Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity

Sometime I wonder what would happened if the typical movie hero met reality. James Bond would be dead 60 seconds into most of his movies, etc.

So, here is dirty Harry meeting a small mid west town. And yes, its all ending in a lawsuit. What a surprise.

Here is a latex style file that enable one to write all the proofs in place, and by commenting out one line, one can create a version with the (marked) proofs to appear in a special appendix. The (top of the) style file contains instructions on how to use it.

And here is the latex source of an example. And here is the resulting version, with proofs in appendix, and another version with the proofs in place.

I am sure that a tex wizard can hack something more elegant easily, but that just might be good enough…

It seems like 12 out of 120 authors of papers in SoCG 08 are female (10%). There are claims that only one talk was given by a woman (Erin Wolf). Draw your own conclusions.

Who would think that cement can be that interesting?

The book of mozilla. Or is it all about robots? I’m confused.

And this is what I call grumpy.

…like ourselves, the rebels had become experts in repairing such damage. Sherman, in his memoirs, relates an anecdote of his campaign to Atlanta that well illustrates this point. The rebel cavalry lurking in his rear to burn bridges and obstruct his communications had become so disgusted at hearing trains go whistling by within a few hours after a bridge had been burned, that they proposed to try blowing up some of the tunnels. One of them said, “No use, boys, Old Sherman carries duplicate tunnels with him, and will replace them as fast as you can blow them up; better save your powder.”

– Personal memoirs of U.S. Grant.

Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth.
–Herman Hesse, Beneath the wheel.

The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

– Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams.

From the SoCG banquet.

I just have nothing useful or interesting to say.

Anyway, we had two days of SoCG in UMD so far, and except for two hot days, and a strong rain that caught us on the way back from the bonquet, there is nothing much to report. I am told by insiders than there are talks going on in this conference, but since I do not go to talks myself, I can only classify this piece of infomration as a rumour.

I want to emphesize that similarly to the Clinton campaign (for the presidentcy) this blog is not just about me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me. Its also about myself.

For example, I am currently working on some set cover related problems that seems to be significant and insignificant in the same time. For example, given a set of pseudo-disks in the plane, we can find an indepdent set of pseudo-disks of size opt/polylog(opt) (independent set = not intersecting). On one hand, the result looks interesting and probably not known, on the other hand, its just the regular combination – use standard approxmation technniques (not from geometry), splash in some CG tools, add olive oil, cook for 3 minutes, apply shallow cuttings, and viola, you have a new result (but dont forget to wash the kitchen, its a mess). Its hard to judge a quality of work when its not something you worked on before for a long time. Oh well, I would leave this judgement to the relevant PC/referees/etc.