May 2009
19 posts
1 tag
Bordered Heegaard Floer homology: Invariance and... →
Robert Lipshitz, Peter Ozsvath, Dylan Thurston
May 31st
1 tag
Slicing planar grid diagrams: a gentle... →
Robert Lipshitz, Peter Ozsvath, Dylan Thurston
May 31st
1 tag
Three dimensional manifolds all of whose geodesics... →
John Olsen
May 31st
1 tag
Recently read: The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio I read the abridged Norton Critical Edition of The Decameron in college, but decided a few months ago that it was high time I read the whole thing. I’ve been reading it off and on since, 10 or 20 stories at a time with extended breaks for other books. This is a really delightful collection of stories, spanning a range of topics from...
May 31st
 sportsguy33: I have a legal question: can LeBron sue Mike Brown for coaching negligence in this series? Is there a legal precedent?
May 31st
 hotdogsladies: Multitasking is like driving or cunnilingus; most people assume they’re great at it until they start asking around.
May 25th
 sportsguy33: ESPN’s Ric Bucher is reporting that George Karl plans on coming up with an effective inbounds play by Game 5. Story developing.
May 24th
 sportsguy33: We need to tweak the NBA’s taunting rule. You should always, and I mean ALWAYS, be allowed to taunt Sasha Vujacic.
May 24th
1 tag
Recently read: The Breaks of the Game, by David Halberstam This is, ostensibly, the story of the Portland Trail Blazers’ disappointing 1979-80 season, but the disappointment of that season is so tied up in the fallout of the Blazers’ 1977 championship and Bill Walton’s subsequent injury and acrimonious departure that it’s really the story of the fragility of excellence...
May 23rd
1 tag
Recently read: The Last Judgement, Giotto’s Hand, and Death and Restoration, by Iain Pears Books four through six of Pears’ Art History Mysteries series. All reasonably good (and all better than The Bernini Bust), but the best is Death and Restoration,1 which follows the formula of the most successful books in the series: it’s set in Italy, it focuses primarily on a single...
May 21st
 sportsguy33: I’ve said it a million times: When George Karl is your coach in a tight game, that means George Karl is your coach in a tight game.
May 20th
May 13th
1 tag
Recently read: The Bernini Bust, by Iain Pears The third of Pears’ art history mysteries. Although the mystery is reasonably engaging, it lacks some of the charm of the earlier books in the series, both because most of the action takes place in Los Angeles instead of Italy and because this is the book in which the protagonists make the awkward transition from superficially mismatched...
May 13th
 Conspicuously absent from both game coverage and postgame show: a replay of the “foul” which led to Nowitzki’s icing free throws.
May 12th
WatchWatch
As if circulation isn’t the measure of success for newspapers and magazines. For extra irony, note that, as mentioned later in the video, John Horgan was the first staff writer hired by Scientific American when, in an attempt to appeal to a more mainstream audience, they started producing more staff-written articles.
May 10th
 Clear sign of Bennett Salvatore’s involvement in this game: following the final buzzer, both teams are completely irate.
May 10th
1 tag
Recently read: The Cuckoo’s Egg, by Cliff Stoll The story of how Stoll accidentally discovered and, with considerable doggedness in the face of almost total apathy on the part of all the relevant authorities, ultimately tracked down a German hacker, Markus Hess, who had gained root access to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s computer system and was trying (with a surprising amount...
May 8th
The Nature of Time →
Julian Barbour explains why time is unnecessary.
May 4th
1 tag
Eigenvalue and gap estimates for the Laplacian... →
Pierre Guerini, Alessandro Savo
May 1st