Why do you find it so sad? What am I missing?
I don't know. Something in her expression seems so green and optimistic.
Or maybe like her optimism is beginning to sour.
and she's not sure what to do if you don't have optimism to carry you anymore.
I think they look young and sweet and slightly messy in an appealing way.
The photo was taken seconds before young Lance revealed what would prove to be a lifelong passion for the song "Disco Duck."
The photo was taken seconds before Jan was informed that she'd unknowingly conceived Lance with her twin brother, from whom she'd been separated at birth.
Are Jan and Lance well-known people?
I don't know what looks sad about this.
Also, the purple-gray clouds and expanse of space seem so sad and bleak.
The photo was taken seconds before Jan handed Lance over to his grandmother and left her home behind forever, joining the freedom fighters of the Western Sahara.
The photo was taken seconds before Lance first "saw dead people."
I'm glad I'm not the only one confused. In trying to imagine why this was sad, I thought maybe I should recognize the brown bottle as being some iconic brand of hard liquor.
The photo was taken the day before Lance became the first child to be diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
"Jan and Lance" may be the parents, one of whom is taking the picture.
The photo was taken just as Jan was deciding to vote Republican for the first time.
15: I hope not. That would be in violation of the Photographic Naming Conventions of 1918.
I am trying to figure out how this fits into the site's theme. Is Jan Lance's mother? The site is about people before they were parents so that wouldn't fit. Is the Jan that submitted the photo the same Jan as is in the photo. Then it isn't about her parents. Maybe it is a different Jan and Lance is a much younger brother to the woman in the photo? I am more confused by this than saddened.
You keep going, like all the rest of us. It is a poignant photo+caption. I was surprised by how many single-parent photos are there.
I have a photo I really like of my nonchalant-looking dad, having a cigarette in front of a coke machine. He is a slightly anxious man, quit smoking long ago, never a soda fan, so the photo perfectly captures a stranger-in-a-strange-land vibe that's part of his personality.
The right mindset can imbue anything with pathos-- that poor water fountain that no-one uses, the shoelace that did its best but is used up now. I think that if the impulse to pathos does not cloud judgement about actual living people who deserve to be accurately percieved, then pathos is basically a healthy portion of one's emotional makeup-- feeling sadness is much much better than feeling nothing, which is pretty common.
One may have to click through. It is possible.
Hey Heebie. Is it cool that you've put Jan and Lance's picture up on the front page there like that?
Keep going, DS! You can take this thread to Kobe almost single-handedly. (Well, one hopes you're typing with two hands.)
What's sad is the barren snowy wasteland surrounding me right now. Oh look, spotty cell phone reception.
18: I've got it: Lance, the kid, is Jan's parent before he had kids. Which means that Jan, holding him, is both his daughter and mother. She must have travelled back in time, met a dashing disco instructor and accidentally conceived the man who would become her own father. It's the classic Terminator causality loop -- no wonder it's drenched in pathos.
(Well, one hopes you're typing with two hands.)
*guiltily returns second hand to keyboard*
I was eating chips with the other one, okay? Chips.
that poor water fountain that no-one uses, the shoelace that did its best but is used up now.
FALLACIOUS.
(That was me.)
Further to the theory in 23, the photo was obviously taken seconds before a killing machine from the future arrived to try to whack Jan and Lance.
I could keep going, but I'm calling this one: SOLVED.
Um. I could talk about pictures looked upon decades later, and pathos and stuff, which is interesting,
but actually I'm sort of not comfortable with Jan and Lance's picture being lifted from elsewhere and put up on the front page here, unless it's quite clear that it's okay with Jan and Lance.
Doesn't John at 25 mean "Pathetic?" Not in the mean sense, of course.
It's because Jan dressed her little boy in halter tops, right? Or is it the picture-taker's scuffed and battered shoe in the bottom corner?
The photo was taken by the supervillain Doctor Devious as part of a decades-long scheme to provoke a ridiculous flamewar about fair use on Unfogged. His ultimate aim? Who can say?
On second thought, I can see how maybe fallacious would be just as good and require less explanation.
28: Seriously, have you clicked through and seen where the picture comes from?
Are you familiar with the originating site, Parsimon? Jan sent it in for strangers to look upon. though it is strange that Jan sent it in.
WAIT. That's it. The theme of the site is My Parents Were Awesome, but it's the mom who sent it in. Therefore it must be her awesome parent who snapped the photo, and all the now-grown Lance has to remember his grandfather by is just the scuffed toe of one boot.
I was going to put DS's comment in 31 in italics at the top of this comment, and then comment on it, but I just want to make sure that that's okay with DS first.
I find it sad when people can't crop overhead wires out
34: I'm telling you, man, causality loop.
35: Actually, that would be racist appropriation. Thanks for checking.
In fact I'm feeling a little uneasy with even referring to DS's comment by number like that, absent explicit permission to do so.
36: Who's to say they weren't explicitly left in by the photographer?
(36: But without the wires, how would we know about the nearby CyberDyne research facility?)
Actually, that would be racist appropriation. Thanks for checking.
So you're saying it's totes okay, right? "Racist appropriation" is the new "wizard cocksucker", from what I gather.
41: See, that's exactly what your mama said when I "appropriated" her the other night.
33, 34: I was just doing that. Still weirds me out a little (put it this way: I could see myself putting up a cool photo of my parents on that site, but would still be quite weirded out if my pic showed up someplace I'd never heard of).
But okay.
that would be racist appropriation
It's okay if I quote it, though. Some of my best friends are commenters.
(1) No, not the least bit sad.
(2) No really, not even a tiny little bit.
I like the show protruding into the lower left corner, which gives the picture a certain something that is not even slightly related to sadness.
Conclusion: Heebie's lost her mind.
I'm glad they ran the pic of my dad, though.
(That is not really my dad. But he is awesome.)
43: If you were Jan's ex-boyfriend, forced to cut off all contact with her when she got married to some jerk, I could maybe see getting upset that her picture ended up on Unfogged. Otherwise, not so much.
Conclusion: Heebie's lost her mind.
No, you're just an unfeeling robot.
Should I be pronouncing "Jan" in my head as if it were short for "Janice", or as if it were pronounced like the name of the paralyzed Norwegian husband in Breaking the Waves? Just checking. Don't want to act rashly.
51: I told y'all she was awesome.
I think there needs to be a competing site called "My Parents: Awesome or Not" where you can vote on the photos.
weirded out if my pic showed up someplace I'd never heard of
Pictures of me with my giant college mullet have shown up on multiple funny hair sites. I've gone viral... laydeez.
Another idea for a great site: people roughly my age submit pictures of the first apartment / house they lived in which they payed for with their own earnings. Title: My Rent Was Awesome.
Also, a site for photos of avian friends of yore: My Parrots Were Awesome.
54: Absolutely. We'll all put up photos of our parents.
Pictures of me with my giant college mullet have shown up on multiple funny hair sites.
I have to adjust my ideas of internet privacy protocol in a big way.
54: But then some of us would have an unfair advantage. I'd put up pictures of test tubes, for instance, which being sleek, cool to the touch and visually appealing are automatically awesome.
Should I be pronouncing "Jan" in my head as if it were short for "Janice", or as if it were pronounced like the name of the paralyzed Norwegian husband in Breaking the Waves? Just checking. Don't want to act rashly.
The American and female way.
56: Further to 56, this is the kind of living space I'm referring to.
