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silent upon a peak in Darien
May. 24th, 2008 01:43 amThree day weekend. What a lovely thought that is.
We were having a phone/webex meeting with the people from America who've been developing our new classification update system -- that is, me, a colleague in the same room but several desks away, another colleague elsewhere in the UK, and the two people from America. The fact that it was purely auditory/computer meant that there was occasional gesturing and comment going on between me and the colleague in the same room.
However, he could give the excuse of going to catch the train after we'd overrun by half an hour. Since everyone knows I walk home, I couldn't.
I did eventually slink off 45 minutes overdue. Well, to be precise I strode off. Very briskly. In the direction of a particular room. Sometimes my coffee-drinking habits have certain consequences, especially when meetings run nearly an hour overtime.
The weather forecast is promising cooler weather, rain, gloom, traffic holdups (okay, that's the news rather than the weather forecast), train delays or downright non-running, etc. I plan to have a nice three day weekend at home and walking around down at most.
Must remember to phone home. Must also remember not to give too unvarnished an opinion about parents' failure to get in touch from China. (Apparently they got a local mobile and it didn't work, so not strictly their fault.)
---
Love and Tensor Algebra
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product of four scalars it defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
-- Stanislaw Lem
We were having a phone/webex meeting with the people from America who've been developing our new classification update system -- that is, me, a colleague in the same room but several desks away, another colleague elsewhere in the UK, and the two people from America. The fact that it was purely auditory/computer meant that there was occasional gesturing and comment going on between me and the colleague in the same room.
However, he could give the excuse of going to catch the train after we'd overrun by half an hour. Since everyone knows I walk home, I couldn't.
I did eventually slink off 45 minutes overdue. Well, to be precise I strode off. Very briskly. In the direction of a particular room. Sometimes my coffee-drinking habits have certain consequences, especially when meetings run nearly an hour overtime.
The weather forecast is promising cooler weather, rain, gloom, traffic holdups (okay, that's the news rather than the weather forecast), train delays or downright non-running, etc. I plan to have a nice three day weekend at home and walking around down at most.
Must remember to phone home. Must also remember not to give too unvarnished an opinion about parents' failure to get in touch from China. (Apparently they got a local mobile and it didn't work, so not strictly their fault.)
---
Love and Tensor Algebra
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product of four scalars it defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
-- Stanislaw Lem
