Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,
Thou shalt not write thy doctor’s thesis
On education,
Thou shalt not worship projects nor
Shalt thou or thine bow down before
Administration.Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms,
Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose,
Nor, above all, make love to those
Who wash too much.Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
And take short views.
— from Under Which Lyre by W. H. Auden
On January 21, 1970, Leary received a ten-year sentence for his 1968 offense, with a further ten added later while in custody, for a previous arrest in 1965, twenty years in total to be served consecutively for less than a half ounce of marijuana. When Leary arrived in prison, he was given psychological tests that were used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed some of the tests himself (including the “Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test”), Leary answered them in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a great interest in forestry and gardening.[21] As a result, Leary was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison, and in September 1970 he escaped.
I’m tempted to say something sour and deprecating about Morrissey, but I’m sure he’s already put it into verse.
— Morrissey Stable After Onstage Collapse | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
Much of the mathematical analysis that was developed over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries originated in attempts to circumvent arithmetic. With our ability to do large-scale arithmetic … we can employ simple, direct methods requiring much less old-fashioned mathematical training … This situation by no mean implies that the mathematician has been dispossessed in mathematical physics. It does signify that he is urgently needed … to transform the original mathematical problems to the stage where a computer can be utilized profitably by someone with a suitable scientific training.
—
-Richard Bellman, Some Vistas of Modern Mathematics
Quote found in The Finite Volume, Finite Difference, and Finite Elements Methods as Numerical Methods for Physical Field Problems
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
A short video about the making of a graphic novel which tells the story of Bertrand Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics.
Mark Cuban – owner of the Dallas Mavericks – claims that the 2009-10 Mavericks are better than the 2005-06 team that managed to reach the NBA Finals.
Antiracism is a favorite concept on the American left these days. Of course, all good sorts want to be against racism, but what does the word mean exactly? The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them.
…
The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the “civil rights movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South.
…
To extrapolate anachronistically to the present, they would have understood that the struggle against racial health disparities, for example, has no real chance of success apart from a struggle to eliminate for-profit health care.
The song features David Byrne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge, & Z-Trip, and the video features the artwork of Shepard Fairey.
In almost all textbooks, even the best, this principle is presented so that it is impossible to understand.
-K. Jacobi on the Principle of Least Action, Lectures on Dynamics
I have chosen not to break with tradition.
-V.I. Arnold responding to Jacobi’s comment, Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics
Jerk.
-Me
Designs for an automated genre fiction generator
A fully operational implementation lives here.