There was a period in my life when I would go to hotornot.com and rank all of the unattractive people 10s and all of the attractive people 1s, unless an attractive person happened to look especially kind or really unbelievably attractive, in which case, 10. It was a public service.
60: We'll just have to let the voters decide.
the first apartment / house they lived in which they payed for with their own earnings
Basement apartment on the bottom left corner. That year, everybody I knew living on the bottom floor in that complex had big holes rot through the ceiling over the shower.
65: Some of us might not feel like it.
I pulled that picture from apartmentratings.com, where one review includes the following: "I have mole growing around my bat tub, the maintenance told me it's not mole and just cocked it well it came back IT'S MOLE!"
I took and posted 100 or CC "Attribution"-licensed photos on Flickr a few years back. It's fun to periodically search for my username and flickr and see where they've popped up. I found that a photo I took of a recycling bin was used in the annual report of an Oregon environmental non-profit., and that a picture I took of a "Tsunami Evacuation Route" sign has been used for all kinds of blog posts about tsunamis.
Third floor front. A very nice place.
9th floor, right side. A very nice place.
What grows near your bath, and burrows a path
in the form of a long dark hole?
What freaks out ogged and listens to prog?
It's Mole, Mole, Mole!
It's MO-OLE, MO-OLE
it's small, it's furry, it's blind.
It's MO-OLE, MO-OLE
it's better than bad, it's fine!
Everyone wants a mole!
You're gonna love it, mole!
Come on and get your mole!
Everyone needs a mole!"
It's MO-OLE, MO-OLE
it's small, it's furry, it's blind.
I was pronouncing it in my head like the Mexican sauce.
In retrospect, I paid too much for that place, and would have been better off both socially and financially if I had elected to live with other people.
I think we can safely assume by now that Otto's rent wasn't awesome.
So yeah, the rent was definitely not awesome.
82 crossposted with 81, but: I was right!
71 is so great.
I've heard that the txting kids these days are well-placed to be more literate. Am I just making that up?
83: You'll have to post your pictures at another site. Sorry.
60: My father was a test tube. My mother was a knife.
I'm having a hard time figuring out what "just cocked it" is supposed to mean. Did maintenance punch the mole really hard? That's not very nice.
Shit, if this is gonna be that kind of apartment, I'm gonna stick my cock in the mole sauce.
PULL THE PHOTO! MOM'S CRUSHING MY CIGARETTES!
I cocked the mole but the mole won.
The right mindset can imbue anything with pathos
I have a feeling I'm going to be going around saying, "Well, IT'S MOLE!" a lot for the next week or so.
60: My father was a test tube. My mother was a knife.
A freckled and frivolous cake there was
That sailed upon a pointless sea,
Or any lugubrious lake there was
In a manner emphatic and free.
How jointlessly, and how jointlessly
The frivolous cake sailed by
On the waves of the ocean that pointlessly
Threw fish to the lilac sky.
Oh, plenty and plenty of hake there was
Of a glory beyond compare,
And every conceivable make there was
Was tossed through the lilac air.
Up the smooth billows and over the crests
Of the cumbersome combers flew
The frivolous cake with a knife in the wake
Of herself and her curranty crew.
Like a swordfish grim it would bounce and skim
(This dinner knife fierce and blue),
And the frivolous cake was filled to the brim
With the fun of her curranty crew.
Oh, plenty and plenty of hake there was
Of a glory beyond compare -
And every conceivable make there was
Was tossed through the lilac air.
Around the shores of the Elegant Isles
Where the cat-fish bask and purr
And lick their paws with adhesive smiles
And wriggle their fins of fur,
They fly and fly 'neath the lilac sky -
The frivolous cake, and the knife,
Who winketh his glamorous indigo eye
In the wake of his future wife.
The crumbs blow free down the pointless sea
To the beat of a cakey heart
And the sensitive steel of the knife can feel
That love is a race apart.
In the speed of the lingering light are blown
The crumbs to the hake above,
And the tropical air vibrates to the drone
Of a cake in the throes of love.
96: Thank god. This being nice all the time is ruining my cred.
Wow, I love this thread, even if no one sees how right I am. Also I briefly panicked when I couldn't remember what it was, in 76, before it was mole. My log was awesome. Laydeez, I guess.
98: You neglected to mention whether the rent was awsome. I'm beginning to suspect that people just aren't getting the concept of "My Rent Was Awesome".
The post totally reads like we are supposed to know Lance grew up to be a famous killer! But no.
102: No, just in for a series of small but demoralizing setbacks. More Jan than Lance. In a small town surrounded by a lot of space. Sad space with gray-purple clouds.
86: You'll have to post your pictures at another site. Sorry.
See, I was afraid of that, and that is why I was reluctant to make a statement vis-a-vis the awesomeness of my rent. I was hoping my not-awesome rent would not be caught due to a flight of submissions. But you win, M/tch.
Life can be sad that way, heebie, it sure can.
Maybe Lance is Lance Armstrong and it's sad because now he only has one ball?
I don't think I've ever paid less than $350/month. I need to find "My rent wasn't that awesome in 1997 dollars to a 19 year old but in hindsite it's decent."
The rent was awesome + a dormer window.
107: Arm-strong, he only HAS ONE BALL...
108: I paid I think $125/month in the first place I payed for by myself. And tuition at UT was about $500 a semester, or something awesome like that. Which is why Austin was such a great town for music: you could attend UT (for years and years), live within easy walking or biking distance to it, in a a nice bungalow-style house, and pay for it all with a part time job in a record store or waiting tables, all while playing in three or four bands.
My first rent (My First Rent?) was $350, which was insanely low, but then I've always lived in somewhat (to very) expensive places.
Heebie has an awesome hindsight.
In the US $290 for a roomshare in Dupont. Crappy room, nice house, excellent location.
In Europe: $200 right after college in Poland: crappy studio apartment in a crappy building in a crappy location. And c. $180 in Koblenz - crappy basement room/studio (kitchenette but shared br) five minutes from the archives, in a crappy soul crushing small provincial German city, but I repeat myself. I wanted to spend more but six month furnished places were few and far between. I spent the savings getting a thorough education in Mosel wines - couldn't get them in stores, but that's because you could get them directly from the producers at the same price as the wholesalers, i.e. roughly forty percent of the US retail prices. Not like there was anything else to spend in a mind numbing town where you don't know a single person. Thought I might be turning into an alkie, but no, once my supply of cheap amazing wine was cut off, my consumption plummeted.
I think the picture 'codes as depressing' because the background 'codes as poor'.
I think the picture 'codes as depressing' because the background 'codes as poor'.
Strange, I found the setting to be happy. It reminded me of visiting some friends who were living in married officers' quarters on an air force base in Wyoming. Truly a spartan setting but we had a great time. The skies looked just like that a couple days when we were cooking out.
$150 in 1994 for a decent-sized room in a medium-sized house with a non-house-trained pitbull and a bunch of skinheads, in a working-class neighborhood on the bus route and right across the street from the @ist center where I volunteered.
$225 in 1996 for a 3rd floor studio on Omaha's skid row.
$370 in 1996 for a 2nd floor studio in a fancy hipster neighborhood in Mpls.
98: There's a reconstruction of one of them Frankfurt kitchens at the art museum here. All the worksurfaces are approximately 19" off the floor. Were Weimar women all about 4' 2" in their stocking feet?
