Home is where the limbic system gets to take a little bit of a break from freaking out about dangers

i dont want to change the world. it changes often enough on its own. it will all end at some point anyway so what does it matter.

No problem with that at all, Zeno.

The expert replied. The n-cube is worth thinking about, and there are plenty of open questions. Well I am working through the proofs, which provides a modicum of structure to the days.

Prof. Las Vergnas. I had never met or contacted him and had no right to be there. Here is a pass to the library, here is a pass to the cafe, because this is France, and here is the key to the department. His wife cooked some French meat dish with prunes for Sunday lunch.

That is great

Las Vergnas was very kind to me, but he also had what seemed to me a typically French disdain for bullshit. He was not about to pretend to like things he didn't like. I had been working on a topic that he had helped to create. A couple of months in, I had to give a talk at the group's weekly seminar. If it turned out that I were some clown, they probably would have gotten around to politely showing me the door. "That was a good talk", he said to me afterwards. Twice!

Did he give you a bottle of wine?

Kudos by the way.

A few months later, they held a conference in honour of Claude Berge, the recently deceased founder of their group. Berge was a member of the French upper class, who apparently would play the game of Hex all day, before knocking out some massively influential paper in the evening. The free Conference Dinner was held at La Coupole, one of the grand old cafes of Montparnasse, where Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald would spend their last centimes on oysters, while bickering about Art Nouveau. Owing to a slightly nervous disposition, I was always wary of abusing their hospitality, and so did not attend. Hey, Charlie, where were you... ?

Just read the essay Twenty-four Hours in London, by Richard Steele. Very good. Link below. For your enjoyment, Lastcard.


steele/twentyfour_hours_in_london/

I have lived in three places on the Harringay ladder, and in various other addresses nearby, and I understand the difference between Haringey and Harringay. The New River is ubiquitous, and my first pint since lockdown is in The Cricketers in Enfield; a bastion of conservatism. A lot of rules are going on, for the sake of doing something, and it is a sky blue July day and evening.

My mother has had skin cancer for at least the past thirty years. It doesn't kill you, apparently, but more and more it is eating her up, on her arms, legs and head. We have some subtle matters of good taste in common, but she has a natural energy and passion for life that I do not possess. She has travelled through Africa, India and the Far East on a budget out of sheer curiosity. On the phone tonight about the latest round of treatment: stitch abscesses, penicillin, iodine... Too bad I am unable to offer much emotional support. It would have been easier if you had been able to STFU for thirty seconds and let me finish one sentence, Ma. It would have been easier if you hadn't been the perfect enabler cheerleader for my alcoholic NPD father.

NPD?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcis...ality_disorder

ah, of course, TY sir.

Hi,

in what areas would you like to change the world? And how has it been going so far?

amazing you pick this thread for your first post. but welcome anyway and have fun on the forums.
charlie is a good guy and has alot to offer.

I'm going to reformulate space as a product of finite circles, rather than as a product of infinite lines, which is a contemporary mass delusion. My idea is so fabulous that I seem unable to make progress with it.

In my early twenties, I spent eight months in prison for conspiracy to burgle and commit criminal damage on a non-dwelling property. In my late twenties, I realized I had a talent for mathematics, and have unsuccessfully been playing catch-up since then.

I imagine that the circles must be finite because you can't really have a circle that's infinite in size. But if that's true, how can a series of finite sized circles -- even if arbitrarily large -- cover the same distance (assume just two dimensions for the moment) as a set of infinite lines?

The product of two lines:



The product of two circles:



Nobody knows which shape the universe is. Locally, the second looks like the first, just as the Earth appears to be flat. If the universe were the second, torus shape, what would your question be?

Sure. In the torus shape, though, you return to your beginning point if you travel radially far enough; in the cartesian plane, you don't. Of course, the scale of a torus could be so large that we can't determine the difference.

That's right.

If you send a beam of light out into the universe, nobody knows whether it would keep getting further away, or whether it would eventually return to its beginning point.

And I always thought a talent for mathematics would help a lot when commiting a crime . Have you managed to get a degree since then?

Yes, I have a PhD. It was about how to construct infinite spaces, e.g. the real line and Euclidean space, as limits of finite ones. It was mostly topology, graphs, measures, and categories. Not enough geometry or algebra.

Wow. Congratulations. I know only high school maths so these terms sound quite abstract to me, however your story sounds inspirational. And it gives me some motivation that some people can turn their life around.