Subject: gesammelte swiss melange
geneve and arolla:
hello folks from the hotel mont collon in arolla, switzerland, the sun is shining and all of my troubles are now behind me:
i began this trip by going to the rochester airport with a feeling of deep forboding. for three years, i have not had a flight without a major problem. what would the airlines do this time to screw me up?
last fall, on the way to my cousin's funeral, they made me sit in a plane on the tarmac in philadelphia for 8 hours. could they top that? no, they could not. but you have to admire their consistent efforts to do so.
this time they cancelled my flight to boston twenty minutes before it was to depart. all the checking was of no avail. there was no notice. first they said it was weather. then it became mechanical problems. since it was the start of a three plane trip to geneve (rochester-frankfort-geneve), this had the potential of a real screw up, a cascading of disaster. even though i had allowed a 4 hour interval in boston, it was not enough for their first attempt to fix the situation. but i give credit where it is due. usair got creative, sent me to washington to connect with a functioning flight to boston and into the relatively safe hands of lufthansa. but i boarded the plane with great fears for my luggage. i was right about that.
this is a message from geneve where i am waiting for my wayward luggage to arrive. with the great start that usair gave it, it ended up in munich. this is interesting since my plans did not include munich, only frankfort. oh well, at least the country was right.
wait a minute! i am in switzerland, the country is wrong!
but i have to give lufthansa credit. they tracked the luggage without difficulty and promised to have it at my hotel by 2 o'clock local time.
i still have faith in german efficiency. but that can be crushed too. my luggage arrived at 4 after i went back to the airport to see what was going on. not too bad, at least, i had it now.
yesterday night i ate in a restaurant in geneve called "at the foot of the pig" , in other words, "au pied du cochon." i find it amusing that a restaurant called "at the foot of the pig" sits at the feet of the palace of justice." this proves that the swiss do indeed have a sense of humor and a keen perception of society.
i had the signature dish of the restaurant, roasted pigs feet stuffed with mushrooms, accompanied by roasted potatoes, some very nice zuchinni stuffed with a tomato concoction, a white wine kir, and some sparkling water.. i enjoyed it immensely. first of all, the feet tasted like good roast pork, if maybe a little richer and fattier than our current obsession with lean. but the texture was very different, it had a warm gelatinous quality that most americans do not like, reminescent to me of head cheese. in other words, it was pickled pigs feet without the pickling and it brought back warm memories of my german-american roots.
as anthony bourdain says, the best food is often made from the "nasty bits", those things which some cultures throw away but which the great cuisines of the world learn to love and to turn into something wonderful. such were the roasted pigs feet in geneve. and i am pleased that anthony would be proud of me since i sought out this food! granted, it did not take the courage that he showed when he ate the roasted warthog anus in the kalihari desert.
oh yes, i had a dessert of creme brulee made with grand marnier. it was accompanied by the coffee with creme that the swiss call renverse. it was very good, but it stopped well short of being wonderful since the creme brulee was only a little warm.
despite my tendency to lapse into english, the ticket agents in the train stations have been favorably impressed by my french. this will surprise jacques who expressed the opinion that i would never learn french properly because of all the unpronounced letters in the words. what jacques did not take into account is that i am learning from the tapes of the late michel thomas, the language teacher to the stars, the man who taught both woody allen and princess grace to speak french. woody doesn’t lie and i trust any man who can get an endorsement from him. besides that, michel thomas is the man who taught doris day to properly pronounce “que sera, sera.” he is very proud of that.
what michel thomas does is focus on two things, proper pronunciation and then verbs and their tenses. even when you take account of the exceptional verbs, the latter is rather mathematical. it emphasizes the structure of the language. vocabulary is important but is a secondary issue. after all, since the time of william the conquerer, english has had a lot of french words in it. all you have to do is learn how to tranform them and you already have a large active vocabulary, “une vocabulaire activ.”
a few remarks about my impressions of geneve. geneve is something like paris but less grand. i especially liked the bust of piaget in the park. recall that piaget was famous for his early studies of child development. and there seem to have been multple founders of the red cross, all of them with busts in the park.
you see many biracial couples and children here. it is almost as if europe has passed into a new millenium which america has yet to reach. no wonder barack obama is very popular here.
there seems to be no black-white racial tension and, in geneve at least, little european-arab-turkish tension. this latter may be a false facade. i certainly know about some such tension in european places like france and germany. and i even am fond of the spanish “festival of the moors” wherein they blow up an effigy of mohammed in memory of the reconquest of spain. the festivities date to the 1500s. after all, the spanish have the right to do it. the bastards were invading their country. maybe some day the iraqis will have similar festivals.
i note that the russians have captured the town in georgia called gori. since gori was the hometown of someone called joseph stalin, maybe they have a right to it. and my friend paul panomarev points out to me that old joe had a lot to do with enlarging georgia by the forced addition of some provinces filled with people who are not georgian and do not want to be. i myself must admit to some prejudices against a country that was, until recently, proud of having an avenue named after george bush.
i note that our esteemed president, just back from fondling the american volleyball team in beijing, is delaying his new well deserved vacation a few days to keep up with the developments in georgia. it is indeed true that the american people have gotten the government they deserve. indeed, since they elected the guy or at least made it close enough to steal, they deserve the guy more than the romans deserved nero.
by the way, does anyone really believe that a small country like georgia is going to prod the russian bear with a stick without first clearing it with its major ally? there are only 3 possibilities, they are stupid, or they are lying, or they have a very bad major ally, or any combination of these 3. they remind me of the poles, of the government, not of the people. or since they have close ties with the israeli government, perhaps they are taking lessons from them but without the political capital to get their way.
if i may be permitted the observations of an over the hill, post aortic dissection male, i must say that geneve is full of very attractive young ladies and, i suppose also, attractive young men. i certainly never encountered such density of pulchritude when i was young. the place is alive with life and, i suppose, is getting continually more so. for example, some young ladies in dresses ride bicycles to work with all the good that that implies.
by the way, the internet is lousy in geneve. 5 euros for 30 minutes! and they have to be consecutive! bummer! for wonderful and free internet access, give me the paris mcdonalds anytime. i wonder if they have a macdonalds in geneve? i have not seen one yet.
i have arrived in arolla. nothing to do there except think about mathematics, work on a paper, hike around, and practice a little french. i will enjoy it and learn somethings about homotopy inverse limits. what precisely are they anyway? it seems that they are the actual inverse limits of diagrams where, according to some yet to made precise laws, some or of all maps have been replaced by fibrations. there should be people who know here, people like bill dwyer, and i look forward to becoming enlightened. i am thinking of putting an informal description of homotopy inverse limits in my book, nothing fancy but something which summarizes the essense of them. done well, the accumulation of such relatively little things can be major selling points.
halleluyah! the hotel mont collon has entered the modern world! they now have wireless connection to the internet! this is now the perfect hotel.
unfortunately, my ipod seems to have encountered nonresponse problems. this is evidently a standard disease of ipods and can be cured over the internet. but the price is a temporary wiping out of all your ipod stuff. since i can still hook up the ipod to my laptop and play my language tapes, i don't want to wipe it all out at this time. it will have to wait until my rochester based desktop is available to act as backup.
a lazy day:
it is snowing in arolla, 10 centimeters the last time it was measured. hiking is curtailed. naps to cure jetlag are always welcome and i spent my waking time calling up my credit card companies to verify that the lastest email message is a fraud. it claimed that my account had just been billed 8300 dollars and i don't even have that much in there. it is just some scheme to get me to reply to them and send them useful financial information. i thought so but now i am sure.
i was happy to hear from jacques that the internet had a cure for frozen ipods. it worked like a charm and caused no loss of data. so i can, while walking around, commune with the ghost of michel thomas concerning the mysteries of the french language.
the hotel must feel sorry for us in this snowy wilderness. they are offerring a choice between fondue and raclette for dinner tonight. i like fondue better. the wine helps the cheese a lot.
i am feeling better concerning kathryn's prohibition of my going on the glacier walk. old and out of shape as i am in this post aortic dissection world, i was still feeling that i was going to miss something. now i can enjoy the schadenfreude of hoping that the weather continues to be lousy tomorrow, lots of rain, sleet, snow, fog, and clouds, perfect mountain weather for staying inside.
i contemplate unsuccessfully how to prove that the inverse limit of a tower of fibrations is a weak homotopy invariant. it is not that i have real doubts but the proof is elusive.
by the way, i am leaning towards choosing cambridge over the ams as the publisher of my book. the attractiveness of the cover, the offer of being in a series which also has a book by bombieri, the fond memories of frank adams, and the traditional lure to americans of british class are the perhaps shallow reasons for this leaning. no matter, both would be good choices.
it is the next day and the sun is shining so i guess that i will be forced to take a walk. today is actually beautiful.
i think that i have over night actually figured out how to prove that the inverse limit of a tower of fibrations is a weak homotopy invariant. it is rather clever. for the experts, it involves playing the hurewicz notion of a fibration against the serre notion.
a not so lazy day:
to paraphrase lewis carrol,
"you are old, father william, and a little bit fat.
yet your trade you ply in the mountains up high,
pray what is the purpose of that?"
yesterday, i hiked up to and back from the "cabane des aigelles rouges", the "cabin of the red eagles", a mountain hut to which i have been before in previous younger years. it took 7 hours to complete the hike. although i have been doing 6 hour hikes in rochester, there are two major differences up here. one, the air is a little thinner. two, the hike here consisted of 4 and a half hours of uphill and 2 and a half hours of hard downhill. the hikes in rochester were on canal paths and exceedingly flat. believe me, it makes a difference!
for me this was a difficult hike. i barely made it back to the bus stop before the last postal bus. if i had missed that, i was threatened with a long, flat walk on the highway back to the hotel. i knew i didn't want that. i was forced to increase the speed of my downhill descent. and without poles! as several swiss told me, they knew what my next purchase would be, poles to check and steady the descent. as i told them, i already owned very good poles but they were home in rochester. in fact, though i did not like to be so rushed, it was good to have to revert to my younger days when descent involved careful placement of one's feet on solid rocks so that one did not slip. no poles then!
"brave mountaniers! we always were untroubled by time." (song by gordan lightfoot)
anyway, i caught the last bus back and arrived at the hotel, much to the relief of madame anzevui. she was threatening to send out the mountain rescue corps if i didn't return on the last bus. actually, as i told her, i had discovered that i had two options. one, i could have phoned my hotel from the small restaurant at the bus stop. madame would have gladly picked me up. she and kathryn seem to have formed some conspiracy to avoid the possibility of having to ship my body back to rochester.
but much better was the second option. on the trail i had agreed to take a somewhat artistic picture of 8 young frence ladies who had arranged themselves in a pinwheel lying on the ground. there was much giggling. let your imagine fly, you can imagine it if you try! when they saw me waiting for the bus, they asked if i needed a ride. at that moment, the bus arrived to whisk me back to my hotel.
by the way, i had endeared myself to the young french ladies by apologizing for our current president. together we expressed strong wishes that obama win the election and rescue the american political system from the abyss. i pointed out that, with the american electorate being so stupid, things could easily get worse. they suggested that we take zarkosy if we needed him. they were not fans of him either.
let me add that my acceptance on the trail is much increased by my newfound ability to reply with french sentences which are not minimalistic, not just the simple , " tres chaud, ne pas?" but something like "c'est tres difficile pour moi. je suis trop vieux pour le faire." i mean that my sentences are complicated enough and have enough meaning to have been composed by an adult.
since i had arrived back in time for dinner, i went in to join the other topologists for dinner. i enjoyed the salad and soup, but unfortunately, when the main course of port arrived, i was just too tired to continue eating. this was sad to me since pork is ordinarily one of my favorites. i skipped the rest of the dinner and just took a large bottle of sparkling water back to my room. lots of liquids were clearly what i needed.
i did not discover exactly what the dessert was. it was something called "pavlova" and, despite my suggestions that it consisted of pieces of the corpse of the most famous russian ballerina of all time, perhaps jumping out of a cake, it probably was some concoction of sorbet topped with grand marnier. sorry to have missed it.
joe n
grumpy observations:
after all these years of going to conferences, i have finally learned a very important lesson. the most important and valuable thing is who you eat your meals with. it is vital both for enjoyment and for learning, the only two purposes of going to conferences.
breakfast, lunch, and dinner conversations are far more useful and enjoyable than most lectures. therefore, it follows that extreme care should be taken in getting a good spot at a good table. carelessness here can lead to being trapped at a table with an extremely boring clump of people.
in my case, i was completely surrounded by a trio of totally narcisistic englishmen. they filled the air with boring conversation. it was totally centered around themselves. they chose to discuss personal things with roots in their youth, not things of broad general interest. only they could possibly care about this trivia. they had no wit to speak of. i was being driven out of my mind. it was far worse than silence could ever have been.
a disastrous dinner can happen in the following way. you see a cluster of interesting people around a table. you therefore choose to sit at the corner of that table. but what you saw was just a temporary clump. the interesting people disperse and the table is left available for colonization by others.
you may take this as a reflection on your own social desirability. it might well be. or, to be more kind to yourself, you may realize too late that the potentially interesting people had in fact previously acquired seats at distant tables which they have now returned to.
into this vacuum, a person appears with whom you have been acquainted for years. he takes possession of all the seats which surround you. he is accompanied by two of his long time friends, people who you do not know. they are a small swarm with little, if any, connection to the conference. you are soon immersed in a sea of vapid conversation. you are slow to realize your true danger. your acquaintance, while known for his nonstop talking, has been bearable in the past. that was because you were always able to escape.
i lasted through the first course of pickles, ham, and the swiss version of ham that is made from beef. it was quite good. but, during the wait for the start of the fondue, i realized that i was approaching insanity. i stood up, looked around for an empty seat that would provide escape. the nonstop blathering was torturing me. i found no empty seats. i decided that, since i had had fondue 4 days ago and since i had some oranges back in my room, my preference was to just leave. i did so.
i got my computer and used skype to call michelle ravenel. i had a far superior conversation than the one i had escaped from. i regained more equilibrium by taking a walk in the night along the dark road which went past the hotel. madame anzevui was terrified for my safety and was relieved when i finally returned.
all should be well tonight. i have ran levi's promise to save a place for me at dinner.
back to mathematical things. one of my old friends told me that he thought that mathematics had entered a new phase where the emphasis was no longer on solving problems but was now on formulating new ideas and programs. being a cynic, i feel that this is the easy way out. in fact, i think it is true more in algebraic topology than in other, more healthy areas of mathematics. it is more a sign of decay than renewal. it is better than nothing. but give me real problems solved anytime. this includes the traditional areas of application of algebraic topology to things like manifolds and and groups. of course, the crown jewels are things like the poincare conjecture, fermat's last theorem, and the riemann hypothesis. transcendent problems all.
the names of some of the new areas of study seem to have been chosed by people with strong understanding of the principles of advertising. "sell the sizzle, not the steak." some topologists are selling the sizzle. new areas have names like "topological string theory" and "topological quantum field theory." they incorporate the ideas of cobordism and monoidal categories but the names are meant to imply that they are important for the development of physics. this may be doubtful.
i recall a conversation i had with an eminent physicist who just happened to be chuck mcgibbon's father-in-law. i asked him what he thought about the new work in gauge theory that was being done by mathematicians of the high caliber of atiyah and bott. that work was held in high repute at the time. he smiled sagely. he said that he guessed that it was a good thing that the mathematicians were getting around to looking at these things. but it was his honest opinion that the mathematicians were studying only those cases that the physicists thought they understood well enough already. he thought that the mathematicians were avoiding looking at the cases that the physicists still wanted to understand. the point is not that either side is completely right or wrong here. the point is that both sides probably have some portion of the truth and it is rare for either side to see the truth of the other.
and, striking at the heart of physics itself, recall the words of richard feynmann shortly before he died of cancer. "i am an old guy now and you should never ask for the opinions of old guys, but what the hell, my opinion is that string theory is junk." or words to that effect. feynmann believed that the ultimate test of physics was experiment and string theory did not pass that test. in fact, it had not even taken the exam! nor, absent access to the energy of a small star, could it.
perhaps some of these observations are caused by the fact that the sky is gray and it is starting to rain.
on a positive note, i am extremely pleased that i have learned some solid things about homotopy inverse limits from people like bill dwyer, wojcieck chacolski, and jerome scherer. you can't get better experts than that in this area. the resulting references to their papers have completely answered some debatable points in my book. i now feel no need to make an attempt to include a treatment of inverse limits in the book. it is enough to have the references and to understand the proofs.
so that is not being grumpy.
joe n
grumpy observations continued:
in relation to the importance of finding a good seat at meals, the subject of the mathematics conferences at oberwolfach was brought up by paul panomarev.
since oberwolfach had a mandatory seating arrangement, randomly shuffled by the staff, there was no choice involved. but the seating plan used at oberwolfach is fraught with danger. under the appropriate circumstances any methods, legal or not, are justified to avoid the conference equivalent of waterboarding.
i have not been to oberwolfach in a very long time. i remember little about it, except for the german preoccupation with the hard boiled eqqs at breakfast and who was entitled to them. you had to reserve an egg to have a legitimate right to one. the pushy americans were always appropriating eggs which were the rightful property of others, usually of germans. many raw feelings were the result.
at most conference meals, paul panomarev's suggestion to dawdle on the periphery would a good way to minimize loss. but the best choices often go quickly. don't wait too long or all the good choices will be gone. obviously, if you are certain that an attractive dinner companion has firmly planted her butt in a specific spot with an adjacent empty seat, then you would be a fool to delay.
i am getting strong agreement with the comments on the changing nature of mathematics, at least in topology.
most of the talks here in arolla are "satz frei," that is, no theorems. at best, we are being told that one thing that we know nothing about is the same as another thing that we know nothing about. such knowledge can be quite important. i remember donald spencer describing the atiyah-singer index theorem in precisely those words. so it is not always a bad thing.
but, what we are getting in arolla are descriptions of large abstract machines for which there are no known applications to traditional problems. the machines include in their formulations references to grothendieck algebraic geometry and to maclane categorical coherence. that is their world. the air is thin up there and it is a long way back to earth. our departed colleague, david anick, would not be pleased. his work was always clever and tied to real problems.
even very abstract work like that of bill dwyer and emmanuel dror farjoun can still be tied to real problems. it is all relative.
in this land of the mountains, the old quote of george mallory is relevent. when asked why one would want to climb everest, he said "because it's there." and no one has ever come up with a better reason. in fact, it is not a bad reason.
so, when i ask why i should have the slightest interest in the tangent space of some moduli space related to ring spectra, perhaps mallory's answer has validity. after all, lots of interesting things like algebraic groups are blended into the structures. something interesting might come out even if it hasn't yet done so.
but i am suspicious. i recall an quote due to von neumann: "the chief danger in mathematics is that it will become baroque." baroque mathematics being that which has grown far from its roots in the soil of experience and tradition, in the soil of physics, geometry, and number theory. such mathematics tends to get more and more complicated, more and more abstract, less and less connected to other things, and less and less interesting.
the baroque era is in full flower around here. it seems firmly planted at such major centers as harvard and mit and is spreading rapidly. princeton seems less infected with it as yet. perhaps princeton received an innoculation in the solution to fermat's last theorem. tons of abstract machinery were used but in the service of an important, venerable, and central result. princeton could be protected by pasteur's principle of vaccination.
there are national histories and national styles in mathematics. there is the classic german style exemplied by gauss, riemann, hilbert, and others. in fact, riemann with his simplicity and brilliance seems to have a little russian dna in him. the french define the modern world of mathematics. they have poincare and leray to reflect the russian style. they have weil and serre to reflect the german tradition. but they also have this totally french creation of grothendieck who may very well be the antichrist of mathematics and destined to lead mathematics down into the depths of abstract hell.
in closing, there is something honest about number theory, geometry, and physics. there are fools there too but they seem to be more quickly found out. maybe string theory is an exception since it has lost its roots in experiment.
this is the last conference day and i am looking forward to hearing about model categories. at least, i think i will understand most of the words!
tomorrow, weather permitting, i will take a walk down into the town of les hauderes, have a coffee and snack, and take the bus back up. no strain involved.
best wishes,
joe n
conference summation:
…
i walked down to the village of les hauderes today and found this little metropolis on sunday to be even more shut down than the little tourist clump that is arolla. but the walk was pleasant. i encountered a french couple, not very young, who were bicycling up the trail. they told me that the bicycling was "heavy." they eventually gave up and i saw them whiz by me onto the road. it seems that spandex is not sufficient to make a champion.
by far the best athletes around here are the cows. i have always been very impressed with the athletic ability of swiss cows. i am sure that, if olympic runners had to carry gallons of milk while competing, the cows would beat them every time. no matter how high you go in the alps, never think that you have surpassed the level of the cows. just as you think that it is safe to drink the water, you will hear the sound of cowbells coming from the stream above you.
the cows in this valley are exceptional. they actually fight for dominance in the herd. and the swiss encourage this behavior. they hold festivals to determine the champion fighting cow. these cows are certainly not meek. they look you straight in the eye with a look that says that you should be the one to give way! on one of my hikes, a cow chased a dog over a bridge. i think it was just to show the dog who is boss(y). sorry, i couldn't resist that pun!
ran levi"s graduate student nora is really very sweet. i think she is very overwhelmed by all the mathematics here. i try to be encouraging and tell her to take into account that even an old fossil like me, especially an old fossil like me, cannot understand most things. the way to be is to not worry about it, ask lots of modest questions, and then some enlightenment will eventually come to you. in fact, i seem to recall that this advice goes way back to some french or swiss mathematician of the eighteenth century, perhaps l'hopital. "go on and faith will come to you." in which case, it would be l'hopital's rule, which for those who never took calculus, is a mathematical pun!
anyway, if i ever get to aberdeen, nora has promised to make me "plaumekuchen", plum tart. i happened to mention that i loved it as a child. nora is german, and knows how to make it. this should go well with the haggis that ran has promised me if i come to aberdeen. so i will have to go. there is a convenient occasion next summer, a conference planned on the isle of skye.
nora cemented her sweetness credentials by giving presents to the conference organizers, flowers to kathryn and very nice collapsible hiking cups to jerome and christian. kathryn was touched by the flowers but i think that the next day she may have been a little disappointed to have impermanent flowers instead of a sturdy and attractive hiking cup, a gift that will last forever and refresh you on the trail.
speaking of flowers, i am very impressed by this model category stuff. there is a lot of real homotopy theory embedded in there. for example, the model category experts prove very general results on weak equivalences. when i tried to prove even the special case that a bouquet of weak equivalences is a weak equivalence, i had to haul out the van kampen theorem and an old result of ganea. it is not hard but it involves at least one classical result, that of ganea, which not every professional knows. i will have to look more carefully, but these experts seem to get the general case without using any classical results. magic? it is all included in the mantras that homotopy colimits and homotopy limits both preserve weak equivalences.
