Middlering - 下一站：中環。 Next Station: Central.

(Gordon ramsay chewing out a restaurant owner over his old expired ingredients) And where the fuck does this door lead? If I see a- (there is a hallway miles long, with ashen black walls and no end in sight)¹

1. oh for fucks sake

HAPPY 2024 YALL WE'RE CELEBRATING WITH THE SAPPHICS EVER

2023 was crazy but also i don't remember most of it Imao, I genuinely hope yall had a good year though and made some accomplishments (whether or not they were what you wanted in the beginning of the year) and I hope 2024 is a great year for you all!!!! 🥳💜🎉

After the math pope, we have a math president

From the Wiki page of Nicușor Dan, the new president of Romania:

He won first prizes in the International Mathematical Olympiads in 1987 and 1988 with perfect scores.[3] Dan moved to Bucharest at the age of 18 and began studying mathematics at the University of Bucharest.[4] In 1992, he moved to France to continue studying mathematics: he followed the courses of the École Normale Supérieure, one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles, where he gained a master's degree. In 1998 Dan completed a PhD in mathematics at Paris 13 University, with thesis "Courants de Green et prolongement méromorphe" written under the direction of Christophe Soulé and Daniel Barsky [de].[5][6]

Dan's 1988 gold medal also means he was one of eleven contestants to get full marks on the infamous Problem 6, a question so difficult that nobody on the IMO problem committee could solve it.

His personal website lists his primary area of research as Arakelov geometry, a method of studying Diophantine equations from a geometric point of view.

His thesis, in the same field.

His arXiv.

Happy 2025!

I worked like mad to finish this but here it is – some insanely large number of words about the year that was, through the lens of Billy Joel songs with "night" in the title because they are fascinating as all get out.

Interchanges, rambles, and confluences

Sing Us A Song To Night: The Night-time Motif in Billy Joel’s Songwriting

Some reviews are so esoteric or so literal rather than musical in their outlook that they just confuse the issues involved. —Billy Joel, int

Special shoutout to @thebreakfastgenie for helping to infect me with the urge to go even deeper into the old man research.

#holding out hope the new documentary confirms my theory that 'died in september' refers to the suicide attempts occurring in september 1970

Having it on the record one way or the other would be everything.

The other thing that gets me about the lyrics (and I also put this into my giant Billy Joel essay) is "Unsung songs show my direction" because Walter Everett once compared the song's composition to Henry Mancini and André Propp and in 1971 both of them had just written instrumental songs ("A Time for Us" and "Love is Blue") that went to the top of the charts. So that line is already meta for the likely inspirations behind "Silver Seas" but then he removed the lyrics and added another self-referential layer because now that lyric refers to "Nocturne" itself too.

Once I lived You might remember Born in May Died in September

Just adding the former Twitter thread of analysis here for posterity.

threadreaderapp.com

Thread by @normative on Thread Reader App

@normative: I just got a graphic novel adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four and was pleasantly surprised to see they included the Appendix “Pr

Actually the implied timeline for the fall of Ingsoc is even shorter than that, on a second look. The Appendix says the Newspeak spoken in 1984 is captured in the 9th & 10th editions of the Newspeak dictionary, and that the 11th edition was the “final” one.  We don’t know exactly when the Party rose to power or started Newspeak, but if they’re already on the 10th edition by 1984 or shortly thereafter, and the Party doesn’t take power until after 1949, that implies new editions being released at absolute most every 3-4 years.  If the 10th edition is released roughly contemporaneously with the events of the book & Ingsoc lasts long enough to produce an 11th edition, but not a 12th, that suggests the collapse of the regime within about a decade of those events.  Another clue: Translation of English Lit classics to Newspeak were planned, and it “was not expected that they would be completed before the first or second decade of the 21st century,” after which the originals would be destroyed.  The use of the subjunctive—and the fact that the future authors of the Appendix assume readers remain familiar with works of Shakespeare, Milton, Jefferson etc.—also implies the fall of Ingsoc before “the first or second decade of the twenty-first century”.  So that’s at least two very strong clues Orwell plants that Ingsoc did not outlast the 20th Century, despite its seeming efficiency at ferreting out and breaking dissenters.

Absolutely amazing money quote too:

The large number of people responding that they did indeed miss this when they read Nineteen Eighty-Four suggests Orwell pulled off a rather brilliant literary prank: He wrote an optimistic epilogue, but hid it in the guise of an Appendix which many (perhaps most) readers either skipped or took at face value as just an essay about Newspeak, rather than a continuation of the story. And this is perfect. It would have been a literary crime to spoil the gut punch of “He loved Big Brother” by tacking on an overt happy ending epilogue. The happy ending is there, but Orwell makes you work for it.

