HRSFANS.org

HRSFANS supporting HRSFANS, especially those in greater Boston, should know that two HRSFANS are soon to open a restaurant, called “Journeyman,” in Somerville.

I don’t want to say too much more at this time, although many HRSFANS will be able to guess which two people I’m talking about.  I’m certain it’s going to be good.  In the past their cooking has been described as second in Boston only to L’Espalier (in print, no less!).

I encourage all interested parties to follow their blog (feed) and try them out after their expected open in late May 2010.

HRSFANS member Neil S. has just returned from a trip to visit his family in rural India, and has a really interesting blog post with photos from and thoughts about his adventures. I particularly enjoyed hearing Neil’s perspective on life there because he’s simultaneously part of the family, and an observer from modern urban America. Plus it’s full of great photos:

The world of Algebraic Geometry (to which I have personal but absolutely no professional ties) is kind of tempest-tossed at the moment. I wouldn’t be suprised but what a number of you would enjoy thinking about and commenting on what’s going on.

In brief, lay terms, as I have heard it, there was this brilliant young French mathematician in the 1950s by the name of Alexandre Grothendieck who all but single-handedly revolutionized/created certain fields of Algebraic Geometry. Some 10-15 years later, he gave up academic life, moved to the Pyrrenées, and became a sheep farmer.

Since Grothendieck’s disengagement, his body of work has remained wildly useful and has formed a bedrock for later mathematical generations. The respect accorded to his own writings has gone so far as to inspire its own personal Distributed Proofreaders analogue for creating a TeX version of a long systematic work, “Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique” (or SGA). The free electronic SGA project has been ongoing for the better part of a decade or more; volumes SGA 1 and SGA 2 are up on the arXiv already.

It seems just possible that might not be true much longer.

Behold the text of the until-recently-current webpage for the SGA 4 project:

Alexandre Grothendieck a malheureusement souhaité que cessent les travaux de réédition de SGA. Les pages qui étaient consacrées sont donc closes.
Dernière actualisation : 2 février 2010.

There is slightly more information, and much discussion, at Scott Morrison’s post on the Secret Blogging Seminar, a group math weblog. Again in brief (and English), Grothendieck apparently resurfaced enough to put out a letter stating that he doesn’t want his work republished or translated.

And he wags his finger at anyone who has done so or wants to.

Which is the really weird part. Assuming the letter is genuine, what legal ramifications does it actually have? Why use a phrase like “unlawful in my eyes,” which sounds to me deliberately obfuscatory? (Legality is not a matter of an individual’s vision.) The comments on the SBSeminar post seem weighted towards arguments as to the moral dimensions of Grothendieck’s stated wishes and a given mathematician’s obligation to respect them (or not). To me, the legal questions are more pressing and pertinent. Whether one has a moral obligation to respect an author’s wishes is a decision one makes for oneself. Whether the mathematical community as a whole has a legal obligation to take Grothendieck at his word has greater ramifications–and probably a single, findable answer (unlike a question of personal morality).

Edixhoven, one of the prior leaders of the TeX SGA project, did research the distribution question through the publishers and was told copyright had in fact reverted to the original authors (as he states on the linked page). This seems to indicate Grothendieck is not out of line to say he withholds his permission. But the questions only start there. …

Some on the SBSeminar comment thread made the “glass half full” suggestion that maybe it’s time SGA got a revamp anyhow. Yet the original is still a precious resource. I’ll be interested to try to follow what decisions are made.

This is just a little piece of internet wonderfulness that was emailed to me by a friend.  The web page begins:

Every year, we throw a big, game party to ring in the new year. This year (2010) is our house’s 100-year birthday, so we celebrated with cupcakes…
…and the cupcakes were a game.

Here they are in random order – see how many you can guess!

Indeed, it is 100 cupcakes, each themed after a popular [board | video] game.  Most anyone who will read this blog will recognize quite a few of these.  I did well except for a couple of video games and board games from the last decade.  I guess I need to catch up to the present.

Enjoy.

Casting my memory back lo these many years (those of you who know my actual age may snicker) I think I can trace my own fascination with alternate history to an epigraph for a chapter in an Arthur C. Clarke novel, The Fountains of Paradise.

Almost all the Alternative History computer simulations suggested that the Battle of Tours (A.D. 732) was one of the crucial disasters of mankind. Had Charles Martel been defeated, Islam might have resolved the internal differences that were tearing it apart and gone on to conquer Europe. Thus centuries of Christian barbarism might have been avoided, the Industrial Revolution would have started almost a thousand years earlier, and by now we would have reached the nearer stars instead of merely the farther planets….

I do not remember when I read the novel, but it must have been right around early high school. I remember little of it beyond the outline of the main plot, the monks and the butterflies, and that little paragraph about alternate history: what if, in effect, the Dark Ages had been averted?