i was listening to nick kuhn giving a lecture on v_n periodic phenomena in the unstable homotopy groups of spheres. at one point, he said "this result is so old that it is in joe neisendorfer's thesis." i immediately told him that vengeance would be mine!
at the end of the talk, i asked him whether all this fancy machinery could compute the homotopy groups of an eilenberg-maclane space. the answer was no, except for the case of a circle. next i asked if all this fancy machinery could compute 4 times the 2-primary component of the homotopy groups of the 3 dimensional sphere. again, the answer was no. the point is that, in both cases the answer is essentially zero. it is an imprecise mantra, but there is a lot of truth to the mantra that "properly understood, all good theorems in homotopy theory compute zero."
it means that, instead of not knowing how twisted and tangled up things are, you know when they let go.
by the way, i prefaced these questions by saying that i had two questions related to v_2, not in the modern sense,but in the sense that the germans used it in world war 2. in those days, v_2 meant vengeance weapon, version 2. needless to say, this joke went way over everybody's head and was not well received! doesn't anyone know any political or military history around here?
i do not pretend to know the answer but it is not clear to me which will be easier in god's eye (as einstein used to say), unstable or stable homotopy theory. since more people live in the stable world, more people seem to thing that the stable world is easier.
i am biased the other way. since the beginning of my career, this has never been my experience. my thesis was aimed primarily at stable homotopy theory and included unstable machinery only as a afterthought. so far, the stable stuff has proved fairly useless and the unstable stuff has made my name. it is rather near the end of my career. i do not expect the situation to change in my lifetime.
tomorrow i catch the 10 o'clock postal bus to the train station in sion, then on the train to overnight in geneve, and onto a plane the next day. 3 planes later, i should be back in rochester.
joe n
last swiss thoughts:
michelle ravenel says that i must not care much for swiss food since i do not write about it much. that is not exactly true and yet there is truth in the statement. first of all, let me say that the last conference dinner at the hotel mont collon consisted of totally properly cooked duck a la orange and a wonderful salad with goat cheese. it was superb meal and, in many ways, a departure from the usual swiss food.
i love many swiss consumables, such as yogurt, milk chocolate, the form of dried beef that is native here, and the excellent, subtle cheeses like appenzeller and a nice gruyere. all these are swiss foods not to be missed. notice that they all have their origin in the cow. much of swiss cuisine is defined by the cow. it is both the strength and the weakness of swiss food.
as an aspect of the cow cuisine, the swiss love to put their meat in a cream sauce. i am not fond of that. for the conference banquet, the hotel roasted a whole calf and served veal. it was a superb meat, not overcooked, but, alas, in a cream sauce. the swiss will never learn. i know that the swiss don't always immerse their meat in a cream sauce but there is no denying their tendency to do so.
the swiss share many characteristics with the jews. both are a tribal people who were conquered by the romans. but the swiss have never been a hot desert people who had to learn to be cautious about milk. the swiss have no caution when it comes to milk. they would benefit by adopting some of the principles of kosher, in particular, the law against mixing the milk of the mother with the flesh of the offspring. on the other hand, i see no real reason to adopt the prohibitions against pigs and crustaceans. i have to admit that i love some cream cheese on my cold roast beef sandwiches. add some lettuce, mayonaisse, and pepper too, please.
madame anzevui's mother lives in israel. so i am baffled as to why kosher principles have not infiltrated the hotel mont collon.
this morning i took the bus to sion and then the train to geneve. an uneventful trip since i decided not to stop in lausanne, hike up the steep hill to the chocolate shop, buy some chocolate, and return to the train to geneve. kathryn is a feirce partisan of lausanne chocolate but, after all, the big brother city geneve is also known for chololate and i could certainly get some good stuff there.
i spent some time contemplating the weak homotopy invariance of homotopy colimits, the two main cases being pushout diagrams and infinite increasing unions of cofibrations. the second follows directly from the fact that homotopy commutes with such direct limits and has no difficulties.
the weak homotopy invariance of pushout diagrams is harder, even in the easier cases like bouquets and suspensions. when the spaces are simply connected, the theorems follow from the mayer-vietoris sequence in homology. but if the spaces are not simply connected or even connected, the game is much more subtle. for example, the weak homotopy invariance of the suspension requires some thought on what exactly does the suspension of a nonconnected space look like. not hard, but subtle.
the difference between the old methods and the new model theoretic methods of proving the weak homotopy invariance is that the old methods require one to do too much. old methods require getting a tighter hold on the geometry. sometimes the tighter hold is a computational hold on the homotopy groups of these homotopy pushouts. for example, the van kampen theorem on the fundamentql group of a bouquet is such a hold. ganea's result on the homotopy fibre of the map from the bouquet into the product is another such tighter hold which is not computational..
the model theoretic versions proceed without getting a tighter hold.. these methods prove nonsimply connected weak homotopy invariance results for homotopy pushouts even when there is no such tighter hold. in particular, knowledge of the homotopy groups remains far away. remarkable.
upon arrival in geneve, i deposited my things at the hotel ibis and headed out on the town. a short distance from the hotel, i passed mike wong's "fast food asiatic" restaurant. as i stopped in stunned disbelief, i recalled the words that humphrey bogart said to ingrid bergman in the movie casablanca: "if you don't do this, you will regret it, maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, soon, and for the rest of your life." what i now saw before me was the opportunity to try ice cream made from the fruit called durian.
durian is the fruit described by anthony bourdain as tasting something like rotten custard. it is beloved by some in southeast asia and detested by others, including most westerners. it is one of the ultimate acquired tastes. guests are not allowed to bring it into the finer hotels of southeast asia. it smells that bad.
bourdain is able to savor durian. he says that one should think of it as similar to a fine and very stinky french cheese. i think of the german cheese called limburger. anthony can swallow some awful stuff. recall his adventure with roast warthog anus in the kalihari dessert.
bourdain's dark clone, the bizarre foods guy, andrew zimmer, the guy who relishes rotten fish and worms which bourdain hates, cannot swallow durian. he has tried many times. he has failed many times. durian is a worthy test of food courage.
i resolved to try it. perhaps the ice cream would thin it out a bit.
the deal at mike wong's is that you have to buy two tubs of ice cream for 5 francs. you cannot not buy just one. i choose the durian and the coconut. it was interesting to compare them. the coconut was the stronger, with a perfectly acceptable coconut taste.
the durian had a much fainter taste. it was not unpleasant. it hinted at the potential to be truly revolting. it was in fact faintly reminiscent of rotten custard. but not in a bad way. i enjoyed the durian ice cream. i was slightly disappointed that it had not been more of a challenge.
but there was so much of the durian ice cream that i could not finish it. i closed the tub and took the remainder back to the hotel. since it was a hot day, i put the tub under the spare blanket that the hotel had conveniently provided, probably for some other purpose. i left the ice cream there. i went back out to explore the city of geneve.
several hours later i returned to my hotel and decided to finish the durian ice cream. in the interval, it had thawed considerably. this caused it to regain much of its power. the durian had not become totally disgusting. i still liked it. but it had woken up. it now had a much stronger taste of rotten custard. i was happy that i had been able to enjoy this powerful and marvelous fruit.
i cannot understand how richard and joanne kane could be in southeast asia, the home of durian, and not sample it. it ranks right up there with many canadian classics such as poutine. oh well, what do you expect when the kane's first meal in singapore was texmex food? i had suggested that they try the boiled shark's head and the chili crab. chili crab is made from crabs which fatten on the corpses in the ganges river. the kanes completely ignored my suggestions, even though these suggestions came with the enthusiatic endorsement of the great anthony bourdain. these are some of the reasons why anthony regards singapore as the food capital of the world.
as i wandered the streets of geneve, i discovered the swiss department store called "manor." they have wonderful foods in the basement. i bought a plum tart and a bottle of carrot juice. i passed up the salmon pizza.
up on the fourth floor of "manor" there is a cafeteria called "manora." i had a capuchino and a salad from the buffet. the buffet was piled high with sliced cucumbers, chopped beets, chopped celery, roast potatoes, and many other good things. i was doing well with food!
i looked at the chocolate available in "manor". it was excellent but i did not judge it to be so exceptional that it made sense to get it there. it was a hot day. the selection at the geneve airport is not bad and it has less time to melt before you get it on the plane.
by the way, like all foods of real character, the durian has a significant and lingering aftertaste.
joe n
wikipedia on durian:
The unusual flavour and odour of the fruit have prompted many people to express diverse and passionate views ranging from deep appreciation to intense disgust. Writing in 1856, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace provides a much-quoted description of the flavour of the durian:
“
The five cells are silky-white within, and are filled with a mass of firm, cream-coloured pulp, containing about three seeds each. This pulp is the edible part, and its consistence and flavour are indescribable. A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acid nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact, to eat Durians is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience. ... as producing a food of the most exquisite flavour it is unsurpassed.[17]
”
While Wallace cautions that "the smell of the ripe fruit is certainly at first disagreeable", later descriptions by westerners are more graphic. British novelist Anthony Burgess writes that eating durian is "like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory."[18] Chef Andrew Zimmern compares the taste to "completely rotten, mushy onions."[19] Anthony Bourdain, while a lover of durian, relates his encounter with the fruit as thus: "Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother."[20] Travel and food writer Richard Sterling says:
“
... its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away. Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia.[21]
”
Hydrogen sulphide is one of the chemical compounds that may be responsible for the characteristic odour of durian
Other comparisons have been made with the civet, sewage, stale vomit, skunk spray and used surgical swabs.[22] The wide range of descriptions for the odour of durian may have a great deal to do with the variability of durian odour itself. Durians from different species or clones can have significantly different aromas; for example, red durian (D. dulcis) has a deep caramel flavour with a turpentine odour while red-fleshed durian (D. graveolens) emits a fragrance of roasted almonds.[23] Among the varieties of D. zibethinus, Thai varieties are sweeter in flavour and less odourous than Malay ones.[2] The degree of ripeness has an effect on the flavour as well.[2] Three scientific analyses of the composition of durian aroma — from 1972, 1980, and 1995 — each found a mix of volatile compounds including esters, ketones, and different sulphur compounds, with no agreement on which may be primarily responsible for the distinctive odour.[2]
This strong odour can be detected half a mile away by animals, thus luring them. In addition, the fruit is extremely appetising to a variety of animals from squirrels to mouse deer, pigs, orangutan, elephants, and even carnivorous tigers. While some of these animals eat the fruit and dispose of the seed under the parent plant, others swallow the seed with the fruit and then transport it some distance before excreting, with the seed being dispersed as the result.[24] The thorny, armoured covering of the fruit discourages smaller animals; larger animals are more likely to transport the seeds far from the parent tree.[25]
the end of the journey, a posting with the permission of av suvorov, and a bit of michael moore:
i survived the trip home with no major incidents, just the cancellation of a flight by my trusted lufthansa and the loss of my luggage by united airlines. both problems were fixable.
the cancellation was easily remedied by lufthansa. they rerouted me via british air to geneva-london heathrow-washington dulles-rochester, with the last leg remaining the same originally scheduled us air flight. or so i thought.
i had been warned to avoid heathrow. security delays were supposed to be very long. i approached this change of planes in heathrow with trepedation. it went well even though i was astonished that the necessary bus trip from the new terminal 5 to terminal 4 took one half hour of travel time. who in the world had designed this wide separation? the people, being british, were helpful even when they didn't know anything about where to go. so one felt content.
on the british air flight there was a safety video involving detailed instructions as to how to use a life jacket. it occured to me that i was not aware that life jackets had ever saved any lives during a plane crash. even in the case of the sinking of the titanic the life jackets were rather useless since the water in the north atlantic over which we were flying was rather cold. the survival time was too short unless you were in a life boat out of the water. i asked the steward about this and, after much consultation, he eventually came back with the claim that, once, in the middle of the indian ocean, 5 lives were saved by life preservers. the water was warm there and the sharks were not quick enough.
when i arrived at washington dulles, i made a minor mistake. as one must, i secured my luggage, went through customs, and looked for the place to transfer to the luggage to my us air flight to rochester. if there was a place, i missed it. i was told that i couldn't go back. i must take the luggage to the us air ticket counter. this was ok since i needed to convert the e-ticket to a real ticket anyway. i headed to the us air ticket counter. it was closed. and no one was there. from a baggage person, i eventually learned that my us air flight was actually being operated by united airlines. the airlines did this sort of switching all the time. they did not think that it was important for passengers to know it about it. since the united counter was open, there was no problem. with an hour to spare, i secured my ticket and gave them my luggage. all was well or so i thought. two hours later i arrived at rochester. my luggage did not. i filled out the lost luggage form. doug and michelle ravenel took me home late at around midnight.
the next day, i had a pleasant but misleading conversation with a confused baggage person. he was located in calcutta and had no direct knowledge of my luggage. but a computer told him that my luggage had been found, put on the plane and then taken off again for an unknown reason. he assured me that he would tell the people in washington to put it on the next plane to rochester. but, in fact , my luggage was already in rochester. it was delivered almost immediately afterwards. so the trip was finally over.
i close by relaying the following emails which i received from a certain av suvorov and from a certain michael moore. both are different points of view than usual. they are similar but one has more hope.
joe n
SUVOROV BEGINS:
O.K. Neocons, you have a major problem:
1) The U.S. military is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2) Most of the Muslim world, both Sunni and Shiite, hates our guts because
of our criminal invasion of Iraq and our mindless support of the Fascist
state of Israel.
3) The U.S. is the world's leading debtor nation and most of the debt is
owed to China.
4) Now Russia is calling your bluff and standing up for its national
interests - instead of giving them away like Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
5) You have a volunteer army consisting mostly of high school dropouts,
misfits and retards, who have to rely on massive air power to get anything
done.
6) But all the indiscriminate bombing mostly kills innocent civilians, so
the insurgencies get stronger and the U.S. is hated by more people around
the globe.
7) The American educational system is so bad that the electorate does not
have the critical thinking ability to make sensible political choices.
8) The corporations run everything - it's a "corporatocracy", not a
democracy - and the rich get richer as they piss on the middle class and
the poor (Reagan's real "trickle down theory").
9) The housing and banking sectors of the economy are being barely propped
up by the Federal government.
QUESTION: How long before the whole rotten system finally collapses?
Posted by AVSuvorov at 02:13 AM : Aug 29, 2008
SUVOROV ENDS
MOORE BEGINS
Friends,
I'm am speechless after listening to Barack Obama's speech last night. So I'm sending you something I wrote to you two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. It remains every bit as relevant today, on Katrina's 3rd anniversary, as when I wrote it on September 11, 2005. Please give it another look. Here it is in full:
A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush... from Michael Moore
Dear Friends,
On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it feel?
How does it feel to know that, the man you re-elected to lead us AFTER we were attacked, went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?
That's right. Horse shows.
I really want to know -- and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect -- how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C'mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don't start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.
I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of Republican/conservative/born-again/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.
Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that, after the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have... zero experience in emergency preparedness (!), do you think we are safer?
When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man with little experience in national security, do you feel secure?
When men who never served in the military, and have never seen young men die in battle, send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for a threat that was never there?
Do you really believe that turning over important government services to private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?
Why do you hate our federal government so much? You have voted for politicians for the past 25 years whose main goal has been to de-fund the federal government. Do you think that cutting federal programs like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers has been good or bad for America? GOOD OR BAD?!
With the nation's debt at an all-time high, do you think tax cuts for the rich are still a good idea? Will you give yours back so hundreds of thousands of homeless in New Orleans can have a home?
Do you believe in Jesus? Really? Didn't he say that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us? Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all. The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake.
That's not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Mr. Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Mr. Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him at some fundraiser with John McCain. All this while New Orleans sank under water.
It would take ANOTHER day before the President would do a "flyover" in his jumbo jet, peeking out the widow at the misery 2,500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in DC. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read "My Pet Goat" to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying "Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you're doing a heck of a job!"
My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?
And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?
Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can't string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can't pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.
Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and build so many gated communities before the fruit of what you've sown will be crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want to wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone long enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?
I know you know better. You gave the country and the world a man who wasn't up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren't up for the job. You did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it. Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this has to be fixed. What do you propose?
I have an idea, and it isn't a horse show.
Yours,
Michael Moore
MOORE ENDS
joe n
what michael moore has actually said and some quotes from james madison
hello folks: since there has been some false testimony about what michael moore has said about the storm gustav, here is the actual message from him. you can judge for yourself whether he wishes new orleans to get hit by gustav.
i also include some quotes from james madison. these quotes may be summed up by: so much wisdom then, so little wisdom now. it is more convincing evidence that america is a society in decline. "the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with pashionate intensity."
compare james madison with john mccain and sarah palin. this is not evolution, it is degeneration, comparable to ancient rome.
joe n
p.s. like albert einstein and richard feynman, i do not believe in a god who intervenes in the affairs of men. he is a mere metaphor and he is lucky to be that. yet people seem to take seriously these pleas which are sent off into the cosmos and called prayers. so it would behoove them to quote the prayers accurately.
by the way, george carlin pointed out that he got better results by praying not to god, but to joe pesci. he asked joe to intervene in the affairs of men with a baseball bat. and isn't it a good deal to get the credit for all the good things and none of the blame for the bad. according to traditional standards of evidence, there is sufficient evidence that our lives are controlled by aliens in a spacecraft in the andromeda galaxy. you might try addressing your prayers to them.
meanwhile, you can also judge for yourself whether this federal administration has done enough to avert another catastrophe for new orleans. they have had three years to fix the levees. that is 3 quarters of the time that the franklin roosevelt administration fought world war two. compare the results.
by the way, although i have much respect for the creator of our national parks, people should understand the the later of the two roosevelts is the greater president. the first one suffered from a severe case of being a war monger. our current administration and its chosen successor have adopted the bad half of the first roosevelt's motto to "speak softly and carry a big stick."
isn't it past time to say that the american people have proven themselves to be a stupid people.
An Open Letter to God, from Michael Moore
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
Dear God,
The other night, the Rev. James Dobson's ministry asked all believers to pray for a storm on Thursday night so that the Obama acceptance speech outdoors in Denver would have to be cancelled.
I see that You have answered Rev. Dobson's prayers -- except the storm You have sent to earth is not over Denver, but on its way to New Orleans! In fact, You have scheduled it to hit Louisiana at exactly the moment that George W. Bush is to deliver his speech at the Republican National Convention.
Now, heavenly Father, we all know You have a great sense of humor and impeccable timing. To send a hurricane on the third anniversary of the Katrina disaster AND right at the beginning of the Republican Convention was, at first blush, a stroke of divine irony. I don't blame You, I know You're angry that the Republicans tried to blame YOU for Katrina by calling it an "Act of God" -- when the truth was that the hurricane itself caused few casualties in New Orleans. Over a thousand people died because of the mistakes and neglect caused by humans, not You.
Some of us tried to help after Katrina hit, while Bush ate cake with McCain and twiddled his thumbs. I closed my office in New York and sent my entire staff down to New Orleans to help. I asked people on my website to contribute to the relief effort I organized -- and I ended up sending over two million dollars in donations, food, water, and supplies (collected from thousands of fans) to New Orleans while Bush's FEMA ice trucks were still driving around Maine three weeks later.
But this past Thursday night, the Washington Post reported that the Republicans had begun making plans to possibly postpone the convention. The AP had reported that there were no shelters set up in New Orleans for this storm, and that the levee repairs have not been adequate. In other words, as the great Ronald Reagan would say, "There you go again!"
So the last thing John McCain and the Republicans needed was to have a split-screen on TVs across America: one side with Bush and McCain partying in St. Paul, and on the other side of the screen, live footage of their Republican administration screwing up once again while New Orleans drowns.
So, yes, You have scared the Jesus, Mary and Joseph out of them, and more than a few million of your followers tip their hats to You.
But now it appears that You haven't been having just a little fun with Bush & Co. It appears that Hurricane Gustav is truly heading to New Orleans and the Gulf coast. We hear You, O Lord, loud and clear, just as we did when Rev. Falwell said You made 9/11 happen because of all those gays and abortions. We beseech You, O Merciful One, not to punish us again as Pat Robertson said You did by giving us Katrina because of America's "wholesale slaughter of unborn children." His sentiments were echoed by other Republicans in 2005.
So this is my plea to you: Don't do this to Louisiana again. The Republicans got your message. They are scrambling and doing the best they can to get planes, trains and buses to New Orleans so that everyone can get out. They haven't sent the entire Louisiana National Guard to Iraq this time -- they are already patrolling the city streets. And, in a nod to I don't know what, Bush's head of FEMA has named a man to help manage the federal government's response. His name is W. Michael Moore. I kid you not, heavenly Father. They have sent a man with both my name AND W's to help save the Gulf Coast.
So please God, let the storm die out at sea. It's done enough damage already. If you do this one favor for me, I promise not to invoke your name again. I'll leave that to the followers of Rev. Dobson and to those gathering this week in St. Paul.
Your faithful servant and former seminarian,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
P.S. To all of God's fellow children who are reading this, the city New Orleans has not yet recovered from Katrina. Please click here for a list of things you can do to help our brothers and sisters on the Gulf Coast. And, if you do live along the Gulf Coast, please take all necessary safety precautions immediately.
In memory of a time in which america had intelligent leadership, i quote James Madison (yes, these things were actually said by a man who was elected president of the united states! say them now and you will be sent to political oblivion. this is evidence of the growing stupidity of the american people.):
A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.
All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.
All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.
By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt.
Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations.
Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.
I should not regret a fair and full trial of the entire abolition of capital punishment.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
In no instance have... the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.
It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Of all the enemies of public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded.
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
The capacity of the female mind for studies of the highest order cannot be doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science.
The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home
War should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.
We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.
Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense.
Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Friday, June 13, 2008
Republican playbook
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, THE TRUTH IS THE GREATEST ENEMY OF THE STATE." -- Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday.
The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.
As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.
The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell.
In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people.
"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.
"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."
And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.
Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein's real thoughts on the subject. "He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying. There's no beating about the bush," he told AFP.
The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.
As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.
The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell.
In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people.
"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.
"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."
And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.
Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein's real thoughts on the subject. "He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying. There's no beating about the bush," he told AFP.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Friday, March 28, 2008
historical potpourri
Subject: HISTORICAL POTPOURRI from whence we came
GEORGE WASHINGTON
Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.
George Washington
Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
George Washington
The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.
George Washington
THOMAS JEFFERSON
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Thomas Jefferson
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
Thomas Jefferson
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson
I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Thomas Jefferson
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.