Besties I am reading about the appendix of 1984 by George Orwell and I just re-read the actual appendix last night and I stg I'm gonna scream and cry and throw up because it's fucking past perfect tense and it's the "woulds" and it's the fact that the appendix is written in modern English. 1984 secret ending where Big Brother is long gone it makes me cry.

Generalized Golf

I have looked up nothing about golf to write this.

Let C be any topological space. We will call this the ‘course’. For any two points x,y ∈ C we have a collection S_xy of ‘shots from x to y’, where each ‘shot’ s ∈ S_xy is a path in C from x to y, which is to say a continuous function s: [0,1] → C with s(0) = x and s(1) = y. For a shot s ∈ S_xy we call x its ‘start’ and y its ‘end’. Let S denote the collection of all shots in C between any two points.

A ‘hole’ on C is a triple (t,h,p) where t ∈ C is a point called the ‘tee’, h ⊂ C is a subset called (confusingly) the ‘hole’, and p is an ordinal number called the ‘par’. For any cardinal number κ we define a ‘golf’ of length κ to be a function g: κ → H, where H is a set of holes on C. A golf g is called ‘finite’ if κ is finite and the par of every hole in the image of g is finite. We define the par of a finite golf as the sum of the pars of its constituent holes.

A quintuple (C,S,κ,H,g) defined like above is called a ‘game of (generalized) golf’.

Take a hole (t,h,p), a successor ordinal ω+1. Let F: ω+1 → S be a function such that F(0) is a shot from t, for every i < ω the end of F(i) equals the start of F(i+1), the end of F(ω) is an element of h, and no F(i) ends in h before this. Such an F is called a ‘play’. We call ω the ‘score’ of F.

A ‘golfer’ is a collection of probability spaces, which for any shot s ∈ S with start x and end y gives a probability space on the set of shots from x. This is to be interpreted as the ways in which a shot can deviate from the golfer’s intent.

…

Now to define the real numbers by way of games of golf on ℚ.

if you’re a new tumblr user from tiktok or IG or something and only like posts and dont reblog them yeah people will think you’re a bot and block you but you will also make this website actively worse. they want “algorithmic” users like you, served recommended posts through likes, not people who just follow each other and respond to the direct chronological feed. there is a reason this website is still better than the rest, even with all its problems, do not ruin this

Blatantly Partisan Party Review XV (federal 2025): Katter’s Australian Party

Running where: QLD. The party is contesting three House divisions: Bob Katter himself for Kennedy, plus candidates in Herbert and Leichhardt, while in the Senate, a candidate is second on a joint ticket with Rennick First for Group G

Prior reviews: federal 2013, federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “For those of us on the left, KAP has a few things to like and a lot to detest.” (federal 2022)

What I think this year: I’ve already covered a bunch of “dontcha know who I am?” cult-of-personality parties, and here is perhaps the most larger-than-life personality of the Australian political scene: the North Queenslander in the big hat, the man who would let a thousand blossoms bloom, part of the parliamentary furniture itself, the one and only Bob Katter.

Now, Bob is a character but he's consistent one, so instead of reprising the greatest hits that I've featured before, I thought I would present you with some history to contextualise him and his electorate. Katter’s seat of Kennedy is a vast one. It stretches from the Coral Sea coast between Cairns and Townsville, across the Great Dividing Range, and through Outback towns such as Charters Towers, Hughenden, and Cloncurry out to Mount Isa, across to the NT border, and up to the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Bob Katter has seemingly stomped the length and breadth of it to become an enduringly popular local member. Although Kennedy is one of the original 65 electorates from Federation in 1901, Katter is remarkably just the seventh person to hold it.

Kennedy was in Labor hands from 1929 to 1966 while Darby Riordan and then his nephew Bill held the seat, but for the last 59 years it has been a family business for the other side of politics:, a Katter has represented Kennedy for all but 3 years. Bob’s father, Bob Katter Sr, won it for the Country Party (later renamed the Nationals) and held it from 1966 until his death in 1990, while the young fella learned the family business as a state MP from 1974. Bob Jr served as a cabinet minister from 1983 under another larger-than-life Queensland pollie, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and in August 1989, Sir Joh unsuccessfully endorsed Katter as his successor as premier. Instead, Bob Jr had an annus horribilis: he went into opposition at the December 1989 Queensland state election, his dad died days before the March 1990 federal election, and Kennedy fell to Labor. The new MP, Rob Hulls, however, only got one term representing this sprawling constituency (and yes, Victorian readers with long memories, that is the Rob Hulls, deputy premier to John Brumby in 2007–10; quite the change of scenery!).

Katter shifted to federal parliament at the 1993 election, winning back the seat of dear old dad, and he has held Kennedy ever since. In 2001 he left the Nationals to sit as an independent: he disagreed with the rise of neoliberal economics (good!) and with some of the Coalition’s more socially liberal policies (bad! especially as the Coalition is uhh not very socially liberal!). In 2011, he founded Katter’s Australian Party, which met with very little success outside Queensland at the 2013 and 2016 federal elections and has since focused on winning seats in North Queensland. It really ought to be called Katter's North Queensland Party.

