!!

I have now started settling in my apartment in Edinburgh, and along the way, I've stumbled across a number of things well worth documenting for the all-knowing interwebs.

The Bank Issue

I have enough friends who have moved to the UK to know what terrible travails are involved in getting setup with a bank account. First you wait, 3-4 weeks, for your first utility bill. Then, you bring it and your passport to the bank. Then, 2 weeks later, you finally have everything in place. Waiting two months for your first salary to materialize hasn't been unusual.

I tried to circumvent this with my move.

First, I tried applying to HSBC — who have their HSBC Passport: a bank account explicitly for immigrants. They do adress verification with utility bills from your OLD foreign adress, and thus you can get set early.

HSBC turned down my application. I fail their internal criteria for credit-worthiness, and they will not tell me how or why.

Second, I got in touch with Handelsbanken, where a very nice Edinburgh representative told me that since I'm a customer with Handelsbanken in Sweden, they can get me up and running quickly there. They'll even take a signed lease instead of a full on utility bill as proof of adress.

Being fully set this way, I went into RBS and BoS upon arrival, just to see whether anything could be done quicker.

BOTH had some secret tricks up their sleeves that immigrants aren't necessarily aware of.
At the RBS, they told me about a fast lane to adress verification: you can call up the HM Revenue and Customs (the UK tax agency), and request a form that provides proof of your taxation bracket (the name eludes me). They will then mail this to the adress you state; and this works as a proof of adress.

At the BoS, they told me about an account form they have — with only a debit card, and with severe penalties for misbehaving — but which takes, as proof of adress, the return of a card they send to your stated adress. This is the solution I ended up going with — it will take 1-2 weeks after setting foot in a BoS office until you are all set.

LycaMobile, phone numbers and porting

As I arrived, I picked up a SIM card from a corner store, just to have a phone I could be using. The phone number was particularly pleasing — and so I got quickly attached to it. However, the provider — Lyca Mobile quickly turned out to be not the best choice for me. They specialize in catering to the immigrant crowd, just like Lebara, and others, and so offer decent rates for calls abroad. However, with out infatuation with Rebtel, we don't need international calls to make international calls — so it would be a lot more helpful to have something that gives me cheap UK-calls, good internet access, and is well-established enough that Twitter recognizes them.

I found one: Vodafone has decent deals. And they told me what to do to keep my number — just get my PAC code from Lyca.

You see, the way porting works in Sweden (and thus the way I'm used to it working), you sign a piece of paper, and the phone company slugs it out with your old provider. The way it works in the UK, however, is that you get a code from your old provider and you give it to your new provider, and they then setup the changeover.

Lyca — it turns out — have a track record of being assholes about this. Once I got around to googling "Lycamobile PAC" I found no shortage of stories about the hoops they send customers through.

Now that I have gone far enough in the process to check things out, here's how it is supposed to go according to the industry regulations enforced by the Office of Communications (OfCom):

1. You call your customer service, and ask for a PAC code.
   
2. They read you your PAC code, or send it by SMS, or maybe even by paper mail — within 2h.
   
3. Done.
   

Here's what happened so far with Lyca:

1. On September 5, I call them and request a PAC code. They give me 20 questions about why I am changing provider, and then give me a reference number. Tell me to call back after 24h to get my code.
   
2. Today, September 7, I call them and request my PAC code. They start on the 20 questions again, and I give them the reference number. They tell me I need to submit a bank statement because my account is a "fancy number". I tell them it's insane and that I will be checking with OfCom about these practices.
   
3. I call OfCom, and describe the situation so far. They give me the flowchart above — with 2h maximum time for producing the code — and will now start pressuring Lyca to give me my damn PAC number. If I haven't received it within 24h, I am to call back and escalate my complaint.
   

I'll update once I know whether OfCom pressure has any effect.

As so often otherwise, stolen from silmaril .

The rules: Bold the ones you've read, italicize the one you started. Put commentary in parentheses.

( Here be books )

May 14 this year, the triennal Quarnevalen occurred again in Stockholm. I had the good fortune of finding a nice spot early on in this student parade, and was able to take a number of nice pictures.

Here, I'd like to use these pictures as a base for explaining swedish student culture in general and Quarnevalen in particular to friends abroad, and in particular to friends within the hacker/maker culture.

( Swedish students )

Calling makers and hackers

The next Quarneval is in 2014. As evidenced by the club Mosquito, and by the several non-student orchestras walking the parade, being a student is not a prerequisite to participate. In three years, we should be able to assemble a cool crowd of hackers and makers, and get some sort of living arrangements cleared out et.c. and build a kick-ass hackers of the world float. What do y'all say?

Nicked off of reynardo and lederhosen.

Below are lyrics from the first 15 songs to show up.

