Month: February 2002

It’s so rare that Ben Affleck actually has something interesting to say, I had to stop and write this down. Earlier tonight, I finished watching the final episode of Project Greenlight on HBO (taped earlier for my amusement), and I like what Ben had to say at the close of the program:

Movies inherently are like this. You have all these fights, you get outraged, you get furious at people, you have all this drama because a lot is at stake and you really care about it. And then, you know, you’ve all gone through it together so you’re sort of all buddies at the end. If the kind of time you had was a direct correlation to how good the movie was, then Smokey and the Bandit would be the best movie of all time.

My question to Ben: it isn’t?

In a recent e-mail, a fellow capper asked, “Does anybody in this country *not* hate Valentine’s Day?” I replied, “A few, but they’re being rounded up and shipped off to reeducation camps where they’ll learn that love is *not* a many splendored thing and be force-fed little candy hearts until they cry. Or maybe just shown the complete works of Coleman Francis, which has about the same effect.”

Oh well, happy Valentines Day anyway, courtesy of the Acme Heart Generator.

Remember, even the geekiest of us need love.

I put about as much faith in horoscopes as I do in online personality tests (see below), but I kind of like this one for Aries, which is what they tell me I am:

Happy Valentine’s Day, Aries! How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love how skilled you are at wriggling free of unproductive jams. I admire the way you change yourself into a fresh creation when you’ve gone as far as you can with the old model. I am delighted by how robustly you rebel against your past and fling yourself open to the unpredictable sweep of the future. There are so many other ways I adore you, my dear, but there’s only room to mention one more: I am enchanted by how you always seem ready to build a castle in the wilderness if this world ever fails you.

Found through pool, Karawynn Long’s message board.

These “What Kind of — Are You?” personality tests have run their course. Case in point:

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be William Fulton and Joe Harris’s Representation Theory: A First Course.

My primary goal is to introduce the beginner to the finite-dimensional representations of Lie groups and Lie algebras. Intended to serve non-specialists, my concentration is on examples. The general theory is developed sparingly, and then mainly as a useful and unifying language to describe phenomena already encountered in concrete cases. I begin with a brief tour through representation theory of finite groups, with emphasis determined by what is useful for Lie groups; in particular, the symmetric groups are treated in some detail. My focus then turns to Lie groups and Lie algebras and finally to my heart: working out the finite dimensional representations of the classical groups and exploring the related geometry. The goal of my last portion is to make a bridge between the example-oriented approach of the earlier parts and the general theory.

Which Springer GTM would you be?

The Springer GTM Test

Now, I find this mildly amusing, since I used to work in a bookstore and was, more than once, responsible for receiving boxes and boxes of Springer-Verlag books (it was a University, we had quote-unquote “yellow sales,” it wasn’t fun), but what’s the point? Really, what’s the point? Found at Tuppence.