stoutfellow

Last week in Linear Algebra, we started in on abstraction - general vector spaces and the like. I made some brief comments on the concept of dimension - not the precise idea used in linear algebra, but a more general one - and one of the students asked about visualizing four-dimensional objects with three-dimensional images. I went off on a brief digression about tesseracts and their three- and two-dimensional shadows, drawing a picture of the latter.

Today, after class, another student came up to me and said he'd been thinking about what I'd said, in the context of Plato's Cave. It's a fairly obvious connection to draw, if you know (on the one hand) enough mathematics and (on the other) enough history of philosophy; but it's still nice to see a student drawing cross-subject connections.

I suggested that he read Abbott's _Flatland_; it's not quite in line with what he was talking about, but he might find it interesting.

On Thursday, I got a new pair of glasses. They're a bit stronger than my old pair, I think, and they're shaped slightly differently; I'm probably going to take a while getting used to them. But I'm back in action.

Yesterday, I did my taxes. For the first time in some years, I wound up taking the standard deduction rather than itemizing, but will get small to medium refunds, if all goes well.

Today, to reward myself for Achieving Things, I paid a visit to Amazon. I've been feeling a bit nostalgic for a group of writers I enjoyed back in the '70s, so I ordered one book from each of them: Fletcher Knebel's "Night of Camp David" ("Seven Days in May" doesn't seem to be available on Kindle); Morris West's "Shoes of the Fisherman" (I read the Reader's Digest version; the rest of the Vatican Trilogy is also available on Kindle); Irving Wallace's "The Man" (about the first black U.S. President); Arthur Hailey's "Hotel" (not as well known as "Airport", but there was a movie and a short-lived TV series); Leon Uris' "QB VII" (the first book of his I read); Allen Drury's "Advise and Consent" (the series got very polemical by the end, but I recall the first two or three as being pretty good); and James Michener's "Centennial". Wallace and Hailey basically wrote potboilers, and, if the Suck Fairy has struck any of these, those two are the most likely.

I also bought further volumes (hardcopy) of Girl Genius, Schlock Mercenary, and Fables, and the first volume of Saga. A later volume of Saga was a Hugo nominee at the Reno WorldCon, I think, (nope, it was Spokane 2015) and I liked it quite a bit - I think it was my number one choice in its category - but I haven't gotten around to starting the series yet.

Finally, I ordered a couple of nonfiction works: "Censors at Work", by Robert Darnton (recommended by Jo Walton) and "Freedom and Responsibility" by Hilary Bok, aka hilzoy, who was my favorite poster at Obsidian Wings until she retired from blogging. I still have her Twitter feed bookmarked. (OW hasn't been the same since Andy Olmstead died and she and katharine retired, alas.)

So, things to do in my spare time...

ETA: Gaah, I forgot to mention two more e-books: Marc Morris' "The Norman Conquest" and Miles Cameron's "Cold Iron". I don't remember who recommended them, but I put them on the list, so they must have sounded interesting.

For those who are tempted to despair by the events of the last month - and the prospect of worse to come in the next couple of years - here is A Brief for the Defense.

Hat-tip to Abi Sutherland at Making Light.

It is a good thing to prepare a casserole, using multiple ingredients with different flavors and textures, to be eaten over the course of a week.

It is also a good thing to put peanut butter on whole-wheat crackers and wash them down with milk.

Certainly Buster and Gracie are more in favor of the latter.

Quite a few years ago, I bought The Intentional Stance, by Daniel Dennett. I don't remember what prompted the purchase. I've had it shelved with the books on linguistics, but, as I discovered when I took it down a week or so ago, it's actually a philosophy text, on the theory of mind and the nature of belief. Not what I expected.

I'm finding it a tough read, but an interesting one. The oddest connections keep popping up: to the disputes in philosophy of mathematics since Cantor's time, to the work of Csányi and de Waal on the minds of animals, to works of fiction like Bear's Queen of Angels and Bujold's Memory....

I realize that I'm probably missing a lot; the book is confessedly a contribution to a long dispute, and - not having read any other parts of that dispute - I can't really assess how strong the book's arguments are, or even, in full, what they mean. I recognize names - Hilary Putnam, W. V. O. Quine, Saul Kripke, Jerry Fodor - but little more than that. (Kripke and Quine, in particular, I ought to investigate. I've got at least one book by each of them, sitting unread on my shelves.)

Interesting or no, I probably won't be reviewing it. It's too dense and, frankly, too far from my main areas of interest. Still, I think I'm glad I picked it up, even if I don't remember why.