Years ago, in a galaxy far far away, I once co-wrote a 20-page college paper on the study of quantum vortex and EPR condensation in superfluid ³He.

Our choice of topic was essentially guided by these insanely cool videos depicting blobs of superfluid helium making their way out of a container all by themselves, so lively you’d expect them to jump at the experimenters and start hatching eggs.

Unfortunately the equation part was much less exciting, leading us very naturally to cook up a few results through the tested and approved algorithm of “resolution through ultimate obfuscation”. This is the method where you fill half a page with crazy developments up to a point where it is quite painfully clear you are not getting anywhere, then pull some random bullshit argument out of the closest cavity at hand, and jumps to the result you were out to prove in the first place. I had a few incredibly talented teachers in this particular technical skill.

A basic example might be something like:

Step 1: 1 + 1 = 2
<=> Step 2: 4*∫₀^+π/2cos(x)dx + Σ .9(1/10)^k = 2
<=> Step 3: ∫_{- ∞}^+λψ(x,y,z)dx * δ(1.2) + Σ ρ^e = δ φ#$@#$(*&&&(#!~%$%42))

[...]

Step 99: By using a nabla decomposition, we then easily extract the following result:

<=> 1 + 1 = 1

etc.

As you can imagine, the final result, albeit quite impressive by its depth and the sort of topic covered, was very much sub-standard, scientifically speaking. We managed to blow enough smoke in the room during our lengthy presentation to get a tired nod from our supervisor, who knew a thing or two about resolution through ultimate obfuscation himself. Quite obviously, the perspective to skip lunch mattered more to him than the potential reasoning flaws in our work.

Yet, the blatantly poor level of research of this paper didn’t prevent it, through some bizarre quirk of fate, from littering the darker recesses of the Intarweb, whence it was regularly pulled by hopeful young students in science who would then proceed to track me down and contact me to inquire about the very interesting way we seemed to get to that result on page 14 and these incredibly useful properties exhibited by the results on page 17, not to mention, these potential applications, heretofore unheard of, discussed on page 18…

Of course, I felt bad for the poor guys and their crushed spirits when I had to tell them that, actually, black magic and distilled alcohol played a major role in the way these results had been obtained, but on the other hand, there was little I could do.

Yet I knew that karma would come and byte me nasty in the arse one day. And it did.

It probably sounded like a good idea to my esteemed professor to ask me to present this as a validating paper to my previous years of monkeying around.

One of the burning question of these past few months has been then: Will I be able, either through acting class or with personal help from the manes of Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr, to make a sufficiently convincing adaptation of that brilliant piece of work, sustaining a second, possibly more critical observation, come the end of June?

The answer, in short: No

I will be spending a very studious Summer, busy figuring out new and inventive ways to amend the laws of physics to fit my needs.

In other news, I’m boarding my flight for Nihonland tomorrow. Get the sake ready. loads thereof.

Tokyo’s shock rocker extraordinaire has recently been spreading noxious germs memes batons, and kindly asked for my participation in the process.

Unfortunately, I will have to decline, seeing how:

1. I have already posted enough list/sample/endless ranting around the theme of music, digital version thereof included, to fill a few medium-sized encyclopedia. I am sure all the answers to the questionnaire are already there, in one form or another.
2. I like kittens.

However, not one to stay on a grumpy note, I went extra miles to participate in another of her cool ventures and add my contribution to her neat flickr group idea.

Yes, it’s a picture of myself. And I’m naked. So what? other people have done it before. There’s no shame.

What can I say, I was a sexy mutherfucka in my youth… Can you sense that raw sensuality oozing from my bare muscular buttocks?

(more…)

Snap taken of movie. Can you tell I enjoyed this movie? A fun night out in Tokyo town!
〓Tracey〓

Take Abe. Star of Bondi Tsunami. Met in person tonight. Very skinny and a stronger Aussie accent than me.
〓Tracey〓

Flick snaps.
〓Tracey〓

Australian-Japanese surfing road movie in FJ holden. What more can you ask for in a cult film?
〓Tracey〓

Don’t mind the noise in the background: still a few Apple fanboys around the world finishing themselves with WWDC keynote reruns. Man, what a mess the conference hall floor must have been.

