gestalt

Usually a good indicator that bad writing awaits...

oprah

What could be said about Oprah that I would be interested in?

thought leader

Just trying searching on this term to see what I mean...

I start trying to find patterns. So I'm doing calculations which try to explain some little piece of mathematics. I'm trying to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some branch of mathematics. Sometimes that'll involve going and looking up in a book to see how it's done there; sometimes it's a question of modifying things a bit, sometimes doing a little extra calculation; and sometimes you realize that nothing that's ever been done before is any use at all and you just have to find something that is completely new, and it's a mystery where it comes from.

It's like being in a unfamiliar town, full of little byways. You think, 'Ah, I want to visit the palace—perhaps it's through here.' You plod along, you take a few twists and turns, you look up, and suddenly, there you are, at the palace steps.

I would like to put forward a second aspect of mathematics: I maintain that mathematics has an object that is just as real as that of the sciences I mentioned above [geology, particle physics, biochemistry, cosmology], but this object is not material, and is located in neither space nor time. Nevertheless this object has an existence that is every bit as solid as external reality, and mathematicians bump up against it in somewhat the same way as one bumps into a material object in external reality. Because this reality cannot be located in space or time, it affords—when one is fortunate enough to even uncover the minutest portion of it—a sensation of extraordinary pleasure through the feeling of timeliness that it produces.

If sometimes you feel insignificant, useless, offended, or depressed, always remember that you were once the fastest and most victorious sperm out of hundreds of millions.

Looks like it would be a great time for hanging out at Oakhurst, the weather being consistently in the high fifties and not much precipitation. (Not that we're about to travel out there)...

We were there (Oakhurst) on the Martin Luther King day weekend and it was perfect, nice and warm and not at all too hot. Some of my math work got mentioned in the American Mathematical Society's "New in Math" column (on the web). I go to physics class, taught by my neighbor, tonight.

A girl named Amy Malzbender, 6 years old, was run over and killed by a Palo Alto high school senior January 28. The driver kept on going "as if nothing had happened" (as one says). It happened over near Gunn High School, which is near the University Club.

Cole and I went for a bike ride the next day and saw a parrot sitting on a mailbox, near a busy intersection. It was very talkative, calling out "Look at the bird! Look at the bird!" over and over again. We stopped to listen and the owner appeared. The bird says what it hears, that's all, she said.

...Tony Benn met Saddam in 1990 when, along with other British politicians, he tried to seek the release of British civilians in Iraq following Baghdad's invasion of neighbouring Kuwait.

He said the reason for his current visit to Baghdad was "to explore possibilities of a peaceful solution to a problem, that otherwise might lead to the most catastrophic war in which innocent people will be killed with long-term consequences".

"Mama—when we say that it is not opposite day, it means that it is opposite day. And if we say it is opposite day, it—well, actually, it's not...