Thomas Jefferson
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
Thomas Jefferson
It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
Thomas Jefferson
JOHN ADAMS
At some points during the war, Adams feared that the cause would fail because he saw too much greed and commercialism in the colonies. "I have seen all my life such selfishness and littleness even in New England, that I sometimes tremble to think that, although we are engaged in the best cause that ever employed the human heart, yet the prospect of success is doubtful not for want of power or wisdom but of virtue." During the revolution, Adams -- evoking the manner of his Puritan ancestors -- told his friend Benjamin Rush that the colonials would only have a chance of winning, "if we fear God and repent our sins." He even speculated that God might intend for America to be defeated so that its "vicious and luxurious and effeminate appetites, passion and habits" would be cleansed, laying the foundation for a more-deserved victory in the future.
Adams wasn't alone in seeing the events on the ground as a reflection -- positive and negative -- of God's assessment. One minister ascribed the Continental Army's difficulties to the presence of slavery. Noting the brutal winter, the poor crops, the loss of cattle, and the seemingly imminent collapse of the army, a Quaker farmer speculated that it was part of a divinely-ordained set of plagues. When on July 20, 1775 the Continental Congress called for a day of prayer, it was accompanied by a call for fasting, self-reflection and a unified effort to "unfeignedly confess and deplore our many sins."
As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen … it is declared … that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever product an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. … The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.
Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli (1797-01-04, which was carried unanimously by the U.S. Senate and signed into law by John Adams
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The war has gone on some twenty months; for the expenses of which, together with an inconsiderable old score, the President now claims about one half of the Mexican teritory; and that, by far the better half, so far as concerns our ability to make any thing out of it. It is comparatively uninhabited; so that we could establish land offices in it, and raise some money in that way. But the other half is already inhabited, as I understand it, tolerably densely for the nature of the country; and all it's lands, or all that are valuable, already appropriated as private property. How then are we to make any thing out of these lands with this encumbrance on them? or how, remove the encumbrance? I suppose no one will say we should kill the people, or drive them out, or make slaves of them, or even confiscate their property. How then can we make much out of this part of the teritory? If the prossecution of the war has, in exphe conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether"
Abraham Lincoln 1865
A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.
Abraham Lincoln
I can make more generals, but horses cost money.
Abraham Lincoln
I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
Abraham Lincoln
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
Abraham Lincoln
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars - yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame - Southern Methodist University game and doesn't care who wins.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old, and that I know.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it's usually lousy.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The purpose is clear. It is safety with solvency. The country is entitled to both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The sergeant is the Army.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
MARTIN LUTHER KING
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Feb. 4, 1968: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."
GEORGE WASHINGTON
Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.
George Washington
Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
George Washington
The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.
George Washington
THOMAS JEFFERSON
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Thomas Jefferson
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
Thomas Jefferson
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson
I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Thomas Jefferson
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.
Thomas Jefferson
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
Thomas Jefferson
It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
Thomas Jefferson
JOHN ADAMS
At some points during the war, Adams feared that the cause would fail because he saw too much greed and commercialism in the colonies. "I have seen all my life such selfishness and littleness even in New England, that I sometimes tremble to think that, although we are engaged in the best cause that ever employed the human heart, yet the prospect of success is doubtful not for want of power or wisdom but of virtue." During the revolution, Adams -- evoking the manner of his Puritan ancestors -- told his friend Benjamin Rush that the colonials would only have a chance of winning, "if we fear God and repent our sins." He even speculated that God might intend for America to be defeated so that its "vicious and luxurious and effeminate appetites, passion and habits" would be cleansed, laying the foundation for a more-deserved victory in the future.
Adams wasn't alone in seeing the events on the ground as a reflection -- positive and negative -- of God's assessment. One minister ascribed the Continental Army's difficulties to the presence of slavery. Noting the brutal winter, the poor crops, the loss of cattle, and the seemingly imminent collapse of the army, a Quaker farmer speculated that it was part of a divinely-ordained set of plagues. When on July 20, 1775 the Continental Congress called for a day of prayer, it was accompanied by a call for fasting, self-reflection and a unified effort to "unfeignedly confess and deplore our many sins."
As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen … it is declared … that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever product an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. … The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.
Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli (1797-01-04, which was carried unanimously by the U.S. Senate and signed into law by John Adams
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The war has gone on some twenty months; for the expenses of which, together with an inconsiderable old score, the President now claims about one half of the Mexican teritory; and that, by far the better half, so far as concerns our ability to make any thing out of it. It is comparatively uninhabited; so that we could establish land offices in it, and raise some money in that way. But the other half is already inhabited, as I understand it, tolerably densely for the nature of the country; and all it's lands, or all that are valuable, already appropriated as private property. How then are we to make any thing out of these lands with this encumbrance on them? or how, remove the encumbrance? I suppose no one will say we should kill the people, or drive them out, or make slaves of them, or even confiscate their property. How then can we make much out of this part of the teritory? If the prossecution of the war has, in exphe conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether"
Abraham Lincoln 1865
A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.
Abraham Lincoln
I can make more generals, but horses cost money.
Abraham Lincoln
I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
Abraham Lincoln
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
Abraham Lincoln
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars - yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame - Southern Methodist University game and doesn't care who wins.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old, and that I know.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it's usually lousy.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The purpose is clear. It is safety with solvency. The country is entitled to both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The sergeant is the Army.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
MARTIN LUTHER KING
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Feb. 4, 1968: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."
commentarimathhelv
hello again:
to paraphrase arnold swartzenegger, i am back. or rather, i have ceased being back and i am on the road again.
today, i journeyed from rochester, new york, to lausanne, switzerland, by way of continental airlines, newark, new jersey, air india, paris, paris france, and the tgv. actually, it took two days and i was exhausted.
the trip began in the rochester airport where michelle ravenel had dropped me off. a rather mild rain was causing water to leak into their computer system. nonetheless, they were able to get it together and send me on my way.
in Newark, homeland security was in full force. the taking off of shoes, the policy of no liquids, absolutely no pocket knives, not even the dullest swiss army knife, is accepted by the american people. i had to mail mine back to my house at a cost of $9.99. i detect marketing here.
in the restrictions as to what you are allowed to carry, there is no thought, no discrimination. people accept the bush line that they must endure inconvenience, long lines and delays. they are totally cowed. they do not think to ask themselves if all this is necessary. if what is being checked is what should be checked. they do not ask if the dick cheneys of the world have to go through this too. the answer, of course, is no and there is already the beginnings of a security system based on class. yet the american people do not seem ready to rebel, not ready to even get a little nasty and sarcastic in order to insure equality of treatment. fear.
anyway, i left the american security paranoia behind and walked approximately 100 feet to the domain of air india. it was a trip back to the old indian culture. they felt the need to repeat the security check in their own very old fashioned indian way. this meant going through the motions for the sake of appearances, the only purpose being to create a long line to stand in. people wandered back and forth from the supposedly secure area to the supposedly insecure area. there was absolutely no way of distinguishing between those who had been checked and those who had not. it was not chaos. it was pointless obedience by the bureaucracy and uncomplaining resignation by the customers. fortunately, i had lots of time to kill.
the flight on air india was a revelation. it was as if i was in a different time, in a new culture which had more to do with the modern present than the colonial past. most of the people were native indians who were going on to mumbai. inside the plane, the crew and passengers seemed totally normal, that is to say, they seemed western, as if they came from the suburbs of rochester. 30 years ago, i knew some indians of a different sort. for example, i knew harsh pittie (his real name!), who was a totally sophisticated citizen coming from an upper-class indian family. harsh knew and was confident of his place in the world. he was certainly not typical. you could not find enough harsh pitties to fill up an enormous plane. i thought at the time that a more typical case was an indian mathematician at the institute for advanced study who was very insecure. he seemed to live in fear of being sent back to poverty the streets of calcutta. not so the people on the plane. they were just plain folks who seemed to have no hang-ups about their place in the world. perhaps this was because there was such a high percentage of indians on the plane. or perhaps it reflects the transformation of at least part of india to a modern society. if so, it seems to affect both the young and the old.
on the plane, i had a nice lamb curry and the chance to make almost final preparations on my number 5 and number 6 lectures. that leaves only numbers 7 and 8 to prepare. they are fairly well thought out and don’t have to be given for two weeks. so all that is well in hand.
i arrived in paris and was pleased to discover an air france bus which would take me directly to the gare de lyon and my tgv train to lausanne. no problems at all!
arriving in the train station, i paid 50 cents to use a toilet and to wash up. this was an excellent decision.
having time to kill and being hungry, i paid a culinary tribute to richard kane. i had the french version of a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, literally, a bacon, salade, et tomate on a baguette, a BST! tres excellent! especially when combined with a lipton’s ice tea with peach flavoring. it was less sweet that the american version. perhaps because of this, it seemed to have more of the essence of peach in it. ah yes, when it comes to ingestibles, the french seem to understand even the small things.
finally, off i went on the tgv, glad to just sit and nap for 4 hours. it was rather warm in paris but there was snow in the passes as we crossed into switzerland. then it was warm again in lausanne, even at 8 o’clock at night. i took the short steep walk up the hill to the hotel, pulling my luggage behind me. kathryn had told me that a young fellow named Jonathan scott had biked up the hill on his last day here. i couldn’t do that now. but i was reminded of a hill in the finger lakes of new york state which i had once biked twenty years ago. a workman saw me struggling up the hill and remarked that i must be hard as nails to do it. it was of course long before my aortic dissection and i must have been forty pounds lighter. but in my memory, it was a comparable hill, only longer. so i must get rid of those unwanted forty pounds!
i lecture tomorrow. tonight i sleep.
tomorrow has come and gone. the students and i seem to have survived the first two hour lecture. i have an audience of approximately 20. that is a lot of students for a class at this level. i had to leave a few things out but it all seemed to remain coherent. today i give the second two hour lecture and then we have time off for, believe it or not, approximately two weeks before another four hour bunch of talks.
i am still settling in. i need to figure out how to do laundry without paying the hotel the small fortune of 8 swiss franks per shirt. there must be a laundromat somewhere and i will find it. otherwise, i will start doing laundry in the bathtub.
up in the town square, there is a wonderful cafe where i plan to eat breakfast. the pastries looked great and i will sample them together with some cappucino. america has not caught up with europe when it comes to quality of pastry.
i have been paid. it is just like portugal. i have been handed over 4000 swiss franks in cold hard cash and must now worry about where to keep it. for the moment i carry it with me everywhere i go. i plan to learn to use the combination safe which is in the room and relieve myself of this burden.
today or tomorrow i must establish an internet connection. it is the usual situation. i can receive but i cannot send.
time flies! i have now finished 4 hours of lectures. it is hard to believe that, after 3 days here, i am half finished with all i have to present. i still have some preparation to do for the final 4 hours but not so much that i am worried that i cannot do it all in 2 weeks. the localization lectures are over and the chain models lectures are yet to begin. the latter is what they really know well around here and i must prepare it well if i am to survive. my only strength is that i have a different point of view then they have, less explicit, more conceptual, more princetonesque.
for lunch today, i had beef tartare and frites. it was much different than i expected. there was a lot of tomato sauce mixed in with the raw beef. that makes the raw meat much less exotic. kathryn assures me that this is a common way of doing it and it is a good way. her husband is fond of it. so i guess i have passed the beef tartare test. it is as easy as the sushi test. the dish is tasty and good in a quite normal way. it needs no courage or aclimatization to enjoy it. i expected more of a challenge.
i need something different to eat, something which is a true test of swissness. what could it be? like the tibetans, do the swiss have a version of rancid butter that they are fond of? mountain cheeses, while wonderful, tend to be tamer than the smelly lowland stuff the french love. so what is true mountain food? how about cows that die over the winter? or are those only eaten by wolves? there must be some food which will keep an entire winter, probably hard and dry. some food which modern swiss hate but which is still savoured by traditionalists.
they have very good yogurt here, mixed with good things like muesli. that is very swiss. and they have good bread, substantial and tasty stuff. since this is french switzerland, i have not yet encountered a good version of a bratwurst. however, there are hot dog stands and shops to get sandwiches. the turks sell kebobs and falafel which should be tasty.
hello again from the alpha-palmiers hotel in downdown lausanne, right up the hill from the train station:
i see from the BBC that the weather in the northeastern USA involves a massive return to winter. even at the masters golf tournament in augusta, it does not seem to be warm. oh well, it is warm here and that is all that counts for me.
sometimes i cannot see what is right in front of my eyes. how can one wonder what to eat in switzerland without recalling dairy products? all those cows up in the mountains are the foundation of a wonderful dairy tradition. it starts with wonderful yogurt, complete with the ultraswiss addition of birchermuesli, those little bits of fruit, nuts, and grain which are the foundation of good swiss breakfasts. and here is something which seems to be completely unknown in the USA, buttermilk flavored with fruit, strawberry, cherry, or my favorite, mango. this is a wonderful thing to do with buttermilk.
and of course, there is chocolate. but one cannot live by chocolate alone! you can however almost live on a diet of chocolate milk alone.
the swiss are also famous for melting cheese. in the winter, they do fondue. now begins the season for raclette, melted cheese with potatoes. kathryn tells me that one must distinguish between the two forms of melted cheese. i think it is similar to the fact that the inuit have hundreds of names for varieties of snow and we have so few because we don't really understand snow. this weekend, i am looking forward to having raclette at kathryn's home outside of lausanne. it is also nice that i have an invitation to do laundry.
today, i am headed off to a large park in the city. the map shows pictures of mountain goats there. maybe it is like a zoo. it is hard to believe that mountain goats could grow wild in the city. i plan to end the day at a bavarian brasserie with a plate of fois gras. great stuff!
yesterday, i spent the day contemplating an old paper of john moore on universal hopf algebras. it is amazing that the existence of bipolynomial hopf algebras boils down to the classical fact that all symmetric functions can be expressed in terms of the elementary symmetric functions. this stuff relates to my current theme. how do certain things stay hidden in algebraic topology but are there nonetheless. the most striking example is so-called neisendorfer localization but with a large assist from haynes miller, alex zabrodsky, and emmanuel dror-farjoun. the attempt to cut off the bottom homotopy groups of a finite complex does not in fact get rid of the memory of them. theory says that you can get them back by a functor. but, if you don't know beforehand what you are supposed to get back, know one knows what is going on. you only know that the machine makes sausage when you know that you put sausage scraps into it or that you are getting sausage out. at least one very competent person, aka clarence, has tried and failed to understand this.
a more elementary example is in the bott-samelson theorem. the loops on a suspension retains the memory of the coalgebra structure of the space which is suspended. the suspension remembers the something about the space that it is the suspension of. this is expressed more generally by observing that the eilenberg-moore models have the coalgebra structure in them. but it comes from the geometry of the eilenberg-zilber map, it is not just algebra. it can be hard to get your hands on. maybe i can make some contribution to the theory of the eilenberg-moore approximations by coming up with an effective way to get at this. the key word is effective, ineffective theory is not enough. but the book comes first.
as i typed the above two paragraphs, i realized that i was not addressing my whole audience. oh well, live with it. the truth is that i don't write these things primarily for you but to amuse myself in the hotel room. if you think about it, you realize that there are only a few things to do in a hotel room and, even in switzerland, some of these are illegal. so, in the absence of nicole kidman, i feel free to type some mathematical thoughts.
i have just returned from my explorations. i first went to the cathedral, a very impressive place with nice stained glass windows and a wondrous organ which was restored by, among others, the husband of our friend, kathryn lesh. she is a mathematician who finished at MIT at the same time as our kathryn here. the organ is spectacular.
i kept walking until the i reached the large bois de sauvabelin, a park with many hills and a small lake with boats and a restaurant. it is a very pleasant place which reminds me of the small lake in seneca park in rochester. our lake is actually nicer, but it is often under threat from our country administration who want to curtail it for various forms of corporate use and development. on the other hand, the lake here seems to a treasured and lively place with a cafe where you can get coffee, ice cream, and even fondue. altogether it was a pleasant day.
during the walk, i thought about what i shall say in my new lectures. mainly, the first question is: what is the appropriate chain model for a fibration? rather than choose the newer quillenesque notion, i choose the older cartan inspired notion of construction. the difference is that you are doing abelian homological algebra rather than the nonabelian version due to quillen. i have nothing against the quillen ideas and have even used them in my now ancient rational past. but the abelian version is sometimes much easier to compute. so that is what i will use. i have some convincing arguments that this is not a bad idea. the main theorem of eilenberg-moore is that they give chain models of homotopy pullbacks via cotensor products. and they have some of the formal properties of fibrations in the sense that cotensor products with these creatures is homologically invariant. oops! we are getting a little too technical.
since this is also the land of knives, as in the swiss army versions, i have begun to evaluate the selection of knives with the intent of purchasing an interesting swiss army knife. in the meantime, i have purchased an opinel, the primitive but very useful french knife which is great for cutting things to eat. you can never have too many of them and they are cheap.
by the way, i manage the basic tasks of life rather well with my primitive french. i can not discuss the finer points of philosophy in french but what i have is adequate for expressing what food i want to order, to thank them for it when i get it, and even to express my disgust with george bush if i so wish. le government de usa, c'est horrible, c'est fou, no? c'est vrai, oui? oui, oui!
kathryn tells me that my month's work entitles me to become part of the swiss retirement program. in fact, i am required to fill out the form and assured that i will receive a monthly payment if i bother to inform them when i officially retire. i suspect that it will not be a massive sum, perhaps enough to purchase one small bar of chocolate per year. one nice thing about the swiss is that they have rules which they follow. i suspect that it derives from all those cold winters in the mountains where you had to get along or go outside and die. but that does not mean that they are as cowed and repressed as the typical american. far from it! only in america does puritanism thrive in its peculiar southern mutation.
last night i returned from my visit to the home of kathryn and her husband felipe in the town of aigle. it is a half hour on the train from lausanne and very pleasantly located in the valley on the way to sion. there are mountains all around. local trains will take you up to the mountain resorts. it is a very nice place to live and to raise their 4 boys, who are, by the way, quite well behaved. it is a warm place with good skiing a few minutes away up the mountains. the dinner of raclette (melted cheese with potatoes, mushrooms, and pickles) was excellent and was accompanied by a nice dry white wine of the region. i think i like the pure cheese of raclette better than the mixture of wine and cheese which is fondue. the town of aigle has a castle and it has the high school which was attended by the great mathematician georges de rham.
today is the monday after easter and, except for places to eat, everything is closed. tomorrow, i will buy an economical and attractive sweater so that i can impersonate a dressed up person. today is a good day to prepare some lectures.
after putting in a good start on the lecture preparation, i decided to meet up with a rhubarb tart i had noticed at the manora, the pleasant lausanne version of a cafeteria. it was very good with a renverse (= coffee with cream). afterwards, i walked up to the park in front of the hall of justice. the blue of the lake and the grey mountains topped with white snow were stunningly beautiful. it is quite a contrast to the continuing weather reports about the snow in eastern north america. the fact that there is enough snow to close the toronto airport makes me think that the situation in rochester is probably not much better. the big difference between here and there is that the snow here is all high up in the mountains and it is beautiful warm spring-like weather down here.
by the way, i have internet access from the university but not from the hotel. so that is the reason for the gap in messages over the long easter weekend.
is fonda fond of fondue?
just a little tongue twister in the title, no sense to it, although i am of a generation where many were fond of fonda. and you must admit that it is musical.
hello once again from warm and sunny switzerland:
just to let you folks know, i sleep with the window open. it is that warm.
i noticed today that john milnor is giving a lecture in zurich on april 12. the occasion is to honor beno eckmann (it must be his ninetieth birthday). the subject of the lecture is “topology in the 50s and 60s.” it will probably be a great lecture and very interesting to me who was born as a topologist in the later part of this period. this was, after all, the golden age of topology. but i soon realized that, small as switzerland is, it would be a five to six hour train ride to get to zurich. this would not be easy. even though milnor is one of the great math lecturers of my lifetime, i am doomed not to hear him this time.
i consoled myself by having dinner at a swiss brewery with good beer and a nice strassbourg version of a pizza, a so-called flaming tart with onions, cream, smoked meat, and little cut up wieners on a thin crust. not bad but it will not replace traditional pizza.
kathryn gave me a delayed easter present, a chocolate egg filled with individual chocolates, sort of a chocolate box of chocolates. it is made in aigle, her home town. these are some very good tasting chocolates.
in contradiction to the above paragraph, i have returned from zurich where they were having a conference in honor of the 90th birthday of beno eckmann. it was good to see old friends like henry glover, guido mislin, peter hilton, and john milnor. at least i know them well enough to say hello to. lunch was at the eigennosishen technishe hochscule in the very pleasant rooftop cafeteria with a lovely view of the city and of lake zurich. at lunch, jean-pierre serre, perhaps the greatest mathematician of his time if it isn't milnor, happened to pass by, tripped over my knapsack on the floor and almost took a tumble. as someone said, "that could have been a career ender right there." not that i have to worry about that now. i did not even get a chance to reintroduce myself. after all, chuck and i proved a conjecture of his and he should be able to recall that.
beno eckmann, 90 though he may be, seems to be in excellent physical condition. unfortunately, the same cannot be said for peter hilton who is 86 and, while bright and alert, has trouble with his balance. as always, he was very gracious. i also stopped to say hello to albrecht dold. he is very hard of hearing and seems to have some of the symptoms of altzimer's disease. sad. i don't know what he would do without his wife. she remembered me much better than he did. when octavian cornea was my student 15 years ago, his work overlapped with some work of albrecht. in fact, octavian had better results then but there was no doubt that dold still possessed an agile and sharp mind.
the trip from lausanne to zurich and back was a very pleasant exercise in the swiss train system. zooming back along the lake by neuchatel is very attractive. at first, i thought the trip would take 5 hours each way but it turned out to be a pleasant 2 hours each way. the trains zoom through the swiss countryside with a rocking suspension system which the swiss call pendular. the view was not deep mountain scenery but it was quite nice, a mixture of cows and vineyards in different parts. in switzerland at least, the german swiss seem to have more cows and the french swiss more wine. but my limited survey could be wrong about that. in france, they certainly have a lot of cows.
i learn that the swiss have slightly different electrical outlet plugs than the rest of europe. the swiss plugs are 3 pronged and thus better grounded but otherwise they seem the same. my experience is that you can use a european plug in a swiss outlet but not the other way around. so i will wait until i get to france before buying some plugs.
i gave kathryn a quick outline of my last 4 lectures and she seemed pleased with the minor insights i am adding to the field. i think that one of the pleasures of mathematical old age is that you have the time to reflect on the best way of doing things. you do not have to restrict yourself to the quickest way of just getting the job done. it is a lot like sex in that respect. except that you get better at exposition as you get older.
the weather here is delightful. we just had coffee outside in the bright sunshine with the mountains and lake in the background, as pretty and idyllic as a postcard.