116: I don't find the picture all that depressing, either, hence my snarky quotemarks. Now, some of my happiest grandparent memories are in a Quonset hut, so.
The site as a whole suggests that color photography is kind of a bad idea.
Also, I second 118.
Or maybe like her optimism is beginning to sour.
cheer up, Heebie! Your optimism will come back!
Jan is hot. The photo is beautifully composed.
Holy crap, my first apt is on streetview. It wasn't awesome, but it was OK. Ugly building.
Jan is the kid. Otherwise it makes no sense for Jan to have submitted the photo to the "my parents were awesome" site.
Lance is the parent holding the kid, prior to his sex reassignment surgery, and when Lance was named Linda. The photo is sad because Jan never came to terms with his mother's decision to become a man. He thinks his parent was awesome, when his parent was a mom. But not anymore. The implied rejection of the parent by the child, and the years of misery caused by Jan's lack of understanding and sympathy, are pretty fucking sad.
What took you to Sobeslav? I have family near there.
You're never going to appeal to the electorate if you don't realize that "caulk" can be spelled "cock". Also, to scoff something means to scarf it, i.e. to eat it rapidly.
Third floor, I think $300/month in 1989-90. Nasty old fridge not unlike this one, just one crappy gas heater in the middle of the living room for the whole apartment, and the oven pilot wouldn't stay lit. On the other hand, you could crawl out the kitchen window onto the roof of the addition built for the first two floors and hang out there drinking beers and playing music. It overlooked a field, and with the Armenian church to the right and the pre-teens chasing each other with kitchen knives to the left, there was no one to complain.
The church was actually the best part of living there. The cross on top of it lights up blue at night and can be seen from the highway and a large part of town. Whenever I needed to explain where I lived, I'd just say, "Next to the church with the blue cross" and everyone would know where I meant--no directions necessary.
In my idiolect, "cock" and "caulk" are pronounced quite differently. Is that not true for everyone?
re: 127
They are different in mine too, but we've established that I/we (Scots) have more vowel phonemes than the average American does. Although 'cock' and 'caulk' are much closer in my idiolect than some of the other vowel oppositions that have come up in past threads.
128: Maybe it's obvious to you, but some of us are a bit slow.
My share was a $100 month in '95. Shared with 6 other slobs, I slept in the sleeping porch off the second floor, which was sloped and pulling away from the house. And the roof leaked right over the bed. And I had to walk through another dude's room to get to mine. However, that dude's girlfriend was smoking hot and put out. Good summer.
I'm gonna stick my cock in the mole sauce.
This Russian camp song (crappy quality home recording) by Polish fifties and sixties dandy/top impresario of the bohemian social and scene and cult songwriter, has the Japanese emperor's cock in tomato sauce. And the slightly different version by his rock star son May be NSFW for anyone with Russophones in hearing distance, the Japanese emperor stuff is among the less obscene lyrics.
My first apartment. First floor. 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, kitchen, dining, and living rooms, $900 in 2001. (I'm paying $1252 for a studio now, so that hurts.)
I can't remember what I paid the first summer I spent in Hyde Park. Something like $400 or $500 to share the worst apartment in Hyde Park.
"Cock" and "caulk" do not sound alike, no.
First housing situation -- does "paid for from your own earnings" include student loans? -- anyway, first housing situation was probably something like $190/month, in a 3-bedroom house actually housing 6 people. It was a zoo.
Later, more realistically, it edged up to $275. This was in the mid- to late 80s. I hung on at around $350-$400 throughout the 90s.
How many places have people lived in (on your own, not with parents or college-affiliated)? I've lived in ... 10. Which I think is not that many.
The attic of the place on the right, $100/month, summer of 1984. The window provided easy access to the roof, so I used to read up there; the house is on top of a hill (or ridge, more accurately), so the view was terrific.
You can tell how people pronounce things by how they misspell them.
the worst apartment in Hyde Park.
That's a pretty bad apartment!
How many places have people lived in (on your own, not with parents or college-affiliated)? I've lived in ... 10. Which I think is not that many.
What's the minimum stay for it to count as "lived in" rather than "stayed at"?
138: This was in a run-down K&G-owned building where the laundry room smelled like raw sewage and was full of flies and mosquitoes.
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I thought, stupidly, that it might be Lance Loud.
A review of a book about An American Family
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Otherwise, too many inchoate thoughts and feelings to express. Did I tell ya I picked up a batch of 20k art photos? In desktop random rotation, a newone every 45 minutes. (Currently Alex Webb, "Memorial for Haitian victims 1987") What is the huge difference between the one at the top and an artist's?
What is the differences between a photograph portrait and a painting?
And my roommate made the arrangements and somehow led me to understand that the place would be furnished, when it was not.
I'm on my 4th place, post college. 3 if you exclude the place I was only at for a month (but I still moved all my shit there, so it should count).
If we're doing 'first apartments, three br for $900', here's mine Can't figure out how to get a better angle saved, so you can't see the top floor where we lived. It was nothing special. The beautifully restored, huge two hundred year old 3BR that we lusted after was $1300 IIRC.
What's the minimum stay for it to count as "lived in" rather than "stayed at"?
Man, when I was in college I got such an earful from the RH when he asked me how many places I'd lived and I answered this way.
145: But it's not at all obvious! Also, given how often at international conferences I get asked "where do you live?" only to find out they mean "what hotel are you staying at?", it seems the distinction isn't made the same way in certain other languages.
How many places have people lived in (on your own, not with parents or college-affiliated)? I've lived in ... 10. Which I think is not that many.
Three, which is very few.
CHANGEBAD.
My first apartment was probably my neatest. It was something like a carriage house or servant's quarters off in the corner from a turn of the century mansion that had been converted. A tiny little box in the corner of a vast lawn 600 (400?) sq feet in two stories. I completely forget what I paid for it. Had stolen cable in 1972 or 1973 HBO. Nobody else I knew had cable.
How many places have people lived in (on your own, not with parents or college-affiliated)?
I have lived in this house since the early 80s. From 69 to 82 there may have been fifty, counting communes, parks, cliffs, wilderness, hospitals and halfway houses.
What's the minimum stay for it to count as "lived in" rather than "stayed at"?
Where you moved all your shit in. I guess. I dunno, 3 months?
I don't have that many borderline cases: the 3-month house-sit? Mm, I moved all my shit in, but it wasn't my place, and I didn't pay rent.
How about: you furnished it (or your space in it) yourself.
$500 for a studio in 2007. It was on the other side of the building, facing the parking lot rather than the street, so you can't see the exact apartment in that picture. It was awesome.
How about: you furnished it (or your space in it) yourself.
What if it came furnished?
Mid-90's, Germany, one furnished room, DM200.
I lived here for four months, yes, with all my shit. Which was mostly a pb Finnegan's Wake
Here, meaning the cliff from which this picture was taken.
Where you moved all your shit in. I guess. I dunno, 3 months?
I've moved all my shit in to places I stayed only two months, but spent 5 months renting someone's guest cottage in Santa Barbara and living out of a big suitcase. I don't know which to count as "lived in".
I had a two bedroom half duplex for 140, I think. That was a while ago, and rent isn't the kind of thing I remember. The other half had first a biker, and then a bluegrass band.
Since graduation, I've lived in 12 places. That's 27 years. Last one was 8, and the one before was 10.
152: Well, then, if it came furnished, you moved all your shit in! Okay?! Provided that you were paying rent, and it was not a house-sitting situation!