I warn you now - my choices are somewhat eclectic, and this does not in the slightest cover the range I listen to. But see if you can work out the song from the lyrics. I've gone with the first few lines unless they particularly mention the song's title. I have skipped a number of instrumental pieces.

It now is time for the great reveal: all titles/artists have been added below.

( And here there be music. )

Some of you, my dear readers here, are actually in the Bay area. If you are, I would be VERY happy if you were able to make it to my going-away-party on April 23 at Noisebridge. I'll try to gather everyone who knows me or amerikabrev for a send-off (and cleaning out of my house bar too) the way we like to do it. Brownies, games and tea, as well as some booze and LOTS of interesting and cool people will be there. Will you?

http://nburl.net/23apr11

Again following in the footsteps of reynardo, here are some hints for this lyrics challenge:

( Hints )

Yesterday I was social for the first time. Good fun was had, and our three-four american guests were properly exposed to Swedish humor and social realism (sorry pastwatcher for that...).

Today was the first day I really seemed awake and alert through the day. I've been on percocet nights and acetaminophen days the entire weekend. Today I haven't taken percocet since 8am, AND I started swallowing whole pills as the evening drew near.

My antibiotics, though, I'll still crush and eat with chocolate pudding. Those things are bloody huge.

The next highlight we're supposed to look forward to is the flaking off of my scabs. That sounds like a singularly unpleasant exercise, and it's supposed to happen this coming week some time. After that, things are almost back to normal, with pain sinking away swiftly.

I have neglected keeping y'all up to date. If you read my facebook or my twitter, you already know this.

Today has been one of the weirdeest days of my life. At ~11am-noon, I was put under anaesthetic, and in what I'm told was a quite successful procedure, my tonsils and adenoids were removed, my septum realigned, my palate and uvula resculpted and my turbinators reduced. All in all, a full remodel of my nose and throat, complete with an updated wallpaper!

I've spent the last 18h hungry, dehydrated and offline. I've spent the last 6 or so awake again from after the surgery, in a mixture of oddball hilarity, zonked out on morphine, eating all the icechips I could melt and dealing with, well, pain that needs morphine every hour on the hour.

I'm still hungry, but apparently I'm doing rather well. So well, in fact, that I now grabbed the computer for some browsing for the first time in spectacularly long.

See all y'all when I'm back on my feet.

Bolded where applicable. Some questions answered for what I did, rather than what I do.

( My answers )

So it turns out my english conforms to the american english dialect spoken in( ... )

I just lay myself down to sleep, so that I'll be fresh and amazing for my job interview tomorrow.

And took with me, as a last thing to read, Tom Leinster's 2-page paper “Sheaves do not belong to algebraic geometry”.

And now I'm back out of bed, in front of my computer again. That punchline is amazing. Inspiring. Dangerous even. The paper makes me think about how these constructions would play out in type theory — especially since the sheafification observation is “really” (in some sense) about final monad algebras (or initial comonad coalgebras), and thus hooks in neatly with Lambek's Lemma and with how Haskell does type definitions.

And the construction of sheaves and their equivalences to étale spaces is SO much clearer in Leinster's categorical language than most treatments I've read so far.

Dammit! I don't have time to sit down and port this paper to Haskell! I have sleeping to do!!

…or How Robert M. Pirsig broke my brain…
…or Those Books that alter your reality while you read them…

I finally picked up ZAMM a few weeks back. Insisted we buy the bargain books version at Borders in spite of amerikabrev trying to temper my shopping lusts. And then I devoured the book. Not satisfied with just reading the book, I then constructed a Google Map with the path travelled, and immediately ordered Lila from Amazon.

I have now, just now in fact, read through Lila as well. I'm less impressed and less moved by it than I was by ZAMM — to a large extent because it reads more like a tome of philosophy, and less like ZAMM did: longer quotes from literature, and more and larger chunks of solid philosophizing trying to apply insights from the previous book to moral philosophy. This makes it less inspiring since it's less of discovering thoughts and more of applying them.

However, I did notice as I read these similarities to other books I've read. Pirsig does the same (kinda backhanded) trick that Ayn Rand does in embedding his philosophy into novels. And at least ZAMM had the same reality-altering effects on me (though softer) that the Illuminatus! trilogy had on my first read through. (Pehr, Jon, you both probably remember that Krakow trip and my sudden descent into numerology?)

Just as with Rand and just as with Illuminatus! though, I'm not sure I buy it. Not when I come out of the reading trance again. Part of it is that I'm just not all that interested in metaphysics — I have a very materialistic outlook, and don't view the Hunt For The Ultimate Buildingblocks as all that relevant to my current life. As such, Pirsig's “Everything is just reified Quality” becomes a neat but irrelevant thesis in much the same way that most religions do. The parts I enjoyed — in both books, actually — are the ones where Pirsig is commenting on Academia, and on Didactics, while the increasingly dense ruminations on the defintiion and preponderance of Quality felt, well, neat but at times rather academic.