kathryn is really enthusiastic about one of my ideas. i had hesitated to tell her about these particular ideas because i thought she might find them too trivial and obvious. there is a simple way to express multiplication of loops in terms of maps of homotopy pullback diagrams. she is thinking about the ideas and has already come up with cute new things to say about them. she thinks more abstractly than i do and is going to incorporate the ideas into things i would never have thought of. more power to her. she is going to bring some life to the subject. i will just sit back and watch.
kathryn thinks that my questions about "change of rings" (whatever that is) are the right ones to ask and is confident that she can answer them in the affirmative. i hope so. i can use the machinery if it works. in the writing of my book, i have to do some handsprings to avoid this more natural way of doing things.
here is a friendly jab at bill singer. when i emailed him about this issue, he rightly pointed out that i didn't really need to do all this and that i could do what i wanted with constructions that were in an old cartan seminar. this is true but it is not esthetic. it only works since you can compute the algebra structure and you know that you have a hopf algebra structure. if you work over the integers, it turns out that this coalgebra structure is uniquely determined. so you get the coalgebra structure in a round about way. it is more esthetic if you can go directly at the coalgebra structure and that is what i want to do. i repeat, bill is right, but kathryn understands me. if you start with an algebra, then the homology of the bar construction should give you a coalgebra. getting an algebra and forcing the coalgebra structure is a form of rape and someday, if not now, you will pay for it.
i have missed my chance to have duck with olives at my favorite cafeteria. by the time i got around to it, they had sold out. instead, i had some nice trout filet with blanched cabbage. the cabbage was excellent. don't knock it until you try it. the blanching makes the cabbage mild enough so that it doesn't overpower the fish. it goes well.
i was at the main post office and i read a plaque which identified it as the site where, between 1783 and 1793, Edward Gibbon wrote large parts of his "decline and fall of the roman empire." john harper should pay a pilgrimage to the site even though it is now totally subsumed in a large post office building. if the building were out of the way, the view would be terrific, as good as the view from the park by the casino.
compared to the dark passions of portugal, the swiss seem to lead a more ordered life. kathryn tells me that this can be deceptive. some female olympic athlete was murdered by her husband in the mountains above where kathryn lives. it took a long time before they could find him. this is the dark side of mountain life, probably caused by being cooped up all winter with no way to get away from each other. like rats in a cage. somehow it is different from the wild passions of the south. and different from the loneliness of the fado singer in portugal waiting for her fisherman husband to return from the cod fishery. in fact, the husband has probably drowned. there is no need to murder him or to be murdered by him and he is fondly remembered.
i had some fois gras at the bavarian brasserie near the hotel. it was very good but with a slight taste of liver that was totally absent from the fois gras in provence. but it was a good sweet fois gras nonetheless. the only problem was that the waiter mistranslated my french into a half bottle of white wine when i really wanted just a glass. fortunately, there was no problem taking the unfinished bottle back to the hotel room.
this weekend, i will try to finish the preparation of my last 2 lectures. this should not be too hard. i have to do 2 things. one, i need to compute the mod p homology of the double loop space of an odd dimensional sphere. this is a straightforward application of the theory i have already prepared. two, i need to develop hopf invariants so that i can compute the bockstein spectral sequence and achieve the crowning glory of the fact that the integral homology has exponent p. my last lectures occur next tuesday and wednesday. in the words of woody woodpecker, 'that's all, folks!"
then i am thinking of running away for a weekend at the hotel mont-collon in arolla. i would spend the weekend at the foot of the glacier. this place i know well and i am known there. i should even get some kind of special welcome. if possible, it would be pleasant to hike up to the cabine des rouges aigles (= the cabin of the red eagles). but snow in the mountains may make that impossible. if so, i can be a vegetable too. arolla is the place where chuck mcgibbon discovered the joys of climbing. i am wondering how he is doing on everest right now. when he reads this, let him know that our solution to the serre conjecture was well received here just as it was in portugal last october. even though this stuff is old, it is attractive, understandable and it still sells.
once more into the breech:
the more i read about the albigensian crusade and the subsequent inquisition, the more i am convinced that bush and cheney are the pope and simon de monfort of our time. back then, a crusade was said to be needed to suppress heresy but in fact it was motivated by economic reasons. a very wealthy region of france did not believe in worshipping the relics of saints and in enriching the established church. so for economic reasons and for the sheer greed of confiscation a crusade was declared. hundreds of thousands were killed, poor and rich alike. properties were confiscated by the crusaders and became hereditary fiefs. the survivors were made public examples of, were forced to recant, and to make expensive and long pilgrimages. if it had not already been stolen, they often had to abandon their property. Once they reached the pilgrimage site, they had documents to be signed by the local church authorities to prove they had reached the appointed goal. This practice continues today in santiago de compostella but the documents are now signed by more lowly clerics. it is just like the republicans reaping the spoils of washington and of government contracts while preaching a morality they do not live up to. or you can pretend to drive out corruption from the world bank while using the funds to enrich your mistress. in short, we live in a time of hypocrisy, reminiscent of the albigensian crusade but with mass killings not yet in full swing.
i spent saturday in the deserted math building preparing some lectures and looking out the window at the sheep mowing the lawn with the mountains in the background. it was a nice way to finish up the preparation of lecture 7 of 8.
before that, i decided to sample the characteristic swiss potato dish called rosti. it is much like hash browns but served with, for example, mushrooms and veal in a cream sauce. too rich for me. i can do without it. maybe i will try it with fried eggs and ketchup. i think the swiss do a version of that too.
i just took a nice walk down to the lake. i discovered restaurants there which deserve return visits. for example, one place was advertising some mussels and frites. but my dinner plans were already made. all i had room for in my stomach were an expresso, and 3 boules of ice cream. i had this at the universal swiss ice cream restaurant chain, movenpick. the pistachio was astoundingly good. i returned to my hotel room where i had my planned dinner of salad, cheese, and fois gras. even though it was supermarket fois gras it was still rather good.
then i got down to work and finished the preparation of my last lecture. i develop hopf invariants and use them to compute the bockstein spectral sequence of the double loop space of a sphere. old stuff but with some new twists.
now i have no more compulsory work to do and can think in a scattered way. if i get a chance to give more lectures, i will trust that i can lecture on familiar stuff without further preparation. i can always leave out details i don’t remember. i think i remember these details well enough to know that i must leave them out. for example, i know how to get the generators of a kernel inside a free lie algebra but i probably would have trouble proving it works on the spot. instead i would justify it by analogy with the generators for the kernel of a free group. no proofs.
anyway, i have been virtuous enough and have done everything so far pretty much from first principles. if i lecture beyond this week, it is time for me and my audience, if i still have any then, to take a break. we can still talk but we will fly.
brayton has asked me a question about eilenberg-moore spectral sequences. at the moment, my passion is to avoid them by the use of small coalgebra models. then the homological algebra is computing what you want without any nonsense. in this style, you use spectral sequences only for comparison theorems to prove that two things are equal. then you use one of them to get the answer exactly. when it works, it is a joy. but you need to know the space you are looking at, or some of its properties, like maybe that it is the total space of a principal bundle. in this way, you might get a small model for it.
the alpha-palmiers is a fine hotel but i have one criticism of it. i think that i charges too much for an internet connection. it was wonderful to always have an internet connection in my room in portugal. it made it easy to send email, to phone with skype, and also to look up stuff on the web. it is not too bad to have to wait to go to the office and i will survive. but i miss the entertainment.
the office email has one other drawback. i had to change my sender to send. this means that no record is kept of the messages i send out unless i send a copy to myself. i have been forgetting to do this and so i have no record of what i have written except for my longer messages.
once again, cnn is issuing weather warnings against travel in the northeastern united states. i am glad i am not there. it is so warm and sunny here.
cnn does not seem to think that the weather on the top of everest is worth reporting. the closest news is that there is flooding in thailand. if the weather is bad in thailand, it probably is worse in the Himalayan. for chuck’s sake, i hope the weather is good in the mountains.
i am beginning to get worried that there is not enough about food and culture in my messages. this means that i am leading a narrow life with most of my interest being focused on mathematics. that is not a bad thing. i have learned things in preparing the lectures. it will help the book. and it is interesting to me. but somehow i feel i am not living up to the standards set by my hero, anthony bourdain. i don’t feel that i have eaten anything really weird or interesting. the beef tartare was fairly tame. maybe i should go get some more. i read that they can make it hotter. the food is very good but it is not adventurous. after all, how adventurous can yogurt with cereal be? and i actually am not very fond of having my meat prepared in a cream sauce. that is too much dairy. and, if i cared, i don’t think it is kosher.
i had a good pasta with salmon and mussels. but once again it had a sort of curry cream sauce! i will try the thai restaurant in the hotel. i want no dairy mixed with meat. i want some heat, some spice! i need a change.
what would anthony do? even he did not like warthog anus. but he ate it and it had no cream sauce. he also ate ostrich eggs scrambled in an ash fire. eggs are not dairy. chicken are not cows. i need to get something eggy, but without the ashes. do the swiss eat any insects?
what would be the swiss of equivalent of a canadian maple latte? would the swiss sink that low? no, a caramel machiato is their extreme in that direction.
i thought of something. the swiss have some kind of gluey nut cake with whole hazelnuts in it, it seems to be some sort of gargantuan swiss baklava. i will try it. i am desperate. i would even welcome a club sandwich, disgraceful as that would be in anthony’s eyes. seriously, they do have good sandwiches. the bread is wonderful. ok, here is the plan. get a sandwich for lunch and have a thai dinner. maybe shrimp.
another thing that is missing from my messages is a sense of sin. in portugal and spain, the sense of the middle ages was so present, so powerful, that your thoughts were filled with sin and lust. and there was fado. and there was crawling to santiago de compostella on your knees, and there was sophia loren tieing the body of el cid to his horse. all these things to remind you of the dark and forbidden passions. the swiss do not seem to have this. as orson wells said, “the italians have a history filled with murder and lust and they created the renaissance. the swiss have had an orderly life for centuries and the best they could come up with was the cuckoo clock.” maybe it would have been different if william tell had slipped and aimed a little bit lower. putting an arrow through your son’s brain should give a culture a sense of guilt.
but where is the passion? where is the abundance? where is the sophia? heidi just doesn’t cut it. maybe i am underestimating heidi. i don’t know her that well. could yodeling ever match fado? i don’t think so. it is hard to express yearning with a yodel. or any thought at all. and the zither is far too upbeat an instrument.
still i love this country. life here is more the way life should be than most other lives are. it is certainly more beautiful.
wait a minute! i am not that far from geneva! that is where that religious fanatic john calvin reigned. even though the passions are buried deep in calvinism and are not at all attractive, still they were strong, even twisted. i think you can distinguish them from the current southern bush version because they are less hypocritical. predestination is a harder road than republicanism. it is even harder than mormanism. by the way, has there ever been a morman democrat?
so let me see if i can fantasize about calvinism. let us see? first, sex has to be without taking your clothes off. well, that doesn’t help. but you could walk up to the most beautiful girl in geneva and claim that your union was god’s plan.
who could be the sex kitten of this culture? maybe bette davis? or, yuck, joan crawford? this is going nowhere! i hear that jane fonda has gotten religion. so maybe we could combine her past with her now. she would be ok.
what came so easy when you have the image of the smoking censor swinging toward the sky in santiago is so difficult here. and it is easy when you find the bones of an apostle just when you need them 1000 years after he died. this is good stuff! your history is loaded!
what happened to history in switzerland? hasn’t anything deep and disturbing, calvin excepted, happened here since hannibal crossed the alps? i read that julius caesar slaughtered a lot of helvetians but they were not on their home turf at the time. i think they were in provence.
provence and especially langedoc has a dark history, what with the albigensian crusades and all. greed, death, violent men, and poisonous women fill the history of france. and of spain and of portugal. and we don’t even have to talk about italy, the popes, and the medici! even the french thought that catherine de medici was a dangerous piece of work.
and the less said about the greeks, the better. the germans have had different sorts of problems. but they all have history, even the austrians. in terms of big events in history, switzerland is like gertrude stein’s description of oakland, “there is no there there.” people find refuge here, people like vladimir lenin. they run away to here.
don’t think i don’t like it here. i like it very much. right now, i am running away to here.
p.s. you should look up this spelling of the word “breech.” i did and i was surprised. what the hell did henry the second mean when he urged on the english, “once more into the breech!” maybe everything the french say about the english is true?
modeling of chains:
tomorrow i start my lectures on chain models. but first here is some history from wikipedia about how to forge your own chains:
“In 59 BC, Julius Caesar declared he was so shocked by the incursions of the dangerous Helvetii tribe into Gaul, and the suffering of the Gaulish peoples, that he had himself appointed 'protector of the Gauls'. By the time he'd finished protecting them, a million Gauls were dead and Julius Caesar owned most of Gaul.”
sound familiar?
today i took kathryn’s advice and ate at the thai restaurant at the hotel. i ordered a shrimp dish served with a green chili sauce. it was mixed with coconut milk and flavored with lemon grass. superb! this was what i needed. for a change, a meal with no dairy in it. i think that this is definitely a better thai restaurant than we have in rochester. and we do have at least one good one.
the haze had burnt off and the mountains were sharp and clear in the distance. there can be no prettier city than this. poor zurich! it has a nice lake but not lausanne’s nearby mountains.
i finished ina caro’s “road to the past,” an historical guide to a road trip through france. i enjoyed the first half but i am glad to be done with it. instead of the serious and deadly history of the albigensian crusade in the south and of the hundred years war in the middle, we end up in the north of france with the petty concerns related to pretty chateaux, elegant gardens, stylish furniture, and the frivolous intrigues and corruption of the french court in the time of absolute monarchy. such subjects are not worthy of the companion to the biographer of robert moses and lyndon johnson. those are two guys who would fit right into the middle ages.
ina caro seems fascinated by petty privilege and should be writing about the current crop of republicans. in contradiction to their name, our republicans want imperial rome or imperial france. the divine right of kings is their ideal. but bush and cheney are really an ineffectual medieval pope and an ineffectual simon de monfort. vive la revolution! things may have gotten out of hand, but robespierre had a point.
the first two hours of my second set of lectures went ok but this stuff requires more definitions and that takes longer. so i am behind schedule. i will probably have to make it up by assuming that hopf invariants are known and then just using them or by just skipping the use of them altogether. that would be a shame since they tie in so nicely to the computation of the mod p homology of the double loop space of a 2n+1 sphere. oh well, the students are going to soon get the perfection of the xerox of my lecture notes, the lecture notes do it all as it should be done.
i had some sushi for dinner tonight. not very swiss but good basic japanese stuff, just like you can get at the tokyo house in rochester. this is part of my current theme to remain kosher in the sense that i am not mixing meat and dairy. however, my form of kosher encourages the eating of most crustaceans! but not with cream sauce even though melted butter is acceptable.
the lectures are over. i had to rush through hopf invariants and gave only the quickest connection to the computation of bockstein spectral sequences. it could be argued that it was better this way. it was the shortest path to the application may have created the most clarity and interest.
now all i have to worry about are two things: what food to eat and how to get completely over this fluish bug that is wiping out most of my energy.
on the question of food, i plan to revert to more salads and also more sausages. i just want to minimize sauces. the sauces tend to taste too rich for me. some sausage and kraut would be a nice change. no sauce there so even sausage will be lighter. or a nice salad. for some reason, i can’t seem to find tuna sandwiches. in france, they were everywhere. maybe this unhappiness with diet has something to do with this flu. could it be that you need health and energy to properly enjoy food?
i think i am getting better. my energy level seems to be higher. and the phlegm that has been clogging my throat and nasal passages seems to be diminishing. until i get better, i will postpone by quick trip into the brisk mountain air of mont-collon. the presciption calls for hot drinks with honey and for my old reliable cure of submersion in hot bath water. i recall that i survived the pain of the night before the diagnonis of the aortic dissection by spending the night in hot bath water. hence, i have a lot of faith in this cure.
From: jnei@math.rochester.edu
Subject: deskyped
Date: April 21, 2007 11:47:53 AM EDT (CA)
To: michelle@ravenel.net
Cc: lewinjacques@bellsouth.net, norman.stein@wanadoo.fr, rkane@uwo.ca, Jan_Pearce@berea.edu, mbenders@math.hunter.cuny.edu, chuck.mcgibbon@gmail.com, tr@teammedia.net, dancefairy@cox.net, jrobin@math.rochester.edu, dharper1@frontiernet.net, harper@math.rochester.edu, and 11 more…
hello all: i was marveling at the fact that i seemed to be able to make an infinite number of skype calls without having my available credit decrease when,
all of a sudden, my skype ran out and now i am having trouble paying them for more time. bummer! i must wait for a reply from their support service.
i am only now being cured of my horrible chest cold by a product of the swiss pharmaceutical industry. it is called "antigrippine" which, i think, means that
it fights things that have a grip on you. i think that the stuff works. it must be powerful since you are allowed to take only 3 a day. anyway, i am less clogged up and more able to drag my tired body up and down the hills of lausanne.
i have been complaining to kathryn about the overuse of cream in the swiss preparation of meat. she claims that it is all the fault of the german swiss and that
she can make some of the very same dishes more palatable by substituting turkey for beef and by substituting coconut milk with lime juice for cream. in a weak moment, i accepted an invitation to dinner at her house in order to test this hypothesis. actually, i still feel under the weather and probably would have been wiser to just be a vegetable in the hotel.
but i have acquired a bottle of the wine, a white one, which is local to her town and will bring it with me on the train. kathryn makes this trip every day and the beauty of the town and its setting makes it worth it but she does live halfway to sion, 40 minutes on a fast train from lausanne. in my current condition, i regard it as a major journey.
now i have returned from a pleasant dinner at kathryn's. i have learned why kathryn splurges for the first class train ticket. on weekends, this train on frida, is standing room only. fortunately, i arrived early and got one of the few remaining seats. but when it is not so crowded, then you can enjoy yourself and even get some work done. no so on this particular train. it was crowded with college kids going home for the weekend and with italians going home to milan, 5 hours way. there even was an out of place old indian couple. they are much to late to get to aishwarya rai's wedding on time. (in case you haven't heard, this is a enormous event in bollywood!)
as kathryn indicated she would, she did a nice fusion dish of turkey in coconut milk with lime juice. except for fact that this dish was prepared in switzerland, there seemed to be very little that was swiss about it. it was quite good but i was not able to do it justice. i think that you need a certain health level in order to consume and enjoy food. but i could appreciate it abstractly. and the closing dessert of movenpick pistachio ice cream would be irresistable even at death's door. and it combines well with a little bit of movenpick chocolate ice cream. this is swiss dairy as it should be! with no meat in it!
as i write this, i am eating a beet salad. it is wonderful. all my life i have eaten overcooked beets and i have loved them nonetheless. i love these more! as far as i can taste, these have no marinade and certainly no thick harvard beet sauce. it is just pure beet goodness!
one more technical point conquered for the book! it is a simple and old thing but i really have worked out well how george whitehead's suspension operator works in the eilenberg moore game. very nice, very simple, and it proves things that are a mess to do otherwise. actually, i knew before several versions of how this goes. but not i know then in a consistent and integrated way. hooray! even though i am stuck in a time warp in the 1950s.!
and i am pleased also that i am going to add to the book a proof of bott periodicity. it is an illustration of the power of the eilenberg-moore game and also as an illustration of some of its hidden complications, namely the fact that the coalgebra structure, while there, is hard to predict by purely algebraic means. Maybe someday it will be possible. kathryn is inching towards it and it is part of moore's dream but it is a long way off. but it is nice to see that in many cases you can handle it by what harper calls generating complexes.
the bott stuff is old and pretty and historically important and it is nice to be able to do it fast.
i will close now. this is one of those days when the air has no haze and the mountains are sharp and clear. it is a shame i am not ready to walk in them.
best wishes,
joe n
happy birthday to me:
i celebrated my birthday by taking a walk in the park by the palace of justice. it has a wonderful view of the lake and the mountains. the best thing is that i felt healthier and stronger. it was nice just to sit on a bench in the warm sun and to think about how very simple the cartan seminar proof of the bott periodicity theorem really is.
i went to the palace hotel brasserie for a lunch which anthony bourdain would have enjoyed. it consisted of braised beef shoulder and bone marrow and root vegetables. i know now why anthony likes bone marrow. he likes fatty things. and this is a very fatty thing. the beef shoulder reminded me of the traditional irish meal of corned beef except that the cabbage was replaced by root vegetables. not that that is a bad thing. in truth, i enjoyed it and finished it off with an expresso and chocolate mouse. quite satisfactory.
i should add that i was entertained at lunch by a long carnival parade. it was a combination of mummers, astecs, and incas. the south american flute music was very nice as the imitation incas danced by. i was not able to tell whether this parade was the opening of a carnival or some lausanne festival which happens every year. either way, it was a good thing.
the french are holding a presidential election today. a main issue seems to be job security. some people think that there is too much of it, and since it is so hard to fire someone, businesses are very reluctant to hire young people. the result is that the young people are emigrating to, for example, england where they can get jobs.
my generation of mathematicians is aware of the downsides of too much job security. excellent people suffered from the fact that tenured slots were full. on the other hand, the people who are in charge cannot be trusted to make fair decisions. balance is required and, unfortunately, that balance is only maintained in a time of labor shortage.
the pub across the street from my hotel was offering a dinner of horse meat and frites. why not? i have never eaten horse before. it does not taste like chicken but rather like very lean beef. i think cows are better to eat but there is nothing wrong with horse and i do not see why it ever got such a bad reputation.
but the lunch of perch meuniere at university’s copernic restaurant was much better. the perch are from lac leman and are served with potatoes and a nice salad. simple and good.
i made my reservation at the hotel mont-collon in arolla. but i should have checked earlier since they are closing for a spring break and i will have to transfer to another hotel. actually, it couldn’t have been avoided since i really did not want to leave lausanne before friday. at least i get two days at the mont-collon before the transfer.
i will move to another nearby hotel before making the transition to france. all the train schedules are checked and worked. there is no reason not to go and buy tickets and make train reservations. i am ready for a new phase, especially since i have totally soured on getting skype to accept payment for more calls.
best wishes,
joe n
arollaing around the mountains and eating through provence:
hello from the hotel mont-collon, at least we start there:
let me begin with a message to two people that i feel somewhat guilty about
not communicating with. i speak of michelle ravenel and of kathryn hess but for different reasons. first of all, realize that i have been in an email dessert in the mountains and now in provence. so let me announce right here and now that i am well and happy and looking forward to my eventual return to rochester. let me take this belated opportunity to thank kathryn who was a wonderful host to me in lausanne. it was swell. and i found it to be a very productive pace to think about mathematics. kathryn; thank you again. and to michelle, i am truly sorry to be such a sorry correspondent. and, since i am typing this on a french keyboard, let me end now.