You may have been bartering for rent, that is possible, but can you work with the question?
Sheesh.
I've lived 9 places spread over 7 towns since 1988. That means moving basically every two years, typically to a new city. That is way way too much. I keep announcing that I am going to die in the house I currently live in, but Molly keeps making noises about moving some place more walkable, or closer to work or school. I hope she is not planning my early demise.
Hey, I have no difficulty answering the question. It's essear who's the troublemaker here. My answer is 3.
Not just seven towns, seven states.
I hope she is not planning my early demise.
Relax, she's probably just going to divorce you.
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Can someone tell Saiselgy not to blog about physics, especially when his source is an article in New Scientist? It pains me.
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I was going to say US rents seem absurdly low, but my 1st (v. cheap) apt was 2800 SEK or so, which was like 300 dollars in 2000, but that was the year the krona was absurdly weak against the dollar (or more like vice versa), which is how Tibro got every wingnut to say Sweden is poorer than Mississippi.
Tiny fully furnished 1 room apt with shower, pans and a sink but no kitchenette, fourth or third floor.
165: Doesn't that wear you out? Don't you hate that?
Timbro, not Tibro. Even Sweden got a few wingnuts, and they're all on wingnut welfare!
I revise my answer to 11 rather than 10. Glad we're getting this straightened out.
rob, are the 9 places since 1988 really distributed evenly every two years or so? That gets rough after a while.
My three places have been in less than three years. It hasn't been so bad. But, of course, I'm quite young.
Since college I've lived in three apartments for a year or more, one for five months, and two for around two months (though for one of those, I was traveling for half of that two-month period).
The longest stretch five years in a single house in Chicago. The second was four years in a house in Canton, NY. Oh, wait, I lived in three places total in Chicago, so that's 10 places in seven states.
Other people seem to have similar numbers, so maybe I'm just extra CHANGEBAD.
166: Well, i moved three times between march and nov 2007, or actually four since I stayed at my parents place in october. I can tell you that wore me out.
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"It's too late, it's already over. I feel the end, I feel the death here."
A scientist I am watching talking about the Columbia Glacier.
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Looking a little closer, that's 7 places from the beginning of 83 to the middle of 88 (in 3 different counties of a single state), and 5 places (in 3 "states") from the middle of 88 to the present.
The first of those was a 2 br log cabin on 10 acres, and I think the rent was 250.
Soon to move out of my sixth home since finishing school, which is also the place I've lived the longest (~10 1/2 years).
Since college (ten years) I've lived in two places. One apartment, by myself, for all of grad school. Then I bought this house. Which it looks like we're planning on staying in more-or-less forever.
I'm a stationary sort. And I've had lucky circumstances.
Am interested in essear's 163-- is the point that the article deserves only to be ignored, or is there stuff Saiselgy's getting wrong that could be explained to an ignorant layman like myself?
I count 7 places, if you want the data.
7 places from the beginning of 83 to the middle of 88
Of which I lived in six before my first child was born (in mid 86).
But, of course, I'm quite young.
I was going to say something faux-indignant about this, but it's true. You get tired of the moving after a while; you also get tired of living with milk-crate bookshelves and so on.
Since college (ten years) I've lived in two places. One apartment, by myself, for all of grad school. Then I bought this house. Which it looks like we're planning on staying in more-or-less forever.
heebie, you're amazing.
178: My opinion is that he's making an irrelevant point - "If you misunderstand what the scientists are saying, don't freak out, because scientists say freaky shit and the world keeps spinning." Kind of an uninteresting slant on complicated physics because he doesn't actually have any idea what the physics is.
181: She's lucky, that she's been able to afford a solo apartment through grad school, and own a house since. I don't know many people who could afford that.
Also he's lighting on this "hologram" phrase and making all sorts of useless inferences and saying "This is what you may think they mean! But don't worry, in the past we've never understood them, either."
She's lucky, that she's been able to afford a solo apartment through grad school, and own a house since. I don't know many people who could afford that.
True, I've been lucky. I don't think that this reflects an unusual degree of luck, though.
185: I don't know what to say. In this area, grad students (in the humanities) who could afford their own one-bedroom apartments were graced indeed. It wasn't usual.
No matter.
First place of "my own": $425/month for one bedroom of a 4br in 1998; steadily upwards since then, and I'm in my fifth place now, and paying nearly triple that.
http://www.esquire.com/print-this/roger-ebert-0310
187: Sure, if you're comparing me to grad students, then it's relatively nice. But if you're comparing me to people aged 22-28, it's nothing to write home about.
Anyway, Austin has cheapish apartments and math has huge TA demands. It was standard for our department to afford comparable living standards.
Housing in Texas is cheap. See also M/tch in 111.
190: You were a grad student when you were living in the one apartment, by yourself (per 176), so I'm comparing you to grad students.
In any case, sure, your field pays its grad students. It's amazing and unusual from a humanities perspective, that's all.
And I really wish you'd put the Jan and Lance photo below the fold. You've headlined it "my parents got their dreams crushed". That is just rude.
Yeah, Jan and Lance are probably lurkers.
Or perhaps just change the post title to "BEHOLD THE SPAWN OF SATAN!"
181: Let's see: post graduation, I lived in one place (with BOGF) for 6 months, because the (downstairs) landlords turned out to be intolerable, another place (with BOGF) for 3.75 years, then a bachelor apt. for 18 months, then this house, in which I plan to die*. Done and done.
* in all seriousness. I mean, I may happen to pass away elsewhere, but I'm really committed to this being my home for the rest of my life.
196: Jesus, Parsi, lighten up.
Post-graduation I lived in an apt in Chicago for a little over a year, then in palo alto for two years, with two months in Berlin in between, and since then I've been living in the same place in sf.
Am interested in essear's 163-- is the point that the article deserves only to be ignored, or is there stuff Saiselgy's getting wrong that could be explained to an ignorant layman like myself?
It's mostly the first; New Scientist writes a bunch of sensationalized trash. In this case, there's something called the "holographic principle", which is probably correct albeit slightly nebulous (except in the case of hyperbolic spacetimes bearing no resemblance to our own), and could reasonably be (and has been) the topic of an interesting article for the lay reader. And then there's the claim that an experiment has actually seen "holographic noise", when in fact (a) only one person seems to be convinced that this sort of noise is a real prediction of the holographic principle and (b) the idea that some unexplained noise in an experiment is telling us something deep about nature is sort of hilarious. (The accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background by Penzias and Wilson, who thought they were probably seeing the effect of bird shit on their telescope, is a rare exception.) Furthermore, since that article was written, the experimenters have claimed to find the real instrumental cause of their noise, and the one guy who was making the predictions has changed his predictions. So, as every reasonable person expected from the start, it was a bunch of hype about nothing.
There's a lot more to say but I don't want to bore everyone to death. Maybe I'll add another remark after I finish reading the Ebert profile and writing the talk I'm giving tomorrow.
Yeah, Jan and Lance are probably lurkers.
And we know the lurkers support heebie in e-mails.
Thanks, heebie and essear.
The accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background by Penzias and Wilson, who thought they were probably seeing the effect of bird shit on their telescope
This actually sounds like an entertaining premise for a sensationalist article. I know that's missing the point; we laymen are terrible that way.
That is just rude.
YOU'RE ONE TO TALK!
