Happy Friday, hexbears!
A short mega today, since I just noticed one has not yet been posted.
Paul Erdos was an extraordinarily prolific mathematician, who produced contributions to mathematics that continue to astound today in terms of both quantity and quality.
I read this in his wikipedia bio, and thought it was interesting:
Possessions meant little to Erdős; most of his belongings would fit in a suitcase, as dictated by his itinerant lifestyle. Awards and other earnings were generally donated to people in need and various worthy causes. He spent most of his life traveling between scientific conferences, universities and the homes of colleagues all over the world. He earned enough in stipends from universities as a guest lecturer, and from various mathematical awards, to fund his travels and basic needs; money left over he used to fund cash prizes for proofs of "Erdős problems". He would typically show up at a colleague's doorstep and announce "my brain is open", staying long enough to collaborate on a few papers before moving on a few days later. In many cases, he would ask the current collaborator about whom to visit next.
Erdos is also believed to have been asexual and aromantic. :hexbear-aromantic:
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I really do love all my comrades here.
Para social and all.
Lanterns floating on a vast dark sea. They provide only a little light, but it's reassuring all the same.
That moment when they’ve screamed for so long that you try and find a timestamp around the time they started so you can ground yourself and validate that it’s been a really long time
I like the idea that for children every inconvenience, frustration, and pain that they experience is literally the worst thing that has ever happened to them in their entire life, and their seemingly over the top reactions are actually just appropriate to their experience from their point of view.
New mega
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Last week I started a job where one of my responsibilities is to moderate a discord channel
I'm a paid mod, lol. lmao
I swear the 80s and 90s have replaced the 50s for a lot of chuds as the "time the west was great." They look at the aesthetic and the business booms and think it was great ignoring that under all the glitz was a shitty couple of decades for anyone that wasn't rich, white and male. Or basically anyone with a heart.
i mean for a lot of chuds the fact that those decades were shit for anyone non-white, poor, or non-male isn't really a problem
This is colored by my own experience, but I think that's because the 80s and 90s were boomers' young adult years and Gen x and millennials childhoods, and were times of relative prosperity (if you were white, cishet, not poor, able bodied, etc) before neoliberal hegemony and the internet.
It was the age of stuffed shoulders, corporate raiding, and cocaine.
My wife will put me in the doghouse if I go to the NRA protest. Hope everyone's having a better day than me. lol
Becoming an Anti-wife comic where all my jokes are about my wife not letting me run a protracted people's war against the united states.
There's something to be said about becoming politicized after you are obligated to others...it sucks.
she is worried that I'm gonna die. Basically because the NRA crowd is all trumpers, january 6th, fascists. She says all it's gonna take is one person in the crowd pushing the wrong dude and then pandemonium. Which, you know she is not wrong, but that's a personal risk I was willing to take. Even with my wife and kids at home. But she doesn't see it as praiseworthy.
I think I'm gonna meet up with the people I was going to meet up with and drop off the food and water I had packed. Give them my info if they get arrested and need to be picked up.
But honestly it sucks.
I think i need to start looking for more ways to help and become part of my local community cause this is just getting worse.
I am from Venezuela so I've watched the effects of American foreign policy, so you wouldn't catch me fleeing anywhere until this country has utterly collapsed or become isolated.
This is honestly such a good point that constantly gets over looked.
"If America sucks so much, why do people want to come here"
You even hear that talking point a lot from immigrants, especially Cuban immigrants.
And the answer is, America is doing its best to destroy the rest of the world. Don't confuse "higher living standards" with "morally rotten to the core."
America only has higher living standards than the global south because of imperialism.
She is definitely not thinking straight but that's the rub.
I suppose going to the protest strapped and armored would be kind of gauche.
I really feel this. It’s hard to not validate those worries, either. We put our kids in car seats even though any given ride is unlikely to end in a crash. So much of safety is a numbers game, especially while raising kids. So why would a protest be any different? It’s easy to say that sacrificing for the cause is worth it, but getting trampled and forgotten by all but your closest friends and relatives is hardly dying for the cause. And if you’re raising your kids to be critical and compassionate and to fight for justice, that is likely worth more than any single protest attendance.
I’m still wrestling with the idea that I may never be a frontline soldier, so to speak. I would gladly open up my home to a comrade in need. I would gladly coordinate communications and gather information. I already give financial support to various orgs and am a member of a couple committees. I know I can be useful. But maybe there’s just a part of me that romanticizes the violence and feels bad for not attending more protests. Time off work and distance from protests has also played a factor but still
Isn't the NRA pretty much toothless now after several lawsuits and schisms? I figured the GOP had moved way to the right even of them?
