ChapterZero

Just when you don’t know what to write about, you’re saved by the proliferation of inanity that is the World Wide Web. At least one person is of the opinion that the latest Star Wars movie is a cautionary tale of the effect of homosexuality on the Catholic Church. He claims that Anakin represents a priest, and his love for Padme represents his lack of celibacy, and as ‘giving into’ sexual urges prevent a priest from fully commiting to the church, so does Anakin’s love for Padme drive him to become a Sith.

Hmmm. If you’re willing to make the rather large leap that the creators of the film had no other purpose for it (say, to make tons of money) than to encrypt a message about the Church, then this interpretation might have some credibility. However, this guy goes on to say that Padme represents homosexuality, and to quote him on homosexual priests:

They become more selfish and think only of themselves, of feeding their urges. They no longer care about their victims. … As a homosexual priest carries out his actions in private, he permanently harms his victims, mostly young boys.

I personally think that Catholic priests should not be homosexual, because their Church is against it, and I believe he has an obvious point when he says:

Once they break their celibacy and give way to homosexual urges, they become focused on it and cannot effectively serve the church any longer. They hide their character from the church, just like Anakin hides his marriage and fatherhood from the Jedi council.

but the rest is so much hog-wash: when did homosexuality become equivalent to pedophilia, even in the Catholic Church?

To put it another way: if we replace his bad choice of words, what he should be saying is that “pedophilia is bad for the Church” is the hidden message in Star Wars— but then, this is obviously not a message that you can pull out of the movie the way he did. Where is there anything even remotely resembling pedophilia?

Anyway, that was my first source of substantial information on the plot of the new Star Wars movie, and I have to say, it sounds pretty insipid. Anakin became a Sith because Padme is doomed to die in childbirth? Give me a break.

I remember finding out sometime this week that kuro5hin is pronounced “Corrosion”; I had always pronounced it ‘kuro-5-hin.org’, which is a lot less satisfactory. My coolness factor just went up.

I haven’t visited there in a while, because most of the front page articles are crap— half-baked opinions of would-be pundits on economics and politics, mostly. The pickings this time around were better than I expected; there was even the rarest of the rare: a piece of short fiction. A relatively pointless piece of fiction, with no satisfactory ending (of course, the two are related), but a well written one. I had better luck in the moderation queue. There was one engaging, astonishingly well written article on homosexuality and religion— almost, but not quite, a topic that has been overdone on kuro5hin—, and another interesting, albeit morose, essay on the futility of relationships for some types of people. I am surprised that the first article had a score of -5 and the second of 35, when the post threshold is 70. No wonder there is no fresh material on the front page! I can imagine the type of people who would vote down good articles like these, and vote up the usual crap, but I thought the k5 crowd was better than that. Guess not.

One of my long standing fantasies has been to find/write a high quality open source symbolic mathematics system that is hackable. Axiom is the closest I have yet to come, but to hack that, I would need to learn Lisp as well as Aldor. Besides, I have the feeling Axiom is headed nowhere, fast; it’s code seems almost anachronistic and certainly foreign, not in content, but in style. It’s a wonderful idea, and the most full featured free CAS, but it lacks an attractive interface (TeXmacs?— blah!). All the other free CASes I’ve found are pathetic (e.g., YACAS), C-based or Lisp-based, and in general resist casual hacking. Certainly, they all lack something a successful CAS must have: an attractive interface, where the math is typset.

Now, it seems like someone has the opportunity to rectify this situation: Python is a very hacker friendly language, and already has a lot of numeric tools that could be called upon by a CAS, e.g. scipy. Also, the gmpy module supports multiple precision integer, rational, and floating point arithmetic. So ‘all’ the aforementioned someone would have to do is write a symbolic engine and some glue code to bind these tools together, as well as a suitable interface. Pythonica, albeit a very small one, is the first step in this direction.

I would love to be that someone, but I don’t know anything about writing an interpreter, or implementing a computer algebra system. Hopefully this entry will inspire someone, somewhere to take up the mantle… and save us all

I’ve started my summer math studying regiment, with differential equations. I found a really nice book

Differential Equations and Their Applications : An Introduction to Applied Mathematics (Texts in Applied Mathematics, Vol. 11)

at the library— nice enough that I’m actually motivated to read it, as opposed to most diff. eq. books. It seems to have just enough of the three aspects of ODE theory: techniques for exact solution, techniques for numerical solution, and theoretical underpinnings. It has large case studies scattered throughout, some of which are interesting enough to read, and all of which can be skipped with no loss of continuity. I will be doing a lot of skipping.

By tonight (before Smallville comes on :)), I will have finished the section on first order d.e.’s, which are fascinating me. I wonder if I wasn’t fascinated by these before because of the way we were taught this stuff in the Eng. Math class I took instead of ODE, or if it’s the fact that I’m much more comfortable with math now. Maybe it is a little of both— I’m pretty sure we didn’t cover e.g. separable ODEs or homogenous equations with variable . In fact, I recall we did all our solutions using exponential bases. That suggests that we skipped a lot of interesting examples, because most of the problems I’ve seen so far don’t have solutions in exponentials, but in ‘weirder’ functions like , , etc.