I actually don't have a problem with MY's post, but then I don't understand the physics. But I do think there's a a sort of ignorant take on New Scientific Breakthroughs that is infinitely credulous, as if a new scientific understanding of the underlying structure of things actually means that anything has changed. Going from geocentrism to heliocentrism doesn't change anything in anybody's life*, unless they decide that this information has metaphysical implications (check out the conservapedia entry for heliocentrism for a chuckle).
IOW, I think there's a real tendency - just as ignorant on the science as MY - to treat these pronouncements in an inappropriate way, and I think MY's response is appropriate.
But hey, maybe not.
* excepting astronomers and others actually engaged in extraterrestrial exploration
202: say more, say more. I've been interested in that story.
The first place, btw, was here (top floor). Totally non-awesome rent of ~$600 (split 2 ways). OTOH, washer and dryer in the bathroom, which was pretty sweet.
The general attitude in the community to this can be summed up by the person I heard recently say "GEO600? That's the experiment that saw some electronic noise at 60 Hz, right?"
I would once again like to note that there's been far too much "I lived here" and not enough "the rent was/was not awesome!".
211: so 60Hz noise tells us the universe is a hologram? AMAZING! Tesla must have seen this.
so 60Hz noise tells us the universe is a hologram?
Only if you play it backwards.
I would once again like to note that there's been far too much "I lived here" and not enough "the rent was/was not awesome!".
My mortgage is about $1000/month. Does that help?
My first post-college apartment was in the far northern end of Rogers Park (in Chicago) and was enormous, wood-floored, sun room, faux fireplaced, like many Rogers Park apartments. The rent was $700 (my share $350). This rent was fairly awesome, but more than my other friends were paying at the time. The next apartment, 7 years later, was about 12 blocks south (Edgewater, I guess), slightly smaller, slightly nicer, at $780. 6 months later, we moved again (our street was super busy, the first floor apartment was too dark, the neighbors way too alcoholic), again about 12 blocks south (Andersonville), to a similarly sized, slightly nicer apartment for $900. We stayed there for years, and when we moved out, I think the rent was like $1200 (Andersonville had become all that and a bag of chips).
I'm rooting for Canada generally in hockey, but would it kill them if the 'wegians got one?
I had a tiny studio in Chelsea for $850/month back in law school, '96 and '97. It had slate tile floors, and a tiny little fireplace that worked if you didn't mind smoke backing up into the apartment and making all your clothes smell like kippers. And the bathroom was fine for women, but there wasn't enough room in it for a man to stand facing the toilet to pee without, I am told, assuming an awkward leaning position.
And it had mice. I caught one in a bag of chips once, and carried it out to the street to set it free. It probably just followed me home again.
217: Taunting the coastal people is fun.
f you didn't mind smoke backing up into the apartment and making all your clothes smell like kippers
Why on earth would you mind that? So great!
I like the coincidence of:
(Andersonville had become all that and a bag of chips).
and
And it had mice. I caught one in a bag of chips once
220.2: I had a mouse once. I saw it eating my generic Sugar Smacks so I put a Sugar Smack on a mouse trap and caught the guy by his foot. He was very much not dead.
Chelsea was already all that and a bag of chips.
224 updated: I have had several mice living in my current house. I now use traps where you can't see them whimper.
1. $250 for 1/4 of a house
2. $350 for half a two-bedroom
3. $360 for one third of a floor of a house
4. $499->$529 for a studio
They put mousetraps in our offices and I remove mine. No thank you.
And it had mice. I caught one in a bag of chips once, and carried it out to the street to set it free
I've caught mice in bags of stuff twice. Once I took out a mallet, the other time I stuck the bag under a faucet. I get a mouse infestation every other year here, and kill all the ones I catch in the glue traps. I am a bad person. I also once drop kicked a mouse several yards down a hallway and splat into a wall. But that wasn't intentional; we startled each other, we jumped, he flew, he died. I blame my traumatic encounter with a dead mouse as a feverish small child alone at home. I summoned my dad from work and stood on a kitchen chair until he came back and threw it in the trash.
228: If that was to me, no I have not. I'm not a fan of cats and I never see any trace of the mice anywhere a cat could get to. We don't have an indoor breeding population (and if I thought we did, I'd have an exterminator the next day), but every fall and winter a couple find their way in.
189:Ebert has become amazing. You can get completely absorbed in his online presence. I have never seen a writer interact with his audience as much, sometimes every fifth comment in a thread of hundreds.
Of course the substance is wonderful, but I avoid it because with the television showing movies (and curling!) at my immediate right I might never leave.
And of course there is a loneliness in Ebert, but I have been reading blogs and threads for a decade now, and I recognize an incandescent supernova of kindness when I see one.
And his writing is the best he has ever done.
229: Because you want the free cheese?
We get Norwegian roof rats, at least a foot long, about every other year.
I managed to catch a rabbit baby once, outside that first apartment. I had it in a cardboard box in my shower for a two-four days, and bought pet food it wouldn't eat, until I located the owner. It was a kid and her mother, but the kid had lost the rabbit several times before, so it probably was wasted effort. Dumb kid.
It strikes me the kid might quite possibly look for her own apt this year or so. God, I'm old.
What is the differences between a photograph portrait and a painting?
You need paint for one and a camera for the other.
(This has been another episode of "Simple answers to simple questions.")
I could see myself putting up a cool photo of my parents on that site, but would still be quite weirded out if my pic showed up someplace I'd never heard of.
Myparentswereawesome is a Tumblr site, which means, in hip internet lingo, that it's expected that people will link to and republish ("reblog" is the Tumblr-specific phrase) the photos hosted there. That's practically what Tumblr is all about.
(I do find that photo just a little sad, but old photos, even happy ones, always make me a little sad because I've always been (sort of neurotically) moved by transience and ephemerality.)
I've always been pretty pleased to catch mice, and really have no compunctions about the traps*. Ruin my food, will you? Little bastard.
* I mean, I don't root for pain and suffering, but I'm not losing sleep over it either.
Okey-doke. After having watched Lost and eaten some grapes, I figure all is well.
"Die in my cold air return, will you? Little bastard." Actually, I felt pretty sorry for that one. I'm not sure how he got in there, but once he did, he wasn't getting out.
When I was a kid, a business in a neighboring town located the remains of a burglar one fall when its chimney didn't work. Which also explained the smell earlier in the year.
Maybe I should put a teeny ladder inside the duct so the mice could climb back up?
Why would I put a kitten in my duct? I'm not a fan of cats, but I don't wish them ill.
To catch the mice. You could send it down there on a little climbing harness.
240:You need paint for one and a camera for the other.
Like Francis Bacon or Frida Kahlo?
I have looked at painting for so long I don't understand what an art photograph is. The distortions of a Weston feel like affectation rather than expression.
Oh. I thought the idea was that the kitten would eat the mice and solve the "where is the smell coming from" problem.
Current wallpaper:Dorothea Lange, Gravestone, St George Utah, 1953
Never mind, I am going to have to work on this for a few months.
I lived here, in 1990, paying a rent that was nearly-though-not-quite-awesome:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1763+p+ST+nw,+WASHington,+dc&sll=38.910849,-77.049702&sspn=0.010569,0.021608&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=1763+P+St+NW,+Washington,+District+of+Columbia,+20036&ll=38.909803,-77.041218&spn=0.010569,0.021608&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=38.909645,-77.041237&panoid=AY-W9kMV6Qepefh80Tok5w&cbp=12,5.01,,0,-2.5
No shortage of rats.
