walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2005-07-07 02:28 am
walkingshadow) wrote2005-07-07 02:28 am
Entry tags:
I'm not catching on fire today
The cat and dog fight like—well, you know. Turns out it's not just a figure of speech.
Together![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
malelia_honu and I blew off yoga on Tuesday and instead went shopping at Old Navy, where we each bought several items at wildly discounted prices. I watched House after dinner. Reactions to "Cursed":
Chase is going around being a nice guy and a good doctor, and people keep getting all up in his business. House is a sociopath with absolutely no respect for personal boundaries, so there are very few defenses against him, but Cameron was just as bad tonight, telling Chase that whatever his father had done shouldn't matter, and then pushing him to tell her what exactly his father had done. Chase kept his patience and his civility with her a whole lot better than I would have. It came off worse coming from Cameron because she purports to be a normal human being, socially speaking. House refuses to conform to social norms and so, while you're shocked and outraged the first few times you interact with him, you soon come to expect that he will not respect your privacy or show any kind of tact when dealing with you or others—he goes out of his way to deliver the opposite; he has no shame, so you can't be surprised when he acts accordingly. But Cameron can't get away with it. She's chastisable. You can point out to her that she's overstepping her bounds and she'll recognize it—or at least she should—and that's what made me so uncomfortable watching her: she was the one to whom I kept saying "shut up. Shut UP. Oh my god, shut up, shut, shut up." She should have known better, but she didn't.
Chase says exactly the same thing to Gabe at the end of the episode that Cameron said to Chase—of course you love him, he's your dad—but Chase knew all the relevant facts in his case, while Cameron did not, and I can't believe she expected Chase to tell her about them when she exasperatedly demanded to know. It follows that House would be the one Chase eventually tells the story to, partly because House isn't just the most curious man on the planet (self-described): he needs to know, and usually we understand and indulge that when we recognize it. It's just that House is such an overbearing and unlikable personality that we lose sympathy for his drive and grow disinclined to help him find out. The other part of the reason he tells House though, is probably that he knows House won't give him sympathy and won't try to talk him out of his resolute detachment.
What was interesting was House's mini- moral dilemma. That he would not stop bothering father and son or piecing together the clues until he figured out what was going on—that's par for the House course. But that he debated whether or not to tell Chase that his father was dying of cancer (and in the end decided not to, apparently based on what Chase told him about learning not to care in order to eliminate disappointment), that shows not only an awareness of the feelings of other people, but actual concern over them, and that's unusual for him. I'd like to sit down with all the episodes in order on my own time, watching for specific things on each viewing, like what exactly is his moral code? when exactly does and doesn't he care about other people? and where exactly does he give away his British accent?ciderpress has things to say about Hugh Laurie's American accent, if anyone's interested—and I'm interested if anyone knows of any discussion elsewhere.
Aside from all that, I'm confused about the dad of the leper, who I suppose is a leper himself: he was never a test pilot at all? How does one fake something like that? And where did his money come from? I guess he's built his fortunes from scratch since '87. And still there are no technicians in the hospital to run CT scans. In what world, I ask you.
I read Dira Sudis's Last Rites a while ago, but I just went back to it for a re-read now that things make more sense. You couldn't ask for a better follow-up to this episode.
And then I finished Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem. It's just what it says, the history of Fermat's Last Theorem and why (and how) it took 350 years to solve. They yadda-yadda-yaddad over most of the actual math, especially toward the end (which I can't help feeling a little put-out about, no matter that I wouldn't even begin to understand it), but it's a good story. In some ways it's a horrifying story: the lives of so many mathematicians seem tenuous at best and the tragedy of time is everywhere in abundant evidence. They often died young, or lived in turbulent times, or lived at the wrong time. Wiles himself finally expressed, explicitly, the danger of a linear, unidirectional timeline:
Isn't that terrifying? The odds of achieving self-actualization are infinitesimal in this world. Galois was a "respectable but not outstanding" student until he encountered mathematics at the age of sixteen; he was twice refused admittance to the École Polytechnique because of the "abruptness and lack of explanation in the oral examination"; he was caught up in the tumultuous politics of 1820s and '30s France and died in a duel at the age of twenty. Leonhard Euler's father was determined that his son should pursue a career in the Church—and he did, until their friends the Bernoullis intervened and persuaded the father that his son "had been born to calculate, not to preach."
What's so haunting isn't that Euler almost became a clergyman to fulfill his father's wishes instead of a mathematician who would later be referred to as "analysis incarnate" and of whom "the French academician François Arago said, 'Euler calculated without apparent effort as men breathe, or as eagles sustain themselves in the wind'"—but that for every touch-and-go story like his that ends happily, there must be countless other stories that end with the hapless protagonist going into his father's business without a word of complaint; or dying in infancy; or being too poor for school or books; or being born into a nomadic tribe, or before the advent of Pythagoras and the entire field of mathematics. The tragedy of time is that in the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci was able to design a helicopter that would have flown—what could he have done today? That kind of thing can keep me up at night.
