Thursday, October 14

[soid]

 Woke up before 9am. Checking the news, on the phone (aka the horror box), then coffee, cottage cheese with granola, maple syrup, grapes; watched Democracy Now! – oh, that's been disappointing. They keep inviting these freaks, calling for negotiations. No, I'm for negotiations too – but after Russia withdraws its forces.

10-11:30am Middle East lecture: Turkey and Iran after WW1. After the war French and British rule the whole world affairs, Americans arrive at the scene, try to participate in negotiations, but lack any expertise, have little to no impact. All 19th century Americans wanted to avoid getting involved in any European wars; it changed with Woodrow Wilson. He picks Lenin's idea of nations' right for self-determination and started promoting it, and the League of Nation, calls it the "war to end all wars". But in the end American senate didn't rectify the League of Nations, Wilson dies. The French and British just divided the Middle East however they wanted. France gets Syria, separates Lebanon as a Christian enclave. Britain gets Iraq (countless troubles keeping it until its formal independence in 1932), and Palestine (divides it, and gives part of it to an allied Arab family to create the country of Jordan). 

11:30-1pm some shallow work, then lunch. It was drizzling outside, warm, but moody due to the rain. I grabbed another coffee after lunch, but it kept raining and being moody. 

1-2pm Prof Kh's Office Hours. We discussed Cantor set topology (I'm still finding new things about it), compact sets, quotient maps. I tried to bring up the topic of glueing squares and disks, but he said it's later.

2:40-4pm Topology Compact sets and stuff from Analysis, blah blah, theorem lemma theorem, then the Lebesgue number. I got super sleepy.

Then I went downstairs to the math library, opened my laptop, put my head next to it, and dreamed some sunny fields, green grass, blue sky, and whatnot. Yes, I'm one of those strange people taking naps in the library. 

Then worked until 7pm. Strange setup, I have 3 primary machines – M1 mac, my old mac mini, and a Win with a good GPU – all different architectures, and then it all synchronizes via Dropbox and runs one different executables. Poor's people parallelization. 

Dinner at home: stir-fried yakisoba noodles with cauliflower, mushrooms, garlic, tomato, beef slices. Cauliflower is a good match. Looking into the progress bar, then YouTube, and then back.

B says almost all her family in China is in lockdown now. Sister is locked in her office, and they don't let her go home. Crazy stuff, but I should say no more. The spies are watching. I'm asking if it'll get better after the party conference, she says everyone hopes so.

Running things, seeing them fail in the evening. Bed by 2am.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Interesting. Lebesgue lemma is ok, but what about glueing squares and disks? Can we hear more?

Wilson, seems like people in the US still hate him for what he did for the world (I believe he did good).

Strange things you are eating. Will try cottage cheese with granola. I eat it with berries and sour cream, but why not experiment a bit.

[soid]

If we "glue" the circumference of a disk in R^2 into a single point, then topology of this disk becomes the same as of a 2D sphere (homeomorphic). So if we travel on the surface of the disk to its boundary then we can jump from any point on the circumference to any other point on it – similar as if we travel to the North pole and jump to any place on top of a map. The top of the map is in a sense glued to a single point.

Similarly, if we "glue" the opposite sides of a square, we get torus topology.

This "glueing" is done by adding new open sets to the disk or square topology. For the disk we just add one more open set that contains all circumference points; for the square we add many two point sets for the opposite pairs of points.
Then it gets more boring as it involves quotient maps and saturated sets, but Prof says we'll get back to it later.
Meanwhile I'll try to glue to opposite sides of a hexagon.

Wilson, seems like people in the US still hate him
It seems like Americans hate all their Presidents, and it's perhaps healthy this way. Wilsonian idealism shaped today's American foreign policy which is easy to hate, but harder to understand and admit its complexity.

Strange things you are eating. Will try cottage cheese with granola. I eat it with berries and sour cream
American cottage cheese is quite different from Slavic tvorog, even though often translated so, if you think of that. Cottage cheese is already creamy, no need in sour cream. I wouldn't eat tvorog with granola either. Doesn't seem to match.

[juan_gandhi]

The only cottage cheese I know is what they sell in Costco. Not creamy.

And anyway, I'm familiar with this level of topology; I still don't see where and how you glue a square to a disk. Glueing edges of a square to build either a torus or a Klein bottle, this is a different story.

[soid]

Ha, sorry, I didn't mean to glue a square to a circle together; just separately on that basic level of topology.

I've never tried cottage cheese from Costco. 10 years ago I bought cotton swabs at Costco – I still have them; it's a lifetime supply of cottage cheese cotton swabs, I just don't need so much. Now I wonder what it's like not creamy cottage cheese, or if my cottage cheese is not creamy enough. And if Costco saves money on the creaminess of their cotton swabs cottage cheese.

[juan_gandhi]

Costco may save money, but we save our health by buying a cottage cheese that does not contain all those chemicals, like guar gum, etc. Or we decide not to save money and make cottage cheese at home. You can do it too. The easiest way is to make it from buttermilk.

[soid]

Interesting, I've never heard of guar gum. Good to know.

[juan_gandhi]

Oh, btw, this one is actually good. I mentioned it by mistake, I'm afraid.