Bob’s son Robbie has been the party leader since 2020, and at state level KAP holds three seats that overlap with the Division of Kennedy. But Bob is the only KAP representative at federal level; ex-One Nation lunatic Fraser Anning briefly joined KAP as a Senator in 2018 but proved to be too barmy even for the Katters. I see little reason to anticipate any change to the party’s representation this year. If you live in Kennedy, you probably know Katter is a strong favourite to retain his seat; if you don’t, I hope the history above helped make this explicable.

What is Bob emphasising in his campaign this year? Well, per the homepage, “KAP = Castle Law”. Yes, their core focus is a fear campaign that “crime in Queensland is out of control” and people have a “right to defend their home against intruders without facing legal consequences”. Look, I spent my teenage years in a conservative Queensland setting where A Current Affair was as serious a source of news as the 7:30 Report, but shooting dead a trespasser in your garden is disproportionate. KAP states that “Under the current law, people must demonstrate they have only used ‘necessary’ force under the ‘reasonable belief’ that the intruder was entering their home to commit a serious crime”. Seems fine to me! But they think that people “cannot always make split-second, measured decisions in moments of crisis”. The existing law as per their own description already accommodates this: a person fiddling with your gate is obviously a different degree of threat to somebody confronting you in your bedroom with a knife, and going out all guns blazing at the former is not "reasonable". KAP's policy is a solution in search of a problem.

Other policies? Still on crime, KAP has a four-step “send ‘em out bush” policy for young offenders that in practice would just make them more resentful. You won’t be surprised to learn that KAP wants harsher sentences in general for youth offending and backs the LNP’s “adult crime = adult time” approach. Turning to energy, KAP want more coal, more gas, and new nuclear. Other infrastructure policies focus mainly on roads and on dams to support agriculture. Unsurprisingly for a party whose largest donors are from the gun lobby, KAP’s approach to firearms is permissive. And maybe one of their odder policies is that “KAP wants flying foxes gone from populated areas” and supports culling them. Did a flying fox steal your dog Bob? Come on man. Three of seven species of flying fox in Australia are listed as vulnerable or endangered.

And, of course, for a party led by a man whose most famous remark is about crocodiles tearing people to pieces in North Queensland, there is a policy that “values human life above crocodiles”. Enjoy. Should this move you, perhaps you might also want to buy an official “let there be a thousand blossoms bloom” shirt. If so, Bob’s got a shop for that. I am not kidding.

Recommendation: Give Katter’s Australian Party a very low preference in the House and a weak or no preference in the Senate.

Website: https://kattersaustralianparty.org.au/

(For the pol nerds: Bob is currently Father of the House, i.e. the longest-serving current MP, but at just over 32 years in office he is not yet in the top ten ever. If the new parliament goes to term and Bob does not retire before the election, he will be either 10th or 11th  on the all-time list depending on the exact day of election. He needs to serve five years from today to get into the top five, 10.5 years to get into the top two, and just shy of twenty years to pass Billy Hughes’ record of 51 years and 213 days. Keep in mind that Bob turns 80 next month. Now, yes, he served 18 years in Queensland’s state parliament, so as of this year he has been in a parliament for half a century, but Billy Hughes served in the NSW parliament for 7 years; to exceed Hughes’ cumulative time, Katter needs to be in office for another 8.7 years)

So I recently stumbled on the Wikipedia article for the Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch theorem, which is an algebraic geometry thing that I'll hopefully learn some day once I actually have the prerequisite knowledge =w= But at the top of the article was this letter, which I thought was a wild thing to have at the top of a Wikipedia article about a niche abstract math thing - here's a translation:

Witches' Kitchen 1971 Riemann-Rochian Theorem: the latest craze*: the diagram

is commutatif**! To give this statement about f: X->Y some approximative meaning, I had to abuse the listeners' patience for nearly two hours. In black and white (in Springer's Lecture Notes) it seems like it will take up to about 400, 500 pages. A gripping example of how our thirst for knowledge and discovery indulges itself more and more in a(n il?)logical delirium far removed from life, while life itself is going to hell in thousandfold ways - and is threatened with absolute annihilation. High time to change our course! (6.12.1971) Alexander Grothendiek

* "der letzte Schrei" is a reasonably common German idiom meaning "the latest craze", but here it could alternatively be translated non-idiomatically as something like "the last cry". I think its more fun to imagine he means the idiom. ** I'm assuming this is a weird old-timey spelling probably taken from french but googling it I can find no examples of anybody using this spelling in German besides this letter

Note that this is 20 years before all of this happens: