It’s a bit unsettling to me how much of mathematics is grounded in the description of something like physical space.  A lot of large areas of math (topology, geometry, various kinds of analysis) start out with one particular property of physical space (or of an intuitive idea of what physical space is), separate that property from all the others, and then generalize it.  The generalizations can get pretty far from the starting point, but even then it’s a strange way of classifying different abstractions: “which property of space did you abstract from?”

I guess one could ask “what else would we do?”, but there’s algebra and number theory.  So it’s like, we have the math that “starts with space” and then the other math, and each of those groups comprises closer to 50% of the math people think about than 90% or 10% (I have no idea how you would measure such a thing, or even define it, but I hope you see what I am getting at).  Which seems strange to me.

(Then again analysis is very useful in number theory, which I have always found spooky, but I’m too ignorant to know whether I should find it spooky.)

Really, I don’t know enough about the super-abstract parts of math subfields to talk about this sensibly, so I welcome input from the less ignorant + you should take this with a grain of salt.

At the news that one of his brothers, an officer in the Austrian army, had been killed in the battle against the Turks, Eugène convinced his friend Armande de Conti to head for the eastern frontier, both of them in drag.

They maintained that there was such a deep and primordial poetry about the crowing of cocks, drenched in the dews of ten thousand tragic dawns of human suffering, full of such equivocal, treacherous, and yet Homeric braggadoccio, carrying memories of women in travail, of dying soldiers, of millions of tortured, imprisoned and executed victims of Society, memories of insomnia, memories of madness, memories of love – that it would be vulgar, sacrilegious, a blasphemy against the dignity of the human spirit, impious, gross, offensive, ridiculous to introduce a pantomimic cock upon the stage.

There are menacing shadowcops, predatory robogoths, mongrel humanoids who are half-dog, poisonous dreamsnakes, and worst of all, interactive Madonnas.

Does anyone else obsess over the idea that they have become mentally worse – less motivated, less energetic, more anhedonic – than their former selves?

I have a habit of assuming this decline is just a known fact, and then thinking a lot about what has changed and how I could reverse those changes.  But in the rare cases when I reflect on it, I realize I have no idea if I’ve declined at all.  I might be comparing the present baseline to highlights of the past, for instance.  Looking around on my computer storage, I can find occasional notes on my mood and motivation from various points in the past (up to 6-7 years ago), but these were all motivated by this same worry, which apparently goes back a ways.

It’s also possible that I really have declined in these ways, but that I’m choosing such a pivotal set of ages (roughly 17-22) for my reference points that I ought to expect decline.

only when bill nye and goddess kring come together as lovers will we be free of this false century

Part of the pleasure here comes from the narrator informing the reader of information previously left out and inquiries into clown activities that are often dryly humorous.

I tend to like restaurants where each entree is described by one or two dozen words of foodie-ish prose, with at least one participle per entree.

m4ge:

there’s a guy in one of my classes who i am secretly battling for dominance over by wearing awful hipster outfits. i dont know if he is thinking the same thing but regardless i am intent on winning

i thought i won today when i walked into class wearing my awful pop art t-shirt of 1995 figure skating champions, mom jeans, and 1980 moscow olympics-theme denim jacket but then he had to walk in wearing a donald duck jacket with matching donald duck socks like what a fucking power move

(via funereal-disease)