by the way, this is what typing on a french keyboard would look like if no care were taken: the auick brozn fox ju,ped over the lqwy dog.
i think that the french think that q is a more common letter than a and hence it needs to be more convenient to the fingers.
this message is being sent to you courtesy of norman stein's computer and you should not repy to this address. not that most of you guys reply much anyway!
the main text begins now!
i am now at my favorite hotel in the whole world, right at the foot of the glacier coming off mont collon. i have been suitably welcomed by madame. and she has informed me that this hotel too now has internet acdess. so this is still the perfect hotel even though it is going to close in two days until june. madame has promised to drive me up the hill to my new hotel, the hotel du glacier, where they have promised to prepare trout mauniere so everything has worked out.
i think i will take some short walks and begin to write more of the book. i need to finish chapter 10. that is the immediate project.
i start by turning into book form some classical computations of homology of loop spaces which were the subject of my lectures in lausanne.
i am perhaps inspired to add something to the book which may seem out of place in a book on algebraic methods in unstable homotopy theory. but one should always remember that the division into unstable and stable is artificial.
the paper of rene thom on unoriented cobordism is surely a landmark among the papers in homotopy theory in the 1950s. among other things it is a major illustration of serre’s localization theory and of the usefulness of the computation of the cohomology of eilenberg-maclane spaces and of classifying spaces.
i hope i am not being overconfident but i am estimating that a nice coverage of the heart of the thom paper can be done in approximately 20 pages. for example, one can compute the additive structure of the oriented cobordism ring very quickly. with modern methods to determine which modules over the steenrod algebra are free, that is just a question of ranks. surely, the inclusion of this into the book would be a contribution.
i had hoped that milnor’s work on the complex cobordism ring would provide a clear way to determine the ring structure of a cobordism ring. alas, milnor only wrote part one and never got around to writing part two which would have included the ring structure. so there is no version written by the master of exposition. it is possible that this question of the ring structure is so intrinsically hard that no one can write a beautiful treatment.
one should always remember that the two most important classical groups are the orthogonal and unitary. ok, maybe the special orthogonal and special unitary are contenders, but after all they have a special relationship to the first two.
anyway, it is worthwhile focusing on their properties and those of their classifying spaces. it is rather easy to get hold of the cohomologies of these groups and of their classifying spaces.
what seems to be a little difficult in both cases is to identify the cohomologies of the classifying spaces with the symmetric functions in the cohomologies of maximal tori.. from this identification can come the product formulas of Whitney and Chern. so it needs to be gotten. and at the moment i am having some difficulty recalling this part. i see a way to do it but it is convoluted, uses a bit of algebra and some might not like it. probably, this will be remedied instantly in the presence of milnor’s characteristic classes but for now it is frustrating.
thom’s work is a paper in stable homotopy theory which was born before the creation of stable homotopy theory as a separate subject. thom’s results are certainly geometric. for that reason, this paper has its unstable aspects. nonetheless, this paper has a claim to being the paper that established that stable homotopy theory has a connection to reality.
thom’s results were created early in the 1950s and it took years for homotopy theory to catch up. only in the 1960s do we see a major return to the subject of cobordism from a homotopy point of view. thom’s paper had already had strong geometric influence way before that in the geometric work of milnor and others. ironically, milnor was one of the people who restarted the homotopy aspects of this work.
i just had a realization that any treatment of the eilenberg-moore materail is incomplete and downright flabby if it does not contain a clear and concise treatment of the suspension.
so that is what i have thought out today. i will write some text tomorrow.
i took a short walk up to the glacier today. i saw skiers who had just come off the glacier. that is one mean glacier and you do not traverse it lightly. the glacier spills off the mountain. it is quite steep and very broken up. you could die there. easy! crampons and belays are required lest you disappear into a crevasse never to be seen again. and, after you get off the snow, you have to walk an awful long way on a narrow downward path carrying skis until you reach a road.
the weather here is beautiful mountain weather, warm and sunny in the afternoon and cool in the evenings. perfect.
i walked down to the village of les hauderes. it was approximately a 2 and a half hour walk, mainly downhill so not tiring at all. then i took the postal bus back. very civilized.
i have to add that one can see the effects of the imminent shutdown of the hotel in the quality of the food. the kitchen staff is cut way back and the menu is just not up to what i am accustomed to here. but it is not terrible. just uninspired. or perhaps it just was bad luck on the lamb. this lamb was done in some gravy, seemd a little tough, and really could have used some kick, perhaps some garlic and thyme or even some mint jelly. the english are not total food idiots. and they do understand lamb.
perception of the quality of food also suffers from the comparison between lausanne and the mountains. in lausanne, the quality was usually high, even if it was not often exciting.
one of the dangers of having all the time you need is that you will use it in reflection and speculation. i am contemplating what is the purpose of this book. in a way, a book at this stage of my career is a sort of biography. you write about the mathematical life you have lived. so you write about the way things were but you also get a chance to correct some things to the way things should have been. those corners you cut in life can now be fully filled and rounded. there is no reason to write such a book unless you are going to do it right. but most of all you get a chance to write about those things which you have loved and respected. one leaves a legacy in the sense that, whether or not these things are popular now, there is now a level of knowledge about them which should be recorded lest it be lost.
by the way, i am now in a situation which is common with internet in european hotels. i can access the web and i can receive email but i cannot send. oy vey! tomorrow i move to the hotel du glacier and perhaps i will have better luck there. not bloody likely! i suspect that it all has something to do with hoss’ overwhelming desire that no outside person be allowed to use the u of r internet. it is difficult to believe that everyone has this same problem.
sorry there is not more about the food and culture. frankly, both have not been that exciting lately.
the internet situation has improved. i am not sure what has been wrong but things are definitely better. i will try to send this message out by bringing my computer near to the internet transmitter for the hotel. we shall see.
this may seem trivial but i have discovered that the restaurant at lac bleu makes a great mixed salad. it has lots of chopped celery root, tomatos, and shredded carrots. and the dressing is great. this makes up for a disappointing trout mauniere.
now we have seen the internet situation and the culprit seems to be, at least in large part, the server at the university of rochester math department. the evidence for this is that the math department website and my own related website is unreachable, totally shut off. this is coupled with a shut down of the email server since yesterday.
oh well, i am resigned to no internet. after a while, it gets frustrating to worry about it too much. it is a waste of time, time which is better spent taking walks and thinking about mathematics. it is a good feeling to be doing precisely the mathematics that one wants to do and to know that, whatever the result, the credit or the blame all belong to you. coauthors have always been a mixed bag. i have had some great ones who contributed a great deal to the joint projects and some not so great who did not pull their share of the load. on the whole, in the absence of the mathematical equivalent of nicole kidman, it is nice to be working alone, especially on a book where the main point is to do things in a way that one finds intellectually honest and attractive.
i just finished writing up the treatment of the homology suspension. it is nice but more difficult than i had at first imagined. but now the path is clear to the end of chapter 10. in chapter 10, there is only one section left and it is devoted to giving some classical examples of the theory so far developed, the homology of the double loops on spheres and the homology of the loops on some classical groups.
after that, there will remain to be done two short computational chapters. all the background is done to finish off the exposition of the exponent theory, which has been the guiding principle of the book.
the last chapter on classifying spaces should not have great difficulties and will finish off with the fireworks of a quick treatment of bott periodicity for the unitary group (a cinch!) and a quick computation of the unoriented cobordism ring, at least additively. then there should be a trumpet fanfare! the book will be done.
i think that chapter 10 was the last big obstacle. a lot of theory had to be organized and presented. i am especially proud of the fact that i have given an honest and original treatment of products in the eilenberg-moore models. even such an expert as kathryn thinks i had something new and useful to say on this subject.
i just read milnor’s introduction to his collected papers on differential topology. in it, he makes the remarkable statement that his simple purpose throughout much of the 1950s was to understand manifolds which were connected up to the middle dimension. and out of that simple purpose came a revolution! he was and is a smart fellow.
well, i am not making a revolution with this book. but i will present:
homotopy groups with coefficients, the most general theory of localization which includes completion and so called neisendorfer localization, a basic theory of particular homotopy limits, hilton-james-toda hopf invariants and their application to exponent results, samelson products and homotopy bockstein spectral sequences, lie algebras and universal enveloping algebras with applications to higher order torsion in the homotopy of moore spaces, the theory of chain models for loop spaces and the eilenberg-moore spectral sequence, the application to the odd primary exponents of the homotopy groups of spheres, chain models for classifying spaces with applications to bott periodicity and unoriented cobordism.
that is not a bad list.
today, may 2 in arolla, we have a snow storm, heavy wet stuff coming down hard. if you look out the window, the landscape is becoming all white, it is a good day to stay inside and work more on the book. tomorrow, i will get up early and travel most of the day to end up in ste-cecile in provence. i hope it is warm and the sun is shining there.
I am in rochegude, one town away from the steins at ste-cecille, settled at my gite. last night, the steins treated me to a nice roast veal. today, it is raining on and off. it is rather chilly. But the food is much improved.
I have at last found a form of rabbit that i really like. rabbit pate made by the local butcher is really good. and he makes an excellent head cheese. he makes a lot of excellent things, such as a mousse made with zuchini, a calamari salad, artichokes in olive oil, and some sort of meat loaf with a green chopped vegetable in it.
tomorrow judy will take me to the market in ste-cecille. more good food is there, maybe some cheese or another nice pate. i have to remember to get some fresh vegetables. with vegetables and eggs and a little something extra like a provencal stew, i will eat well. it is good to have something to say about food again.
the washing machine here was made in italy. washing machines, like military hardware, should be made by germans. even the swiss and the steins agree with this. my italian machine seems to have a mind of its own. it decides on its own that i really want to leave my clothes soaking in water. i would really prefer the spin cycle to get most of the water out. so i am reduced to hand wringing the wet clothes and hanging them out to dry. it is a little better than doing laundry in a hotel room.
the gite is very nice and so is the scnery. it is all very provencale, yellows and blues, like the flowers and sky. in this, it is chromatically similar to bavaria but has a certain style which is all its own, harmonius and distinctive.
a nice feature of the gite, which is run by judy’s friend sarah from england, is that the television here has access to the bbc and other british television. this is not fantastic but it is a great improvement over cnn.
the heat is on in the gite and it is making my life much more comfortable. maybe it will even dry out the wet laundry if i bring it inside?
jacques and margaret have arrived at the avignon tgv station. it is the beginning of a food festival, our very own festival as jacques cooks and eats his way through provence.
food starts with a trip to an enormous market in the town of vaison a romaine.
i bought a belt which i needed. my pants will stop falling down.
the weekly market had all sorts of stuff but the food is the center point. i got some excellent cheese of gruyere type. of course, the girl selling the cheese included a gift of some excellent goat cheese. it is a sort of goodwill gesture to induce return purchases. it is my experience that cheese is always acquired in pairs., one piece you buy and one piece that is given to you.
we also bought a chicken which roasted up quite nicely, a very succulent and tasty bird which went nicely with asparagus and potato salad.
we cooked a duck for dinner and inivited our landlady, sarah, and the steins over for dinner. the food was simple and successful, sauteed duck, leeks, potato salad (with just onions, olive oil and vinegar added), and a some nice ice creams or sherberts to finish, pistachio, coffee, vanilla, and raspberry. we had wine but that does not interest me as much as solid food. after all, wine is just grape juice with alcohol. well, there you are, it was our best meal until the next one when we went out to the local one star restaurant.
at the local one star, i started with some foie gras and a very nice ris (= pancreas or kidney) de goat cooked in a wonderful brown sauce and served on a bed of green lentils. at a restaurant of that quality, they are always throwing in little extras, like some hordeaurves including caramelized olives and an extra dessert with a tiny creme brulee. my main dessert was a grand marnier souffle. but the surprise of the meal was the added extra of a sort of tuna ceviche (raw marinated in vinegar) topped with whipped cream infused with asparagus. weird, unusual. but rather good.
today, we go to norman and judy’s for another meal. but before that we bought some salade de museau, which is a sort of liquid head cheese, cheap cuts of pork in a light vinegar. it looks frightening but it turned out to be tamer than i expected. i like it.
meanwhile, i am suffering from a lack of mathematical information. there is no internet and no math library. norman stein shocked me by not having a copy of steenrod’s book on cohomology operations. he says that he used to know all that stuff and never felt the need to buy one! i could really use a copy right now. or a copy of a certain cartan seminar would be nice. but i am in the middle of a mathematical desert right here. even brayton gray in uzes lacks an adequate supply of mathematical references. how does he get any work done? he evidently does.
today jacques cooked some andouille. this is a sausage made of tripe. i am glad that i tried it but i am not a fan of the stuff. the smell of stomachs and intentines gives me a very slight gag reflex. so i am barred from enjoyment of this speciality.
here is an overall comment on french food. some of it is truly wonderful. in particular, the fruits and vegetables are great, fresh and with lots of flavour. some of the cooked meats are wonderful. a nice cog au vin is a very nice thing to do with an old and tough rooster to make him tender and tasty. and some of the stews are fantastic. it goes without saying that the high end of french food is incomparably good, things like braised veal cheeks and ris de veau are gifts from god. and a roast veal, which is not uniquely french, is of course wonderful.
but i am not a fan of all of french food. for example, on the whole the germans do sausage better. i do not think that internal organs always make good sausage. sometimes they do but not always.
and i prefer green asparagus to the white stuff that the french bury in the ground to keep it from developing chlorophyl.
and now comes the really controversial statement. wine is overrated. sometimes it is very good, but not always. it is like beer but without the mistique. i suspect that the reverence in which it is held has something to do with the worship of alcohol. remember that plants influence us by pandering to our weaknesses and that alcohol is one of them. sometimes a nice clear apple juice is just the thing. and this they serve in intensive care!
today i drove jacques and margaret to the avignon train station to pick up their rental car. the muslim attendent at their cut rate rental place seemed to have little interest in giving them a car, even thought they had arranged the rental in the states. his boss had a similar attitude. jacques even investigated the possibility of upgrading to avis but decided the cost was too high. eventually, the cut rate peope gave them a car which they had had all along. jacques and margaret departed hastily, leaving me to back out of the very tight quarters that jacques had put my car into. i have to give credit to the muslim attendent. he helped direct me to back out without any damage to my car or to the cars in his charge.
with the departure of jacques and margaret, i purchased some boudin and cooked it on the grill. boudin is a sausage pudding made from pig’s blood and pork, flavored with onions. it is a warm pudding with a wholesome taste. i remember that my mother was fond of a german version but that she boiled it. it is good stuff, in taste reminiscent of haggis. i like it a lot, enough that i will search for a version that is available in the united states. by the way, my hero anthony bourdain loves boudin. but anthony is also fond of tripe and intestines. i cannot follow him there. anthony has even eaten warthog anus as a courtesy to the bushmen in the kalihari desert but you could tell that he was not fond of that. he said something about there being too much dirt and shit in that meal and he speculated on the possible need for some antibiotics. afterwards, he was overjoyed to get some roasted beetles. you sprinkle salt on them and suck the insides out..
the french make a yogurt flavored with bits of grapefruit. it is amazingly good.
i visited brayton and sophie in their wonderful house in uzes. there was a very nice leek soup. leeks are underestimated in america.
brayton has restored my faith in universal models for relative samelson products. brayton pointed out to me that i even referred to this faith in an introduction of one of my papers. but i had a crisis of confidence. in fact, i can no longer remember why i lost this faith. since i am now going to include a section in the book on these universal models, i hope that my current belief is the right one. if correct, it does make one part of the exponent splittings cleaner. it is just what john moore wanted me to do so long ago, but at the time, i found an ad hoc way around it.
last day in paris:
after a pleasant farewell pizza dinner with the steins and my landlady sarah at the local pizzeria, i departed the next day on the tgv for paris. as usual the tgv ride was smooth and trouble free.
i arrived at the ibis hotel next to the airport to discover that someone had stolen their computer and they now had no internet for customers at all. when i was here last november they at least had an overpriced version, 15 euros for something like an hour. i resigned myself to having no internet until i return to rochester in 2 days.
in the meantime, i have scheduled a day in paris.
it has been a long, long time since i last saw paris. the first time i saw it i had just finished my thesis. john moore was in those days always in paris in the summer and he was my port for breakfast in the morning. his hotel was too expensive for me to stay at but he pointed me to a more reasonably priced one. it was pleasant to splurge on the hot chocolate and croissants to have a better breakfast and talk to moore about paris and mathematics. i also ate most dinners at some simple bistro with moore. foodwise, it was heaven. and moore added to it by arranging one of his famous dinner parties at a two star restaurant. i was included on the guest list along with the last minute addition of claudine serre. claudine was so last minute that she was dressed in blue jeans and we all crowded around her so that the restaurant staff would not see her state of dress and eject her and/or us all. the particulars of that meal have faded from my memory but i remember that it was terrifically good. i do remember a whiskey sorbet.
at that long ago time, i visited some of the classic parisian sites, including notre dame, the louvre (saw the mona lisa and lots of rembrandt), the gallerie where they had the water lily murals of monet, etc. i went out to chartres and have always remembered the emotion i felt there. anyway, i can’t really explain why i never went back to spend more time in paris. foreign vacations tended to get planned around mathematics conferences. and there just were no suitable mathematical occasions for my specialty, algebraic topology. so i didn’t go back. i went other places, oxford, cambridge, aarhus, kyoto, durham, the list goes on and they were certainly good places. but they were not paris.
even when i went to france, it was my custom to go directly to and from where i was going, luminy near marseiles being one example. well, i am here to admit that this was a mistake not to see more of paris. paris is a wonderful town. the views, the history, the food are all terrific. i will never again plan to just skip this big city. it is always worth visiting.
I began by taking the train from the airport hotel into the city. in honor of the fabled yale full immersion language course, i got off at the luxembourg gardens, site of the fictional flrtation between mareille and robert and the site where her younger sister mari-laure was always having trouble with her sailboat at the most inopportune times. for those who do not know this course, it is still availabe on the internet by the courtesy of the annenberg media foundation. it has attained a cult status. a new generation has a running blog on this course and wonders about the fate of the now old and grey actors. of particular interest is the actress valerie allain who played mareille. many of these cultists are in love with her and with good reason. there was a distressing rumour that valerie had become a french porn star. it is a confusion. there is a french porn star by that name but it is not our valerie. the most that valerie has ever done is take her clothes off on camera. and that is practically mandatory for a french actress and in no way makes valerie into a porn star. you see, i am one of valerie’s fans. by the way, the actor who played robert has actually communicated to the blog. but the actress who played her younger sister has completely disappeared.
the luxembourg gardens have much to offer, including statues of all the french queens and a statue of saint genevieve. saint genevieve was not a queen but she did the nontrivial thing of successfully praying to god to direct attila the hun away from paris and towards orleans. evidently god didn’t mind if attila sacked orleans. anyway, according to the sculptor, saint genevieve was a very physically attractive young lady. this is more than you can say about some of the french queens. on the whole, the further back in time the queen, the prettier the sculptors made her look.
after leaving the gardens, i immediately encountered a macdonalds where i noticed people using laptop computers. hurrying inside and taking a seat, i took my laptop out of my backpack and i discovered that macdonalds was providing reliable and free internet! it was a lure to attract customers from the nearby sorbonne university. i could receve email and i think i succeeded in sending out some replies.
but since my battery supply was low, my computer shut itself off before i could completely research the mod 2 cohomology rings of the special orthogonal groups. oh well, you can’t have everything and i was truly happy to have found this brief internet connection. and it was free!
and i am amused to find that even people who hate macdonalds must admit that they have excellent toilets and internet.
i continued on my walk, passed the ruins of the old abbey of cluny, reached the seine with a lovely view of the cathedral of notre dame. unfortunately, notre dame had an enormously long line of tourists waiting to get in. i contented myself with taking some pictures of the exterior and with visiting a festival tent in honor of the making of bread. bread was actually being made and sold there. since i had already made plans to go back to a brasserie for some mussels and frites (= french fries), i passed up the opportunity to sample the bread.
my main plan was to walk along the seine and to see paris. wow! the louvre and the tuileries garden were just stunning displays of civilization and grandeur. paris is culture on a scale which makes it have no match anywhere else. and i am talking about just the outside of these things. what is inside takes longer to see. i did not have time to do that. i had to pass up the great art that is there. but the outside was enough for me.
i had formed a strange desire to see the palace of discovery. it is a science museum and my michellin guide to paris assured me that the math exhibit was high toned, not dumbed down, an exhibit for professionals. alas, this michellin guide was not written by a mathematician. the museum seemed most proud of the fact that you could find recorded there the current record for the number of digits in the computation of pi. i was devastated and decided to head back.
the museum was located at the intersection of the avenue franklin delano roosevelt and the rue de general eisenhower. ( i bet there will never be an avenue george bush except in various portions of brain dead america.)
by the way, there are monuments for charles de gaulle and winston churchill. the french are truly grateful for having their collective butts saved in world war two. but, in all fairness, there should be some monument to joseph stalin or at least to the russian people. the russians did more than anyone to win world war two. i won’t make the argument here but you could just look up the numbers of dead on both sides and look at where the bulk of the german army was.
the french love their holidays, even ones that mean nothing more to them than a day off. for example, while i was here, two holidays occurred. all the stores were closed. the first occasion was the aforementioned world war two victory. the french had nothing to do with accomplishing this.
the second holiday was the feast of the ascension. the french, having become for the most part secular, are celebrating the ascension into heaven of somebocy they really don’t worship much. but, as i indicated, it is the days off that is the true religion of the french. one sees this more in the small towns of provence than in the lively atmosphere of paris. the french should quake in their boots now that they have elected someone like zarkosy who believes in the mass of people working hard without excessive benefits.
as i walked along the seine, i discovered a new brand of homeless people. some young people had pitched some good quality mountain tents along secluced portions of the banks of the seine. they were living in them. i do not know where the nearest toilet facilities were. perhaps it was the seine.