5 years later, however, I paid a legitimately awesome rent here ($600 for a recently-and-well-renovated 2 BR with an office, huge eat-in kitchen, and enormous back deck):
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=21+jefferson+st,+cambridge,+ma&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=43.848534,88.505859&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=21+Jefferson+St,+Cambridge,+Middlesex,+Massachusetts+02141&ll=42.373018,-71.088966&spn=0.000631,0.00135&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=42.373032,-71.089078&panoid=LRua7NEKuNCcgkXvQafyiA&cbp=12,5.11,,0,1.69
That was my last hurrah of awesomeness on the rent front, unfortunately, as my next move was to NYC.
It's amazing and unusual from a humanities perspective, that's all.
Not really. I've lived alone three of the six years that I've been in grad school, in California. Most of my single compatriots have also lived alone for much of their time in grad school as well.
I moved every single year, often multiple times a year, between the ages of 16 and 24. I know we weren't counting college years, but that shit wears you out too. I have managed to stay in one apartment since for three years, and in this one for what will be two, but I have to move in September again because the rent is too much.
I have too much stuff, too. Or rather, I don't have very much stuff, but I have a lot of books and I have all of my childhood stuff as well, since nothing of mine at all is left at my parents home. It's a little weird to think that all of the stuff I ever collected has been pared down to a few rubbermaid containers.
Also, my rent has never been awesome. Oh, except for the tiny place I shared in a bad neighborhood in Stockton for a few months.
So, from the course of this thread we can conclude that heebie's parents dreamed of mice.
I've lived in six places in the last seven-and-a-half years.
202: say more, say more. I've been interested in that story.
Hmm. Where to start? Mostly it's just painful to see Yglesias talking seriously about an article that's nonsense, but I don't much like this:
The key takeaway point is that various hypotheses (maybe the world is a holograph, maybe the world is a computer-simulation, maybe the world is someone's hallucination) are often presented as skeptical hypotheses when we should probably think of them as metaphysical instead. In other words, instead of saying "everything we thought we knew about the world is wrong and it's all fake!" we could just say "aha, this is an interesting new fact."
"Maybe the world is a computer simulation" and "maybe the world is someone's hallucination" are, I suppose, metaphysical. "Maybe the world is a hologram" might eventually be not metaphysics but physics -- it's a different sort of idea, one that's testable. Relativity and quantum mechanics weren't metaphysical insights about the way the world works, they were physical ones. I don't like to see them lumped together with late-night dorm-room fantasizing of the "what if we're all living in a computer simulation?" type.
But what articles like this tend to miss is that the way holography works doesn't really mean that "what we really are is living on a lower-dimensional surface". At least in the examples where holography is understood (which are toy theories that are, at best, the second cousin three times removed of the universe we actually live in), the point is really that a theory of gravity is equivalent to a theory without gravity on a lower-dimensional surface. It's not "A really is B", or "B really is A", it's "A and B are two diferent ways of talking about the same thing". For some purposes, thinking of it as A is more useful; for others, thinking of it as B is more useful. And it's pretty damn clear that for almost any question, thinking of ourselves as living in a world with three spatial dimensions is useful. The things that holography gives nice insights on are very subtle questions about tiny effects that happen in the presence of black holes, for instance. Whenever I hear someone getting carried away and talking about how the right way to think about gravity is in terms of some asymptotic boundary stuff, I pick up the nearest non-breakable object and drop it ostentatiously.
My most miserable period of moving was the time I spent doing archival research, four places in fifteen months. And given that I don't drive I had to do it all without a car other than the occasional cab splurge to the Post Office (my long distance movers of choice). True, these were all furnished, but I still had a ton of books, clothes, kitchen stuff, and a gazillion photocopies. Incidentally, if you're going to overstay your legal no visa time limit in Germany and ignore the mandatory police registration laws for even short term residents, having a bunch of government documents stamped 'Streng Vertraulich' is not going to expedite your discussion with the Border Police at the airport. They won't care that you have a plane to catch.
one that's testable
To clarify, this is the hope, not the current state of things. At this point it's abstract arguments, not data, that tell us the universe should be holographic. No one currently has much sense of how to test it an experiment, "holographic noise" or otherwise.
260: so how is it different from other (I guess string theoretic?) theories that posit some X number of dimensions to make the math work with gravity?
258:You call that living??
I grew up in a Different World and a transient life was a reasonable choice for a young person.
Given certain circumstances, I plan on going back to the road.
(I don't really care about the part where ylgesias is wildly off-base, although he certainly seems to be.)
Counting it up, I find I've lived in a lot more apartments than I would have thought. 2 in Hamburg, 1 Dresden, 1 Somerville, 4 Cambridge, 5 Berlin.
260: so how is it different from other (I guess string theoretic?) theories that posit some X number of dimensions to make the math work with gravity?
It's not different! At least in the sense that every explicit example of holography that we understand comes from string theory (or the closely related M-theory). There's a gravitational theory with 10 or 11 spacetime dimensions (in string theory or M-theory, respectively)*, but some of them are curled up and small, and some of them are large. Provided these theories have a negative cosmological constant**, there is a holographic boundary theory without gravity that has one less than the number of large dimensions. The small, curled-up dimensions manifest themselves in other ways in the holographic boundary theory, but not as spatial dimensions.
When the gravitational theory is easy to deal with, the boundary theory tends to be a mess mathematically, and vice versa. Since the real world seems to be well described by Newton's laws (or Einstein, if you prefer), it's pretty unlikely that it has a holographic dual that's even remotely tractable to calculate anything in.
* There are some caveats that let one get theories with other numbers of dimensions, but they tend to be less tractable, so people ignore them.
** The real world, as far as we can tell, has a positive one.
There are other footnotes that should go here, but I don't want to be too pedantic.
267: so is the excitement, such as it is, about holographic boundary theory that it could actually potentially lead to testable predictions at some point, unlike (what I understand to be the case with) string theory thus far? And are there any large-scale implications for (say) the origin of the universe that would be meaningful in a lay-understandable way? Or is it really a mechanism of fitting the math together and confirming that our current (tractable) models are about as useful as we're going to be able to work with?
If this comment makes no sense, I blame saiselgy.
"Maybe the world is a computer simulation" and "maybe the world is someone's hallucination" are, I suppose, metaphysical. "Maybe the world is a hologram" might eventually be not metaphysics but physics -- it's a different sort of idea, one that's testable.
You're using "metaphysical" in a different sense than he is. For him, it just means "concerning what there is." So facts from physics, if reality is fundamentally physical, are metaphysical facts.
He's intending, I think, to contrast "metaphysical" with "epistemological," which is the usual context in which "world is really a hallucination" discussions occur in philosophy.
Needless to say, physics is a rich source of xkcd strips.
269: so what are physical facts, then?
Phirst person vindicative
Is someone going to clean up that mess?
267: so is the excitement, such as it is, about holographic boundary theory that it could actually potentially lead to testable predictions at some point, unlike (what I understand to be the case with) string theory thus far?
At this point, it's still a pretty remote hope that we'll find evidence that gravity in our universe is holographic, but it's probably more plausible than finding evidence that we live in a computer simulation. It is a hope, at any rate.
Really there's much more excitement about going the other direction: taking theories of strongly-interacting stuff that don't involve gravity (low-energy quarks and gluons, for one, or strongly correlated electrons in high-Tc superconductors, or other funny materials with exotic properties), and trying to view them as the boundary dual of some gravitational system that's easier to calculate in. This is a very active field, and although it tends to produce gravitational theories that are sort of caricatures of the thing you really want to study, it has proven to be a useful way to get some insights.
