Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity

Worth reading: The end.

Instead it would be submitted. (Abstracts and titles are due today, full submissions are due in a week.) After that it would be selected, neglected, reviewed, criticized, absordified/absurdified, and glorified. In the process it is sure to be misread, misunderstood, and generally confuse everybody that sees it. (The only sub-referee that would really understand the paper would submit his referee report in 2010, just in time for the midterm elections.) Then it would be infected, injected, rejected, ejected, deflated, and if anything else fails even accepted (but to other conferences, naturally).

And now I have to go back to inventing fictional titles and abstracts to the 20-30 papers I am going to write in the remaining week.

The rape of Nanking: A good movie and the wikipedia entry.

Here is a cute proof of Turan’s theorem. That is, a graph G with n vertices has an independent set of size n/(1+t), where t is the average degree in G.

Update: Following some readers comments, is a more elaborate write-up.

I just finished teaching an explicit construction of expanders in the Randomized Algorithms class (covered Zig-Zag product and small expanders, etc). The analysis is partially new (and elegant, me think) and is based on an upcoming paper by Asaf Naor and Manor Mendel. Like most things, the class notes come in three parts: part I, part II, and (you guessed it) part III.

Like all first iteration class notes, they contain mistakes, typos, lies, damn lies, but no statistics.

Now, that the truth is starting to crawl out about Sarah Palin, it seems that the questionnaire she had to fill during the screening process was insufficient to uncover her shortcomings. As such, I suggest to add the following multiple choice question to this questionnaire:

Q: Africa is

1. A state north of south Africa (like Virginia and West Virginia).
2. A continent.
3. A place one can see from a window in Alaska.
4. A meditation technique. The name stands for “AFter Arica“.
5. The period in the war in the pacific following the battle of Arica.
6. A cookie.
7. A shape of a cookie.

Mr. Matzerath has just seen fit to inform me that this partisan, unlike so many of them, was an authentic partisan. For – to quote the rest of my patient’s lecture – there is no such thing as a part-time partisan. Real partisans are partisans always and as long as they live. They put fallen governments back in power and over throw governments that have just been put in power with the help of partisans. Mr. Matzerath contended – and this thesis struck me as perfectly plausible – that among all those who go in for politics your incorrigible partisan, who undermines what he has just set up, is closest to the artist because he consistently rejects what he has just created.

— The tin drum, Gunter Grass

Can you see the train?

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
–Leonard Cohen

The full lyrics are here.

The video.

Exactly four years ago

It will be all my fault!. And I can not even vote.