My fault, almost certainly, is to read it in my 30s and not in my teens, when I was moldable. Just like with Rand, I came too late to the party to be utterly consumed at any length by the texts…

Christmas goose.

Stuffed with cornbread stuffing enriched with:
* prunes soaked in mulled wine
* cashew nuts
* grated granny smith apples
* pecan nuts

Glazed with:
* Molasses
* Lingonberry juice concentrate
* Gingerbread spices — cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cumin

Roasted in 325ºF for about 3-3.5 hours, until a leg thermometer read 165ºF. Subsequently allowed to cool, transported, and crisped in 425ºF for about 10 minutes with refreshed glaze, until it smelled like toffee.

Incredibly nommy.

And as a comparative backdrop to my previous post, here are the first tweets of each month, through 2010:

January Thank you #python for reminding me why #haskell is the only decent programming language IRC channel around.

February michiexile‎ just bought 90 uranium glass beads, fluorescent in black light. Now to figure out what to do with them...

March @k8nowak Is the derivation of that fact accessible?

April @sc_k Heck - I sat a seder this year, and I eat lamb and eggs for easter regularly. It's CULTURAL, not RELIGIOUS!

May Typing up solutions for the practice midterm. Some of these problems might be a little bit involved...

June @tyrsalvia I love that version of that song!!

July Editing photos from Greece. White marble and more white marble.

August Nawwwwwwww! According to a student email, my course made him consider a (math-heavy) Economics major instead of avoiding all math classes.

September @furrygirl Quite! What would you say is the best part of America? And what should we do with squirrels instead? #definitelyaforeignerhere.

October @divbyzero I once ran into an article with the three main quadratic identities. Written with “filled star” and “unfilled star” as variables.

November Quote from [url] . So the TSA designs their procedures based on the impression they give, not on their functionality?

December Loving the occasionally odd color scapes in Amélie.

Not as confident about these being accurate as I am with the LiveJournal posts — twitter is lacking in history features, and the Google Realtime search was … finicky. However, I do notice that the threshold for posting is MUCH lower on twitter than on LiveJournal, and that a lot more sits in conversations with other people, rather than statements on their own.

As usual, it is from silmaril I take my cues. Here's what's been going on for me in 2010 — as captured by first sentences of first post of every month.


January A new year.
An retrospective and prospective post about decades past and future.

February But #House doesn't do funded research does he?
My twitter feed, reacting to someone else tweeting about the latest House MD episode

March Today I went to the anarchist book faire in the Golden Gate Park.
All of March had exactly one post, and it was complaining about the anarchist sub-culture.

April Sometimes I have these instances where my life takes on a strong taste of having been scripted by primetime TV series authors...
Once I shut off the twitter-to-LiveJournal feed, my posting waned egregiously. Only a single post in April too.

May Dearest @Susanne Vejdemo, dearest amerikabrev, it's been a decade.
Commemorating a decade as a committed couple. The other post that same day was a photographic manifesto.

June I'm in Ναύπακτοϛ for the International Conference on Topology and its Applications; and that is as good a reason as any to write a little Travelogue.
Posting picked up once conference travel got started.

July There are more pictures.
Continuing the travelogue started above.

August With inspiration from my beloved amerikabrev, here's the lyrics, and a rough translation (by me) thereof, of one of the ABSOLUTELY biggest summer hits of all time.
A view into the Swedish psyche.

September Dear Editor. I'm a 3rd year grad student. Some of my friends say there is no Bourbaki. My advisor says “If you see the personality in the lemmas, it's so.” Please tell me the truth: Is there a Bourbaki?
And we're back to once a month. This was the “Yes Virginia, there IS a Bourbaki” random burst of creativity. I picked more than one sentence from this just to get the mood.

October On Richmond at Dufferin in London, ON, you'll find the neat little restaurant Garlic's.

November As stolen from fluffboll who took it from a number of Facebook friends of hers.

December: As usual, it is from silmaril I take my cues.

Why, yes, that last one is self-referential. As it turns out, my LiveJournaling has waned a bit lately — in part due to increased twitter activity, and to a large extent due to frantic, but not very creative or mind-engaging activities attacking the academic job market this year.

This past year I've gone low traffic on my LiveJournal, and almost no traffic on my mathematics blog (last two posts are from August and April). On the other hand, I post daily on my Twitter, and I've started a daily photo blog, that I'm still maintaining. My LiveJournal posts are moved explicitly by engaging ideas that capture me enough to sit down and do something about them — between the summer travelogue and the bursts of creativity (August, September) I feel that possibly the quality of my posts has gone up. At least compared to the twitter feed.

What do you think?

