Saturday, November 25, 2006

The Crossing


One of the best books I've read in a number of years is Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing". I can't do it justisce with my paultry prose, so I'll just give some excerpts that I love. It's the
second book of a loose trilogy, with "All the Pretty Horses" and "Cities of the Plain". The language is rich and dark. Wonderful.

The boy didn't know if he understood or not. The old man went
on to say that the hunter was a different thing than men
supposed. He said that men believe the blood of the slain to
be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better.
He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it
knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world
save that which death has put there.
Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do
not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that
men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be
so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world
and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the
wind and all the animals that God has mad go to and fro yet
this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own
hands or they see that which they name and call out to one
another but the world between is invisible to them.


She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no
despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that
cored the world to its heart.

His father's eyes searched the coming of the night in the
deepening redness beyond the rim of the world and those eyes
seemed to contemplate with a terrible equanimity the cold and
the dark and the silence that moved upon him...


Riding like a young squire for all his rags. Carrying in his
belly the gift of the meal he'd received which both sustained
him and laid claim upon him. For the sharing of bread is not
such a simple thing nor its acknowledgment. Whatever thanks
be given, however spoke or written down.

She said that it was an American who had lost his way and
the man nodded. He turned away and the weathercreased face
caught for a moment the light from the oil lamp. There were no
eyes in his sockets and the lids were pinched shut so that he
wore a constant look of painful selfabsorption. As if old
errors preoccupied him.

She blessed herself and bent and reached and took hold of the
rag that bound the poultice and lifted it and slid her thumb
beneath the poultice and pulled it away. It was of matted
weeds and dark with blood and it came away unwillingly. Like
something that had been feeding there.


He prodded the ashes with a stick. The few red coals that
turned up in the fire's black heart seemed secret and
improbable. Like the eyes of things disturbed that had best
been left alone.

Hemorrhaging Young People

I love that word! I almost choked on my cereal when I read it.

From the NY Times today

...That disparity was evident in a report released this week by the Metropolitan Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, which showed Atlanta leading the pack among big cities (at attracting young professionals), while other metro areas, like Philadelphia, hemorrhaged young people from 1990 to 2000.

Friday, November 10, 2006

A candle in low gravity



A nice picture of a candle flame in low gravity. No one
really knew if a candle would burn in space, due to the lack
of convection to supply new oxygen. There is still diffusion,
but is it enough to keep the candle lit? Here's a picture
of a candle burning (cool) in low gravity. In space, the
flame is a sphere.

Friday, November 03, 2006

MikTex for Mac/Unix

I was happy to discover that Christian Schenk ported the MikTex Latex package manager mpm to Unix/Mac. All you need to build/install is here:

Installation
(Grep for "mpm")

and here is the

HOWTO

It's great to not have to manage your own tex hierarchy! Thanks Christian...

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Babelfish discrimination

I'm trying to write an email to a friend in Paris.
I tried to use Babblefish to help out.
This is a website that roughly translates between
different human languages.
One of the sentences in my email was:
"I am in Pittsburgh." Even I know
how to translate this one. Babblefish returned an
error message. Three times. Then I tried changing
"Pittsburgh" to "New York" and it worked perfectly:
"Je suis à New York". I tried some other cities too.
You can even say you are in Newark.

Monday, August 07, 2006

Eyes on the Prize, held hostage

A bit of infuriating news. The excellent documentary
Eyes on the Prize, about the Civil Rights Movement is
not being distributed (indeed, has not been for 10 years)
because of copyright issues.
If you can have your community organize a screening .
I hope to do so when I get back to Pittsburgh in September.


Friday, July 14, 2006

Hawthorne and Bronte

English books are decidedly more expensive here. I'm thus
sticking to the "Penguin Popular Classics" series. It's
shocking how few I've read. I read the Scarlet Letter
(1850) and Jane Eyre (1847) on my trip to Spain.
The Hawthorne was much better than I remembered it. The
writing is enchanting, if somewhat moralizing. The
situations are a bit ridiculous (dying on the scaffold?),
but I guess that was the norm in those days. Some nice
passages:

"The heat that had formerly pervaded his nature, and which
was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that flashes and
flickers in a blaze; but, rather, a deep, red glow, as of
iron in a furnace."

"It is a good lesson--though it may often be a hard one--for
a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for
himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means,
to step aside of of the narrow circle in which his claims
are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of
significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves
and all he aims at."