And are there any large-scale implications for (say) the origin of the universe that would be meaningful in a lay-understandable way?
It's very possible that holography has something important to tell us about the early universe, but I would say that there hasn't been much clear progress in this direction. Some of Leo/nard Suss/kind's most recent work looks like it might be a promising way to use holographic ideas to learn something about how cosmology works, but I haven't managed to really grok it yet.
271: facts that come out of physical theory. They might exhaust the set of metaphysical facts or be a subset of them, depending on what you think about minds, numbers, God, possibilities, and other shit.
(Please don't make me talk boring philosophy nomenclature while drunk).
You're using "metaphysical" in a different sense than he is. For him, it just means "concerning what there is." So facts from physics, if reality is fundamentally physical, are metaphysical facts.
Fair enough. Maybe "ontological" would be clearer?
and trying to view them as the boundary dual
Duals are like the things you can draw in crystalline lattices, but more so, right? (I get so much out of John Baez's writings, really.)
So what's a boundary dual?
I should admit, at this point, that I'm going to bed, so I'm really asking on teo's behalf (although I totally will read it in the morning).
Duals in this case are just two theories that are alternative ways of describing the same system. By "boundary dual" I mean the lower-dimensional nongravitational theory that describes the same physics as some other gravitational theory.
I'm really asking on teo's behalf
Um, what?
But alternative in a specific, interesting way, right? Like, they have some meaningful topological relationship to the original theory?
I'm also going to bed. Poor teo won't get any more answers.
Poor teo won't get any more answers.
That's okay. I'm about to go to bed too.
Well, if everyone's asleep, just to remind you that heebie couldn't have been wrong here, from Hanoch Levin:
Gentlemen, I have tried and tried but I cannot find a single flaw in me. For 71 years I have been examining myself, and I simply find such rectitude in me that Lord have mercy! I say to myself:"For once, don't be right this time, you're only human, you're allowed to err every once in a while, it's only natural, it's normal." But no! I wake up in the morning and - Bam! I'm right again. Bam! And I'm right. Bam! I'm right. Once, during my afternoon nap, I said to myself: now that you're dozing, why don't you screw up, just a bit, do something stupid?
There you go, you've found yourself someone to screw up! I wasn't born to screw up, just wasn't born to it.
By the way, I'm the prime minister and you aren't, and in your shoes I'd be eating my heart out. Thank you.
Essear does seem to be mildly underplaying the degree to which the holographic principle is yet another gesture in a long line of gestures towards the idea that fundamental physics is driven by informational/computational constraints. There's been decades of work on this, and a bunch of interesting results, but as of yet noone has really been able to really put it all together.
This paper by Erik Verlinde is a surprisingly readable recent example of these kinds of ideas. The arguments are all of the vague handwavy heuristic variety, so anyone with some basic physics knowledge and a willingness to take a few things on faith should be able to follow along.
Back-half 2nd floor with 3 of us. Rent was next to nothing, but hard to describe as awesome given what it procured. We "upgraded" to the bottom floor for the summer.
11th place since college. ~One a year for 10 years and then 23+. Never expected the latter; I laughed at the real-estate agent when she showed us the high-school and said that was where our kids would go and yet that is what happened.
I have also only lived 2 places post college. One single bedroom apt by myself for 5 years and my current house for 4 years. During college you could add in 3 other places one of which was the dorm.
235: I managed to catch a rabbit baby once, outside that first apartment.
245: Maybe I should put a teeny ladder inside the duct so the mice could climb back up?
246: How about a kitten?
247: Why would I put a kitten in my duct? I'm not a fan of cats, but I don't wish them ill.
248: To catch the mice. You could send it down there on a little climbing harness.
Id like to think that 246 was in reference to 235 (since "kitten" can be a word for baby rabbits) and got reinterpreted joke-wise as being about 245 and then run with, but am tormented by my inability to discern whether that was actually how it happened, or whether (maybe more plausibly?) it was always only intended in reference to 245.
I've lived in 11 apartments/houses since college, in 3 areas. 7 places in 4 years of college, and 7 before college. My dad still has my childhood home and my mom the place I lived in in HS. Truly awesome rent...$700 for a big one-bedroom on Guerrero in the SF Mission was fairly awesome at the time (mid 90s), but not spectactular. It turned out to be tragically close to my cousin's dealer.
But alternative in a specific, interesting way, right? Like, they have some meaningful topological relationship to the original theory?
What do you mean by topological relationship?
289. Holbo has been beaten over the head with links to essear.
People I know IRL are much more likely to read Crooked Timber than here, so I probably would have preferred to write comments there under another pseud. But oh well - this is the internet, and I wasn't fast enough.
Sure, whatever, Chris Y. Essear.
288: I wish I knew. No, so like, if you had a square lattice (that is, each node has 4 connections), the dual would be another rectangular lattice with the nodes at the center of the squares from the first lattice, right? Topological very well may be entirely the wrong word, but I thought there were restrictions on the topology (geometry?) of the dual based on the topology (geometry?) of whatever it's dualling.
You know what? I'm going to google this. Never mind me.
And indeed, the wikipedia pages for "dual" and "reciprocal lattice" make me realize I was mostly talking about something else entirely. I think it would be helpful to me to be able to visual what a dual space is, but I'm not going about it the right way.
293: You can have a topological equivalence, that is, a map which commutes with the topology. You can also have an induced topology under a map. Either way, there needs to be an implied map to have a topological relationship.
Your intuition is right about the dual: high-dimensional things like n-cubes get mapped to the point in the middle, n-1 faces get mapped to an edge which connects the image-points of the adjacent n-cubes, etc. The dual should inherit a topology from the original under this map, modulo details I can't remember at the moment.
Sorry essear, didn't realise there was a confidentiality issue.
But I don't know if there's any way to say topological equivalence between theories, which is what I got hung up on originally.
297: No big deal, just a mild preference.
Sifu, heebie: the definition of "dual" here is not the same as in the case of a "dual lattice" (which does come up in other cases where one physical theory has two different, dual descriptions -- just not in this particular case). In this case, the theory without gravity can be thought of as living on the boundary of a theory with gravity. (Think of those Escher "circle limit" pictures -- the interior of the circle has the sort of hyperbolic geometry the theories with gravity have, and the nongravitational theory would live on the circle itself.)
Someone on CT mentioned Stokes Theorem: is there some sense in which if you sufficiently understand the theory without gravity, you can get the whole picture?
299: and you can describe the entire circle, as it were, by just describing the boundary because the geometry of the inside of the circle is known?
I still don't get why it's called a "dual" but that's neat.
I still don't get how Gem fits into this.
Or wait! Is it a dual because it's an isomorphic mapping, it's just an isomorphic mapping to a different geometry and dimensionality?
Essear, you have lost me, but you know that I am always here for you if you'd like to discuss Shelly Pomroy's party and the trip to the dentist.
Mathematicians and physicist hand out the label "dual" the way drunken frat guys hand out beads at Mardi Gras. If you can somehow associate B with A, there's a 70% chance it gets called "dual", or gets a "co-" prefix. In functional analysis, you can take the dual of the dual. Sometimes you get back to your original starting point, but sometimes you end up with something new, called the "double dual".