A few thoughts to dump on top of the 20 millions (conservative estimate) blatantly unqualified comments on Apple’s recent decision to stick it to IBM and go with Intel:

(more…)

I flipped a coin, and between blogging about health, cats or the Deeper Meaning of Life, the latter won.

Then I realized I had very little to say about the Deeper Meaning of Life tonight.

…

Health is good.

I’m told it’s a good sign that I have stopped spitting blood.

Damn, I meant to mention: if you are planing on reading, you may want to stop eating now. If you are planning on eating, you may want to stop reading now…

Of course, I’d appreciate this news even more, had it not been replaced by recurrent bouts of blood sneezing. It would appear that, despite near-seasonal-record temperatures registered all over Europe for the past two weeks, I have managed to catch, of all things, a cold.

I think I know exactly when I caught it. Right after my surgery. Not only were the conditions memorable, but they also featured some very strange insights in the utterly fucked-up way my poor excuse for a brain seems to work:

Dunno if that was due to the longer-than-expected duration of the surgery, but apparently, my post-op wake-up was a bit more shaky than should have been…

The usual procedure goes something like this:
1) open eyes 2) say “hello world” and give my bravest sickly-young-boy smile with a thumb up worthy of the most ridiculous afternoon soaps 3) feel intense pain in every parts of my body, barely mitigated by the horrible aftertaste of anesthetic in the back of my throat 4) give the International Sign Language version of “please more painkiller in my I.V. drip” 5) go back to sleep…

Instead, it went something like:
(more…)

[Blogger Advisory: unspeakable nerdery, use of foul language.]

As promised: the answer to yesterday’s riddle (I know, suspense is killing you)…

Upon closer inspection, maybe I went a bit ahead of myself when I postulated the solution was “really easy”. Note that the explanation below, while somewhat tedious and longwinded, should be perfectly intelligible to anybody with very basic notions of arithmetic and a few sober neurons. If you don’t fit either criteria, feel free to skip to the last paragraph.

The Question

Does one stand better chances of: 1) getting at least one ace with 6 throws of a die, or 2) getting at least two aces with 12 throws?

(more…)

In the spirit of sharing the pain and suffering, I figured I’d make an entry dedicated to the kind of stuff I currently spend my days doing. Well: apart from giving you gruesome details of my current state of health or finding new, inventive, ways to scratch my ass.

Yes, brace yourself, for today is about Mathematics. Physics may come in another post later this week.

Probabilities

Since, I’m confident none of you, the nerdiest included, really want to hear about quadratic integration and advanced set theory (basing this guess on the fact that I would myself be much happier not knowing anything of their existence), I’ll talk about the only mathematical field remotely interesting to the common: Probabilities.

Unfortunately, probabilities are a very minor part of my curriculum, in what is probably my personal gods’ way of telling me: “see that finger? well that’s all you get, so stick it wherever you see fit and don’t hope for anything better”.

Mathematics, past early college level are fairly useless. The farther away, the more completely, utterly, devoid of potential real-life applications they get. And I don’t mean merely for those who later go on working full-time as stunt doubles in the San Fernando valley: even advanced engineering hardly ever requires mathematical tools that go beyond a first or second year university program, the rest is all for the mere glory of it. That leaves you with research and teaching as the two only career somewhat approaching full use of the curriculum.

Since no institution sane in their mind would ever let me anywhere close to a research lab (least of all: pay me to do so), while the degree of contempt I hold for my fellow humans happens to peak around the age group that frequents universities, it is safe to assume that I won’t ever be needing most of the stuff I am currently expected to master.

Lost in this ocean of tediousness, the barren islands of semi-useful fun that are Probabilities and Game Theory are the most paradisiac coasts you’ll ever lay an eye on. They let you actually glimpse into real uses for some of the wildly abstract mathematical constructs you’ve been using for years… That’s pretty unheard of for a student of Mathematics…

Even if the gist of it is: you would have to be a complete moron to ever lay a chip in a Vegas casino and, in the long run, we are all dead. If you squint really hard, you could nearly imagine that hypothetical situation where an idealized version of yourself, self-assured and composed, would step forward amidst the panic-stricken crowd of your fellow plane-crash passengers, and proclaim loudly: “We may as well save ourself the jump in these shark-infested waters: our chances of survival regardless are below 1% with a 97.48% probability factor. I would know: I am a mathematician.”