"It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous
school of literature."

The contrast was remarkable, given the fact that they were
only written 3 years apart. Eyre reads much like my
favorite book, David Copperfield, but Eyre is a bit too
perfect for my taste. I delight in the peccadillos of
Dickens' protagonists, while she had none but naivete. The
writing is beautiful though, with none of the melodrama
of Hawthorne:

"No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on
them, and that I might gaze without being observed, than my
eyes were drawn involuntarily to his face; I could not keep
their lids under control: they would rise, and the irids
would fix on him. I looked, and had an acute pleasure in
looking - a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with
a steely point of agony: ..."

I'm on to Pride and Prejudice now...


Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Paris

One of the dangers of being in a country where you don't
know the language is that sour cream containers look a lot like
yogurt containers.
I went to the Louvre on Saturday night. All the museums
were open late and for free. It was really nice. So it's
not close to 5 Mets on the inside. Probably not even 2, but
it's still huge. I was lost about half my time in the museum.
The Rembrandt was great, there was a famous El Greco, and
I really appreciated De La Tour for the first time.
There was also this other Spanish painter whose name
I've forgotten. I'll have to go back.
I have no idea why everyone likes the Mona Lisa
so much. I find it totally emotion-less and dull. Not even
particularly well executed. Everyone's a critic I suppose...
It just irks me that that painting gets so much attention
while El Greco and Goya take a back seat.
French art is prominent, as was expected. I didn't
expect Raft of the Medusa to be so powerful, but
it was amazing. I'm generally not too keen on the
romantic stuff, but that is a great painting.
I went to Versailles on Sunday. The palace is gaudy, but
the gardens are splendid. I was thinking, mostly about the
Louvre, but Versailles as well, that it takes very rich people
like Rockefeller to build big museums and libraries, but it
takes a king to build a Louvre. Bill Gates could
build his own private Versailles, but even he couldn't
put together such awesome art in one place. (Hmm...well, maybe
he could...) That's one part of my leanings against
capitalism I've never come to terms with. Many of the great
parks, buildings and works of art have been paid for
by millionaires. If wealth were equal, there would be
no Rockefeller park upstate, or the amazing Carnegie library
system in Pittsburgh to name two worthy examples.
I went to an English used book store today, but
everything was really expensive. It was worth the trip to
hear some English dialogue. The store's called Shakespeare
and Co. Apparently Hemmingway used to hang out there.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Paris

Paris

I've been in Paris for 6 days now. My schedule has been
rather hectic, I've had weird jet lag, and no internet until
yesterday, so I've been mostly out of contact with my family
and friends. Sorry for this.

Address



I live in a college dormatory on the south border of the
city called Cite Universitaire. My room is fine. There's a
little bathroom, a little fridge, a little desk, a little
nightstand, and a little bed. Well, pretty much everything
else is little as well. My address, for those dying to send
me care packages and postcards is:

Sean McLaughlin
Cite Universitaire
Fondation Victor Lyon Chambre 004
29 Bld Jourdan
75014 Paris
France

I think there are some accents on some of the letters, but I
can never remember where they go. I think the zip code and
street are enough, though, so I wouldn't worry about that.

Phone


I have a phone on which I can receive incoming calls, but
outgoing calls are rather expensive, so I'll stick to Skype
as long as I can. The number is
014-313-6507
or at work
016-935-6965.
I'm at work between about 10 and 7.

Work



I work at a computer science research lab called Inria which
stands for Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et
Automatique. (One nice thing about French, unlike
Hungarian, is many times you can kind of figure out what the
words mean, as in this case.) The lab (one of Inria's 9) is located in
Orsay, a southern suburb. I take a train and a bus to get
there, which usually takes about 40 minutes. The lab is run
by Gerard Huet, the famous logician and computer scientist.

I work with Georges Gonthier,
who recently proved the Four Color Theorem in the Coq
theorem prover. He's been great to work with. I'll be
formalizing basic Galois theory in Coq this summer. His
eventual goal is, in the long run, the classification of
finite simple groups. This is a heroic undertaking of a
10K+ page collection of difficult group theory. He's
beginning with the Feit-Thompson theorem, which states that
any finite group of odd order is solvable. His wife is
a piano teacher, and I'm playing the Schumann Fantasy Pieces
with her in a concert next month.

