Thursday, October 6

[soid]

Woke up without around 7:30am – too early; back to sleep. Strange dreams, very engaging, mind-absorbing; it’s too early to get up. Looking at my phone – what’s on the news? It’s 9:40am and I have the lecture at 10. How do I even remember when I have so realistic dreams? No time for the news. Quick shower, no breakfast, getting a coffee at Uris hall, 15 minutes late to the lecture. 

10-11:30am Middle East history lecture. WW1 – complex topic; but we only focused on the Ottoman empire. Basically, the Ottomans were destroyed after WW1, but they also had the highest proportion of population lost, huge devastation, and Armenian genocide – partially due to welcoming Russian invasion, partially because of being too liberal. Still I don’t understand why modern Turkey won’t admit the genocide. It seems very similar to Holodomor and its Russia’s denial – especially since much of Armenian genocide cause by famine – but I should look more carefully into this.

11:30-12:30pm looking over Topology practice problems, definitions. Definitions, definitions, it’s important to remember them right.

12:30-1pm lunch at Barnard. Whoops, I’m not allowed to eat at Barnard; it turns out. So I just grabbed a burritto bowl at Diana. 

1-2pm Office Hours with Khovanov. If I had 3 more hours, I would probably figure it out on my own, but it’s good to be able to get some help and speed it up. 

Then I lost my jersey cause it was too warm outside and I took it off, and I kept looking for it until 2:40. 

2:40-4pm Topology midterm. Khovanov brought my jacket that I was trying to find the past hour. The midterm was not too bad, but I probably made a bunch of pity mistakes. The beginning was harder, then I realized the end was easier, then I was trying to double-check, and the time was over.

4-6pm working in the Math library. On a break I went to the stacks and picked up Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica. I was surprised a lot of it is written in mathematical logic notation (quantifiers, implications, etc), pages after pages, very little English – unlike any other math book I looked into before. I should probably write a more thoughtful post about it.

6-9pm walked home, it was 72 degrees and sunny; last two days of summer, according to the weatherman. Dinner, YouTube news (Noam Chomsky complaining about US refusing to talk with Russia– which makes a bit of sense), then I finished work and decided to watch a movie: The Last Emperor (1987). Seems like an interesting movie. I watched a half; 3 hours movie is a TV show of which episodes you decide. 

But watching it I kept thinking of the role of nationalism in the modern society, and how it is an invention of the 18-19th century; how Chinese are identified as Chinese and how separate they are from the western dude – in the movie. I kept thinking how the movie is the history of the West, not the East, – take for example English spoken by the characters in the movie with the stereotypical Asian accent; you can’t find modern movies like that anymore. Truely an document of “barbarianism”. And Nationalism appears to be a product of globalization – given all differences it is “natural” to cling to the like-minded.