(I just checked to see if anyone named something "codual", and the answer is... yes!)
The original meaning of "dual" is from projective geometry, where you can reverse the meanings of "point" and "line", and all of the axioms of projective geometry remain the same.
Is it a dual because it's an isomorphic mapping, it's just an isomorphic mapping to a different geometry and dimensionality?
"It" = the theory on the boundary vs. the theory on the interior? Isomorphic mappings? Are you just playing fast and loose with these words?
He's trying to drive you mad, heebie. And it's working. I can hear the twitch from here.
That's true. I am completely unable to participate in hand-wavey conversations. I get more and more confused and am the one who says Stop! What topology are you using? What metric? I don't understand what the assumptions are!
307: yes and yes? I'm conflating "theory" and "description", I guess, so like in those Escher drawings if you had complete information about the boundary -- in whatever form -- you should be able to recreate the entire circle image with the boundary represented in a structure-preserving way. Right? Wouldn't the whatevering between those two states be an isomorphic mapping?
In a larger sense, I'm trying to ask meaningful questions about math I only vaguely begin to comprehend, if indeed I begin to comprehend it at all. If that answers your question.
codependent incoherence makes mathematicians moley.
In light of 309, 310.1 may not be useful. I'm fascinated, though!
Did I ever tell y'all about my concept for a college major? "Stoner math": all about high dimensional geometry and topology and shit but with no need to get the details right.
you should be able to recreate the entire circle image with the boundary represented in a structure-preserving way. Right? Wouldn't the whatevering between those two states be an isomorphic mapping?
A better way to think about it is that the conditions on the disc are so highly structured that knowledge of just the boundary allows you to recover a lot of information about the disc. For example, functions on the complex plane - if you know how a function behaves on the boundary of a nice region, you have a ton of information about the function on the interior region. But isomorphic is a strict equivalence stating that two things are basically identical, up to labels, which is not a good description of a boundary vs. interior.
313: okay, thanks. That does make sense, and I guess I'll just roll with Walt's assertion that dual means many things to many people and stop trying to find an equivalence between the projective geometry "dual" and this one.
"Stoner math": all about high dimensional geometry and topology and shit but with no need to get the details right.
I had a friend who had that major for a while. He was making a lot of progress, but failing all his classes. Eventually he settled down and returned to regular math, and then ended up a computer programmer.
I've taught Stoner Math. Somehow when I was a grad student I ended up at a fraternity party. Around 3am, I was sitting on the steps with 15 of the fraternity brothers, answering their questions about black holes and the 4th dimension.
315: A friend of mine did stoner physics. Was baked out of his skull while doing all the homework, and got to the point where he was far better at math while stoned than straight. Took the qual baked like a pizza. He used brownies rather than smoking up beforehand because they release THC more slowly, ensuring he'd still be good and high by the end of the 4 hour exam. He passed with flying colors.
Need I say that I hate Stoner Math? It's not nearly as horrible as Look At My Big Dick Math conversations, but equally unintelligible.
But you'd want to look at my big dick if I don't talk about math, right?
This sounds safely hypothetical.
Look At My Big Dick Math conversations
318: it also has the problem of not actually being math, but you know, details.
320: No, I have a proven ability to not talk about math.
So is that scene in Animal House with a very high Boon and Donald Sutherland when they talk about having universes in their thumbnails and maybe our universe being in a giant's thumbnail Stoner Physics or Stoner Metaphysics?
324: No, that's literal truth.
305 Essear, you have lost me, but you know that I am always here for you if you'd like to discuss Shelly Pomroy's party and the trip to the dentist.
Wonderful. Those are the important things, after all!
So, pondering whether heebie's questioning of "isomorphic" is on target, I decided that if someday mathematicians manage to formalize quantum field theory and quantum gravity they will declare that holography is a functor. If this makes no sense I blame the snowy coldness that's keeping me from thinking properly.
What else does isomorphic mean? It depends a little on the context, but usually an isomorphism preserves all properties that you care about, no?
I'm bummed that stoner math is deprecated. It always looked like a lot of fun.
328: aha! AHA! That's what I wondered about. If the information contained in the boundary is enough to describe the full shape, given a holographic projection, then why isn't the projection isomorphic?
331: I may be off, but usually isomorphism refers to a structure preserving map for some formalized definition of structure. So if you want to call the holographic principle an isomorphism, you have to say with respect to what. It's very likely that for a whole slew of things the holographic projection isn't isomorphic--indeed, given that the internal space and the boundary description are mathematically very different things I would bet that they don't satisfy a lot of the main isomorphisms(perhaps it fails group, topological, etc isomorphisms). The best you can get is that they are isomorphic up to "describes a certain physical dynamics", but I'm not sure anyone has a handle on everything that would mean formally.
Oh hai, this thread keeps going. salacious is getting at what's wrong with "isomorphic", I think: these are two very, very different sorts of theories that happen to describe identical physics if you're careful about how to map a given quantity in one to a quantity in the other. So I think probably something like "full and faithful functor" is better than "isomorphism". But I am not a mathematician and these objects do not have mathematical definitions, so this is all hand-waving.
Also, I disagree with salacious about whether E. Ver/linde's paper is worth reading, but let's not open that can of worms.
I love hand-waving. But this is all very informative, thanks. Although I still don't know why it's called a "dual".
Let A be an object of category C, and B an object of the opposite category Cop. We say that A is dual to B whenever P(A) in C if and only if not P(B) in Cop.
Or so the mullahs would have you believe.
I think essear is right with the functor business. We want homomorphisms, not isomorphisms.
I though an isomorphism was just a set of bijective homomorphisms between two sets?
336: aha! That's the stuff right there.
I don't mind structure-preserving maps, but math just isn't ready for the homomorphisms.
Not even a bit bijection-curious?
"Go thou, my full and faithful functor." Yes.
Knowing the difference between an injective and surjective mapping basically bought me my house. Oh, for the days of low-hanging fruit. Also, the difficulty with applied math turns out really to be that only the desperate will give up their model of their problem and let you apply some math. (To a first approximation of grad school, anyway.)
The hoohole is a forgetful functor.
It turns out that wikipedia page for "Dual (category theory)" would have answered my question, too. Who'da thunk.
I wonder how many more people ai can enlist in answering my boneheaded math questions?
Do you mean yourself, artificial intelligence, or love?
Whoa, Standpipe, I never said anything about changing the direction of any arrows. We physicists might throw the word "dual" around a lot, but prepending "co-" to everything in sight hasn't really caught on yet.
I never said anything about changing the direction of any arrows
Indeed you didn't. I was just trying to help Tweety find a thread attached to the sweater of a non-handwavy notion of duality. Sorry for the confusion.
When did this blog become all about nonsense?
Functors are merely homomorphisms of categories.
Fumbibulators are merely hornocular polar bears of flim-flam.
Infundibular comonads are nothing more than the bidual of two girls, one cup.
komonoids are merely silkenhabitudinal concupiscent vagiform embodiments of manifold circumfrences.
No, komonoids are a kind of monitor lizard.
Functor? I hardly know her.
a monitor lizard is merely a verdiform slitherinidum with presence in the crystelline plane of atomic flux capacities.
They went the way of the slap bracelets.
they caused millions of pre-teens to accidentally slash their wrists?
I remember the late-80s–early-90s period as one big pool of pre-teen blood.
"Is that really a kimono?"
"No, it's a dressing gown, but it does look rather kimonoid."