Jet lag



Today is the first day I woke up to daylight. It was very
exciting. My sleep schedule for the last week has been roughly:
Bed by 9, awake at 2, back to sleep at 6, awake at 8 or 9.
I slept from 9:30 until 5:30 today. Almost normal!

Paris



(Warning: this section replete with cliches)
Paris is beautiful. Even apartment buildings in residential
districts often have architecturally interesting features.
There are old stone and bronze buildings and monuments
everywhere. The city is not large in area, but somehow
walking the couple miles from Notre Dame to the Louvre feels like
10, there is so much to experience. I haven't been in the
Louvre yet, but I am stunned by it's raw size. My first
estimate was 5 Metripolitan Museums, but I'm not sure how
accurate that is. It's strange to see a building so large
which has such ornate detail throughout. The Pei pyramid is
splendid, with a charming spiral staircase inside.

There's some modern architecture as well, though I haven't
seen much. The Bastille opera house is modern, though not
terribly interesting. It pales to the National
Opera house, which was in my high school art history book.

The people are generally very nice and helpful. I was
surprised by this, as everyone told me how curt they are
with foreigners. Perhaps it's because I'm usually not in
heavily touristy areas. Many speak a little English, but
few are fluent, which has been a problem. I did manage to
find a grocery store, open a bank account (not easy) and
find a store with the electronic supplies necessary to
charge my laptop and connect to the internet. I don't say
much in these situations, but it usually works out OK.
To find the bank I was led around the block by an old lady
who could understand what I needed to find, but didn't speak
English.

I tried to start French classes yesterday, but while the
classes started at 8, the registration closed at 6, so I
went to sleep instead. I think I will make an effort to
learn French, despite my pile of work I need to do, both for
Gonthier, Pfenning and old dodecahedral revisions ((sigh)).

The weather has been lovely so far.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Spring

Spring has arrived in Pittsburgh. I just went
on a walk through Schenley Park. It baffles me
how quickly the trees blossom. There was one tree
that had fallen across a path during a storm. It
was cut cleanly in two to unblock the path. The
upper half was blooming just as wildly as its
freestanding neighbors, as if it didn't know of
it's death sentence.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

A nice line from Schlesinger

Every so often a historian makes an observation
I can't help but record, if only for use at
parties... Here's one I read this morning,
which never occured to me:

Talking about the Sugar and Stamp Acts in the
pre-Revolutionary colonies, A. Schlesinger. Jr.
writes:

"The right to be texed in this way [only by Parliment,
as opposed to the King or House of Commons],
and in no other, as a hard-won prindciple of the British
constitution... It therefore seemed monsterous to
Americans that, in the Sugar Act and th eStamp Act,
Parliament, a body in which they had no representative,
had presumed to tax them. If Parliament could levy these
taxes, it could levy others. Once the precedent was
set, the colonists would be as badly off as England had
been before the rise of Parliament. They would,
ironically, be oppressed by the very body that had
rescued England from the same kind of tyranny.
"


Saturday, January 28, 2006

Georgetown Law

I've been lazy about writing lately, but this one deserves immediate
attention and praise.



Saturday, January 07, 2006

Taylor Branch's Third Volume

The third and last volume of Branch's civil rights trilogy
will be appearing on January 10. This is excellent timing,
as each of the books took nearly 10 years to write. Lucky
us! Imagine waiting 10 years between Harry Potter books
(gulp)... I highly encourage anyone with even remote
interest in US history to read these trenchant and detailed
examinations of this complex era.









King Strikes Back

The FBI's disgusting attacks on King and the Civil Rights Movement
continue into Branch's second book, Pillar of Fire.
At this point, around 1964, they have bugs in all of
King's residences and workplaces. Using these bugs they
deduce his travel plans and bug his hotel rooms and
automobiles. At a press conference, titled "King's Icy
Fury" by the SF Examiner (go Examiner!), King
challenges Hoover's incapable institution:

"It would be encouraging to us if Mr. Hoover and the FBI
would be as diligent in apprehending those responsible for
bombing churches and killing little children, as they are in
seeking out alleged communist infiltration in the civil
rights movement."

Branch: "These installations[wiretaps] would glean no
embarrassments the bureau could use, but wiretaps did
confirm that King had broken through Hoover's intimidation
as the rare adversary who refused to be bullied.
"I want to hit him hard. He made me hot, and I wanted to
get him."