Python is turning out to be a wonderful language. I’m glad I took the time to learn yet another language; this time it has actually been worth it. The tutorial van Rossum wrote for it is surprisingly comprehensive, and having read it over a weekend, I feel I’ve learned just about everything I’ll ever need to know about Python :), but I’m going to work my way through Dive into Python, if only for the longer more practical examples. Then I’m going to find a book that does for Python what Learning Perl does for Perl, so by the time I’m finished reading it, I’ll have syntax coming out of my ears. It doesn’t seem like Python has much syntax to learn though, so that should go by quickly.

After that, I have no idea what to do next. Certainly I’ll browse through the standard library docs, so I’ll have a clue of what tools are out there. I know I’d like to learn Numeric, because then I could use Python’s scientific toolboxes better, and maybe even forget about Matlab for personal use (I dislike using it even at work). Of course, I’d also like to learn one of the windowing toolkits, either wxPython or PyGTK; it depends on which OS I’m running this summer— I might be moving my desktop into my office at school, in which case I might have an Internet connection which makes running Linux worthwhile.

Python also seems like it would be a really nice language for web application development, given the way it is so easy to load toolboxes into it, the way you do for Perl, as opposed to PHP (how do you load stuff in PHP?). So maybe I’ll look into that.

I’m grading my last set of papers for this semester, and I noticed that a couple of students had the correct formula, but incorrect graphs. To satisfy my curiousity as to what they might be doing wrong, I wanted to graph the formulas. Somehow, I managed to forget that I have a graphing calculator sitting right here!– probably because I’ve gotten so accustomed to not having one daily, this semester. So, I tried using Matplotlib, installed on this webserver. It was very easy to get a good plot in basically one line, and I can see myself using this a lot more in the future, especially if I study up on the features offered by the library. I plan on adding the option of using matplotlib to IllustRender later today. Shouldn’t take but a minute.

Here’s the code, and when the addition to IllustRender is complete, the graphical output should also be visible:
[python]
from pylab import *

x = arange(1,2,.01)
y = [t**(1/3.) for t in x]
z = [1.027*t - .1073*t**3 for t in x]

figure(figsize=(6,4))
plot(x, y, x, z)
savefig(’public_html/test.png’, dpi=75)

[/python]

School is officially, finally, over. Friday was graduation for the engineering college; it was somewhat depressing to see so many of my classmates graduate, leaving me behind. Especially when lots of them already have jobs lined up ahead of them. The only source of money in my immediate future is grants, etc.— but that’s all for education. No play money for me for a while yet.

On the other hand, I’m sure this is an even wilder ride for them. Now they are officially out in the world, where they have to stand on their own two feet. Exciting stuff, but daunting. No more skipping classes or an entire day when you’re feeling tired. No more summer vacation! Got to wear suit and tie to work every day… Speaking of which, you have to get a job. Everyone was hustling for a job this semester.

In a sense, I’m jealous of the graduates, because they’re done with the educational stage of their lives, and have moved on to the getting paid stage. But at the same time, I feel good that I haven’t stopped here, that I have a ways to go before I’m out of this stage, if ever. Like, I’m a better person for continuing on, taking the road less traveled. Conceited? Maybe.

Wonder what next year’ll be like, with all my engineering friends gone. I only know a few people in the class behind me, so I guess I’ll be making new friends, or just sticking with my math people. Aargh… this is depressing.

I still am not sure what I’ll be doing this summer. If the math prof I was working on the image processing project with is not too put off by the fact that I haven’t talked to him since mid-April, then I should be working on that with him. That might be fun, or not, depending on if I finally get exactly what it is I’m doing and why. So Monday, I’ll go see him.

Other than that, I shall have the blessing of an uneventful summer. For once, I’m going to be in town, at UH, my customary environment, so I won’t have any adjustments to make, except for the changed atmosphere of summer. Some of my friends will even be there, for summer school, so I’ll have people to hang out with. And since I’m doing math research, I’ll have lots of free time. I plan to use that time to read, read, read. And of course, continue looking up fellowship information, and start applying to grad. schools.

I need a halcyon summer, after this semester.

Primer — a movie about a ‘fantastical’ invention– was written and directed by an engineer. I watched it last night; it was not what I expected overall, but the delivery was exactly how I thought an engineer would make it. There was better semi-intelligible technical jargon than in your typical sci-fi movie, there was a lot of business details (working out funding, office politics… all the boring things engineers have to deal with), and a total avoidance of the impossibility of the machine they were building. It’s only fitting that an engineer should write such a movie: he spent a lot of time focusing on the building of the machine, and figuring out it’s implications, and exploiting it, but at no point did he even touch any real science. That was ok though; after all, suspension of disbelief is what movies are all about, especially sci-fi. But beyond that, the movie was too fast-paced, the plot got confused and confusing, and the end was sudden and didn’t resolve anything. So, crappy movie overall.

via ComplexZeta: someone claims to have proven the Four Color Theorem in 4 pages, with no computer assistance! Too bad I don’t have an AMS account. Later today I shall visit the library and download the article. Very interesting.

Then, I have to get back into finals mode: have to study for the Digital Electronics one on Thursday, which I heard he always makes tricky… because he’s an evil man Also, I will be helping a friend study for his Abstract Algebra final— even though why he so badly needs to *study*, as opposed to review definitions, is beyond me. Since I will be sacrificing time I could be using to study, sleep, or in general do something more interesting, I will allow myself one snide remark: How does one get to a senior level math course without being or becoming capable of cruising through such an easy course? Especially when it’s nothing but a review of the first modern algebra course you took?