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by 082349872349872 741 days ago
Comme je suis bête ! In my defence I saw that one in a 747, so low cabin pressure may not have done my long term memory formation much good. (EDIT: looks like whatever I was remembering as LoA wasn't even that?)

The multivalued functions are a relief — should the sparks/stars lit in my noggin by a comment align in a different direction from intended, it's not that I'm running riot in a deterministic world, but merely finding myself perhaps at the same coordinates, but on a different sheet, in a nondeterministic one?

The Maugham story in which bumble-puppy appears (if slightly later in the decade than in Huxley) is worth reading, especially with the background that WSM worked for MI6 and had (orientation as well as valuation?) reasons to make use of glueings along branch cuts in his personal, as well as his professional, life.

> In a place like the sanatorium where there was little to occupy the mind it was inevitable that soon everyone should know that George Templeton was in love with Evie Bishop. But it was not so easy to tell what her feelings were. It was plain that she liked his company, but she did not seek it, and indeed it looked as though she took pains not to be alone with him. One or two of the middle-aged ladies tried to trap her into some compromising admission, but ingenuous as she was, she was easily a match for them. She ignored their hints and met their straight questions with incredulous laughter. She succeeded in exasperating them.

Being partway through Conflict, War and Revolution(2022)*, I think something may be coming together modelling all your options: Kaczynski and Galois may have been too idealistically violent (the one having done what he could unto others, the other having suffered what he must?) and Grothendieck too idealistically nonviolent (which obviously leads to minimising one's dot product with the world) but Kolmogorov found a nonviolent quadrant inside Machiavelli's pragmatic lead: Fortune provides a martingale process, and virtu consists of minimaxing one's expected interests with respect to her whim.

On a planet like earth it is inevitable that men should seek the favour of Fortune, but it is rarely easy to tell what her feelings are. (or, for that manner, if they even be iid)

* https://press.lse.ac.uk/site/books/m/10.31389/lsepress.cwr/

1 comments

s/virtu/epsilon of licentiousness/ ?

EDIT: not "viti"

Going to flip through your recommendations (at least) with an eye (3rd) towards ergodicity (or even Hurwitz spaces)

EDIT: don't worry too much about Galois -- you make me wonder if I had not read his letters (esp the fine print in his last testament) too carelessly.

For every epsilon of licentiousness, there exists a delta of venus, such that...? (as an algebraist, it seems analysts spend an awful lot of time chasing tails!)

I have been brought up in a culture where seduction follows a sequence ("running the bases"); are there cultures where that does not suffice, and seduction requires more sophistication: a net*, say, or even a filter?

* in line with the genre fiction cover kind of net, someone once won a competition we had at uni for "best line to get a member of the appropriate sex into your room" with 75 pound test, eg https://fr.aliexpress.com/i/839412765.html

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK9nx7e9IGM (Scholes, Meriwether, and Merton would've done well to listen more to this one?)

The epsilon of tail-chasing beats the delta of (phallic) symbol pushing!

Re: uni- Cantabrigian?

Yes, for "better" seduction technik, you should restrict your search to uni culture.

No, although I do have a fair amount of shelf space devoted to a CS book series (published by that breakaway technical college somewhere in the fens) all of which are in shades of what I would've called green, but a cantab colleague informed me was in fact blue.

If either of us had had any irish gaelic, maybe we would've agreed upon glas? see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...

No iG but likewise my uni can be said to have Brythonic roots. (As opposed to merely Anglo-Saxon)
Tonnerre de Brest ! Swansea by any chance? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013890