More snippets from the book.:
p. 26
To appreciate the value of such [mathematical] proofs they should be compared with their poor relation, the scientific proof . . . Pythagoras showed that the truth of mathematics could be applied to the scientific world and provide it with a logical foundation. Mathematics gives science a rigorous beginning, and upon this infallible foundation scientists add inaccurate measurements and imperfect observations.
p. 66
Finally, a theorem is important if it solves a problem in an area of research that previously was hindered for the lack of one logical link. Many mathematicians have cried themselves to sleep knowing that they could achieve a major result if only they could establish one missing link in their chain of logic.
p. 84
The solution for Bombelli was to create a new number, i, called an imaginary number, which was simply defined as the solution to the question, What is the square root of negative one? This might seem like a cowardly solution to the problem, but it was no different to the way in which negative numbers were introduced. Faced with an otherwise unanswerable question, the Hindus merely defined -1 as the solution to the question, What is zero subtract one? It is easier to accept the concept of -1 only because we have experience of the analogous concept of "debt," whereas we have nothing in the real world to underpin the concept of an imaginary number. The seventeenth-century German mathematician Gottfried Liebniz elegantly described the strange nature of the imaginary number: "The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful recourse of the divine spirit, almost an amphibian being between being and non-being."
p. 275
Iwasawa theory on its own had been inadequate. The Kolyvagin-Flach method on its own was also inadequate. Together they complemented each other perfectly. It was a moment of inspiration that Wiles will never forget. As he recounted these moments, the memory was so powerful that he was moved to tears: "It was so indescribably beautiful; it was so simple and so elegant. I couldn't understand how I'd missed it and I just stared at it in disbelief for twenty minutes. Then during the day I walked around the department, and I kept coming back to my desk looking to see if it was still there. It was still there. I couldn't contain myself, I was so excited. It was the most important moment of my working life. Nothing I ever do again will mean as much."
p. 280
While science journalists eulogized over Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, few of them commented on the proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture that was inextricably linked to it. Few of them bothered to mention the contribution of Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura, the two Japanese mathematicians who back in the 1950s had sown the seeds for Wiles's work. Although Taniyama had committed suicide over thirty years earlier, his colleague Shimura was there to witness their conjecture proved. When asked for his reaction to the proof, Shimura gently smiled and in a restrained and dignified manner simply said, "I told you so."
That was all Tuesday; today was Wednesday, but I didn't do much with it. My mother and I ran errands, we made our own version of these shrimp pouches for dinner, and we started the seventh season of M*A*S*H*: BJ's moustache is truly hideous, but his initials stand for anything you want!
And if you're still here, leave a one-word comment that you think best describes me. It can only be one word. No more. Then copy & paste this in your journal so that I may leave a word about you.
Together
malelia_honu and I blew off yoga on Tuesday and instead went shopping at Old Navy, where we each bought several items at wildly discounted prices. I watched House after dinner. Reactions to "Cursed":Chase is going around being a nice guy and a good doctor, and people keep getting all up in his business. House is a sociopath with absolutely no respect for personal boundaries, so there are very few defenses against him, but Cameron was just as bad tonight, telling Chase that whatever his father had done shouldn't matter, and then pushing him to tell her what exactly his father had done. Chase kept his patience and his civility with her a whole lot better than I would have. It came off worse coming from Cameron because she purports to be a normal human being, socially speaking. House refuses to conform to social norms and so, while you're shocked and outraged the first few times you interact with him, you soon come to expect that he will not respect your privacy or show any kind of tact when dealing with you or others—he goes out of his way to deliver the opposite; he has no shame, so you can't be surprised when he acts accordingly. But Cameron can't get away with it. She's chastisable. You can point out to her that she's overstepping her bounds and she'll recognize it—or at least she should—and that's what made me so uncomfortable watching her: she was the one to whom I kept saying "shut up. Shut UP. Oh my god, shut up, shut, shut up." She should have known better, but she didn't.
Chase says exactly the same thing to Gabe at the end of the episode that Cameron said to Chase—of course you love him, he's your dad—but Chase knew all the relevant facts in his case, while Cameron did not, and I can't believe she expected Chase to tell her about them when she exasperatedly demanded to know. It follows that House would be the one Chase eventually tells the story to, partly because House isn't just the most curious man on the planet (self-described): he needs to know, and usually we understand and indulge that when we recognize it. It's just that House is such an overbearing and unlikable personality that we lose sympathy for his drive and grow disinclined to help him find out. The other part of the reason he tells House though, is probably that he knows House won't give him sympathy and won't try to talk him out of his resolute detachment.
What was interesting was House's mini- moral dilemma. That he would not stop bothering father and son or piecing together the clues until he figured out what was going on—that's par for the House course. But that he debated whether or not to tell Chase that his father was dying of cancer (and in the end decided not to, apparently based on what Chase told him about learning not to care in order to eliminate disappointment), that shows not only an awareness of the feelings of other people, but actual concern over them, and that's unusual for him. I'd like to sit down with all the episodes in order on my own time, watching for specific things on each viewing, like what exactly is his moral code? when exactly does and doesn't he care about other people? and where exactly does he give away his British accent?
ciderpress has things to say about Hugh Laurie's American accent, if anyone's interested—and I'm interested if anyone knows of any discussion elsewhere.Aside from all that, I'm confused about the dad of the leper, who I suppose is a leper himself: he was never a test pilot at all? How does one fake something like that? And where did his money come from? I guess he's built his fortunes from scratch since '87. And still there are no technicians in the hospital to run CT scans. In what world, I ask you.
I read Dira Sudis's Last Rites a while ago, but I just went back to it for a re-read now that things make more sense. You couldn't ask for a better follow-up to this episode.
And then I finished Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem. It's just what it says, the history of Fermat's Last Theorem and why (and how) it took 350 years to solve. They yadda-yadda-yaddad over most of the actual math, especially toward the end (which I can't help feeling a little put-out about, no matter that I wouldn't even begin to understand it), but it's a good story. In some ways it's a horrifying story: the lives of so many mathematicians seem tenuous at best and the tragedy of time is everywhere in abundant evidence. They often died young, or lived in turbulent times, or lived at the wrong time. Wiles himself finally expressed, explicitly, the danger of a linear, unidirectional timeline:
Having tried every tool and technique in the published literature, [Wiles] had found that they were all inadequate. "I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal. It could be that the methods needed to solve this particular problem may simply be beyond present-day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years. So even if I was on the right track, I could be living in the wrong century." (237)
Isn't that terrifying? The odds of achieving self-actualization are infinitesimal in this world. Galois was a "respectable but not outstanding" student until he encountered mathematics at the age of sixteen; he was twice refused admittance to the École Polytechnique because of the "abruptness and lack of explanation in the oral examination"; he was caught up in the tumultuous politics of 1820s and '30s France and died in a duel at the age of twenty. Leonhard Euler's father was determined that his son should pursue a career in the Church—and he did, until their friends the Bernoullis intervened and persuaded the father that his son "had been born to calculate, not to preach."
What's so haunting isn't that Euler almost became a clergyman to fulfill his father's wishes instead of a mathematician who would later be referred to as "analysis incarnate" and of whom "the French academician François Arago said, 'Euler calculated without apparent effort as men breathe, or as eagles sustain themselves in the wind'"—but that for every touch-and-go story like his that ends happily, there must be countless other stories that end with the hapless protagonist going into his father's business without a word of complaint; or dying in infancy; or being too poor for school or books; or being born into a nomadic tribe, or before the advent of Pythagoras and the entire field of mathematics. The tragedy of time is that in the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci was able to design a helicopter that would have flown—what could he have done today? That kind of thing can keep me up at night.
More snippets from the book.:
p. 26
To appreciate the value of such [mathematical] proofs they should be compared with their poor relation, the scientific proof . . . Pythagoras showed that the truth of mathematics could be applied to the scientific world and provide it with a logical foundation. Mathematics gives science a rigorous beginning, and upon this infallible foundation scientists add inaccurate measurements and imperfect observations.
p. 66
Finally, a theorem is important if it solves a problem in an area of research that previously was hindered for the lack of one logical link. Many mathematicians have cried themselves to sleep knowing that they could achieve a major result if only they could establish one missing link in their chain of logic.
p. 84
The solution for Bombelli was to create a new number, i, called an imaginary number, which was simply defined as the solution to the question, What is the square root of negative one? This might seem like a cowardly solution to the problem, but it was no different to the way in which negative numbers were introduced. Faced with an otherwise unanswerable question, the Hindus merely defined -1 as the solution to the question, What is zero subtract one? It is easier to accept the concept of -1 only because we have experience of the analogous concept of "debt," whereas we have nothing in the real world to underpin the concept of an imaginary number. The seventeenth-century German mathematician Gottfried Liebniz elegantly described the strange nature of the imaginary number: "The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful recourse of the divine spirit, almost an amphibian being between being and non-being."