From pozorvlak who got it from fanf. ( I've marked my own competency levels, much in the style of pozorvlak )

As stolen from fluffboll who took it from a number of Facebook friends of hers.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Books owned and/or partly read are in italics. Mark books you want to read with an X.

( I've read 35 of them. )

On Richmond at Dufferin in London, ON, you'll find the neat little restaurant Garlic's. They live up to their name — not quite as insistent on the garlic as Garlic and Shot's in Stockholm, they still emphasize the garlic in their menu composition.

I had the Roasted garlic and onion bisque, and then their Chicken caesar salad. The soup was divine. Fantastic. Beyond words. Garlic pointed but not overwhelming, and a sweetness popping out with the chive oil that was quite remarkable. The bread served with it must have been sweetened with something remarkable — the taste still lingers, one salad and a brisk walk back to the hotel later. Maybe maple syrup? And then a very … cleanly executed caesar salad. The one thing that made me really pay attention to that was the croutons: far from the usual cubes, they had shaved the bread before drying it, leading to wafer-thin, gorgeous little chips of crouton bread, that far better complemented the taste of the sauces with their crunch than croutons usually do.

Amazing restaurant — if you're ever in London, ON, you should definitely pay the place a visit.

I place part of the blame for this on maradydd

Dear Editor. I'm a 3rd year grad student. Some of my friends say there is no Bourbaki. My advisor says “If you see the personality in the lemmas, it's so.” Please tell me the truth: Is there a Bourbaki?

Virginia, your friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be professors' or students', or Grothendieck's, are little. In both the constructive and classical topoi, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless Platonic world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Bourbaki. He exists as certainly as groups and rings and fields exist, and you know that they can be bounded and give to your papers their highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Bourbaki. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no Hilbert schemes then, no universes, no topoi to make categorical all our logic. We should have no formalisms, except in logic and set theory. The french style with which modern algebraic geometry drains the brains of our grad students would be tempered.

Not believe in Bourbaki! You might as well not believe in Euler! You might get your advisor to hire postdocs to re-prove all of Éléments I - IX to find Bourbaki in them, but even if they did not see the personality of Bourbaki in all of these books, what would that prove? Nobody sees Bourbaki, but that is no sign that there is no Bourbaki. The most real things in the world are those that neither grad students nor full professors can see. Did you ever read Euler in his original Latin? Of course not, but that's no proof that he didn't write it. Nobody can grasp all of mathematics on their own.

You may read through the entire code of Maple and see what makes the computations work, but there is a veil covering the theoretic world which not even Grothendieck, nor even the united strength of all the Fields medalists that ever lived, could tear apart. Only stringence, formalism, elegance, compact writing, empty induction base cases, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Bourbaki! Thank Erdös! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the hearts of grad students.

Together with a number of close friends (maradydd, enochsmiles, Gabi & krfsm), I have decided to honor my 30th birthday (upcoming!) by starting a group photoblog.

At http://3x365.blogspot.com/ we shall all be posting one photo each day, taken within the 7 days preceding publication, and however much commentary we feel like adding to the photo. I hereby invite all of you to come there, watch our progress, our development, and join in the conversation.

As for me, I expect the hereby forced habitual photography to help me develop as a photographer, grow in my expression, and produce a decent amount of worthwhile pictures.

With inspiration from my beloved amerikabrev, here's the lyrics, and a rough translation (by me) thereof, of one of the ABSOLUTELY biggest summer hits of all time. This is our Under the boardwalk, our Seasons in the sun, the one evergreen everybody always sings along with, and that on a fundamental level represents SUMMER to the Swedes.

Sommaren är kort
Inte ett moln så långt ögat kan nå, inte en droppe regn på flera dar. Med en glass i min mun och i sandaler av plast går jag i solen och tänker på dig. Ljusblåa dagar seglar förbi.	Nary a cloud as far as the eye can spy, not a drop of rain for the last several days. With an icecream in my mouth and in plastic flipflops, I walk in the sun and think about you. Light blue days sail by.
Chorus: Sommaren är kort. Det mesta regnar bort. Men nu är den här, så ta för dig, solen skiner i dag.	Chorus: The summer is short. Most of it rains away. But it's here now - so grab all you can: the sun shines today.
Hösten kommer snart, det går med vindens fart, så lyssna på mej: Solen skiner kanske bara i dag.	Fall comes soon, it approaches like the wind, so listen to me: the sun may shine perchance only today.
Vattnet är varm och luften står still, jag sitter i skuggan läser gårdagens blad. Snart är det dags för ett dopp i det blå, få bort sanden mellan tårna och svalka min kropp.	The water is warm and the air stands still, I'm sitting in the shadow, reading yesterday's news. Soon it'll be time for a swim in the blue, clear out the sand between my toes and cool down my body.
Chorus: Sommaren är kort. Det mesta regnar bort. Men nu är den här, så ta för dig, solen skiner i dag.	Chorus: The summer is short. Most of it rains away. But it's here now - so grab all you can: the sun shines today.
Hösten kommer snart, det går med vindens fart, så lyssna på mej: Solen skiner kanske bara i dag.	Fall comes soon, it approaches like the wind, so listen to me: the sun may shine perchance only today.