I returned to the vicinity of notre dame and went in to visit the conciergerie on the ile de la cite (= isle of the city). this is the historic castle of louis the first. after the kings of france moved up in the world to fancier palaces, prisoners were kept here. and trials were held here during the french revolution. from small cells with beds of stone covered straw, people were carted off to the guillotine. i guess that was better than being burned alive at the stake the way the grand master of the knights of the templars was. king philip the fair noticed that the templars were very rich, a definite threat to the power of the king. he decided to suppress them. this means that he decided to kill all the templars he could find. he also decided to
confiscate their estates and all the templar gold he could find. there is a legend that the main part of the templar treasure survived along with many templars. the legend says that the templars disappeared into the heart of the swiss alps where they founded banks and became the gnomes of zurich. other evidence for this is that the swiss fighting ability suddenly became much more effective at this time. after all, the templars were warrior knights.
the conciergerie is a lovely medieval hall. it has big fireplaces where lots of meat could be roasted. off to the side, it has little jail cells where people, the high and the low, were kept before being guillotined. robespierre and marie antoinette were among the temporary residents.
to the side of the conciergerie is the chapel of sainte chapelle. this is a lovely chapel dating from the 12th century. it was built by the king siant louis to house the crown of thorns, the real crown of thorns, the one supposedly worn by the founder of a major religion. this was found on a crusade by a french nobleman who pawned it to the venetians and then appealed to louis to redeem his pawn. this louis did, being a saint or about to become one, and then he had to build a suitable housing for it.
it is a big chapel, with towering and beautiful stained glass windows. in a time when cathedrals took a hundred years or more to bulid, this place took 33 months to build in the 12th century. granted that a chapel is not as big as a cathedral, that is fast construction. i doubt if kellog, brown, and root or bechtel or any of the firms which our current administration likes to employ could do as well. but architecture in the middle ages, especially religious architecture, reached a peak that it has never climbed to again. so perhaps the friends of bush can be forgiven for not living up to these standards. and i think that they had such a thing as huge cost overruns in those days too.
seriously, there are two big differences between those guys in the past and our current crowd. one, in the past they were more competant. two, in the past they were sincerely ruthless. they did not feel any need to hide it with a smirk. similar to the romans in these respects. whatever else you might say about them, these guys understood the concept of “bottom line.”
i ended up at the brasserie where i had planned to have mussels and frites. although the waiter was young and slow, he came through with some wonderful mussels. the frites were good enough to add to the pleasure of the meal which i ate with a nice kronenbourg draft beer. it was excellent! the mussels were cooked in a liquid with onions, parsley, and carrots. i finished by eating the liquid as if it were a soup. it was a classic brasserie meal.
but the frites were disappointing. on the frite quality scale, i rank frites as follows. up at the top are my mother’s frites, browned and a little crisp on the outside with a soft tender inside, the best frites.
the frites you can find in stands on french or also canadian highways (even in ontario!) are almost the equal of my mother’s frites.
close behind them are the frites called new york fries which you can only buy in canadian malls.
in the days when macdonalds made their frites with true and unhealthy grease their frites were very good. even such a discriminating gourmet as frank peterson acknowledged that macdonalds’ frites were not bad. alas, macdonalds has given in to health concerns and their frites are just not as good as they used to be.
after all these frites come the frties i had with my mussels at the brasserie. but they are still better than most frites and they went well with the mussels.
so after a closing expresso, i said a fond farewell to paris and hopped on the train back to the airport hotel.
over and out,
joe n
to paraphrase arnold swartzenegger, i am back. or rather, i have ceased being back and i am on the road again.
today, i journeyed from rochester, new york, to lausanne, switzerland, by way of continental airlines, newark, new jersey, air india, paris, paris france, and the tgv. actually, it took two days and i was exhausted.
the trip began in the rochester airport where michelle ravenel had dropped me off. a rather mild rain was causing water to leak into their computer system. nonetheless, they were able to get it together and send me on my way.
in Newark, homeland security was in full force. the taking off of shoes, the policy of no liquids, absolutely no pocket knives, not even the dullest swiss army knife, is accepted by the american people. i had to mail mine back to my house at a cost of $9.99. i detect marketing here.
in the restrictions as to what you are allowed to carry, there is no thought, no discrimination. people accept the bush line that they must endure inconvenience, long lines and delays. they are totally cowed. they do not think to ask themselves if all this is necessary. if what is being checked is what should be checked. they do not ask if the dick cheneys of the world have to go through this too. the answer, of course, is no and there is already the beginnings of a security system based on class. yet the american people do not seem ready to rebel, not ready to even get a little nasty and sarcastic in order to insure equality of treatment. fear.
anyway, i left the american security paranoia behind and walked approximately 100 feet to the domain of air india. it was a trip back to the old indian culture. they felt the need to repeat the security check in their own very old fashioned indian way. this meant going through the motions for the sake of appearances, the only purpose being to create a long line to stand in. people wandered back and forth from the supposedly secure area to the supposedly insecure area. there was absolutely no way of distinguishing between those who had been checked and those who had not. it was not chaos. it was pointless obedience by the bureaucracy and uncomplaining resignation by the customers. fortunately, i had lots of time to kill.
the flight on air india was a revelation. it was as if i was in a different time, in a new culture which had more to do with the modern present than the colonial past. most of the people were native indians who were going on to mumbai. inside the plane, the crew and passengers seemed totally normal, that is to say, they seemed western, as if they came from the suburbs of rochester. 30 years ago, i knew some indians of a different sort. for example, i knew harsh pittie (his real name!), who was a totally sophisticated citizen coming from an upper-class indian family. harsh knew and was confident of his place in the world. he was certainly not typical. you could not find enough harsh pitties to fill up an enormous plane. i thought at the time that a more typical case was an indian mathematician at the institute for advanced study who was very insecure. he seemed to live in fear of being sent back to poverty the streets of calcutta. not so the people on the plane. they were just plain folks who seemed to have no hang-ups about their place in the world. perhaps this was because there was such a high percentage of indians on the plane. or perhaps it reflects the transformation of at least part of india to a modern society. if so, it seems to affect both the young and the old.
on the plane, i had a nice lamb curry and the chance to make almost final preparations on my number 5 and number 6 lectures. that leaves only numbers 7 and 8 to prepare. they are fairly well thought out and don’t have to be given for two weeks. so all that is well in hand.
i arrived in paris and was pleased to discover an air france bus which would take me directly to the gare de lyon and my tgv train to lausanne. no problems at all!
arriving in the train station, i paid 50 cents to use a toilet and to wash up. this was an excellent decision.
having time to kill and being hungry, i paid a culinary tribute to richard kane. i had the french version of a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, literally, a bacon, salade, et tomate on a baguette, a BST! tres excellent! especially when combined with a lipton’s ice tea with peach flavoring. it was less sweet that the american version. perhaps because of this, it seemed to have more of the essence of peach in it. ah yes, when it comes to ingestibles, the french seem to understand even the small things.
finally, off i went on the tgv, glad to just sit and nap for 4 hours. it was rather warm in paris but there was snow in the passes as we crossed into switzerland. then it was warm again in lausanne, even at 8 o’clock at night. i took the short steep walk up the hill to the hotel, pulling my luggage behind me. kathryn had told me that a young fellow named Jonathan scott had biked up the hill on his last day here. i couldn’t do that now. but i was reminded of a hill in the finger lakes of new york state which i had once biked twenty years ago. a workman saw me struggling up the hill and remarked that i must be hard as nails to do it. it was of course long before my aortic dissection and i must have been forty pounds lighter. but in my memory, it was a comparable hill, only longer. so i must get rid of those unwanted forty pounds!
i lecture tomorrow. tonight i sleep.
tomorrow has come and gone. the students and i seem to have survived the first two hour lecture. i have an audience of approximately 20. that is a lot of students for a class at this level. i had to leave a few things out but it all seemed to remain coherent. today i give the second two hour lecture and then we have time off for, believe it or not, approximately two weeks before another four hour bunch of talks.
i am still settling in. i need to figure out how to do laundry without paying the hotel the small fortune of 8 swiss franks per shirt. there must be a laundromat somewhere and i will find it. otherwise, i will start doing laundry in the bathtub.
up in the town square, there is a wonderful cafe where i plan to eat breakfast. the pastries looked great and i will sample them together with some cappucino. america has not caught up with europe when it comes to quality of pastry.
i have been paid. it is just like portugal. i have been handed over 4000 swiss franks in cold hard cash and must now worry about where to keep it. for the moment i carry it with me everywhere i go. i plan to learn to use the combination safe which is in the room and relieve myself of this burden.
today or tomorrow i must establish an internet connection. it is the usual situation. i can receive but i cannot send.
time flies! i have now finished 4 hours of lectures. it is hard to believe that, after 3 days here, i am half finished with all i have to present. i still have some preparation to do for the final 4 hours but not so much that i am worried that i cannot do it all in 2 weeks. the localization lectures are over and the chain models lectures are yet to begin. the latter is what they really know well around here and i must prepare it well if i am to survive. my only strength is that i have a different point of view then they have, less explicit, more conceptual, more princetonesque.
for lunch today, i had beef tartare and frites. it was much different than i expected. there was a lot of tomato sauce mixed in with the raw beef. that makes the raw meat much less exotic. kathryn assures me that this is a common way of doing it and it is a good way. her husband is fond of it. so i guess i have passed the beef tartare test. it is as easy as the sushi test. the dish is tasty and good in a quite normal way. it needs no courage or aclimatization to enjoy it. i expected more of a challenge.
i need something different to eat, something which is a true test of swissness. what could it be? like the tibetans, do the swiss have a version of rancid butter that they are fond of? mountain cheeses, while wonderful, tend to be tamer than the smelly lowland stuff the french love. so what is true mountain food? how about cows that die over the winter? or are those only eaten by wolves? there must be some food which will keep an entire winter, probably hard and dry. some food which modern swiss hate but which is still savoured by traditionalists.
they have very good yogurt here, mixed with good things like muesli. that is very swiss. and they have good bread, substantial and tasty stuff. since this is french switzerland, i have not yet encountered a good version of a bratwurst. however, there are hot dog stands and shops to get sandwiches. the turks sell kebobs and falafel which should be tasty.
hello again from the alpha-palmiers hotel in downdown lausanne, right up the hill from the train station:
i see from the BBC that the weather in the northeastern USA involves a massive return to winter. even at the masters golf tournament in augusta, it does not seem to be warm. oh well, it is warm here and that is all that counts for me.
sometimes i cannot see what is right in front of my eyes. how can one wonder what to eat in switzerland without recalling dairy products? all those cows up in the mountains are the foundation of a wonderful dairy tradition. it starts with wonderful yogurt, complete with the ultraswiss addition of birchermuesli, those little bits of fruit, nuts, and grain which are the foundation of good swiss breakfasts. and here is something which seems to be completely unknown in the USA, buttermilk flavored with fruit, strawberry, cherry, or my favorite, mango. this is a wonderful thing to do with buttermilk.
and of course, there is chocolate. but one cannot live by chocolate alone! you can however almost live on a diet of chocolate milk alone.
the swiss are also famous for melting cheese. in the winter, they do fondue. now begins the season for raclette, melted cheese with potatoes. kathryn tells me that one must distinguish between the two forms of melted cheese. i think it is similar to the fact that the inuit have hundreds of names for varieties of snow and we have so few because we don't really understand snow. this weekend, i am looking forward to having raclette at kathryn's home outside of lausanne. it is also nice that i have an invitation to do laundry.
today, i am headed off to a large park in the city. the map shows pictures of mountain goats there. maybe it is like a zoo. it is hard to believe that mountain goats could grow wild in the city. i plan to end the day at a bavarian brasserie with a plate of fois gras. great stuff!
yesterday, i spent the day contemplating an old paper of john moore on universal hopf algebras. it is amazing that the existence of bipolynomial hopf algebras boils down to the classical fact that all symmetric functions can be expressed in terms of the elementary symmetric functions. this stuff relates to my current theme. how do certain things stay hidden in algebraic topology but are there nonetheless. the most striking example is so-called neisendorfer localization but with a large assist from haynes miller, alex zabrodsky, and emmanuel dror-farjoun. the attempt to cut off the bottom homotopy groups of a finite complex does not in fact get rid of the memory of them. theory says that you can get them back by a functor. but, if you don't know beforehand what you are supposed to get back, know one knows what is going on. you only know that the machine makes sausage when you know that you put sausage scraps into it or that you are getting sausage out. at least one very competent person, aka clarence, has tried and failed to understand this.
a more elementary example is in the bott-samelson theorem. the loops on a suspension retains the memory of the coalgebra structure of the space which is suspended. the suspension remembers the something about the space that it is the suspension of. this is expressed more generally by observing that the eilenberg-moore models have the coalgebra structure in them. but it comes from the geometry of the eilenberg-zilber map, it is not just algebra. it can be hard to get your hands on. maybe i can make some contribution to the theory of the eilenberg-moore approximations by coming up with an effective way to get at this. the key word is effective, ineffective theory is not enough. but the book comes first.
as i typed the above two paragraphs, i realized that i was not addressing my whole audience. oh well, live with it. the truth is that i don't write these things primarily for you but to amuse myself in the hotel room. if you think about it, you realize that there are only a few things to do in a hotel room and, even in switzerland, some of these are illegal. so, in the absence of nicole kidman, i feel free to type some mathematical thoughts.
i have just returned from my explorations. i first went to the cathedral, a very impressive place with nice stained glass windows and a wondrous organ which was restored by, among others, the husband of our friend, kathryn lesh. she is a mathematician who finished at MIT at the same time as our kathryn here. the organ is spectacular.
i kept walking until the i reached the large bois de sauvabelin, a park with many hills and a small lake with boats and a restaurant. it is a very pleasant place which reminds me of the small lake in seneca park in rochester. our lake is actually nicer, but it is often under threat from our country administration who want to curtail it for various forms of corporate use and development. on the other hand, the lake here seems to a treasured and lively place with a cafe where you can get coffee, ice cream, and even fondue. altogether it was a pleasant day.
during the walk, i thought about what i shall say in my new lectures. mainly, the first question is: what is the appropriate chain model for a fibration? rather than choose the newer quillenesque notion, i choose the older cartan inspired notion of construction. the difference is that you are doing abelian homological algebra rather than the nonabelian version due to quillen. i have nothing against the quillen ideas and have even used them in my now ancient rational past. but the abelian version is sometimes much easier to compute. so that is what i will use. i have some convincing arguments that this is not a bad idea. the main theorem of eilenberg-moore is that they give chain models of homotopy pullbacks via cotensor products. and they have some of the formal properties of fibrations in the sense that cotensor products with these creatures is homologically invariant. oops! we are getting a little too technical.
since this is also the land of knives, as in the swiss army versions, i have begun to evaluate the selection of knives with the intent of purchasing an interesting swiss army knife. in the meantime, i have purchased an opinel, the primitive but very useful french knife which is great for cutting things to eat. you can never have too many of them and they are cheap.
by the way, i manage the basic tasks of life rather well with my primitive french. i can not discuss the finer points of philosophy in french but what i have is adequate for expressing what food i want to order, to thank them for it when i get it, and even to express my disgust with george bush if i so wish. le government de usa, c'est horrible, c'est fou, no? c'est vrai, oui? oui, oui!
kathryn tells me that my month's work entitles me to become part of the swiss retirement program. in fact, i am required to fill out the form and assured that i will receive a monthly payment if i bother to inform them when i officially retire. i suspect that it will not be a massive sum, perhaps enough to purchase one small bar of chocolate per year. one nice thing about the swiss is that they have rules which they follow. i suspect that it derives from all those cold winters in the mountains where you had to get along or go outside and die. but that does not mean that they are as cowed and repressed as the typical american. far from it! only in america does puritanism thrive in its peculiar southern mutation.
last night i returned from my visit to the home of kathryn and her husband felipe in the town of aigle. it is a half hour on the train from lausanne and very pleasantly located in the valley on the way to sion. there are mountains all around. local trains will take you up to the mountain resorts. it is a very nice place to live and to raise their 4 boys, who are, by the way, quite well behaved. it is a warm place with good skiing a few minutes away up the mountains. the dinner of raclette (melted cheese with potatoes, mushrooms, and pickles) was excellent and was accompanied by a nice dry white wine of the region. i think i like the pure cheese of raclette better than the mixture of wine and cheese which is fondue. the town of aigle has a castle and it has the high school which was attended by the great mathematician georges de rham.
today is the monday after easter and, except for places to eat, everything is closed. tomorrow, i will buy an economical and attractive sweater so that i can impersonate a dressed up person. today is a good day to prepare some lectures.
after putting in a good start on the lecture preparation, i decided to meet up with a rhubarb tart i had noticed at the manora, the pleasant lausanne version of a cafeteria. it was very good with a renverse (= coffee with cream). afterwards, i walked up to the park in front of the hall of justice. the blue of the lake and the grey mountains topped with white snow were stunningly beautiful. it is quite a contrast to the continuing weather reports about the snow in eastern north america. the fact that there is enough snow to close the toronto airport makes me think that the situation in rochester is probably not much better. the big difference between here and there is that the snow here is all high up in the mountains and it is beautiful warm spring-like weather down here.
by the way, i have internet access from the university but not from the hotel. so that is the reason for the gap in messages over the long easter weekend.
is fonda fond of fondue?
just a little tongue twister in the title, no sense to it, although i am of a generation where many were fond of fonda. and you must admit that it is musical.
hello once again from warm and sunny switzerland:
just to let you folks know, i sleep with the window open. it is that warm.
i noticed today that john milnor is giving a lecture in zurich on april 12. the occasion is to honor beno eckmann (it must be his ninetieth birthday). the subject of the lecture is “topology in the 50s and 60s.” it will probably be a great lecture and very interesting to me who was born as a topologist in the later part of this period. this was, after all, the golden age of topology. but i soon realized that, small as switzerland is, it would be a five to six hour train ride to get to zurich. this would not be easy. even though milnor is one of the great math lecturers of my lifetime, i am doomed not to hear him this time.
i consoled myself by having dinner at a swiss brewery with good beer and a nice strassbourg version of a pizza, a so-called flaming tart with onions, cream, smoked meat, and little cut up wieners on a thin crust. not bad but it will not replace traditional pizza.
kathryn gave me a delayed easter present, a chocolate egg filled with individual chocolates, sort of a chocolate box of chocolates. it is made in aigle, her home town. these are some very good tasting chocolates.
in contradiction to the above paragraph, i have returned from zurich where they were having a conference in honor of the 90th birthday of beno eckmann. it was good to see old friends like henry glover, guido mislin, peter hilton, and john milnor. at least i know them well enough to say hello to. lunch was at the eigennosishen technishe hochscule in the very pleasant rooftop cafeteria with a lovely view of the city and of lake zurich. at lunch, jean-pierre serre, perhaps the greatest mathematician of his time if it isn't milnor, happened to pass by, tripped over my knapsack on the floor and almost took a tumble. as someone said, "that could have been a career ender right there." not that i have to worry about that now. i did not even get a chance to reintroduce myself. after all, chuck and i proved a conjecture of his and he should be able to recall that.
beno eckmann, 90 though he may be, seems to be in excellent physical condition. unfortunately, the same cannot be said for peter hilton who is 86 and, while bright and alert, has trouble with his balance. as always, he was very gracious. i also stopped to say hello to albrecht dold. he is very hard of hearing and seems to have some of the symptoms of altzimer's disease. sad. i don't know what he would do without his wife. she remembered me much better than he did. when octavian cornea was my student 15 years ago, his work overlapped with some work of albrecht. in fact, octavian had better results then but there was no doubt that dold still possessed an agile and sharp mind.
the trip from lausanne to zurich and back was a very pleasant exercise in the swiss train system. zooming back along the lake by neuchatel is very attractive. at first, i thought the trip would take 5 hours each way but it turned out to be a pleasant 2 hours each way. the trains zoom through the swiss countryside with a rocking suspension system which the swiss call pendular. the view was not deep mountain scenery but it was quite nice, a mixture of cows and vineyards in different parts. in switzerland at least, the german swiss seem to have more cows and the french swiss more wine. but my limited survey could be wrong about that. in france, they certainly have a lot of cows.
i learn that the swiss have slightly different electrical outlet plugs than the rest of europe. the swiss plugs are 3 pronged and thus better grounded but otherwise they seem the same. my experience is that you can use a european plug in a swiss outlet but not the other way around. so i will wait until i get to france before buying some plugs.
i gave kathryn a quick outline of my last 4 lectures and she seemed pleased with the minor insights i am adding to the field. i think that one of the pleasures of mathematical old age is that you have the time to reflect on the best way of doing things. you do not have to restrict yourself to the quickest way of just getting the job done. it is a lot like sex in that respect. except that you get better at exposition as you get older.
the weather here is delightful. we just had coffee outside in the bright sunshine with the mountains and lake in the background, as pretty and idyllic as a postcard.
kathryn is really enthusiastic about one of my ideas. i had hesitated to tell her about these particular ideas because i thought she might find them too trivial and obvious. there is a simple way to express multiplication of loops in terms of maps of homotopy pullback diagrams. she is thinking about the ideas and has already come up with cute new things to say about them. she thinks more abstractly than i do and is going to incorporate the ideas into things i would never have thought of. more power to her. she is going to bring some life to the subject. i will just sit back and watch.
kathryn thinks that my questions about "change of rings" (whatever that is) are the right ones to ask and is confident that she can answer them in the affirmative. i hope so. i can use the machinery if it works. in the writing of my book, i have to do some handsprings to avoid this more natural way of doing things.
here is a friendly jab at bill singer. when i emailed him about this issue, he rightly pointed out that i didn't really need to do all this and that i could do what i wanted with constructions that were in an old cartan seminar. this is true but it is not esthetic. it only works since you can compute the algebra structure and you know that you have a hopf algebra structure. if you work over the integers, it turns out that this coalgebra structure is uniquely determined. so you get the coalgebra structure in a round about way. it is more esthetic if you can go directly at the coalgebra structure and that is what i want to do. i repeat, bill is right, but kathryn understands me. if you start with an algebra, then the homology of the bar construction should give you a coalgebra. getting an algebra and forcing the coalgebra structure is a form of rape and someday, if not now, you will pay for it.
i have missed my chance to have duck with olives at my favorite cafeteria. by the time i got around to it, they had sold out. instead, i had some nice trout filet with blanched cabbage. the cabbage was excellent. don't knock it until you try it. the blanching makes the cabbage mild enough so that it doesn't overpower the fish. it goes well.
i was at the main post office and i read a plaque which identified it as the site where, between 1783 and 1793, Edward Gibbon wrote large parts of his "decline and fall of the roman empire." john harper should pay a pilgrimage to the site even though it is now totally subsumed in a large post office building. if the building were out of the way, the view would be terrific, as good as the view from the park by the casino.
compared to the dark passions of portugal, the swiss seem to lead a more ordered life. kathryn tells me that this can be deceptive. some female olympic athlete was murdered by her husband in the mountains above where kathryn lives. it took a long time before they could find him. this is the dark side of mountain life, probably caused by being cooped up all winter with no way to get away from each other. like rats in a cage. somehow it is different from the wild passions of the south. and different from the loneliness of the fado singer in portugal waiting for her fisherman husband to return from the cod fishery. in fact, the husband has probably drowned. there is no need to murder him or to be murdered by him and he is fondly remembered.