(more…)

5 Scars, off the top of my head:

• age – body part – shape – tool used – location: comment
• Before 1 – upper-lip – all over – scalpel – some hospital: Don’t remember much of that one.
• 8 – lower belly – straight line, a good two inches long – scalpel – some other hospital: Dangerously closer to vital reproductive organs.
• 12 – left shoulder – kinda star-shaped, rather tiny – surfboard+wave+basaltic ocean ground – bottom of the Indian ocean: The wave didn’t look that big at the time. Volcanic stone will really rip your skin apart.
• 17 – left shoulder – neat incision, half-an-inch – girlfriend with a knife – Paris: Not nearly as bad as it sounds.
• 22 – knuckle on medium finger of right hand – crescent-shaped – blunt object held by Bad Guy – Tokyo: more blood than damage. Didn’t end up all that well for Bad Guy.

(more…)

Nevermind that he wrote the all-american novel and was the icon of a generation…

One, and only one thing makes F. Scott Fitzgerald the coolest writer there ever was:

He married a girl named Zelda.

If anybody reading this was legally given the name Zelda at birth, please contact me: I think I may have to marry you right now.

When not writing meticulous reports of my wonderful travels and everyday fight to vanquish universal evil and save the world. I also read blogs. Much less these days, busy as I am, self-hypnotizing myself into a bona fide mathematician.

When not posing as a 16-year old girl from Kansas in IRC chatrooms, I leave comments on the blogs I read, infused with my usual blend of sassy retort and insightful modesty.

Thanks to the wonders of a strict classical education, and the miracles of modern computer-assisted translation, I usually read and comment in all of four languages (at least that’s what Babelfish tells me). Struggling as I am for broadness of perspective amidst the perpetual echo chambering and intra-community navel gazing of each specific blogosphere… as well as wary to preserve my worldly credit at social functions, without much of the laborious skimming of foreign newspapers that used to come with it.

Among the unavoidable reads of the old continent, sits Laurent Gloaguen, phlegmatic, pipe-smoking, contemporary critique with the dedication of a pro and the tongue-lashing skills of… err… an unpaid expert. His blog usually attracts an eclectic, if not selective, crowd of readers, whose comments span the full spectrum of the childish to the very insightful. As many observers have cauda-venenumously pointed out in the past: “the comments sometimes surpass the content itself”. Which is both slightly unfair to the nice synthetic work Laurent does, and true of every other institutionalized fixtures of the blogosphere.

At times, I have ended up writing entire posts (long ones) in the comment section of some of his entries, instead of simply opening a parallel debate on my own blog: Often, I would find myself sucked into debate on ultra-topical issues I initially held little interest for, and ended up building strong opinions upon discussion… Also, I suspect, the sheer pleasure of using another language without the concern of boring a public that understandably prefers posts not written in some foreign gibberish (and often very much limited in their international scope). Actually, let’s be frank: a lot of my commenting on foreign blogs has to do with a will to practice otherwise unused languages skills, at one level or another.

Anyway, all that to say that I had a lengthy exchange of comments on one such blog in recent times, and not wanting to overstay our welcome, decided to take it on this blog, for added clarity and freedom of ranting. It’s all here. But beware, as it’s entirely written in this cheese-eating monkey patois they call “French”. Try Babelfish for added comic purposes.

Sorry and we will be back to ranting in a civilized language as soon as the next entry.

[Cue upbeat music, engaging footage of miscellaneous means of locomotion blended over map of Europe, traveling red dot drawing a sinuous line toward the southern edge of the continent...]

[cue beach sunset slowly fading into the horizon. fade to black]

[...]

My medications run out tomorrow.

Chicago jazzman Oscar Brown Jr. died last Sunday.

He wasn’t perhaps sitting at the top of my personal pantheon of Jazz, but one of his track most definitely is.

But I was cool has to be the most hilariously infectious tune ever howled by a talented musician this side of the Funk belt, and the only way you should spend your next 2 minutes 55 seconds.

And until my bandwidth freezes over, or the vindicative Gods of Copyrighted Music kick me in the karma nuts, I’m gonna put the track for download on my server: please be nice and buy the album, it is well worth it. The trial sample is right here.