Listening to the French news as immersion practice. I finally understand enough to recognize when they say liberal bullshit.
Other fun facts about Erdos:
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He used amphetamines heavily. At one point, one of his friends was worried about him and asked him to quit for a month. Erdos did, easily, and at the end of the month said to his friend something like "congrats, you've delayed the course of mathematics by a month."
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Erdos was so prolific and had so many collaborators that it's like 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon in mathematics, still. If you published a paper with Erdos you have an Erdos number of 0. Publish a paper with someone who published a paper with Erdos and your Erdos number is 1. And so on. Erdos has been dead for awhile and these numbers are still small. My Erdos number (my advisor's number +1, because I've only ever published with my advisor) is I think 4, maybe 5.
Edit: You actually start Erdos number calculations from 1, not 0. And yes, my Erdos number is 4, which, since we're starting from 1, is actually 1 less than I thought. My advisor published a paper with a person who published a paper with a person who published a paper with Erdos.
More stuff
Described by his biographer, Paul Hoffman, as "probably the most eccentric mathematician in the world," Erdős spent most of his adult life living out of a suitcase.[17] Except for some years in the 1950s, when he was not allowed to enter the United States based on the accusation that he was a Communist sympathizer, his life was a continuous series of going from one meeting or seminar to another.[17] During his visits, Erdős expected his hosts to lodge him, feed him, and do his laundry, along with anything else he needed, as well as arrange for him to get to his next destination.[17]
On 20 September 1996, at the age of 83, he had a heart attack and died while attending a conference in Warsaw.[18] These circumstances were close to the way he wanted to die. He once said,
I want to be giving a lecture, finishing up an important proof on the blackboard, when someone in the audience shouts out, 'What about the general case?'. I'll turn to the audience and smile, 'I'll leave that to the next generation,' and then I'll keel over.[18]
...Hungary at the time was under the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union. Although Hungary limited the freedom of its own citizens to enter and exit the country, in 1956 it gave Erdős the exclusive privilege of being allowed to enter and exit the country as he pleased.
...Possessions meant little to Erdős; most of his belongings would fit in a suitcase, as dictated by his itinerant lifestyle. Awards and other earnings were generally donated to people in need and various worthy causes. He spent most of his life traveling between scientific conferences, universities and the homes of colleagues all over the world. He earned enough in stipends from universities as a guest lecturer, and from various mathematical awards, to fund his travels and basic needs; money left over he used to fund cash prizes for proofs of "Erdős problems" (see below). He would typically show up at a colleague's doorstep and announce "my brain is open", staying long enough to collaborate on a few papers before moving on a few days later. In many cases, he would ask the current collaborator about whom to visit next.
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so i made the mistake of opening the hexbear emoji menu. literally burned my hand on the overheating phone lmao
Did I need to know which of the chapo are circumcized? No. Do I now possess this information after the most recent episode? Hell yes.
You can't just post this and then not share the details with the class
Felix is the most jewish man to ever cast a pod. Obviously he's cut.
Matt got done at birth, I suppose common sentiment at the time was that it was 'cleaner' to do so.
Will is somehow the only man from the Upper West Side who is uncut.
Amber has not been circumcised.
Matt getting done at birth is just typical Midwest shit I think
Erdos was homeless for years and just stayed on the sofas of various professors whose unis he was lecturing at, also liked his amphetamine there was an incident when a friend challenged him to quit for a week, which he did and said something like 'You've successfully proven I'm not an addict, but you've set mathematics back months!'
hexbear: we've got an emoji for everything... and a user for everything too!
Westerners:
:only-throw: No! No find out!
:only-throw: Only fuck around!
prof chastising me for interrupting her when she interrupted me and started to misinterpreted my point and i literally just clarified? like, no, i'm saying two concepts are related, i'm not answering a different question? is it offensive that i tried to clarify? wtf? i was mid point when you cut me off like okay is this just a hierarchy thing? ugh
Many profs pick up bad habits of interrupting others and then feeling like they didn't have time to get their own point across. The worst thing ever is having 2-3 of them in the same conversation.
Maybe next time it would work better to raise a hand half-way? Not like you're asking a question, but sort of the universal gesture for "hang on, I've got something to say". Maybe accompanied by a slight head tilt? It can't get you accused of interrupting, but the meaning is also clear to you and everyone else. If she ignores you and insists on moving on, you do the slightly exaggerated lowering of the hand with a slight shake of the head, and the "you poor thing" half-smile, and she comes off looking brash.
I know you weren't actually looking for advice here. but, eh.