i had some fois gras at the bavarian brasserie near the hotel. it was very good but with a slight taste of liver that was totally absent from the fois gras in provence. but it was a good sweet fois gras nonetheless. the only problem was that the waiter mistranslated my french into a half bottle of white wine when i really wanted just a glass. fortunately, there was no problem taking the unfinished bottle back to the hotel room.
this weekend, i will try to finish the preparation of my last 2 lectures. this should not be too hard. i have to do 2 things. one, i need to compute the mod p homology of the double loop space of an odd dimensional sphere. this is a straightforward application of the theory i have already prepared. two, i need to develop hopf invariants so that i can compute the bockstein spectral sequence and achieve the crowning glory of the fact that the integral homology has exponent p. my last lectures occur next tuesday and wednesday. in the words of woody woodpecker, 'that's all, folks!"
then i am thinking of running away for a weekend at the hotel mont-collon in arolla. i would spend the weekend at the foot of the glacier. this place i know well and i am known there. i should even get some kind of special welcome. if possible, it would be pleasant to hike up to the cabine des rouges aigles (= the cabin of the red eagles). but snow in the mountains may make that impossible. if so, i can be a vegetable too. arolla is the place where chuck mcgibbon discovered the joys of climbing. i am wondering how he is doing on everest right now. when he reads this, let him know that our solution to the serre conjecture was well received here just as it was in portugal last october. even though this stuff is old, it is attractive, understandable and it still sells.
once more into the breech:
the more i read about the albigensian crusade and the subsequent inquisition, the more i am convinced that bush and cheney are the pope and simon de monfort of our time. back then, a crusade was said to be needed to suppress heresy but in fact it was motivated by economic reasons. a very wealthy region of france did not believe in worshipping the relics of saints and in enriching the established church. so for economic reasons and for the sheer greed of confiscation a crusade was declared. hundreds of thousands were killed, poor and rich alike. properties were confiscated by the crusaders and became hereditary fiefs. the survivors were made public examples of, were forced to recant, and to make expensive and long pilgrimages. if it had not already been stolen, they often had to abandon their property. Once they reached the pilgrimage site, they had documents to be signed by the local church authorities to prove they had reached the appointed goal. This practice continues today in santiago de compostella but the documents are now signed by more lowly clerics. it is just like the republicans reaping the spoils of washington and of government contracts while preaching a morality they do not live up to. or you can pretend to drive out corruption from the world bank while using the funds to enrich your mistress. in short, we live in a time of hypocrisy, reminiscent of the albigensian crusade but with mass killings not yet in full swing.
i spent saturday in the deserted math building preparing some lectures and looking out the window at the sheep mowing the lawn with the mountains in the background. it was a nice way to finish up the preparation of lecture 7 of 8.
before that, i decided to sample the characteristic swiss potato dish called rosti. it is much like hash browns but served with, for example, mushrooms and veal in a cream sauce. too rich for me. i can do without it. maybe i will try it with fried eggs and ketchup. i think the swiss do a version of that too.
i just took a nice walk down to the lake. i discovered restaurants there which deserve return visits. for example, one place was advertising some mussels and frites. but my dinner plans were already made. all i had room for in my stomach were an expresso, and 3 boules of ice cream. i had this at the universal swiss ice cream restaurant chain, movenpick. the pistachio was astoundingly good. i returned to my hotel room where i had my planned dinner of salad, cheese, and fois gras. even though it was supermarket fois gras it was still rather good.
then i got down to work and finished the preparation of my last lecture. i develop hopf invariants and use them to compute the bockstein spectral sequence of the double loop space of a sphere. old stuff but with some new twists.
now i have no more compulsory work to do and can think in a scattered way. if i get a chance to give more lectures, i will trust that i can lecture on familiar stuff without further preparation. i can always leave out details i don’t remember. i think i remember these details well enough to know that i must leave them out. for example, i know how to get the generators of a kernel inside a free lie algebra but i probably would have trouble proving it works on the spot. instead i would justify it by analogy with the generators for the kernel of a free group. no proofs.
anyway, i have been virtuous enough and have done everything so far pretty much from first principles. if i lecture beyond this week, it is time for me and my audience, if i still have any then, to take a break. we can still talk but we will fly.
brayton has asked me a question about eilenberg-moore spectral sequences. at the moment, my passion is to avoid them by the use of small coalgebra models. then the homological algebra is computing what you want without any nonsense. in this style, you use spectral sequences only for comparison theorems to prove that two things are equal. then you use one of them to get the answer exactly. when it works, it is a joy. but you need to know the space you are looking at, or some of its properties, like maybe that it is the total space of a principal bundle. in this way, you might get a small model for it.
the alpha-palmiers is a fine hotel but i have one criticism of it. i think that i charges too much for an internet connection. it was wonderful to always have an internet connection in my room in portugal. it made it easy to send email, to phone with skype, and also to look up stuff on the web. it is not too bad to have to wait to go to the office and i will survive. but i miss the entertainment.
the office email has one other drawback. i had to change my sender to send. this means that no record is kept of the messages i send out unless i send a copy to myself. i have been forgetting to do this and so i have no record of what i have written except for my longer messages.
once again, cnn is issuing weather warnings against travel in the northeastern united states. i am glad i am not there. it is so warm and sunny here.
cnn does not seem to think that the weather on the top of everest is worth reporting. the closest news is that there is flooding in thailand. if the weather is bad in thailand, it probably is worse in the Himalayan. for chuck’s sake, i hope the weather is good in the mountains.
i am beginning to get worried that there is not enough about food and culture in my messages. this means that i am leading a narrow life with most of my interest being focused on mathematics. that is not a bad thing. i have learned things in preparing the lectures. it will help the book. and it is interesting to me. but somehow i feel i am not living up to the standards set by my hero, anthony bourdain. i don’t feel that i have eaten anything really weird or interesting. the beef tartare was fairly tame. maybe i should go get some more. i read that they can make it hotter. the food is very good but it is not adventurous. after all, how adventurous can yogurt with cereal be? and i actually am not very fond of having my meat prepared in a cream sauce. that is too much dairy. and, if i cared, i don’t think it is kosher.
i had a good pasta with salmon and mussels. but once again it had a sort of curry cream sauce! i will try the thai restaurant in the hotel. i want no dairy mixed with meat. i want some heat, some spice! i need a change.
what would anthony do? even he did not like warthog anus. but he ate it and it had no cream sauce. he also ate ostrich eggs scrambled in an ash fire. eggs are not dairy. chicken are not cows. i need to get something eggy, but without the ashes. do the swiss eat any insects?
what would be the swiss of equivalent of a canadian maple latte? would the swiss sink that low? no, a caramel machiato is their extreme in that direction.
i thought of something. the swiss have some kind of gluey nut cake with whole hazelnuts in it, it seems to be some sort of gargantuan swiss baklava. i will try it. i am desperate. i would even welcome a club sandwich, disgraceful as that would be in anthony’s eyes. seriously, they do have good sandwiches. the bread is wonderful. ok, here is the plan. get a sandwich for lunch and have a thai dinner. maybe shrimp.
another thing that is missing from my messages is a sense of sin. in portugal and spain, the sense of the middle ages was so present, so powerful, that your thoughts were filled with sin and lust. and there was fado. and there was crawling to santiago de compostella on your knees, and there was sophia loren tieing the body of el cid to his horse. all these things to remind you of the dark and forbidden passions. the swiss do not seem to have this. as orson wells said, “the italians have a history filled with murder and lust and they created the renaissance. the swiss have had an orderly life for centuries and the best they could come up with was the cuckoo clock.” maybe it would have been different if william tell had slipped and aimed a little bit lower. putting an arrow through your son’s brain should give a culture a sense of guilt.
but where is the passion? where is the abundance? where is the sophia? heidi just doesn’t cut it. maybe i am underestimating heidi. i don’t know her that well. could yodeling ever match fado? i don’t think so. it is hard to express yearning with a yodel. or any thought at all. and the zither is far too upbeat an instrument.
still i love this country. life here is more the way life should be than most other lives are. it is certainly more beautiful.
wait a minute! i am not that far from geneva! that is where that religious fanatic john calvin reigned. even though the passions are buried deep in calvinism and are not at all attractive, still they were strong, even twisted. i think you can distinguish them from the current southern bush version because they are less hypocritical. predestination is a harder road than republicanism. it is even harder than mormanism. by the way, has there ever been a morman democrat?
so let me see if i can fantasize about calvinism. let us see? first, sex has to be without taking your clothes off. well, that doesn’t help. but you could walk up to the most beautiful girl in geneva and claim that your union was god’s plan.
who could be the sex kitten of this culture? maybe bette davis? or, yuck, joan crawford? this is going nowhere! i hear that jane fonda has gotten religion. so maybe we could combine her past with her now. she would be ok.
what came so easy when you have the image of the smoking censor swinging toward the sky in santiago is so difficult here. and it is easy when you find the bones of an apostle just when you need them 1000 years after he died. this is good stuff! your history is loaded!
what happened to history in switzerland? hasn’t anything deep and disturbing, calvin excepted, happened here since hannibal crossed the alps? i read that julius caesar slaughtered a lot of helvetians but they were not on their home turf at the time. i think they were in provence.
provence and especially langedoc has a dark history, what with the albigensian crusades and all. greed, death, violent men, and poisonous women fill the history of france. and of spain and of portugal. and we don’t even have to talk about italy, the popes, and the medici! even the french thought that catherine de medici was a dangerous piece of work.
and the less said about the greeks, the better. the germans have had different sorts of problems. but they all have history, even the austrians. in terms of big events in history, switzerland is like gertrude stein’s description of oakland, “there is no there there.” people find refuge here, people like vladimir lenin. they run away to here.
don’t think i don’t like it here. i like it very much. right now, i am running away to here.
p.s. you should look up this spelling of the word “breech.” i did and i was surprised. what the hell did henry the second mean when he urged on the english, “once more into the breech!” maybe everything the french say about the english is true?
modeling of chains:
tomorrow i start my lectures on chain models. but first here is some history from wikipedia about how to forge your own chains:
“In 59 BC, Julius Caesar declared he was so shocked by the incursions of the dangerous Helvetii tribe into Gaul, and the suffering of the Gaulish peoples, that he had himself appointed 'protector of the Gauls'. By the time he'd finished protecting them, a million Gauls were dead and Julius Caesar owned most of Gaul.”
sound familiar?
today i took kathryn’s advice and ate at the thai restaurant at the hotel. i ordered a shrimp dish served with a green chili sauce. it was mixed with coconut milk and flavored with lemon grass. superb! this was what i needed. for a change, a meal with no dairy in it. i think that this is definitely a better thai restaurant than we have in rochester. and we do have at least one good one.
the haze had burnt off and the mountains were sharp and clear in the distance. there can be no prettier city than this. poor zurich! it has a nice lake but not lausanne’s nearby mountains.
i finished ina caro’s “road to the past,” an historical guide to a road trip through france. i enjoyed the first half but i am glad to be done with it. instead of the serious and deadly history of the albigensian crusade in the south and of the hundred years war in the middle, we end up in the north of france with the petty concerns related to pretty chateaux, elegant gardens, stylish furniture, and the frivolous intrigues and corruption of the french court in the time of absolute monarchy. such subjects are not worthy of the companion to the biographer of robert moses and lyndon johnson. those are two guys who would fit right into the middle ages.
ina caro seems fascinated by petty privilege and should be writing about the current crop of republicans. in contradiction to their name, our republicans want imperial rome or imperial france. the divine right of kings is their ideal. but bush and cheney are really an ineffectual medieval pope and an ineffectual simon de monfort. vive la revolution! things may have gotten out of hand, but robespierre had a point.
the first two hours of my second set of lectures went ok but this stuff requires more definitions and that takes longer. so i am behind schedule. i will probably have to make it up by assuming that hopf invariants are known and then just using them or by just skipping the use of them altogether. that would be a shame since they tie in so nicely to the computation of the mod p homology of the double loop space of a 2n+1 sphere. oh well, the students are going to soon get the perfection of the xerox of my lecture notes, the lecture notes do it all as it should be done.
i had some sushi for dinner tonight. not very swiss but good basic japanese stuff, just like you can get at the tokyo house in rochester. this is part of my current theme to remain kosher in the sense that i am not mixing meat and dairy. however, my form of kosher encourages the eating of most crustaceans! but not with cream sauce even though melted butter is acceptable.
the lectures are over. i had to rush through hopf invariants and gave only the quickest connection to the computation of bockstein spectral sequences. it could be argued that it was better this way. it was the shortest path to the application may have created the most clarity and interest.
now all i have to worry about are two things: what food to eat and how to get completely over this fluish bug that is wiping out most of my energy.
on the question of food, i plan to revert to more salads and also more sausages. i just want to minimize sauces. the sauces tend to taste too rich for me. some sausage and kraut would be a nice change. no sauce there so even sausage will be lighter. or a nice salad. for some reason, i can’t seem to find tuna sandwiches. in france, they were everywhere. maybe this unhappiness with diet has something to do with this flu. could it be that you need health and energy to properly enjoy food?
i think i am getting better. my energy level seems to be higher. and the phlegm that has been clogging my throat and nasal passages seems to be diminishing. until i get better, i will postpone by quick trip into the brisk mountain air of mont-collon. the presciption calls for hot drinks with honey and for my old reliable cure of submersion in hot bath water. i recall that i survived the pain of the night before the diagnonis of the aortic dissection by spending the night in hot bath water. hence, i have a lot of faith in this cure.
From: jnei@math.rochester.edu
Subject: deskyped
Date: April 21, 2007 11:47:53 AM EDT (CA)
To: michelle@ravenel.net
Cc: lewinjacques@bellsouth.net, norman.stein@wanadoo.fr, rkane@uwo.ca, Jan_Pearce@berea.edu, mbenders@math.hunter.cuny.edu, chuck.mcgibbon@gmail.com, tr@teammedia.net, dancefairy@cox.net, jrobin@math.rochester.edu, dharper1@frontiernet.net, harper@math.rochester.edu, and 11 more…
hello all: i was marveling at the fact that i seemed to be able to make an infinite number of skype calls without having my available credit decrease when,
all of a sudden, my skype ran out and now i am having trouble paying them for more time. bummer! i must wait for a reply from their support service.
i am only now being cured of my horrible chest cold by a product of the swiss pharmaceutical industry. it is called "antigrippine" which, i think, means that
it fights things that have a grip on you. i think that the stuff works. it must be powerful since you are allowed to take only 3 a day. anyway, i am less clogged up and more able to drag my tired body up and down the hills of lausanne.
i have been complaining to kathryn about the overuse of cream in the swiss preparation of meat. she claims that it is all the fault of the german swiss and that
she can make some of the very same dishes more palatable by substituting turkey for beef and by substituting coconut milk with lime juice for cream. in a weak moment, i accepted an invitation to dinner at her house in order to test this hypothesis. actually, i still feel under the weather and probably would have been wiser to just be a vegetable in the hotel.
but i have acquired a bottle of the wine, a white one, which is local to her town and will bring it with me on the train. kathryn makes this trip every day and the beauty of the town and its setting makes it worth it but she does live halfway to sion, 40 minutes on a fast train from lausanne. in my current condition, i regard it as a major journey.
now i have returned from a pleasant dinner at kathryn's. i have learned why kathryn splurges for the first class train ticket. on weekends, this train on frida, is standing room only. fortunately, i arrived early and got one of the few remaining seats. but when it is not so crowded, then you can enjoy yourself and even get some work done. no so on this particular train. it was crowded with college kids going home for the weekend and with italians going home to milan, 5 hours way. there even was an out of place old indian couple. they are much to late to get to aishwarya rai's wedding on time. (in case you haven't heard, this is a enormous event in bollywood!)
as kathryn indicated she would, she did a nice fusion dish of turkey in coconut milk with lime juice. except for fact that this dish was prepared in switzerland, there seemed to be very little that was swiss about it. it was quite good but i was not able to do it justice. i think that you need a certain health level in order to consume and enjoy food. but i could appreciate it abstractly. and the closing dessert of movenpick pistachio ice cream would be irresistable even at death's door. and it combines well with a little bit of movenpick chocolate ice cream. this is swiss dairy as it should be! with no meat in it!
as i write this, i am eating a beet salad. it is wonderful. all my life i have eaten overcooked beets and i have loved them nonetheless. i love these more! as far as i can taste, these have no marinade and certainly no thick harvard beet sauce. it is just pure beet goodness!
one more technical point conquered for the book! it is a simple and old thing but i really have worked out well how george whitehead's suspension operator works in the eilenberg moore game. very nice, very simple, and it proves things that are a mess to do otherwise. actually, i knew before several versions of how this goes. but not i know then in a consistent and integrated way. hooray! even though i am stuck in a time warp in the 1950s.!
and i am pleased also that i am going to add to the book a proof of bott periodicity. it is an illustration of the power of the eilenberg-moore game and also as an illustration of some of its hidden complications, namely the fact that the coalgebra structure, while there, is hard to predict by purely algebraic means. Maybe someday it will be possible. kathryn is inching towards it and it is part of moore's dream but it is a long way off. but it is nice to see that in many cases you can handle it by what harper calls generating complexes.
the bott stuff is old and pretty and historically important and it is nice to be able to do it fast.
i will close now. this is one of those days when the air has no haze and the mountains are sharp and clear. it is a shame i am not ready to walk in them.
best wishes,
joe n
happy birthday to me:
i celebrated my birthday by taking a walk in the park by the palace of justice. it has a wonderful view of the lake and the mountains. the best thing is that i felt healthier and stronger. it was nice just to sit on a bench in the warm sun and to think about how very simple the cartan seminar proof of the bott periodicity theorem really is.
i went to the palace hotel brasserie for a lunch which anthony bourdain would have enjoyed. it consisted of braised beef shoulder and bone marrow and root vegetables. i know now why anthony likes bone marrow. he likes fatty things. and this is a very fatty thing. the beef shoulder reminded me of the traditional irish meal of corned beef except that the cabbage was replaced by root vegetables. not that that is a bad thing. in truth, i enjoyed it and finished it off with an expresso and chocolate mouse. quite satisfactory.
i should add that i was entertained at lunch by a long carnival parade. it was a combination of mummers, astecs, and incas. the south american flute music was very nice as the imitation incas danced by. i was not able to tell whether this parade was the opening of a carnival or some lausanne festival which happens every year. either way, it was a good thing.
the french are holding a presidential election today. a main issue seems to be job security. some people think that there is too much of it, and since it is so hard to fire someone, businesses are very reluctant to hire young people. the result is that the young people are emigrating to, for example, england where they can get jobs.
my generation of mathematicians is aware of the downsides of too much job security. excellent people suffered from the fact that tenured slots were full. on the other hand, the people who are in charge cannot be trusted to make fair decisions. balance is required and, unfortunately, that balance is only maintained in a time of labor shortage.
the pub across the street from my hotel was offering a dinner of horse meat and frites. why not? i have never eaten horse before. it does not taste like chicken but rather like very lean beef. i think cows are better to eat but there is nothing wrong with horse and i do not see why it ever got such a bad reputation.
but the lunch of perch meuniere at university’s copernic restaurant was much better. the perch are from lac leman and are served with potatoes and a nice salad. simple and good.
i made my reservation at the hotel mont-collon in arolla. but i should have checked earlier since they are closing for a spring break and i will have to transfer to another hotel. actually, it couldn’t have been avoided since i really did not want to leave lausanne before friday. at least i get two days at the mont-collon before the transfer.
i will move to another nearby hotel before making the transition to france. all the train schedules are checked and worked. there is no reason not to go and buy tickets and make train reservations. i am ready for a new phase, especially since i have totally soured on getting skype to accept payment for more calls.
best wishes,
joe n
arollaing around the mountains and eating through provence:
hello from the hotel mont-collon, at least we start there:
let me begin with a message to two people that i feel somewhat guilty about
not communicating with. i speak of michelle ravenel and of kathryn hess but for different reasons. first of all, realize that i have been in an email dessert in the mountains and now in provence. so let me announce right here and now that i am well and happy and looking forward to my eventual return to rochester. let me take this belated opportunity to thank kathryn who was a wonderful host to me in lausanne. it was swell. and i found it to be a very productive pace to think about mathematics. kathryn; thank you again. and to michelle, i am truly sorry to be such a sorry correspondent. and, since i am typing this on a french keyboard, let me end now.
by the way, this is what typing on a french keyboard would look like if no care were taken: the auick brozn fox ju,ped over the lqwy dog.
i think that the french think that q is a more common letter than a and hence it needs to be more convenient to the fingers.
this message is being sent to you courtesy of norman stein's computer and you should not repy to this address. not that most of you guys reply much anyway!
the main text begins now!
i am now at my favorite hotel in the whole world, right at the foot of the glacier coming off mont collon. i have been suitably welcomed by madame. and she has informed me that this hotel too now has internet acdess. so this is still the perfect hotel even though it is going to close in two days until june. madame has promised to drive me up the hill to my new hotel, the hotel du glacier, where they have promised to prepare trout mauniere so everything has worked out.
i think i will take some short walks and begin to write more of the book. i need to finish chapter 10. that is the immediate project.
i start by turning into book form some classical computations of homology of loop spaces which were the subject of my lectures in lausanne.
i am perhaps inspired to add something to the book which may seem out of place in a book on algebraic methods in unstable homotopy theory. but one should always remember that the division into unstable and stable is artificial.
the paper of rene thom on unoriented cobordism is surely a landmark among the papers in homotopy theory in the 1950s. among other things it is a major illustration of serre’s localization theory and of the usefulness of the computation of the cohomology of eilenberg-maclane spaces and of classifying spaces.
i hope i am not being overconfident but i am estimating that a nice coverage of the heart of the thom paper can be done in approximately 20 pages. for example, one can compute the additive structure of the oriented cobordism ring very quickly. with modern methods to determine which modules over the steenrod algebra are free, that is just a question of ranks. surely, the inclusion of this into the book would be a contribution.
i had hoped that milnor’s work on the complex cobordism ring would provide a clear way to determine the ring structure of a cobordism ring. alas, milnor only wrote part one and never got around to writing part two which would have included the ring structure. so there is no version written by the master of exposition. it is possible that this question of the ring structure is so intrinsically hard that no one can write a beautiful treatment.
one should always remember that the two most important classical groups are the orthogonal and unitary. ok, maybe the special orthogonal and special unitary are contenders, but after all they have a special relationship to the first two.
anyway, it is worthwhile focusing on their properties and those of their classifying spaces. it is rather easy to get hold of the cohomologies of these groups and of their classifying spaces.
what seems to be a little difficult in both cases is to identify the cohomologies of the classifying spaces with the symmetric functions in the cohomologies of maximal tori.. from this identification can come the product formulas of Whitney and Chern. so it needs to be gotten. and at the moment i am having some difficulty recalling this part. i see a way to do it but it is convoluted, uses a bit of algebra and some might not like it. probably, this will be remedied instantly in the presence of milnor’s characteristic classes but for now it is frustrating.
