Lamb and music tv
Newspapers, current affairs shows, syndicated columnist, hobos on trains, what have they got in common? In recent weeks, they've all been talking incessantly about two of the most important issues that modern society has ever faced: Availability of lamb in nordic countries, and stupid crap on Swedish music TV. This post adds a little more to the already voluminous literature on each.
1) Lamb. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. But first some background: If anyone read the article about Jervis Bay, and was wondering what the crap about suckling baby lambs at the end meant, basically it was a fairly accurate rendering of life at Soelvi's family's house. They have a small sheep farm, and sometimes when too many lambs are born, they have to feed them with baby's bottles, cuddling them in front of a fireplace, and her mum really does spin wool from rabbit hair. She told me about this at Jervis bay, hence its inclusion in that article.
Now the news: In a recent email to her about my Christmas visit, I reminded her of this rather sweet image I've carried with me since Jervis, and she replied: "Remember that there is no little lambs running around at Christmastime. Thats when we eat them!"
I was shattered, disillusioned, kinda like Lisa in that episode "Li-i-i-sa, I thought you lo-o-o-ved me-e-eee!". But I like the taste of lamb far too much for that to stop me.
2) Stupid crap on swedish music tv. Because I'm not completely up to speed with the language yet, with some things I see on TV, I'm not quite sure if they're supposed to be funny, tongue in cheek sorta, or if they're serious. Two examples:
a) Last night, watching some MTV whilst reading up on topological entropy (yet another nugget of genius stemming from the work of Kolmogorov), they showed a David Hasselhoff video clip. Just in amongst usual clips from Kanye West, Green Day, and what have you. Joke? I honestly don't know.
b) Later on, they had a "80's top ten". People had texted in votes for their favourite video clips from that most shoulder-padded of decades. Surely Michael Jackson is up there, you say? In that decade he could do no wrong! No, not one song from him, but Milli Vanilli came in at number 3. A joke? Again, I honestly don't know.
As TISM said, in a desperate plea that obviously resonated with the Swedish heart-strings:
In other news, I'm finally knee deep in an interesting theoretical problem again, the kind of situation where it's possible I might actually do some constructive work, a situation which seems to come about roughly once per year. And yes, it's to do with topological entropy. And network information theory. Hoping to get something done by 30th of November, for that conference in Tromsø.
1) Lamb. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. But first some background: If anyone read the article about Jervis Bay, and was wondering what the crap about suckling baby lambs at the end meant, basically it was a fairly accurate rendering of life at Soelvi's family's house. They have a small sheep farm, and sometimes when too many lambs are born, they have to feed them with baby's bottles, cuddling them in front of a fireplace, and her mum really does spin wool from rabbit hair. She told me about this at Jervis bay, hence its inclusion in that article.
Now the news: In a recent email to her about my Christmas visit, I reminded her of this rather sweet image I've carried with me since Jervis, and she replied: "Remember that there is no little lambs running around at Christmastime. Thats when we eat them!"
I was shattered, disillusioned, kinda like Lisa in that episode "Li-i-i-sa, I thought you lo-o-o-ved me-e-eee!". But I like the taste of lamb far too much for that to stop me.
Jimmy: Uhh, Mr. McClure? I have a crazy friend who says it's wrong to eat meat. Is he crazy?Norway is the promised land, it seems, where my current culinary conundrum will be resolved.
Troy: No, just ignorant. You see, your crazy friend never heard of "The Food Chain." Just ask this scientician.
Scientician: Uh…
2) Stupid crap on swedish music tv. Because I'm not completely up to speed with the language yet, with some things I see on TV, I'm not quite sure if they're supposed to be funny, tongue in cheek sorta, or if they're serious. Two examples:
a) Last night, watching some MTV whilst reading up on topological entropy (yet another nugget of genius stemming from the work of Kolmogorov), they showed a David Hasselhoff video clip. Just in amongst usual clips from Kanye West, Green Day, and what have you. Joke? I honestly don't know.
b) Later on, they had a "80's top ten". People had texted in votes for their favourite video clips from that most shoulder-padded of decades. Surely Michael Jackson is up there, you say? In that decade he could do no wrong! No, not one song from him, but Milli Vanilli came in at number 3. A joke? Again, I honestly don't know.
As TISM said, in a desperate plea that obviously resonated with the Swedish heart-strings:
Don't want no Peppers, Red Hot Chilli,
I want Milli Vanilli.
Don't want push boulder up no hilly,
I want Milli Vanilli
In other news, I'm finally knee deep in an interesting theoretical problem again, the kind of situation where it's possible I might actually do some constructive work, a situation which seems to come about roughly once per year. And yes, it's to do with topological entropy. And network information theory. Hoping to get something done by 30th of November, for that conference in Tromsø.
posted by I-Rock at 1:54 PM
5 Comments:
What on earth are you working on? It sounds fascinating.
BTW, in response to a much earlier question whilst I was in hibernation, yes, I do know of Alan Edelman. He is awesome, and has some excellent review papers on his website. Lucky you!
I also had an upbringing that involved feeding lambikins from milk bottles and then slaughtering them 12 months later. We used to give them special names, like "Rosemary" and "Christmas". I also had a lamb called "Lioness", cause she looked, IMHO at the time, like a lion. Oh, the imagination of the child.
I'm invisaging some sort of "dance of the entrails" when the lamb is slaughtered, followed by much laughter "muahahahaha, little fluffy was a fool to trust us!". Will keep you posted.
Mat: basically trying to adapt top. ent. to a problem in multi-agent coordination. That means replacing the original compact set with a cartesian product of compact sets, and working through the proofs of all the important theorems to see if they still work in the way I want them to. There's a bajillion limits going every which way!
It also means that the maximal cardinality terms become vectors, not scalars, which is only a partially ordered set, so I don't yet know if they're unique, but I think they are. That's what I'm trying to prove now.
Edelman talk was interesting, but a bit hard to follow. He would kinda think on his feet, start along one train of thought, jump back three slides, add an aside about some interesting tangent, go back to the first train, change his mind about what it all meant, etc.
Lots of interesting head-spinny stuff, though.
Something about the histogram of zeros in the Riemann function probably being a Painleve function. It is supported by simulations, no proofs though. He thinks an eventual proof will be something like the central limit theorem (yes folks, another gem from Kolmogorov).
This line of conversation is confusering.
Lets just talk about stuff from now on. Or things. Man, i love things. Especially cool things. Damn.
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