p. 275
Iwasawa theory on its own had been inadequate. The Kolyvagin-Flach method on its own was also inadequate. Together they complemented each other perfectly. It was a moment of inspiration that Wiles will never forget. As he recounted these moments, the memory was so powerful that he was moved to tears: "It was so indescribably beautiful; it was so simple and so elegant. I couldn't understand how I'd missed it and I just stared at it in disbelief for twenty minutes. Then during the day I walked around the department, and I kept coming back to my desk looking to see if it was still there. It was still there. I couldn't contain myself, I was so excited. It was the most important moment of my working life. Nothing I ever do again will mean as much."
p. 280
While science journalists eulogized over Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, few of them commented on the proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture that was inextricably linked to it. Few of them bothered to mention the contribution of Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura, the two Japanese mathematicians who back in the 1950s had sown the seeds for Wiles's work. Although Taniyama had committed suicide over thirty years earlier, his colleague Shimura was there to witness their conjecture proved. When asked for his reaction to the proof, Shimura gently smiled and in a restrained and dignified manner simply said, "I told you so."
That was all Tuesday; today was Wednesday, but I didn't do much with it. My mother and I ran errands, we made our own version of these shrimp pouches for dinner, and we started the seventh season of M*A*S*H*: BJ's moustache is truly hideous, but his initials stand for anything you want!
And if you're still here, leave a one-word comment that you think best describes me. It can only be one word. No more. Then copy & paste this in your journal so that I may leave a word about you.
no subject
I can't believe I actually teared up about maths quotes; nevertheless I did, and it's interesting because my dad and I look at each other and go "we just living at the wrong time".
Twenty years on and the technology that we're struggling with would be passe -- twenty years ago and these problems wouldn't even be an issue. But as I explained to my brother on the phone "I'm sorry, but what you're wanting just doesn't exists: the technology is not there yet, and no amount of wanting can change that."
I'm talking about fairly specific instances: the whole idea that you can't just grab a laptop that's equivalent to a paper chart, take your notes directly on the ward and have those notes be filed, tagged and easily retrievable is preposterous. Surely we should be able to do that!
My father and brother are inventors and researches and I am the enabler: I find hardware or software solutions for their ideas, I try and turn what they want in to reality and it's. so. hard.
Why is it that field of medicine is so muzzy and confused? What does the appendix do? Why do we yawn? Doesn't it seem ridiculous that we have no idea about these things? Doesn't it seem barbaric that to find out why your period hurts, we have to *cut holes* in you?
It seems to me that I will not recognise the world in a hundred years, and that the problems of my generation will merely be traded for the problems of a new one.
I've had a couple of AHAH computer programming moments like your aforementioned mathematicians: one was so bright and so vivid that it woke me up from sleep. Another took me almost six weeks to crack: nobody could help me because I was doing such a dumb and arcane thing (hacking a Windows 95 database to run on an OEM copy of Win 95 to run on Virtual PC on a Mac). And of course there's nobody who gets that: you have to run up and tell people "I did this brilliant thing! And it was really hard. No, really, it was logically impossible!" and they smile and nod, and you have to nurse the secret joy inside of you.
no subject
Hee! That's the present plan. And, um, thank you. My face is warm.
I can't believe I actually teared up about maths quotes; nevertheless I did, and it's interesting because my dad and I look at each other and go "we just living at the wrong time".
Oh, I can believe it. I got that hollow feeling in my chest that means I'm overwhelmed by the immensity. It's always more frustrating to know than not to know, to be aware of the possibility of something, or—worse—to create the possbility of something, like your father and brother, and be just as sure that you can't make it happen. It's not a question of intelligence or drive or environment or opportunity: just a matter of time, and being born in the wrong one. It's heartbreaking.
Why is it that field of medicine is so muzzy and confused? What does the appendix do? Why do we yawn? Doesn't it seem ridiculous that we have no idea about these things? Doesn't it seem barbaric that to find out why your period hurts, we have to *cut holes* in you?
Well, sort of barbaric. Now that you mention it. And yet—the number of things that we do know about, compared to even a hundred years ago. And what of the things we do know about but are helpless to fix? Shouldn't we be repairing livers and hearts instead of switching them out like spare tires when they fail? How are we so far and yet still here?
And of course there's nobody who gets that: you have to run up and tell people "I did this brilliant thing! And it was really hard. No, really, it was logically impossible!" and they smile and nod, and you have to nurse the secret joy inside of you.
Aaah! I felt this enormous kinship with Andrew Wiles when he talked about finding his beautiful solution. What do you do with something that beautiful? You burst at the seams, there's nothing else to be done. I find that even if no one understands exactly what you've done (or seen, or heard), if you can compare it to something they know, give them an analog of your feeling, then they can share that perfection and that bursting joy. But. So often people are hung up on not understanding what you've done, or content to dismiss it.