thom’s work is a paper in stable homotopy theory which was born before the creation of stable homotopy theory as a separate subject. thom’s results are certainly geometric. for that reason, this paper has its unstable aspects. nonetheless, this paper has a claim to being the paper that established that stable homotopy theory has a connection to reality.
thom’s results were created early in the 1950s and it took years for homotopy theory to catch up. only in the 1960s do we see a major return to the subject of cobordism from a homotopy point of view. thom’s paper had already had strong geometric influence way before that in the geometric work of milnor and others. ironically, milnor was one of the people who restarted the homotopy aspects of this work.
i just had a realization that any treatment of the eilenberg-moore materail is incomplete and downright flabby if it does not contain a clear and concise treatment of the suspension.
so that is what i have thought out today. i will write some text tomorrow.
i took a short walk up to the glacier today. i saw skiers who had just come off the glacier. that is one mean glacier and you do not traverse it lightly. the glacier spills off the mountain. it is quite steep and very broken up. you could die there. easy! crampons and belays are required lest you disappear into a crevasse never to be seen again. and, after you get off the snow, you have to walk an awful long way on a narrow downward path carrying skis until you reach a road.
the weather here is beautiful mountain weather, warm and sunny in the afternoon and cool in the evenings. perfect.
i walked down to the village of les hauderes. it was approximately a 2 and a half hour walk, mainly downhill so not tiring at all. then i took the postal bus back. very civilized.
i have to add that one can see the effects of the imminent shutdown of the hotel in the quality of the food. the kitchen staff is cut way back and the menu is just not up to what i am accustomed to here. but it is not terrible. just uninspired. or perhaps it just was bad luck on the lamb. this lamb was done in some gravy, seemd a little tough, and really could have used some kick, perhaps some garlic and thyme or even some mint jelly. the english are not total food idiots. and they do understand lamb.
perception of the quality of food also suffers from the comparison between lausanne and the mountains. in lausanne, the quality was usually high, even if it was not often exciting.
one of the dangers of having all the time you need is that you will use it in reflection and speculation. i am contemplating what is the purpose of this book. in a way, a book at this stage of my career is a sort of biography. you write about the mathematical life you have lived. so you write about the way things were but you also get a chance to correct some things to the way things should have been. those corners you cut in life can now be fully filled and rounded. there is no reason to write such a book unless you are going to do it right. but most of all you get a chance to write about those things which you have loved and respected. one leaves a legacy in the sense that, whether or not these things are popular now, there is now a level of knowledge about them which should be recorded lest it be lost.
by the way, i am now in a situation which is common with internet in european hotels. i can access the web and i can receive email but i cannot send. oy vey! tomorrow i move to the hotel du glacier and perhaps i will have better luck there. not bloody likely! i suspect that it all has something to do with hoss’ overwhelming desire that no outside person be allowed to use the u of r internet. it is difficult to believe that everyone has this same problem.
sorry there is not more about the food and culture. frankly, both have not been that exciting lately.
the internet situation has improved. i am not sure what has been wrong but things are definitely better. i will try to send this message out by bringing my computer near to the internet transmitter for the hotel. we shall see.
this may seem trivial but i have discovered that the restaurant at lac bleu makes a great mixed salad. it has lots of chopped celery root, tomatos, and shredded carrots. and the dressing is great. this makes up for a disappointing trout mauniere.
now we have seen the internet situation and the culprit seems to be, at least in large part, the server at the university of rochester math department. the evidence for this is that the math department website and my own related website is unreachable, totally shut off. this is coupled with a shut down of the email server since yesterday.
oh well, i am resigned to no internet. after a while, it gets frustrating to worry about it too much. it is a waste of time, time which is better spent taking walks and thinking about mathematics. it is a good feeling to be doing precisely the mathematics that one wants to do and to know that, whatever the result, the credit or the blame all belong to you. coauthors have always been a mixed bag. i have had some great ones who contributed a great deal to the joint projects and some not so great who did not pull their share of the load. on the whole, in the absence of the mathematical equivalent of nicole kidman, it is nice to be working alone, especially on a book where the main point is to do things in a way that one finds intellectually honest and attractive.
i just finished writing up the treatment of the homology suspension. it is nice but more difficult than i had at first imagined. but now the path is clear to the end of chapter 10. in chapter 10, there is only one section left and it is devoted to giving some classical examples of the theory so far developed, the homology of the double loops on spheres and the homology of the loops on some classical groups.
after that, there will remain to be done two short computational chapters. all the background is done to finish off the exposition of the exponent theory, which has been the guiding principle of the book.
the last chapter on classifying spaces should not have great difficulties and will finish off with the fireworks of a quick treatment of bott periodicity for the unitary group (a cinch!) and a quick computation of the unoriented cobordism ring, at least additively. then there should be a trumpet fanfare! the book will be done.
i think that chapter 10 was the last big obstacle. a lot of theory had to be organized and presented. i am especially proud of the fact that i have given an honest and original treatment of products in the eilenberg-moore models. even such an expert as kathryn thinks i had something new and useful to say on this subject.
i just read milnor’s introduction to his collected papers on differential topology. in it, he makes the remarkable statement that his simple purpose throughout much of the 1950s was to understand manifolds which were connected up to the middle dimension. and out of that simple purpose came a revolution! he was and is a smart fellow.
well, i am not making a revolution with this book. but i will present:
homotopy groups with coefficients, the most general theory of localization which includes completion and so called neisendorfer localization, a basic theory of particular homotopy limits, hilton-james-toda hopf invariants and their application to exponent results, samelson products and homotopy bockstein spectral sequences, lie algebras and universal enveloping algebras with applications to higher order torsion in the homotopy of moore spaces, the theory of chain models for loop spaces and the eilenberg-moore spectral sequence, the application to the odd primary exponents of the homotopy groups of spheres, chain models for classifying spaces with applications to bott periodicity and unoriented cobordism.
that is not a bad list.
today, may 2 in arolla, we have a snow storm, heavy wet stuff coming down hard. if you look out the window, the landscape is becoming all white, it is a good day to stay inside and work more on the book. tomorrow, i will get up early and travel most of the day to end up in ste-cecile in provence. i hope it is warm and the sun is shining there.
I am in rochegude, one town away from the steins at ste-cecille, settled at my gite. last night, the steins treated me to a nice roast veal. today, it is raining on and off. it is rather chilly. But the food is much improved.
I have at last found a form of rabbit that i really like. rabbit pate made by the local butcher is really good. and he makes an excellent head cheese. he makes a lot of excellent things, such as a mousse made with zuchini, a calamari salad, artichokes in olive oil, and some sort of meat loaf with a green chopped vegetable in it.
tomorrow judy will take me to the market in ste-cecille. more good food is there, maybe some cheese or another nice pate. i have to remember to get some fresh vegetables. with vegetables and eggs and a little something extra like a provencal stew, i will eat well. it is good to have something to say about food again.
the washing machine here was made in italy. washing machines, like military hardware, should be made by germans. even the swiss and the steins agree with this. my italian machine seems to have a mind of its own. it decides on its own that i really want to leave my clothes soaking in water. i would really prefer the spin cycle to get most of the water out. so i am reduced to hand wringing the wet clothes and hanging them out to dry. it is a little better than doing laundry in a hotel room.
the gite is very nice and so is the scnery. it is all very provencale, yellows and blues, like the flowers and sky. in this, it is chromatically similar to bavaria but has a certain style which is all its own, harmonius and distinctive.
a nice feature of the gite, which is run by judy’s friend sarah from england, is that the television here has access to the bbc and other british television. this is not fantastic but it is a great improvement over cnn.
the heat is on in the gite and it is making my life much more comfortable. maybe it will even dry out the wet laundry if i bring it inside?
jacques and margaret have arrived at the avignon tgv station. it is the beginning of a food festival, our very own festival as jacques cooks and eats his way through provence.
food starts with a trip to an enormous market in the town of vaison a romaine.
i bought a belt which i needed. my pants will stop falling down.
the weekly market had all sorts of stuff but the food is the center point. i got some excellent cheese of gruyere type. of course, the girl selling the cheese included a gift of some excellent goat cheese. it is a sort of goodwill gesture to induce return purchases. it is my experience that cheese is always acquired in pairs., one piece you buy and one piece that is given to you.
we also bought a chicken which roasted up quite nicely, a very succulent and tasty bird which went nicely with asparagus and potato salad.
we cooked a duck for dinner and inivited our landlady, sarah, and the steins over for dinner. the food was simple and successful, sauteed duck, leeks, potato salad (with just onions, olive oil and vinegar added), and a some nice ice creams or sherberts to finish, pistachio, coffee, vanilla, and raspberry. we had wine but that does not interest me as much as solid food. after all, wine is just grape juice with alcohol. well, there you are, it was our best meal until the next one when we went out to the local one star restaurant.
at the local one star, i started with some foie gras and a very nice ris (= pancreas or kidney) de goat cooked in a wonderful brown sauce and served on a bed of green lentils. at a restaurant of that quality, they are always throwing in little extras, like some hordeaurves including caramelized olives and an extra dessert with a tiny creme brulee. my main dessert was a grand marnier souffle. but the surprise of the meal was the added extra of a sort of tuna ceviche (raw marinated in vinegar) topped with whipped cream infused with asparagus. weird, unusual. but rather good.
today, we go to norman and judy’s for another meal. but before that we bought some salade de museau, which is a sort of liquid head cheese, cheap cuts of pork in a light vinegar. it looks frightening but it turned out to be tamer than i expected. i like it.
meanwhile, i am suffering from a lack of mathematical information. there is no internet and no math library. norman stein shocked me by not having a copy of steenrod’s book on cohomology operations. he says that he used to know all that stuff and never felt the need to buy one! i could really use a copy right now. or a copy of a certain cartan seminar would be nice. but i am in the middle of a mathematical desert right here. even brayton gray in uzes lacks an adequate supply of mathematical references. how does he get any work done? he evidently does.
today jacques cooked some andouille. this is a sausage made of tripe. i am glad that i tried it but i am not a fan of the stuff. the smell of stomachs and intentines gives me a very slight gag reflex. so i am barred from enjoyment of this speciality.
here is an overall comment on french food. some of it is truly wonderful. in particular, the fruits and vegetables are great, fresh and with lots of flavour. some of the cooked meats are wonderful. a nice cog au vin is a very nice thing to do with an old and tough rooster to make him tender and tasty. and some of the stews are fantastic. it goes without saying that the high end of french food is incomparably good, things like braised veal cheeks and ris de veau are gifts from god. and a roast veal, which is not uniquely french, is of course wonderful.
but i am not a fan of all of french food. for example, on the whole the germans do sausage better. i do not think that internal organs always make good sausage. sometimes they do but not always.
and i prefer green asparagus to the white stuff that the french bury in the ground to keep it from developing chlorophyl.
and now comes the really controversial statement. wine is overrated. sometimes it is very good, but not always. it is like beer but without the mistique. i suspect that the reverence in which it is held has something to do with the worship of alcohol. remember that plants influence us by pandering to our weaknesses and that alcohol is one of them. sometimes a nice clear apple juice is just the thing. and this they serve in intensive care!
today i drove jacques and margaret to the avignon train station to pick up their rental car. the muslim attendent at their cut rate rental place seemed to have little interest in giving them a car, even thought they had arranged the rental in the states. his boss had a similar attitude. jacques even investigated the possibility of upgrading to avis but decided the cost was too high. eventually, the cut rate peope gave them a car which they had had all along. jacques and margaret departed hastily, leaving me to back out of the very tight quarters that jacques had put my car into. i have to give credit to the muslim attendent. he helped direct me to back out without any damage to my car or to the cars in his charge.
with the departure of jacques and margaret, i purchased some boudin and cooked it on the grill. boudin is a sausage pudding made from pig’s blood and pork, flavored with onions. it is a warm pudding with a wholesome taste. i remember that my mother was fond of a german version but that she boiled it. it is good stuff, in taste reminiscent of haggis. i like it a lot, enough that i will search for a version that is available in the united states. by the way, my hero anthony bourdain loves boudin. but anthony is also fond of tripe and intestines. i cannot follow him there. anthony has even eaten warthog anus as a courtesy to the bushmen in the kalihari desert but you could tell that he was not fond of that. he said something about there being too much dirt and shit in that meal and he speculated on the possible need for some antibiotics. afterwards, he was overjoyed to get some roasted beetles. you sprinkle salt on them and suck the insides out..
the french make a yogurt flavored with bits of grapefruit. it is amazingly good.
i visited brayton and sophie in their wonderful house in uzes. there was a very nice leek soup. leeks are underestimated in america.
brayton has restored my faith in universal models for relative samelson products. brayton pointed out to me that i even referred to this faith in an introduction of one of my papers. but i had a crisis of confidence. in fact, i can no longer remember why i lost this faith. since i am now going to include a section in the book on these universal models, i hope that my current belief is the right one. if correct, it does make one part of the exponent splittings cleaner. it is just what john moore wanted me to do so long ago, but at the time, i found an ad hoc way around it.
last day in paris:
after a pleasant farewell pizza dinner with the steins and my landlady sarah at the local pizzeria, i departed the next day on the tgv for paris. as usual the tgv ride was smooth and trouble free.
i arrived at the ibis hotel next to the airport to discover that someone had stolen their computer and they now had no internet for customers at all. when i was here last november they at least had an overpriced version, 15 euros for something like an hour. i resigned myself to having no internet until i return to rochester in 2 days.
in the meantime, i have scheduled a day in paris.
it has been a long, long time since i last saw paris. the first time i saw it i had just finished my thesis. john moore was in those days always in paris in the summer and he was my port for breakfast in the morning. his hotel was too expensive for me to stay at but he pointed me to a more reasonably priced one. it was pleasant to splurge on the hot chocolate and croissants to have a better breakfast and talk to moore about paris and mathematics. i also ate most dinners at some simple bistro with moore. foodwise, it was heaven. and moore added to it by arranging one of his famous dinner parties at a two star restaurant. i was included on the guest list along with the last minute addition of claudine serre. claudine was so last minute that she was dressed in blue jeans and we all crowded around her so that the restaurant staff would not see her state of dress and eject her and/or us all. the particulars of that meal have faded from my memory but i remember that it was terrifically good. i do remember a whiskey sorbet.
at that long ago time, i visited some of the classic parisian sites, including notre dame, the louvre (saw the mona lisa and lots of rembrandt), the gallerie where they had the water lily murals of monet, etc. i went out to chartres and have always remembered the emotion i felt there. anyway, i can’t really explain why i never went back to spend more time in paris. foreign vacations tended to get planned around mathematics conferences. and there just were no suitable mathematical occasions for my specialty, algebraic topology. so i didn’t go back. i went other places, oxford, cambridge, aarhus, kyoto, durham, the list goes on and they were certainly good places. but they were not paris.
even when i went to france, it was my custom to go directly to and from where i was going, luminy near marseiles being one example. well, i am here to admit that this was a mistake not to see more of paris. paris is a wonderful town. the views, the history, the food are all terrific. i will never again plan to just skip this big city. it is always worth visiting.
I began by taking the train from the airport hotel into the city. in honor of the fabled yale full immersion language course, i got off at the luxembourg gardens, site of the fictional flrtation between mareille and robert and the site where her younger sister mari-laure was always having trouble with her sailboat at the most inopportune times. for those who do not know this course, it is still availabe on the internet by the courtesy of the annenberg media foundation. it has attained a cult status. a new generation has a running blog on this course and wonders about the fate of the now old and grey actors. of particular interest is the actress valerie allain who played mareille. many of these cultists are in love with her and with good reason. there was a distressing rumour that valerie had become a french porn star. it is a confusion. there is a french porn star by that name but it is not our valerie. the most that valerie has ever done is take her clothes off on camera. and that is practically mandatory for a french actress and in no way makes valerie into a porn star. you see, i am one of valerie’s fans. by the way, the actor who played robert has actually communicated to the blog. but the actress who played her younger sister has completely disappeared.
the luxembourg gardens have much to offer, including statues of all the french queens and a statue of saint genevieve. saint genevieve was not a queen but she did the nontrivial thing of successfully praying to god to direct attila the hun away from paris and towards orleans. evidently god didn’t mind if attila sacked orleans. anyway, according to the sculptor, saint genevieve was a very physically attractive young lady. this is more than you can say about some of the french queens. on the whole, the further back in time the queen, the prettier the sculptors made her look.
after leaving the gardens, i immediately encountered a macdonalds where i noticed people using laptop computers. hurrying inside and taking a seat, i took my laptop out of my backpack and i discovered that macdonalds was providing reliable and free internet! it was a lure to attract customers from the nearby sorbonne university. i could receve email and i think i succeeded in sending out some replies.
but since my battery supply was low, my computer shut itself off before i could completely research the mod 2 cohomology rings of the special orthogonal groups. oh well, you can’t have everything and i was truly happy to have found this brief internet connection. and it was free!
and i am amused to find that even people who hate macdonalds must admit that they have excellent toilets and internet.
i continued on my walk, passed the ruins of the old abbey of cluny, reached the seine with a lovely view of the cathedral of notre dame. unfortunately, notre dame had an enormously long line of tourists waiting to get in. i contented myself with taking some pictures of the exterior and with visiting a festival tent in honor of the making of bread. bread was actually being made and sold there. since i had already made plans to go back to a brasserie for some mussels and frites (= french fries), i passed up the opportunity to sample the bread.
my main plan was to walk along the seine and to see paris. wow! the louvre and the tuileries garden were just stunning displays of civilization and grandeur. paris is culture on a scale which makes it have no match anywhere else. and i am talking about just the outside of these things. what is inside takes longer to see. i did not have time to do that. i had to pass up the great art that is there. but the outside was enough for me.
i had formed a strange desire to see the palace of discovery. it is a science museum and my michellin guide to paris assured me that the math exhibit was high toned, not dumbed down, an exhibit for professionals. alas, this michellin guide was not written by a mathematician. the museum seemed most proud of the fact that you could find recorded there the current record for the number of digits in the computation of pi. i was devastated and decided to head back.
the museum was located at the intersection of the avenue franklin delano roosevelt and the rue de general eisenhower. ( i bet there will never be an avenue george bush except in various portions of brain dead america.)
by the way, there are monuments for charles de gaulle and winston churchill. the french are truly grateful for having their collective butts saved in world war two. but, in all fairness, there should be some monument to joseph stalin or at least to the russian people. the russians did more than anyone to win world war two. i won’t make the argument here but you could just look up the numbers of dead on both sides and look at where the bulk of the german army was.
the french love their holidays, even ones that mean nothing more to them than a day off. for example, while i was here, two holidays occurred. all the stores were closed. the first occasion was the aforementioned world war two victory. the french had nothing to do with accomplishing this.
the second holiday was the feast of the ascension. the french, having become for the most part secular, are celebrating the ascension into heaven of somebocy they really don’t worship much. but, as i indicated, it is the days off that is the true religion of the french. one sees this more in the small towns of provence than in the lively atmosphere of paris. the french should quake in their boots now that they have elected someone like zarkosy who believes in the mass of people working hard without excessive benefits.
as i walked along the seine, i discovered a new brand of homeless people. some young people had pitched some good quality mountain tents along secluced portions of the banks of the seine. they were living in them. i do not know where the nearest toilet facilities were. perhaps it was the seine.
I returned to the vicinity of notre dame and went in to visit the conciergerie on the ile de la cite (= isle of the city). this is the historic castle of louis the first. after the kings of france moved up in the world to fancier palaces, prisoners were kept here. and trials were held here during the french revolution. from small cells with beds of stone covered straw, people were carted off to the guillotine. i guess that was better than being burned alive at the stake the way the grand master of the knights of the templars was. king philip the fair noticed that the templars were very rich, a definite threat to the power of the king. he decided to suppress them. this means that he decided to kill all the templars he could find. he also decided to
confiscate their estates and all the templar gold he could find. there is a legend that the main part of the templar treasure survived along with many templars. the legend says that the templars disappeared into the heart of the swiss alps where they founded banks and became the gnomes of zurich. other evidence for this is that the swiss fighting ability suddenly became much more effective at this time. after all, the templars were warrior knights.
the conciergerie is a lovely medieval hall. it has big fireplaces where lots of meat could be roasted. off to the side, it has little jail cells where people, the high and the low, were kept before being guillotined. robespierre and marie antoinette were among the temporary residents.
to the side of the conciergerie is the chapel of sainte chapelle. this is a lovely chapel dating from the 12th century. it was built by the king siant louis to house the crown of thorns, the real crown of thorns, the one supposedly worn by the founder of a major religion. this was found on a crusade by a french nobleman who pawned it to the venetians and then appealed to louis to redeem his pawn. this louis did, being a saint or about to become one, and then he had to build a suitable housing for it.
it is a big chapel, with towering and beautiful stained glass windows. in a time when cathedrals took a hundred years or more to bulid, this place took 33 months to build in the 12th century. granted that a chapel is not as big as a cathedral, that is fast construction. i doubt if kellog, brown, and root or bechtel or any of the firms which our current administration likes to employ could do as well. but architecture in the middle ages, especially religious architecture, reached a peak that it has never climbed to again. so perhaps the friends of bush can be forgiven for not living up to these standards. and i think that they had such a thing as huge cost overruns in those days too.
seriously, there are two big differences between those guys in the past and our current crowd. one, in the past they were more competant. two, in the past they were sincerely ruthless. they did not feel any need to hide it with a smirk. similar to the romans in these respects. whatever else you might say about them, these guys understood the concept of “bottom line.”
i ended up at the brasserie where i had planned to have mussels and frites. although the waiter was young and slow, he came through with some wonderful mussels. the frites were good enough to add to the pleasure of the meal which i ate with a nice kronenbourg draft beer. it was excellent! the mussels were cooked in a liquid with onions, parsley, and carrots. i finished by eating the liquid as if it were a soup. it was a classic brasserie meal.
but the frites were disappointing. on the frite quality scale, i rank frites as follows. up at the top are my mother’s frites, browned and a little crisp on the outside with a soft tender inside, the best frites.
the frites you can find in stands on french or also canadian highways (even in ontario!) are almost the equal of my mother’s frites.
close behind them are the frites called new york fries which you can only buy in canadian malls.
in the days when macdonalds made their frites with true and unhealthy grease their frites were very good. even such a discriminating gourmet as frank peterson acknowledged that macdonalds’ frites were not bad. alas, macdonalds has given in to health concerns and their frites are just not as good as they used to be.
after all these frites come the frties i had with my mussels at the brasserie. but they are still better than most frites and they went well with the mussels.
so after a closing expresso, i said a fond farewell to paris and hopped on the train back to the airport hotel.
over and out,
joe n
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