Awesome badness

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/03/iron-eagle-isra.html

Wired is great for this type of “awesome badness”.

It’s like they took a left critique of society and tried to tick off all the boxes:

Patriarchal, misogynist, jingoistic, phallic imagery, objectification, militarist, macho, capitalist, bourgeois, fear-mongering, warmongering, latent violence, statist, consumerist, mindless pop culture, fascist.

It’s all there, yep, every one. I feel that this arms manufacturer, or their advertising agency, must have accidentally hired some radical feminist antiwar college student who couldn’t find a job elsewhere, who had a great time producing such exquisitely comprehensive awesome badness.

Perhaps it could also be submitted to a feminist journal as a spot-the-gender-binaries game.

Chord diagrams, contact-topological quantum field theory, and contact categories

(74 pages) – on the arXiv – published in Algebraic & Geometric Topology.

Abstract: We consider contact elements in the sutured Floer homology of solid tori with longitudinal sutures, as part of the (1+1)-dimensional topological quantum field theory defined by Honda–Kazez–Mati\'{c} in \cite{HKM08}. The \(\mathbb{Z}_2\) \(SFH\) of these solid tori forms a “categorification of Pascal’s triangle”, and contact structures correspond bijectively to chord diagrams, or sets of disjoint properly embedded arcs in the disc. Their contact elements are distinct and form distinguished subsets of \(SFH\) of order given by the Narayana numbers. We find natural “creation and annihilation operators” which allow us to define a QFT-type basis of each \(SFH\) vector space, consisting of contact elements. Sutured Floer homology in this case reduces to the combinatorics of chord diagrams. We prove that contact elements are in bijective correspondence with comparable pairs of basis elements with respect to a certain partial order, and in a natural and explicit way. The algebraic and combinatorial structures in this description have intrinsic contact-topological meaning. In particular, the QFT-basis of \(SFH\) and its partial order have a natural interpretation in pure contact topology, related to the contact category of a disc: the partial order enables us to tell when the sutured solid cylinder obtained by “stacking” two chord diagrams has a tight contact structure. This leads us to extend Honda’s notion of contact category to a “bounded” contact category, containing chord diagrams and contact structures which occur within a given contact solid cylinder. We compute this bounded contact category in certain cases. Moreover, the decomposition of a contact element into basis elements naturally gives a triple of contact structures on solid cylinders which we regard as a type of “distinguished triangle” in the contact category. We also use the algebraic structures arising among contact elements to extend the notion of contact category to a 2-category.

chord_diagrams_contact_categories

An unpublished letter to the editor of the Stanford Daily

To the editor:

Thank you for reporting on the community meeting held Wednesday night to discuss courses of action in response to the return of Condoleezza Rice. It is welcome to hear the voices of Stanford students and community who are are concerned about Condoleezza Rice’s actions while in high government office, including actions which have given rise to extremely serious allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity, in this newspaper.

We would, however, like to point out some inaccuracies in this article.

First, there is a clear misquote of Professor Todd Davies. As a faculty member, Professor Davies is always careful in his language in regard to fellow faculty members. It is no light matter to raise concerns about criminal behavior by colleagues. Not only do none of us recall Todd making the attributed quote, we know that Davies does not speak in that way. Therefore, we are certain it is a misquote or misattribution.

Second, there is an open letter to the Stanford community in response to the return of Condoleezza Rice, which Stanford Says No to War has prepared and circulated. It is, however, not a petition. A petition was one of many courses of action raised at the meeting on Wednesday, but this letter is not one.

Third, the coalition that met Wednesday night does not yet have an official name. A working title of “Condi Un-Welcoming Committee” was used on the proposed agenda, but no decision has been made on a name yet.

In any case, we look forward to reading more articles in the Daily which raise these extremely serious concerns that many Stanford students, faculty and community members have with regard to Condoleezza Rice. We invite people to read our open letter, which is available at Stanford Says No to War’s website, antiwar.stanford.edu. We invite people who share our concerns to join an email list such as iraq_coalition@ or action_condi@lists.stanford.edu for notifications
and information.

We also invite the Daily and other publications to publish the letter,
or an abridged version of it.

Yours sincerely,

Adam Hudson
Daniel Mathews
Ekin Kocabas
Daniel Weissman

on behalf of Stanford Says No to War

Pizza discovery

We had free pizza at out meeting, according to our principle that free food brings people. I ordered it from the Treehouse, and thought the 5 pizzas I ordered were quite expensive. But when they were delivered, I made a discovery which explained everything.

I discovered that the Treehouse has its own special system of units.

In particular, a “Treehouse pizza” is not a pizza. Rather, ordering a pizza at the Treehouse means you get 2 pizzas! So, we had 10 pizzas, which was a little more than necessary, but it’s all a learning experience I guess, and I have discovered a new interesting fact about the world, or at least, the world of pizza measurement systems.

Chord diagrams, topological quantum field theory, and the sutured Floer homology of solid tori

(89 pages)

This is a previous version of the article Chord diagrams, contact-topological quantum field theory, and contact categories. It contains less content, in particular about contact categories, but is less terse (or more prolix!) and contains more background. It might be useful for some readers, and so I retain it here, even though it has been superseded by that article.

chord_diagrams

A not-very-impressive editorial

In response to a not-very-impressive editorial in the Stanford Daily…

This argument is amazing:

“rescinding tenure or failing to welcome Rice back will send a message to all Stanford professors who are now in or considering public service: do so at your own risk.”

Since the “public service” involved in the allegations against Rice is the commission of major war crimes, with this substitution, with this substitution, the argument becomes:

“failing to welcome Rice back will send a message to all Stanford professors who are now committing or are considering committing major war crimes: do so at your own risk.”

And that, I think, is precisely correct.

That the Daily then draws the opposite conclusion, and that “Stanford professors who are now” committing or are “considering” major war crimes should not be given a message of “do so at your own risk”, speaks for itself.