Crossover

[stoutfellow]

A few months back, I went onto Project Gutenberg to look for P. M. A. Linebarger's book, "Psychological Warfare". (Linebarger is better known to SF fans under the name of Cordwainer Smith. His Instrumentality stories - "Scanners Live in Vain", "The Dead Lady of Clown Town", "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell", and "Norstrilia", among others - are very unusual, and many of them are very good. I like "The Dead Lady" most, but that seems to be a minority opinion.)

Linebarger was a U.S. Intelligence officer during WWII and Korea, and his book on psychological warfare was The Book for quite a while. I'm finding it interesting, mostly for the way it organizes the fundamental concepts and techniques of the subject, but the historical review at the beginning is particularly interesting. His critique of John Milton's ineptitude as a Cromwellite propagandist is rather amusing; he also covers other practitioners, ranging from Gideon and Themistocles to Genghis Khan and other, more modern figures. I'm enjoying the book so far.

Comments

[ndrosen]

That sounds interesting.

Your mathematical work also sounds interesting, in some sense, but I’m not at the level where I could properly appreciate it.

[stoutfellow]

As far as the math is concerned... What I'm actually working on is a methodology for identifying possibly interesting classes of polygons, finding interesting things about those classes, and establishing connections between different classes. That stuff would be extremely hard to explain to non-mathematicians. (I tried to do so, once, on DW, but didn't get very far.)

But there's another layer to it: the results of applying that methodology. That is, I could describe some of the classes I've discovered and say what's interesting about them. That, or at least some of that, might be more accessible. I might give that a go sometime soon.