Of course even phrasing the question that way is a vast oversimplification of the long course of a whole host of cultures—I now know somewhat more about those subtleties—but the question as such captivated me. We live in such accelerated times that the seeming changelessness of prior centuries boggles our minds (though, again, that apparent changelessness no doubt oversimplifies). What if Earth had had an 800-year head start on the Industrial Revolution?  Good heavens, where could we be now?  (I suppose that’s answering my own question….)

This past season I have been reading The Best Alternate History Stories of the Twentieth Century, edited by Harry Turtledove. But alternate history is fascinating in more than just fiction. A friend once told me that the “many-worlds” hypothesis comes to mind for him whenever he does something particularly stupid and escapes death, which happens occasionally (if not too alarmingly so) as a pedestrian in a city such as Boston. On such occasions he considers briefly and pities any number of now-dead “alternate selves.” I have always assumed that nearly all people rehash key conversations in their minds; though in my own case I try to focus on remembering the events as they happened, one also is tempted to consider how they might have gone better.

WARNING: Star Wars spoiler ahead.  Then again, I expect that many of us were spoiled for Star Wars before we were born.

And then … my own personal alternate Star Wars history (and I am not going to look up any sources for this, deliberately!): I have heard that Darth Vader’s declaration of paternity at the end of The Empire Strikes Back was so very secret a revelation that the crew’s scripts were written falsely, such that during the filming of the scene, the actor said something entirely different, while Jones dubbed the real line in later (of course, since it wasn’t Jones in the Vader suit, the last part is almost certainly true). My own reconstruction has it that, to downplay the deception, the actor must have said something that kind-of-almost would have made sense.  And the only other even halfway-consistent alternate history would have been, I feel, for Obi-wan himself to have been Luke’s father. And what would that have meant?

via Palahniuk and Chocolate

danah boyd is a researcher specializing in social issues surrounding new technology, particularly social networking. In a recent blog post, she discusses differences in the cultures of Facebook and Twitter status updates. She points out that despite their superificial similarities, these two networks have different norms with respect to the directionality of communication:

Facebook’s social graph is undirected. What this means is that if I want to be Friends with you on Facebook, you have to agree that we are indeed Friends. Reciprocity is an essential cultural practice in Facebook… Twitter, on the other hand, is fundamentally set up to support directionality. I can follow you without you following me.

She goes on to discuss how these differences in directionality affect the way we present ourselves and the cultural norms that develop on these two different networking services. (Read the full post.)

I found it really interesting to read boyd’s analysis, as it matches up well with my own experience with the two sites, but in ways that I had never been consciously aware of. More generally, I’m really excited about the fact that people are taking social networking and other new media seriously as a subject for research. There is a tendency among some to dismiss these services as all the same, and as poor substitutes for “real” face-to-face interactions. In highlighting the ways in which social norms can develop around new media, boyd’s research also demonstrates the unique role that social networking can play in our lives–not replacing but rather augmenting our other forms of social interaction.

I was shocked to learn recently how misguided our approach to drug policy is. In a recent article in The Independent, Johann Hari clearly explains how a policy based on prohibition and policing is counterproductive, and how all evidence favors legalizing and regulating the drug trade. For instance, did you know that Portugal decriminalized the possession of all drugs in 2001, and that drug use has since fallen, with hard drug use falling fastest? Or that the rate of new heroin addictions in Switzerland has fallen 82% since the country started providing centers where addicts can inject heroin safely and for free? (That’s because addicts no longer need to recruit new users to finance their addiction.)

But despite the evidence, political forces are lined up against a sane drug policy. As Hari explains:

In 1998, the Office of National Drug Control Policy was ordered by Congress to stop funding any scientific research that might give the impression that we should redirect funding from anti-trafficking busts into medical treatment of addicts, or that there is any argument to legalise, regulate or medicalise drug use. … So, to give a small example, the ONDCP spent $14bn on anti-cannabis adverts aimed at teenagers, and $43m to find out if the ads worked. They discovered that kids who saw the ads were more likely afterwards to get stoned, so the evidence was suppressed, and the ad campaign marched on.

Ouch. And while the US might be doing particularly poorly on this front, we’re not alone: In the UK, the chair of the Advisory Committe on the Misuse of Drugs (ie. the country’s top advisor on drug policy) was just fired for speaking out in favor of evidence-based drug policy. There’s an article about it in this weekend’s Boston Globe Ideas section, which is also worth a read. Among other things, it mentions that the Obama administration is taking baby steps in the direction of a more evidence-based policy. Still no Portuguese-scale decriminalization on the horizon for the US, but we can at least be supportive of any move to shift resources into addiction prevention and treatment.

I think it would have been even better if they had used music from LotR, but I still got a good chuckle out of this: