ChapterZero

Time to clean out the current queue. My first selection of books on fluid mechanics have failed to hold my interest, except for Batchelor’s long-winded book (even though I don’t always agree with the arguments, I appreciate the fact that he’s trying to keep a strong connection to physical intution). I’m returning all those to their homes and am going to attempt continuum mechanics– apparently the math is the same, but the physical intuition might be clearer to me — via Teman and Miranville’s book.

And I should give up on algebraic topology for the nonce, as well as Riemannian geometry. I was looking at some of the discrete differential geometry papers available on the web, and figured I’d be better off going back to Talpaert’s book. It’s concise and it covers all the topics that seem to be important in the applications of DDG (which aren’t usually covered in one concise book): introductory cohomology theory, symplectic geometry, etc. Finally, I picked up Warren and Weimer’s book on subdivision surfaces, because that too is strongly related to the Caltech graphics groups’ research.

Now all I need to do is actually read them.

From the BBC:

The price of the iPhone with eight gigabytes of storage is being cut by $200 to $399. The four-gigabyte model is being dropped.

So the iPhone (8Gb model) was $600… what is so great about an MP3 player/cell phone/web browser that so many people were willing to shell out so much for it? There are, after all, so many more interesting and cost effective things you could do with $600. I wonder if the iPhone will eventually drift the way of the Palm. God I hope so; there’s something decadent and reeking of hubris about a cell phone that costs as much as a desktop PC.

My camera and laptop got here today. I took the day off so I could be here when they arrived–at about six this afternoon, after an uneventful day, I decided that the delivery wasn’t going to make it on time. Then I stepped outside, and saw that they left my stuff in front of my next door neighbor’s apartment! The first time that happens, it has to be with the stuff worth stealing.

I haven’t done much with the camera yet, just snapped one picture to check that nothing obvious is wrong with the body, lens, battery, or memory card. Don’t know how to use it for anything much, but I bought the Digital Rebel Field Guide tonight, so hopefully I’ll get up to speed quickly: I’ve been fantasizing about early morning pre-sunrise photographic outings. I’ve yet to see if the camera and laptop can communicate amicably…

Because I’m a little scared of Vista. This is a dual-core 1.7GHz, 1Gb RAM computer, and yet literally immediately after installation, Vista was already chomping at its bits. Specifically, the control panel popped up, and just from the effort of loading that the CPU light blinked and stuttered for a couple of minutes. I’m hoping that’s not a common occurrence. Also, the interface is foreign to me– too different from Win9x. It strikes me that the ’simplified’ interface has me chasing around to find out my options and where they are more than did the earlier versions of the Windows UI; I’ve yet to determine whether that’s a function of the OS itself, or just my lack of familiarity with it. I don’t intend to spend much time under Vista though; I aim to set up a dual-boot with Linux, and to use Vista only when necessary, for say Photoshopping.

I’m posting from Gentoo right now; I booted off of the LiveCD, and found networking and X display worked without any tinkering (my two main concerns about any Linux install), so I’m going to go ahead and use it. Why Gentoo? No particular reason, but I’ve always switched distros whenever I get a new Linux box: first Slackware, then Debian, and in the near future Gentoo. Also, the idea of compiling everything from scratch appeals to me.

The first problem is to construct a simple enumeration of . That is, I want a function for which it is possible to determine without knowing . In particular, algorithms like these are excluded. This question came about as I was trying to cheat on an IQ test– one of the questions required you to decipher an anagram and determine if it named an ocean, city, or etc.– by writing a Python program. If using, say, Scheme, I would gravitate towards one of the standard algorithms, but in Python enumeration seems more natural.

The second problem is more interesting:

From a knowledge of the mass of a molecule and the density of the corresponding substance, it is possible to calculate the average distance between the centres of adjoining molecules.
– Batchelor, An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics

How?

I admit to enjoying a moment of schaudenfreude when I first heard the news of Senator Craig’s troubles, but it didn’t last long. First I was troubled by the fact that I found the Clinton impeachment absurd and entirely politically motivated: who he did or didn’t sleep with doesn’t seem particularly relevant to his job performance. And so what if he ‘lied to the nation and Congress’ about his personal life– unless he was granting favors, who he slept with is really neither none of mine nor Congress’ business. But you can’t really draw a parallel between Craig and Clinton’s situations, because Craig has been consistently anti-gay, so the fact that he possibly solicited gay sex is politically relevant and worth further investigation.

Still, there seems to have been an immediate assumption of guilt. Then today I read this in the New York Times:

Officials at the Republican National Committee readied a news release calling for Mr. Craig to resign but withheld it after learning that there were independent efforts under way to persuade Mr. Craig to quit.

Those actions came after the Republican leadership called for an ethics inquiry and stripped Mr. Craig of his leadership posts on three committees after his guilty plea at the beginning of August to what an undercover officer described as a sexual advance in a men’s restroom in the airport terminal.

Despite such unusual steps against a Senate colleague, Republicans took no punitive action against Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, after his acknowledgment this summer of involvement with an escort service that the police described as a prostitution front.

Party officials said Mr. Vitter’s case was different in that he faced no criminal charges and was not in the Senate but was serving in the House at the time. In the case of Mr. Craig, they said experience from a recent string of misconduct cases, including the House page scandal that hurt Republicans last year, had shown there was no time to waste if the political fallout was to be minimized.

Is Mr. Vitter’s case different? Both Senators claim to support family values, etc., and both got caught in situations that put the lie to their claims. Except, while Vitter admitted to soliciting prostitution, Craig hasn’t admitted to anything, and there’s no incrontrovertible proof that he was soliciting– maybe he really did need to sit with his legs spread wide so his pants wouldn’t fall down, and maybe he did need to reach down for a strip of toilet paper.

Craig’s story is implausible… but Vitter gets to have sex with prostitutes and keep his seat while Craig is forced to resign for possibly making a sexual advance?