Here another one of the Lyrics Game. This time, all are covers, and I'm looking for title, original artist and the cover I have in mind. As usual, you will get first lines for all songs, and each of the three information bits, if correct, will earn you one point.

I will unscreen comments as they are checked for correctness; any comments that have arrived before I unscreen are eligible for the points, any that come later with the same information are not. I forgot to set the flag to screen comments. Oops.

1. There are places I’ll remember
   In My Life, orig. by The Beatles, covered by Johnny Cash
   lederhosen all, silmaril orig. and title, longobord orig.
   
2. I hear there was a secret chord
   Hallelujah, orig. by Leonard Cohen, covered by Jeff Buckley
   reynardo picked the right cover, but it was all mentioned by longobord, maradydd, lederhosen, and all but the cover by silmaril.
   
3. And what costume shall the poor girl wear
   All tomorrow's parties, orig. by Velvet Underground and Nico covered by Apoptygma Berzerk.
   lederhosen and reynardo picked the title. krfsm picked all artists.
   
4. I hurt myself today
   Hurt orig. by Nine Inch Nails in the cover by Johnny Cash.
   lederhosen, longobord, reynardo, maradydd picked it all.
   
5. Riders on the storm
   Riders on the storm orig. by The Doors covered by Infected Mushroom
   lederhosen, reynardo and silmaril picked title and orig. artist. longobord picked all three.
   
6. Your own personal Jesus
   Personal Jesus, orig. by Depeche Mode covered by Johnny Cash
   lederhosen, longobord and maradydd picked all, reynardo picked title and original artist right.
   
7. Come with me into the trees
   Stripped, orig. by Depeche Mode covered by Rammstein
   reynardo and lederhosen picked this.
   
8. When I was seventeen
   It was a very good year, covered by Robbie Williams
   reynardo picked the title, dominicflandry picked the cover artist.
   
9. Mesdames et messieurs, nos avons l'honneur ce soir
   de vous presenter la nouvelle collection de:
   Das Model orig. by Kraftwerk cover by Rammstein
   All picked by fluffboll.
   
10. How lucky can one guy be?
    Ain't that a kick to the head, orig. by Dean Martin, covered by Robbie Williams
    dominicflandry picked it all.
    

I won't tell you not to google; but if you do and then realize you should have known, give the other contestants some time to think of it of their own before you submit? Also, just googling it all is too easy, and not quite sportsmanlike, is it?

For 5, we're still seeking the cover artist, who released the cover/remix on their latest studio album in 2009.

For 8, we're still seeking the original artist.

Inspired by xthread, a lyrics game of my own. I'll post the first lines of a number of songs, and it is your tasks to guess song & artist. Search engines are cheating, but digging through your own music collections is by far kosher. Comments are screened, but will get unscreened as soon as I get around to reviewing them.

1p for right artist. 1p for right song. If it's a cover, 1p for original artist too; though this shouldn't be an issue with these songs unless I missed something subtle. Points are handed out to everyone until the first correct answers have been unscreened, after which no additional points are available for that answer.

One day later, I'm following xthread's treatment and adding a second line of lyrics to the ones still unguessed.

Another day goes by, and I'll add more lines. I'm a little surprised that this year's BIG summer plague in Europe at #7 resonates with no-body at all.

Aaaaand it is time for a wrapup. Final scores are:
awahlbom: 6p
krfsm: 3p
reynardo: 2p
lederhosen: 2p
stripecat: 1p

And here are the answers:

1. Man har borrat genom bergen för att finna rikedom
   Adolphson & Falk: Hav. awahlbom
   
2. Some bright morning when this life is over
   I'll fly away.
   Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch: Fly Away krfsm
   
3. You came to me this morning, you handled me like meat
   You'll have to be a man to know how good that feels, how sweet.
   My mirror twin, my next of kin, I'd know you in my sleep
   Leonard Cohen: Reciting the poem that A thousand kisses deep is based on, on the London Concert album.
   
4. He was a famous trumpet man from out Chicago way
   The Andrew Sisters: Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. reynardo
   
5. I met him out for dinner on a Friday night
   Christina Aguilera. Candyman stripecat.
   
6. Inter Deum et Diavolum semper Musica ist
   Durch Feuer und Glut Ein Heulen, Jammern, Kreischen
   Corvus Corax: Tanzwut krfsm.
   
