Pirandello

The other night I went to see Six Characters in Search of an Author. It's a good play I think. To be honest, the production at the Lowry for which I had tickets failed to impress somewhat. The vast majority of the cast seemed to have come prepared for a pantomime rather than a radical existentialist romp. The story follows a family of six who were created by some author who didn't bother finishing the project. They are left in a sort of limbo of neither being seen by anyone else nor being entirely non-existent. As a result, they barge into a rehearsal for some play or other and demand that their story be told. I think it could be a very powerful drama but alas, such power was lacking from this performance. Could be an interesing thing to watch though. In other news: String theory is cool.

Conferences, Sleeping

Goodness, it has been rather a while. I've been away. This is my general excuse for everything (and it's not as if anyone reads this so I'm sure I'm not depleting some great following by neglecting to write anything). I was in Poland for a week and in Bakewell for another week. Two very different places. The Polish conference was one organised by the ESF on Algebraic Aspects in Geometry. (I was convinced that ought to have been 'of' rather than 'in', but hey, what do I know). It really was a rather strange experience - The only native English speakers were a guy from Wisconsin and me and yet all lectures were in English. The rest of the time, most people spoke either in French Russian or a small smattering of German. I suppose it helped somewhat that most of the people there seemed to be from Luxembourg presumably at the prompting of one of the organisers, Norbert Poncin. I met more than a few interesting people there though, which was great. Right now though, I have to figure out what the hell is going on with the mathematics... I thought I was doing ok, but it turns out that everything that took me a long time to figure out was already known. Boo.

Giotto's World Champion "O"

There's a (probably apocryphal) story that the Pope was thinking of commissioning some painting or other and sent a messenger to Giotto in order to get some sort of proof of his being able to draw. Giotto apparently turned from what he was doing, drew a perfect circle freehand on presumably some sort of paper and handed it to the messenger as proof of his skill. Now you can be world champion circle drawer!

300

Good God. Sorry in advance for the rant that is about to take place. For those who have had the good fortune to have been spared the torment of this film, it is about the invasion of Greece by Xerxes and the Persians and their repulsion at the battle of Thermopylae. The film 300 takes the historical events of Thermopylae and twists them into a hideous battle between the democratic and brave abdominal muscles of the Spartan few against the towel headed slavery loving antics of the Persians. The massive innumerable hordes of Persians attempt to subjugate what will become the cradle of "Western Civilisation" with overwhelming numbers of slave-soldiers... Can the Spartans save the possibility of freedom and democracy in the 21st Century? Only... This isn't what happened at all. Ironically, after the battle of Thermopylae, the Peloponnesian War almost saw Sparta destroying the cradle of civilisation that was the Athenian empire. Most people do not seem to be aware of this period of ancient history and so it seems to me that this sort of skewed and biased portrayal is genuinely damaging in the context of the so called 'war on terror'. The portrayal of an entire nation of Persians (Iranians) as barbaric and brutal is a dangerous oversimplification which simply exacerbates Occident vs. Orient cultural misunderstanding.

Wow

Goodness. It's been a while. Well, that's the way these things tend to go I suppose. Anyway. What have I been doing lately? Went to Southampton a little while ago and had a great discussion about mathematics as a socially agreed set of statements. To make something true in mathematics, all you have to do is to convince people of it. So to what extent is mathematics objectively true. Maybe it's all relative. Maybe the Gulf War never happened. RIP Baudrillard.