A Jewish mother says farewell to her son, who has been drafted into the Czar’s army and goes to fight against Turkey in 1877. She is of course very worried about her son’s welfare. While she is packing his knapsack, she says to him: “Listen, when you get to the front, kill a Turk, and rest. Kill a Turk, and rest.”
“But Mother,” replies the son, “what happens if while I’m resting, the Turk kills me?”
“Good God,” says the mother, horrified, “what does the Turk have against you?”
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This joke might be the source of the phrase “Kill a Turk and rest” – a popular Israeli saying meaning “don’t rush”.
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Amira Hass is using this joke to explain the failure of the Israeli public to distinguish between Palestinian terrorism and freedom fighters.
This semester I am teaching an advanced class on geometric approximation algorithms (see here). I am trying to write class notes for everything, and I am also trying to simplify the exposition of several topics (compared to the literature). Writing those class notes takes forever, but it is intellectually gratifying to see how some of those topics come together. I would appreciate any comments people might have about those class notes. (Currently, I have very few figures in the class notes. Drawing figures takes forever and would probably be done at some later iteration.)
So, SODA 05 (news update: webpage still sucks) results are out (thanks Suresh). Except for the atrocity of rejecting a rather nice paper of mine with Manor Mendel (which is now in full version, and is considerably stronger than the submitted version), I am rather happy with the results, as they accepted two pieces of high quality junk that I was involved in writing: here (with Bardia Sadri) and here (with Boris Aronov). Since Bardia is an Iranian student and as such he is a prisoner of the US/INS (like being a prisoner of Zion, but without hope that anybody cares, and with the danger that if you visit Texas, you will be executed), I would probably have to give both talks. Unless of course, Iran would stop being in the Axis of Evil before SODA takes place.
Also, recently, my magnum opus, “No, Coreset, No Cry” got accepted to FSTTCS, which means that I would be visiting India this December.
A long long time ago. in a land far far away, Kurt Mehlhorn wrote a classical text about data-structure, algorithms and computational geometry. It appeared as a sequence of three thin books in 1984. Anyway, one can download the text of the books from here. Furthermore, those postscript files are typed using tex, and as such are more readable than the original books (which are out of print, hard to get, and expensive) which were typed with some earlier system.
Those books still have several topics which are very well covered compared to other sources.