7. Qui dit étude dit travail
   Qui dit taf te dit les thunes
   Qui dit argent dit dépenses,
   Stromae: Alors on danse
   
8. Hey, heute ist wieder eine der verdammten Tage
   Die ich kaum ertrage und mich ständig selber frage
   Warum mich all diese gefühle plagen, die ich nicht kannte oder nur von hören-sagen
   Die fantastischen Vier: Sie ist Weg
   
9. Ich träume ich treff dich ganz tief unten
   Einstürzende Neubauten: Stella Maris. awahlbom
   
10. O crown of light, O darkened one
    I never thought we'd meet
    You kiss my lips, and then you're gone
    Leonard Cohen: Boogie Street
    
11. Er war ein Punker und er lebte in der grossen Stadt
    Falco: Rock me Amadeus. awahlbom
    
12. I ride across the desert on my camel
    Spinal Tap: Clam Caravan. lederhosen
    

Hints: #3 and #10 are related. #4 and #5 are related. #7 nauseates Europeans by now.

Once we went to Delphi, travel and tourism and spending time with the two beautiful women in my entourage took up so much time no more photo blogging was done - there was one additional rant on cars in part 4, but all our fantastic photos were put on hold.

Now I've been back to Sweden almost a week, and it's time to wrap up this Greece thing with some more narrated photographs.

We went, as I mentioned above, to Delphi and watched the Apollonic temple grounds there. We also met up with Erica, amerikabrev's colleague from Michigan, who was spending her summer in Greece taking language courses and attending conferences as much as she could possibly get away with.

Thus, my entourage consisted of these:

who both joined me in the Alfa Romeo to swoop down the Greek roads at speed. After a while of driving, amerikabrev took to chastising me whenever the speedometer'd drop below 120km/h or so.

The apollonic temple had reconstructed treasuries


mystic tunnels




an apollonic temple


an amphitheatre


and a stadion


After Delphi, we spent some more time in Nafpaktos before driving through the Langhada pass, past the point where the Spartans'd sacrifice their infirm and unworthy babies...


and through roads that had just barely been carved out from the rock that supported the asphalt


down to Mystras, just outside Sparta. A teeming city in Byzanthine Greece, Mystras had houses EVERYWHERE. A whole hilltop was covered, littered, swarming with houses and housing, not an inch left unused. Then it fell into disuse, disrepair and finally ruin.




We walked through the ruins. We frolicked among the overgrown stones. And we marveled at the beauty.






Quite definitely a favourite was the Hagia Sophia; with halfway preserved paintings inside, and a well-preserved architecture.




I made sure to take some more technically experimental photos - and am rather proud of my two Mystras HDR photos. Both of these photos were produced by taking handheld bracketed shots at exposure, +2ev and -2, and then processed into HDR images with judicious help from my father and his Photoshop CS5.


This is an archway in the Hagia Sophia, with a view out over a sunlit column and then the Spartan plains behind it. Each of the component photos was completely hopeless, and not a particularly inspired view in itself - precisely because the extreme dynamic range from the shadowy side room in the archway to the blindingly bright sunlit column behind the archway; but in the HDR version, we see everything - possibly at the price of slightly less blinding feelings from the sunlit portions.


Again, an inherent dynamic range that makes it completely unusable in any single exposure. Behind the ivy-clad wall ruin, the sun burst through the clouds in that magical way it does sometimes; and the composition looked gorgeous in real life. And again, if the foreground was to be recognized, the sky blew out, and if the sky was well-exposed, the foreground vanished. HDR to the rescue - we stacked three bracketed exposures, and then added a masked exposure lift to the foreground, just to get rid of remaining murky tones.

After Mystras, we went to Sparta, where we slept in a hotel just next to an outdoor movie theatre

and looked at the Leonidas statue


And after Sparta we went to Mycenae, with its Very Mythical ruins, its beautiful windblown olive trees

and the dazzling, fantastic, impressive, magic grave chamber of Agamemnon


After Mycenae, Epidavros; known for its still in use amphitheatres, and its old Ascleipos sanctuary:





As a final stop, we went to Athens. We saw weird signs (IllegalSigns.gov.gr? WTF?!), the Acropolis, cute alleys, the Acropolis, the new olympic stadion (from 189x), the Acropolis, weird little pubs and the Acropolis.


I'll leave you with the panorama we did. Again, the judicious and extensive editing help from my father and his CS5 came in handy as we stitched up 5 handheld photos to capture all of the Parthenon's east façade. Stitching made it extreme fisheye, and also weird perspective, so we straightened it as best as Photoshop would let us, and then erased some blank wedges, and a poor tourist guide who had moved too much for the stitching to handle it.

Quite probably the most heavily retouched photo I've done so far.

There are more pictures. Alas, though, there is much less free time and much more Awesome Things To See, so editing and uploading of my pictures from Delphi, from Mystras, from Mycenae, from Epidavros and from Athens will all have to wait until I'm no longer in Greece.

There will be an epic pictorial epilogue to the travelogue however.

Just as you might have divined from the above list of places I have yet to upload pictures from, the last few days have been epic. Fantastic. Intense. Amazing. We've seen the ruins of Delphi, and failed to find the crevice with the noxious fumes. We've seen the Byzantine city of Mystras - well, about half of it, because they closed down and I had to be fed (URGENTLY!)... We've seen the ruins of Mycenae with the lion gate, and the gate that Oresthes fled through and the site of the throne that Agamemnon sat on and... We've seen the ancient site of Epidavros, and sat in the gigantic amphitheatre as a greek theatre group put on Ἱππῆς by Ἀριστοφάνης. We read most of the play in translation in advance, so we could follow along in the somewhat physical comedy even as the actors spoke a language most of us knew nothing of at all. We've also seen Old Epidavros - a gorgeously cute little seaside resort that is everything Nafpaktos fails to be: quaint, cute, cuddly, inviting. And driven through New Epidavros, a much more garish and neon-coloured seaside resort. And we've seen Athens, the Acropolis museum, the odd and friendly Spanish Pirates themed Rock Bar out in a weird corner of the city.

Along the way, I'm convinced of several things. One of them being that I actually am a better driver now than when we got here. After all, I've survived on roads filled with greek drivers!! Key things I have learned include "Ignore road signs!" - everyone else does. If I were to drive at the speed limit, say, I'd have an annoyed greek driver glued to my rear bumper within minutes. Driving 10km/h above? Same thing. 20km/h above? Now we're talking - as long as this translates to something under 100km/h total, I'm pretty much fine, and driving at traffic speed. If the road is marked 80km/h and up, however, traffic flow ranges all the way up to 50km/h over the limit. And this includes the 130km/h freeways.

Unrelatedly? It's FUN to drive an Alfa Romeo.

As the second day of the conference rolled around, so did Every Single Interesting Talk. Including my own. I had two collisions - my talk coincided with a digital topology talk, and two of the other interesting talks collided with each other.

However, the first talk turned out to be from someone who took 'topology' to mean anything that shares that name, and gave a talk ostensibly about network topologies in 4G phone networks, but that turned out to be all about how bandwidth is OMG important for cellphones. Sole interesting thing: he said 'a, n, b' for 'α, ν, β' throughout.

The second talk was a no-show.

The third talk was my own. It went reasonably well - but I've been realizing as this conference progresses that I should have submitted the title "Topological Data Analysis" and the abstract "I will describe some of the current ongoing research into using algebraic topological methods for the analysis of large datasets, with applications to medicine, sensor network planning and elsewhere." instead of the WAY too specialized title/abstract I did give.

It wasn't a catastrophe - I had well over 10 attendees in the audience. Most of them seemed rather bored though. The big payout was the two students who came up to me afterwards, raving about how interesting it was, and asking for more sources for later.

The fourth talk was a technical talk on digital topology, and the fifth a no-show, at which point I got fed-up, and went to go swimming with amerikabrev instead.

That afternoon was the conference excursion - buses to Olympia, and guided tours there. We thought we could do better than that, and instead took the car (OMG! Alfa Romeo! Also: OMG! Greek drivers!) to Olympia, got in at the student rate, and joined the guided tour anyway.

We saw the (once glorious) temple to Zeus.



and the Phillipeon - started by King Phillip, and finished by his son, Alexander the Great


We walked through the entrance arch out onto the olympic Stadion

which is a rather humbling experience: this arch has been in use for over 1100 years, and another millenium or two later, the thing still stands, solid as ever.

We saw Phideas workshop, which was built in order for Phideas to be able to build the very modular Zeus statue in ivory and gold on a wooden skeleton that greeted the visitors to the Zeus temple - it was converted to a church, and thus still mostly stands.

just like some other - surprisingly well-kept structures


After walking through the archeological site, we went to the museum, and saw Nike, and Hermes of Praxiteles, who the guide promised all the women, with a suggestive waggling of her eyebrows, was a particular hunk.


Of course, I won't go places without trying for at least one more artistic photograph. These leaves and seed pods with the sunlight coming through became particularly nice


Then, the day after, it was time for the conference dinner. We were to convene at 8pm for transport to an undisclosed location. This turned out to be a tavern with an amphitheater a little bit outside Rio, where we first were treated to (almost 1.5h of) traditional greek dances from an amateur dance troupe, and then (once we realized the dancing simply wouldn't stop, and the food had already begun) some really nice greek buffet food.

By the time we got to the food, we were ravenous, and by the time we were done with the food, and the DJ started up the disco with a massive 60s medley (averaging about 8 bars from each song), we were exhausted and really only about going home and sleeping. Some judicious nudging from some of the conference goers later, a bus gradually filled up and went back to Nafpaktos with the more boring conference goers.

Today: two lectures, conference closing ceremony and then Delphi, where we'll meet up with one of Susanne's study friends from Ypsilanti and go tour Peloponnesos with her.

First things first: I promised you a photo of the night-lit bridge. This one was taken with a 30s exposure from the beach outside our hotel; resting on a bench for stability.



Now, the conference has started. Alas, my first night, I was faaar to zonked out by travel fatigue, conference fatigue, and spending the first night together with my wife in over a month. Result? For a conference where everything of interest happened before 11am, I woke up at noon. I got myself out for the talk by Sergey Matveev though - very interesting! He applies the Diamond Lemma by Newman to get reduction systems for collections of knots in generic manifolds and orbifolds, and does surgery to simplify the knots. Doing this, he's been able to prove prime decomposition theorems in a number of previously unproven settings - and construct a counterexample for a few interesting settings.

Up today? ALL the really interesting talks of the conference. In a single morning marathon. Good thing I'm awake early enough to catch the hotel breakfast and get there on time today at least. I'll be speaking 3rd.

But before I leave? Have some more pictures. An alchemical bar sign, and my beautiful wife:





TTFN

I'm in Ναύπακτοϛ for the International Conference on Topology and its Applications; and that is as good a reason as any to write a little Travelogue. For now, let me tell you about cars.

My beloved amerikabrev came down to Athens just after me, so that she could enjoy our hotel while I'd be conferencing, and then join me for a bit of Touristing In Greece once the conference is done. So I've booked a rental car through this one awesome Swedish car rental site that deals with insurance all-inclusive, and STILL manages to get you a complete and utter bargain. We pay about €250 for 9 days rental, effectively without ANY deductible. (if we DO need the insurance, we get the deductible back afterwards).

And then the surprises started coming. We first got upgraded from mid-level Economy class to a 7-seat big-as-a-bus Fiat; with the caveat that if we didn't like that one, we could ask for a different car in the lot. Once we saw it, we IMMEDIATELY decided to opt for a different car - it wouldn't fit all our luggage, and had WAY too much space for the 2-3 people we'd have in the car.

So, the rental guy says, if the Fiat was too big, maybe this one won't do either? This one Alfa Romeo? Hightech-y? Gadget-y? HUGE trunk, the typical Alfa Romeo rotated speed gauge (you think you're doing 50kmh, based on the angle? Think again - π radians means you're doing 100kmh...), speed, acceleration, handling....

We took the Alfa.

And Oh my GOODNESS. She's SUCH a joy to drive you'd hardly believe it. Except for you, dad, I know you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Suited up with the car, we took off. And most of the time, had a rather leisurely drive along the 4, no 3, no 2 lane wide side of the highway. Until we decided to stop for food, and amerikabrev tried to figure out where we were. She could find a place that looked right, but we couldn't POSSIBLY be there.

Yeeeeah. We were almost at Tripoli. Smack in the middle of the mountains of Peloponnesos. Far, far away from where we were headed. Time to backtrack 50km and get it right on the second time through Korinthos.

Which reminds me of the speed. The glorious speed. We gave up on speed limits early on, and decided instead to follow the traffic flow. Doing this put me at about 130-150kmh all the way back to Korinthos, so the 50km backtrack was about 20min before we were back on the right way again.

And then 2 lanes became 1, and the separation between directions vanished. At which point we realized one fundamental difference between our earlier car vacations and this one. Greeks drive like f*cking insane crazy psychopaths. Luckily, I spotted the VERY crowded passing that one guy tried to do as we approached from the other direction; it was a bit of a shock to see us go three wide on what amounts to a standard country road. And as it turns out, all the cars who try to stick to the speed limit drive almost exclusively on the shoulder. Why? So that everyone else can squeeze past no matter how much traffic is coming at you from the other direction - duh!

Eventually, the highway widened again as we were approaching Patras and the bridge over from Peloponnesos we needed to take to get to Nafpaktos. So we stopped at a Shell station, and unsure of whether the car turned off the lights automatically I turned off the headlights. One restroom visit later we pulled out and got going - only to IMMEDIATELY get waved down by a police patrol.

License? Registration? Where are you from? Father's name? Really? Father's name? Yes. Father's name. Well, my father is named Roland Johansson.

At which point the friendly policeman wielding the alcotester wrote down Roland under Patronymikon. Oh well. I blew clean, and was told to, please, turn on my headlights, mm'kay?

City driving turned out to be about as much fun as country highway driving - narrow, overcrowded dark streets with cars and pedestrians coming at you from all directions and not all that much clues as to where you're going, why, and how you'll get there. We'll let the car rest for a while during the conference, me-thinks.

More later, including - once I get a good shot of it - a night time shot of the gorgeously lit bridge we drove across. (for €12 bridge toll - no taxes means a constant paying of tolls all over the place for us...)